Ayaho, yoyoyote! ^_^

Although the (relatively) modern computer was in my life by the time I got into book-and-paper RPGs, I was in the same spot as you when I started gaming. Or reading, anyway; I had only one friend (and if there were others, probably the only one I could trust at my back) who was also the person who got me into gaming, but I was never part of an actual gaming group. The closest I ever came to that was a half-dozen thoroughly infrequent gaming sit-downs at a later but just as close friend's place (whom I, with great pride, state that I got into Furry Fandom a couple of years after we met) which were regrettably not even directly connected by plot for more than two of them.

So, I have myself an enormous (300 books, boxes and modules plus, along with a whole mess of dice, miniatures and accessories) library that individually I have never used in a single table playing session. That's what I meant by 'reading', I love the context and worlds the writing of them are shaped around and themselves shape in turn. I don't think I ever thought of it, nor do I think of it now, as excessive or obsessive; I learned this trade (as it were) on the heels of a serious comic book collecting 'career' and I suspect it followed with the same fervor of my obtaining books and all, often specific books or lines of varying rarity, and I really didn't have anyone to guide me along any other path than my experimental 'experiencing' journey into RPG collecting.

The funny thing is that I don't think my experiences with gaming in the manner they ran with me are either rare or unusual. There was no push from any of my family members to feel any way but my own natural curiousity about them, conversely, I had very little guidance from anyone about it; I think it was dumb luck that 2Paw even ended up starting out as a Werewolf: the Apocalypse 'Garou', given that the day I saw (and picked up) the 1st Ed. mainbook in August 1992 I thought with the manner of its writing and art layout it was a graphic novel as opposed to a role-playing game mainbook. I don't even think I learned the basic d10 rules until more than a decade after that, and longer still to make it stick in any practical usage for me. It was the content and background and story I was interested in, the same way someone is interested deeply in a kind of fiction.

That never went away for me, although I do remember my obsessing over the Garou and their plight at the very beginning. (I don't think you knew me then, and I probably would have come across IC much more unbalancedly as I do nowadays.) But it was a springboard; a blank canvas that allowed me to shape myself with 2Paw as an element of my online self over the last twenty-four years.

I regret nothing that you can't prove I did! ^_^

-2Paw.

Oh the tales I could tell of the lives I've led and the places I've been. I think what D&D was to me was, like you, an extension of something that probably already existed. Like you I had a massive Comic collection and still have many rare ones I kept for what they meant to me. In my life I have owned a Spiderman #1 (lost it to a flood) and an X-men real early issue (the first encounter with 'The Blob' back when they had those hideous blue and gold unis!) and some of the very old 'The Shadow' and 'Ghost' comics.

Before comics were cartoons by the bucket load and I would sit and draw those characters all the time (my introduction to 'art'). I got pretty good at it and still occasionally draw stuff but usually it's fantasy art now. Besides comic books I purchased the very first Heavy Metal magazine and every subsequent issue for years (oh how I wish I had those still!!!).

My first ever 'furry movie' was a very old one called 'Watership Down' (I'll find and own it again someday). My first furry crush was the shapeshifter in the TV series 'Space 1999'. Many animated movies followed including 'Wizards', all of the Rankin and Bass 'Hobbit' stuff, and now a huge collection of japanese anime shows. Also include a love of the Muppets and movies like 'The Dark Crystal' and I was most likely furry before I even knew what it was.

D&D opened me up to playing 'Nick Bottom' the weaver in Shakespeare’s 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' along with my very best friend who brought me to Tapestries and was also a fellow D&D'er of many many years of our lives together. A simple game that has so profoundly changed my life's direction not so much by educating me to new things but in helping me discover that which was already inside of me and now grows still. Even to find such friends as you, my Canuck Garou.