Back in the early 1991, I was a sophomore in college. I’d finally gotten a PC (we called them “clones” in those days) the year before, but I still had my Commodore 64 hooked up on the desk beside the PC, and I still hung out on C64 Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). One, called the City of WISE (Waukesha Information System Exchange, as I recollect), I called every night (because in those days, you had to dial up<\/i> with your modem<\/i> to connect to a bulletin board system, and you often had to call late at night when you wouldn’t tie up the phone). I ran a trivia message board, and I even started a message board for a Call of Cthulhu game.<\/p>\n
Someone else was going to run some sort of roleplaying game on a message board, and I signed up. But that gamemaster never showed. Instead, one of the other users (Brass Orchid, handle derived from a Samuel R. Delany book I still haven’t read) and I started riffing absurdly, playing somewhat to roleplaying game conventions. Eventually, Brass Orchid collected these messages and sent me a copy on disk to see if we could make some sort of story out of it.<\/p>\n
Fast forward fifteen years to the present day, and I’m browsing TextFiles.com<\/a>, a repository of text files from that era, and I get to thinking about The Forgotten Legacy (as the message board was called, undoubtedly some grand sweeping sword-and-sorcery campaign that we subverted to our own ends). So I Google Brass Orchid by his real name, and lo, there it is<\/a>, on his Web site:<\/p>\n <\/code><\/ul>\n Suddenly, I’m nineteen years old again, connecting through LotusWorks, and casting spells I made up on the fly. I can see the wood paneling and smell the light must of my basement room, I can feel the keyboard in my lap (because that’s all we had for ergonomics, you damn kids–you could put your keyboard in your lap), and I played late into the night with my short stories, with my bulletin boards, and with simple games without 3D rendering. I had most of college and all of my life ahead of me, and I was as optimistic as a college Objectivist could be.<\/p>\n Crazy, the things you can find on the Internet. I am of the first generation that can find its youth.<\/p>\n UPDATE:<\/i><\/font> Revised a sentence to make clear I looked for Brass Orchid elsewhere but TextFiles.com<\/font><\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in the early 1991, I was a sophomore in college. I’d finally gotten a PC (we called them “clones” in those days) the year before, but I still had my Commodore 64 hooked up on the desk beside the PC, and I still hung out on C64 Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes). One, called the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3334,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3342","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3342","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3334"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3342"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3342\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9145,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3342\/revisions\/9145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3342"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3342"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brianjnoggle.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3342"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>\n=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=\r\n\r\n12\/21\/91; 12:43PM\r\nFrom: Brass Orchid [3]\r\n\r\nWe could always play without him. All the GM \r\ndoes is provide structure and coherence to the game.\r\n=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=\r\n\r\n12\/21\/91; 10:39PM\r\nFrom: L. S. Creetor [62]\r\n\r\nI'll take my bastard sword and stab the Ultimate \r\nReality in the gut.\r\n=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=\r\n\r\n12\/22\/91; 5:08AM\r\nFrom: Brass Orchid [3]\r\n\r\nThe Ultimate Reality suffers 120 HP's damage and \r\nfalls, semiconcious, to the ground, muttering, \"That\r\nBastard sure knows how to hurt a guy.\"\r\nL. S. Creetor collects 20 Exp. Points and finds\r\nthe Medallion of Adaptation.\r\nSuddenly, the sky splits open and a stairway to\r\nthe stars appears. Branches off of the main stairway can\r\nbe seen, dwindling into the distance.\r\nYour move...\r\n=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=<\/pre>\n