Yet Another Reason To Love The Internet
As a child, my first exposure to tabletop role-playing games (RPGs) wasn’t a fantasy setting like Dungeons and Dragons but rather a TSR gaming system called Marvel Super Heroes that was based on my favorite comic books. I first played the game over at my friend Darren Deloach’s house, and I really got into it. In fact, the name of this site, Bactroid.net, is taken from the first character I rolled up. I saved up enough allowance money to buy the boxed set and, soon after, the Ultimate Powers book. During weekend visits, Darren and I played through various adventures of our own making.
When I moved away from Union County to Jasper, I left behind the only people I knew who played the game. Alone in a new place with people who felt foreign, I started just rolling up random characters quietly by myself. I would stage little battles between the characters according to the rules of the game. The time I spent playing alone worried my parents, and a preacher friend of theirs eventually convinced them that RPGs were evil and that I was playing games with the Devil. They made me throw out all of my gaming materials, and I felt even more alone and disconnected than ever. I resorted to making up my own gaming systems for my made up battles. After all, how could the games be evil if I were just quietly making them myself?
As an adult, I’ve played D&D, making a whole new set of friends that I otherwise would never have known, but I always wished that I still had the Marvel Super Heroes RPG materials that had been a part of my childhood. I dug around online a few years ago but found nothing beyond a few scattered references from people who played the game back in the late 1980s. After a stray mention of the game got scattered recognition and ebulliance at the local comic shop during one of my weekly pilgrimmages, I decided to do some digging again, and this time I hit paydirt. Several fans of the game have put all the now out-of-print books on the web in PDF format. A frenzied slew of downloads later, I had all of the books I had as a child along with all the books I wanted to buy but couldn’t afford.
Reading through these rulebooks and rolling up random characters has been a welcome walk down memory lane, an acknowledgment to my disquieted inner child that, no, you were never evil but you did have evil inadvertently done to you. Just having and reviewing the old books has been enough to make me feel more at peace than I have in a long time. Suddenly I understand why I’ve been drifting in an out of comic book stores with stacks of colorful pages in my hands these past couple of months. By returning to comic books, I’m acknowledging a part of myself that was dormant for far too many years, a creative part of myself I was too afraid to embrace.
As time goes on, I discover new interests and embrace old parts of myself that I chose to lose in growing up. I’m ignoring old and irrelevant limits and discovering opportunity in all of my creative ideas. With each passing day, I’m coming closer and closer to reconciling the vision of the man I’ve always wanted to be with the man I am right now in each present moment. Every day I change. Every day I am born again.
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