Initially I played Dungeons & Dragons with school friends but thanks to an advert in a relatively early White Dwarf I found a Roleplaying club held on Sundays at a local scout hut in Gatley, Stockport. They were a friendly if dysfunctional bunch of reprobates some of whom still sit around my gaming table 25 years later.
I always assumed that the Gatley club had been running for some while but my best friend, who was there at the time (though he is several years older than me and we wouldn't become friends until much later) was "in" with those who organized it and upon reading a draft of this blog-post commented that the posting of that advert was almost simultaneous with the club starting. I guess it is still possible that I saw it in a back issue.
As I recall I didn't play a lot of "Red Box" D&D there. Instead I was introduced to WFRP, Palladium, RuneQuest, Judge Dredd, lots of Warhammer Battle ... and presumably AD&D 1st Edition but I don't have any specific memory of the latter. There was also some running around with water pistols, including a "drive by shooting" outside a local shop. I don't think I did any GMing there; at 11 I was almost certainly the youngest and somewhat in awe of my elders, even though many of them can't have been more than 16.
After maybe a year the whole club was kicked out of the scout hut. Apocraphally this was because someone smeared the walls of the toilet with shit. It's not entirely certain that this ever happened, I think it highly unlikely.
My best friend offered the opinion that the event was a concoction to expel the club. After all this time I guess it doesn't matter.
We were temporarily re-homed in the clean and spacious hall of a school in Cheadle. I seem to remember playing a lot of first edition Warhammer 40K there. However we can't have been there more than 6 months before we were moved on again. This time the reason was apparently financial; the club's president had dipped into the kitty to help make his mortgage payments. Again I was just a kid at the time and it's possible the situation was more complicated. Even if true I imagine he meant it to be a short term "loan" and always intended to pay the money back next month. Whatever the full story, the end result was that we had to leave the school and I don't recall seeing him around again.
So when I'm about 14 the club found itself based on the second floor above a rather seedy second hand gaming store in Back Picadilly, Manchester, where we could play both Saturdays and Sundays. Here alas the lease holder gave us free rein to decorate as we pleased and as you might expect from a group of mostly young male geeks this resulted in an already dark room being painted black with a rather amateur attempt rendition of a star-scape implemented with sponge and paintbrush. I remember this venue as always being filthy and I'm told it stank of grease and unwashed gamers; it wasn't being used by anyone else so the impetus to keep it clean was largely absent, in fact it got so bad that on one occasion I brought the vacuum cleaner from home. Not unexpectedly the toilet was especially a hive of scum and villainy. I also remember competition between the separate gaming groups to order the largest round of toasted teacakes at the local McDonald's; 20+ were not unheard of. We were here when the first edition of WEG's d6 Star Wars RPG was released, which I recall being very reluctant to play at first, possibly because of the high regard with which I held the then untainted films. However after the first session I went and bought both the rules and Sourcebook and for a couple of years it was a favoured game.
At about this time my family moved to Stockport and into a large Edwardian property in a very poor state of repair that would take over a decade to rectify. It was however blessed with great size including a very large bedroom for me and extensive cellars. It was also much closer to most of my gaming group. Starting with the occasional midweek or Saturday evening we began to game here frequently. Ultimately with the permission of my parents and after a whirlwind clean and paint of the largest cellar my group decided that we'd had enough of Back Piccadilly and relocated our Sunday game too.
Over the following years until I left for University our group grew into its own small club of up to 4 groups and 20+ gamers scattered over 3 cellar rooms. Most of these gamers joined us from Back Piccadilly as rumours spread of a more convivial environment in what for many was a more convenient location. At this time I was taking more of the GMing duties running 2nd Edition AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, DC Heroes and Star Wars 2nd Edition.
