I was 21 and had just moved to Boston, MA from Nebraska. I wasn’t unfamiliar with roleplaying, but I had never done it or known anyone who had done it. When I was in high school, I knew an older student who played Magic. I did not know what that meant other than when someone would say “He plays Magic,” it was always accompanied with an eye roll or a smirk.

So when my new roommate told me that I needed to play in their weekly D&D game, I was a bit dubious. D&D? Me? Really? But I’m willing to try out nearly anything, especially at that time in my life, so what the hell. I made my first character, a rogue half-elf, the starting character of every shy girl. My first session was a disaster.

I got stage fright. Right at the beginning when we were describing our character, I froze up and couldn’t even whisper her eye color. I ran out of the room and had to take a breather. I couldn’t imagine the draw of such a game where terror could freeze my throat like that. How silly I was.

Now, many years later, I know D&D better than any other game out there, and I’ve tried some. I can put together a great character pretty quickly, and I can even do voices if I put my heart into it. There’s something satisfying about slaying orcs on the weekends.

My husband also loves roleplaying, it’s one of the things that brought us together. He leans back sometimes and tells me stories about the old days- the days before he played sometimes. The days of Gary Gygax and TSR. He reminds me that Gary hated version 3.0, which stands to reason that he hated my favorite version, 3.5. I like listening to his stories. I feel part of a tradition. A group. A club. A cult. But not one of those scary ones. The ones where every eats too much pizza, drinks too much soda, and heroically saves peasants from goblin hordes.

While I never met Gary Gygax myself, his legacy is all over our house. I was incredibly hurt when I heard he had died. The last time I felt this way about the passing of a celebrity, it was Hunter S. Thompson’s shocking death. So few people experiment on the world, it sucks when they have to leave it.

Gary built a world for me to play in. I’ll always remember that.