This rant is not an unusual artifact of the times. I find it has a certain raw charm. I knew a few others who felt similarly out in California during the relevant time period.

FormCritic wrote:
Speaking from direct experience....yes, it is pretty good for a middle school student.

Are you a teacher?  I wish I had been able to write half as coherently as this kid when I was 13.  If I were his English teacher I'd have enjoyed reading his stuff as opposed to the boring dreck I wrote when I was 13... as far as the high emotions go, I'd ascribe that to being 13... plus I think he probably just enjoyed spilling a little bile on the page.  
A boy needs some emotional outlets when he is that age.  I used firecrackers.

FormCritic wrote:Jim's angry pen is interesting reading.  He is pretty articulate for a 7th grader and his rant is no more deranged than some other online posts about gaming books and rules editions.

And more coherent than most of those rants too.

There was sort of an internet, mostly just modem-to-modem or ARPAnet.  The Jimmy Carter campaign used email in 1976.  You'd put your telephone receiver directly onto this robotic mouth & ear, & could hear all the R2-D2esque chirps & squeaks as your computer chatted with another. My older brother got one for our Vic20 in the early 80s, we could download Compuserve files -news stories, stock quotes, but not much else.

I think he's pretty much on target about the Psionics.

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 mutual high school friends who played D&D with him.  He was 14 or 15 and I was 13 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, adapted some "Chivalry & Sorcery" combat and attribute systems 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.

[email protected]

bombadil wrote:
Sadly, this is how my gaming group broke up back in the early 1980s, too.  

Well, if this is authentic, then thanks a lot.  Really cool.  I'd love to see a copy of that news paper article.  

It's not April 1st yet, but someone could be pulling our collective leg here.  Still, if this is on the level, it'd be cool to locate Jim and send him his wayward book...or at least get it signed.

deimos3428 wrote:It's not April 1st yet, but someone could be pulling our collective leg here.

Let's accuse him of being an ebay scammer.

Ok the, here's the article.  The names have been blacked out for the sake of mystery...