One of the role-playing campaigns that I ran in high school was a freestyle campaign that we played in between classes mostly. No dice, no rules, just me making up the action and taking my cue from the players. It started out as you could be whomever and whatever you want. Doug wanted to be a god of intelligence, Curtis wanted to be a Veritech pilot (from Robotech), Jeremy wanted to be Inspector Gadget, and Brandon wanted to be Dr. Who.

Ok, that's a varied set of characters, and they pretty much started out in their respective universes. Curtis and his wingmate had been sent out to reconnoiter an asteroid field, Doug was back in ancient times at his temple when he was attacked by the goddess of something, some arch-enemy I made up on the spot. Jeremy was after Dr Claw while Brandon was in the TARDIS en route to Earth. Eventually I got them together via Brandon's TARDIS and Doug's godly powers. And the thing was that there were four separate plot lines so the characters kept interweaving but not really staying together. A mistake on my part. Still it was fun for the few weeks it lasted.

The first campaign that I ever ran was in fifth grade. Dungeons and Dragons, the 3rd or 4th edition, the one with the basic set having a red cover and the expert set having a blue cover with a wizard watching the scene from the basic set cover. I just ran Keep on the Borderlands straight through. The characters tangled with the hermit and his pet lion, they fought the lizard men in the marsh, missed the giant spiders in the woods, and eventually found the Caves of Chaos. They ventured into a few caves and cleared them out, although I think we stopped playing at that point.

Another early campaign, this one I just played in, was Mike's game of Champions. This is a super-hero game, and a rather good role-playing game overall. I've always believed that super-hero RPG systems come the closest to universal systems, since they have to cover everything that comic books cover. Anyway, in this game I created a character based on Booster Gold. A former athlete with a super-powered suit who was in the super-hero business for the money. He had his Booster Blast and Legion Flight Ring and a Force Field, not very powerful with a base 100 points. I've rarely been a min-maxer so when I play a game where you build a character they don't tend to be all that optimized. Anyway, the first adventure the group came in and fought this villain. And the thing I remember is blasting the guy full force with extra effort to do the maximum possible damage. Didn't even phase the guy, that's when I knew that my character was way out of his league compared to the other heroes.

We played Call of Cthulhu a bit. Everyone was killed quickly so we moved on. RuneQuest was too generic. This is 3rd edition with the boxed set not having any setting other than a small Glorantha booklet. Star Frontiers, that was a good game. I loved the maps they provided. They had a grid pattern so you could place counters on them and see your characters moving around graphically in a city or a spaceship or a dungeon. That's the first game where we used visual aids. Also had a MERP campaign and a Rolemaster campaign in middle school. Don't remember much about them other than that we loved the character generation system.

That's about all I can remember for my early RPG experiences. Looking back it surprises me how many games I actually ran and played in. We did so many other things that it's a wonder I got any schoolwork done.