The first was this little folio game called Star Fleet Battles. It consisted of a small blue hex map, a sheet of 1/2″ counters, a thin rule book and these half sheet sized diagrams of star ships called SSDs. That’s ‘ship’s system display’. And it was Star Trek. This was 1979, only ten years after Star Trek had gone off the air. The only Star Trek gaming stuff I’d seen prior to this was Lou Zocchi’s Star Fleet Battle Manual miniatures rules that I’d never played. I was, however, very familiar with Zocchi’s Avalon Hill Jutland, at the time, my favorite war game to play with JJ. So, here’s this game about Star Trek with a ship system display in the same vein as Jutland … I loved it instantly and have played thousands of hours of SFB with probably half a hundred opponents. Still a great game only now the rules have expanded to encyclopedic size and everyone that sees the rules book runs away screaming in terror. That’s SFB!

The second discovery that day began as a meh … what’s this about? The AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide. I picked it up more out of boredom than curiosity thinking that perhaps I could entice JJ into something he doesn’t have to worry about losing when ever he played me. It was my introduction into role playing and it barely lasted three years. In that time though I did manage to gather a couple of novices, including my brother-in-law and sister-in-law, two other kids in the neighborhood and, of course, JJ. Heck, I even ran a little game at work. So, anyway, this is where the Legacy Character comes from.

Like everything I do, I gathered up everything I could on the subject, i.e. modules for AD&D. This happened to include a few things from a company called the Judge’s Guild. One of their modules, the City-State of the Invincible Overlord became my primary game setting. This was very early days for RPGs and CSotIO was pretty basic but better than anything else … well, more like the only thing available. Its a great city, with every building briefly described, NPCs all over the place, little tidbits like rumours but a lot of things left up to the DM.

One entry amused me. The Park of Obscene Statues off the Plaza of Profuse Pleasures. In the description of this park, which is like three lines, there is a mention of ‘capering trolls’. I blinked, imagining trolls ‘capering’. Well, from that little mention there came da dum Bruce the gay troll. Now, Bruce was THE capering troll in the park and while my party never confronted said troll, Bruce became a fixture, a legend, in my games both in AD&D and Fantasy Hero games. I never wrote him up, or even used him but he was always lurking amongst the statues …

Why Bruce? I dunno, honestly, just at the time ‘Bruce’ was synonymous with ‘gay’. Who knows where we get this shit … though thinking back, there was Bruce Jenner so perhaps Bruce is now synonymous with transgender … So, anyway, my son has taken up D&D, something I am trying very hard to break him of but more on that later, and in telling stories of my various adventures, Bruce reared his ugly head and Cody got a kick out of the concept. Between the two of us joking about a gay troll, we managed to push a couple dozen gay stereo-types together for fun. Cody told his gaming friends and they loved the story so I wrote up a quick Bruce character sheet for D&D 5. I am interested to know how Bruce will fare with this new generation of adventurers.