Hello all,
I was googling Jim Perelman and found this thread...
It's been about 28 years since i first saw that Player's Handbook.
I knew Jim Perelman and played in his world.
We were very good friends. We went to high school together and got kicked out of high school together, we worked and played at the Renaissance Pleasure Faire together and then we lived together in Santa Cruz where we both went to college. We did a bunch of other things together and shared some unique experiences that make me a good person to relate the strange story of Jim Perelman today...
First some info on Jim, for those who are interested (keep in mind it was a long time ago). Jim lived in Tarzana when I met him through high school friends who played D&D with him. He was 15 or 16 and I was 14 I think... and he was a genius gamer! Jim's nickname for himself was "Attila the Hun" and when he got his first car, a green Toyota Celica, he had the personalized license plate "Attila H". And he believed he was the reincarnation of Attila the Hun.
We played ORIGINAL D&D (the boxed set and the 4 original extension books) and when the first "ADVANCED D&D" books were released we bought them up and adapted our play systems. Jim also embraced the Arduin-Grimoire and incorporated it in his game and thought psionics was BS and never used it in his play. As you may of noticed he did not think much of Gary Gygax...the rant was written the week after the Player's Handbook was released I think. And you should have seen what he did to his Dungeon Master's Guide and Monster Manual (although he guarded his secrets carefully). He also created his own game system with original hit charts, experience tables and incredibly detailed magic spells (much of it written with the same enthusiasm as his Gygax rant) and had a big notebook full of reference material that only a few people ever saw.
Our core group was a bunch of high school kids age 13-18 and this would be back around 1980. Notably, we were featured in a Los Angeles Times article about D&D (front page of the Calendar section with Jim and I posed for the cameras). It was a time when roleplaying was getting a bad rap in the press because of dumb and crazy kids playing for real and dying...anyone remember? We met at each other's houses on the weekends, consumed junk food and played for hours and nobody got hurt. He ran a great campaign, which was mostly role playing and less about the analytical dice rolling and hit points. I played a bumbling cleric who was always healing the party from our battles. I won't go into detail about the campaign other than to mention he used City State of the Invincible Overlord and Empire of the Petal Throne maps, altered original D&D modules and dungeon designs from the depths of his mind that were incredibly fun and creative (the "Pink Floyd" dungeon for instance).
Jim was not a psychotic, but was definitely "crazy" back then and we had a lot of fun being friends. We stopped gaming and spent a lot more time doing other stuff as the group grew up and went to other schools and off to college and found other interests (girls and real life). Jim went to Australia and sold kites on the beach for 6 months. Jim moved up to Santa Cruz for college in 1982 and when I moved there in 1983, I lived with him in a house with 13-18 other people for about two years until he moved out. I'm not sure he ever graduated, but I can acount for the Tarzana, Santa Cruz and Walnut Creek addresses during the time period 1980-1986. After that our lives took different paths and I lost touch with him, but his friendship had a big influence on my life.
So if you read this Jim, or if you know how to contact him, have him drop me a line or give me a call. It's great to know he's been immortalized in the world of the online roleplaying forums.
p.s. Carole was his older sister.
[email protected]
