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So this huge ogre with chain-mail and a pet whirlwind (Dingy, I think it was called.) is chasing us to the edge of this cliff.  The rest of the party consisting of various Dragonlance characters, a minotaur, kinder, and my half-ogre mage are all running for dear life.   Me being the heroic idiot that I was, decided to “slow him down,” while the others got away, ignoring the obvious signs from the game master that this was not the stunt I should be trying to pull right about now.  I mean what really got us to this point?  I don’t remember exactly.  I was feeling all the real emotions that I would be feeling if I was actually there in real life, which was awesome.  It was the early 1990’s and these were our adventures in the world of AD&D.

We would plan for weeks in advance, fighting with our parents to allow us to sleep over my best friend’s place.  My parents would rarely let me go, my father usually telling me that home is a place for sleep and that I should always come home. Sometimes for birthdays, special occasions, or when my parents had gone away on trips, I would be able to stray from the rules.

Outside of our AD&D campaigns, I would draw little comics of our adventures and the big events that would happen to us.  I would draw bubbles above the cartoon characters and my best friend would write the dialog.  Sometimes he would write thing so funny that we would cry from laughter.  Like one time I had a picture of Riverwind getting killed by a dragon (or something) and he laid there as mass of body parts and guts, us standing over him sad and confused.  My best friend wrote, “Gee, I didn’t know Riverwind was made of silly putty, I wonder if he can copy comics.”  This was my favorite picture of all time.  Unfortunately as always most of these things were lost in the many spring cleanings that my family would have when I happen to “not be around.”

So back to where we began, I turned around, thinking I was some bad ass warrior and threw my +1 magic dagger at the ogre, and after a failing dice roll and the game master shaking his head, looking at me like I’m an idiot, the dagger bounces off his chest like a pebble.  Then my best friend assuming the role of the ogre points at me and in an angry ogre voice, commands his whirlwind to commence throwing me off the side of the cliff.  Ironically, I’m sure I got to the bottom of the cliff before the others.

When my character had died, I was actually at the brink of tears and had to leave the room.  It was amazing now looking back how much real emotion I had felt for a character that never really existed but that I had associated so strongly with.  Much later, my friend came up and told me I was resurrected and we could continue our adventure.  Though, I said that this was bullshit and that I thought I should stay dead, he told me he did a successful roll to recover me and I was legitimately resurrected not just a fake roll to bring me back to make me feel better.  To be honest, that may have been the last day that we had ever played AD&D.  Soon we just grew up, and got so busy with life that we never resumed our adventures.  It was a nice feeling though, going through old hard back AD&D books and coming across my character sheet, looking over the stats, and remembering all the good times we had.