[Aycorn]

I'm Aycorn, real name Alan.

My prelude to FRP was the board game "Dungeon," which I first encountered in 1977. Soon after that a friend introduced me to D&D with the blue book. I was utterly fascinated (he hated it). I read and re-read that thing!!

A couple years later I got into playing AD&D with others. Started my own AD&D campaign which, while pretty primitive, was a lot of fun. But I did find myself sometimes feeling a little bit hemmed in by the rules.

Anyway, a local library used to let kids play FRP games on weekends, and I went there one day and met a group of older kids playing RQ. So I joined in.

A couple of you have mentioned the word "liberation," well, that's how I found it. I mean - wow! What a difference! No stupid alignments. No stupid class systems that arbitrarily said you couldn't use magic AND a wear armor. Everything was so much simpler, so much more streamlined. I was hooked!

I wanted to convert my AD&D campaign over, but the rest of the gang hated RQ - they couldn't have 10th level magic-users, or kill armies of dragons. I ended the campaign about 6 months later.

Then became an avid Call of Cthulhu player. Being a long-time Lovecraft fan, even then. Still one of my favorite games. I even corresponded with Sandy Petersen (great guy) for a couple of years.

Also dabbled with Top Secret (fun setting, bad system), Gamma World, Metamorphosis Alpha (remember that one?), Superworld, Stormbringer, Ringworld (read, own, never played), Paranoia, etc.

I realized way back that BRP is a great, endlessly adaptable system - a tweak here and a tweak there and it's workable with any setting, as far as I can tell. I wouldn't go so far out on a limb as to say it's THE perfect system, but it is for me. It's very simple and very streamlined, easy to add to or subtract from, easy to extrapolate from. Also, I just plain LIKE the d100 system for some reason. I have also have a lot of sentimental affection for Chaosium. Some of it's because they're material was of such obvious (to me) superior quality to that of TSR et al back in the 80's (I really think Chaosium actually set a lot of the standards that now hold today). And partly because it always just seemed cooler and funkier than TSR (which always seemed to be made up of old nerds like Gary Gygax).

Anyone who's been on the Yog-Sothoth.com forums may have encountered me there, making some of the same arguments I see posted here.

These days I'm not actively gaming (I'm very, very choosy and will only play with close friends, so life sometimes gets in the way). I'm developing a fantasy campaign, using a homebrewed BRP system (mostly Stormbringer) I've nicknamed "Sword of Sorcery." The background is a Celtic-flavored one, with elements from Pendragon, GURPS Celtic Myth and several Celtic-flavored fantasy novels.

It's too bad Chaosium didn't seem to quite realize they had the original "generic universal" system on their hands. They could have grabbed the market GURPS ultimately did. Ah well.