My memory is vague but I think as University approached numbers were already falling as various groups splintered off and started playing elsewhere. At the end I was GMing D&D from the RulesCyclopedia for a group of two or three and probably playing in at least one game too. Our club must have closed in September 1992 with its members either heading like me to University (a minority), drifting into real life or returning to the progenitor club in Manchester, which as I recall was now using a pub function room. The cellar would continue to see gaming action on and off over the next five years when I was on vacation from University but the heyday of Geeks in the Cellar seemed to be over ...
I always assumed that the Gatley club had been running for some while but my best friend, who was there at the time (though he is several years older than me and we wouldn't become friends until much later) was "in" with those who organized it and upon reading a draft of this blog-post commented that the posting of that advert was almost simultaneous with the club starting. I guess it is still possible that I saw it in a back issue.
As I recall I didn't play a lot of "Red Box" D&D there. Instead I was introduced to WFRP, Palladium, RuneQuest, Judge Dredd, lots of Warhammer Battle ... and presumably AD&D 1st Edition but I don't have any specific memory of the latter. There was also some running around with water pistols, including a "drive by shooting" outside a local shop. I don't think I did any GMing there; at 11 I was almost certainly the youngest and somewhat in awe of my elders, even though many of them can't have been more than 16.
After maybe a year the whole club was kicked out of the scout hut. Apocraphally this was because someone smeared the walls of the toilet with shit. It's not entirely certain that this ever happened, I think it highly unlikely.
My best friend offered the opinion that the event was a concoction to expel the club. After all this time I guess it doesn't matter.
We were temporarily re-homed in the clean and spacious hall of a school in Cheadle. I seem to remember playing a lot of first edition Warhammer 40K there. However we can't have been there more than 6 months before we were moved on again. This time the reason was apparently financial; the club's president had dipped into the kitty to help make his mortgage payments. Again I was just a kid at the time and it's possible the situation was more complicated. Even if true I imagine he meant it to be a short term "loan" and always intended to pay the money back next month. Whatever the full story, the end result was that we had to leave the school and I don't recall seeing him around again.
So when I'm about 14 the club found itself based on the second floor above a rather seedy second hand gaming store in Back Picadilly, Manchester, where we could play both Saturdays and Sundays. Here alas the lease holder gave us free rein to decorate as we pleased and as you might expect from a group of mostly young male geeks this resulted in an already dark room being painted black with a rather amateur attempt rendition of a star-scape implemented with sponge and paintbrush. I remember this venue as always being filthy and I'm told it stank of grease and unwashed gamers; it wasn't being used by anyone else so the impetus to keep it clean was largely absent, in fact it got so bad that on one occasion I brought the vacuum cleaner from home. Not unexpectedly the toilet was especially a hive of scum and villainy. I also remember competition between the separate gaming groups to order the largest round of toasted teacakes at the local McDonald's; 20+ were not unheard of. We were here when the first edition of WEG's d6 Star Wars RPG was released, which I recall being very reluctant to play at first, possibly because of the high regard with which I held the then untainted films. However after the first session I went and bought both the rules and Sourcebook and for a couple of years it was a favoured game.
At about this time my family moved to Stockport and into a large Edwardian property in a very poor state of repair that would take over a decade to rectify. It was however blessed with great size including a very large bedroom for me and extensive cellars. It was also much closer to most of my gaming group. Starting with the occasional midweek or Saturday evening we began to game here frequently. Ultimately with the permission of my parents and after a whirlwind clean and paint of the largest cellar my group decided that we'd had enough of Back Piccadilly and relocated our Sunday game too.
Over the following years until I left for University our group grew into its own small club of up to 4 groups and 20+ gamers scattered over 3 cellar rooms. Most of these gamers joined us from Back Piccadilly as rumours spread of a more convivial environment in what for many was a more convenient location. At this time I was taking more of the GMing duties running 2nd Edition AD&D, Call of Cthulhu, DC Heroes and Star Wars 2nd Edition.
My memory is vague but I think as University approached numbers were already falling as various groups splintered off and started playing elsewhere. At the end I was GMing D&D from the RulesCyclopedia for a group of two or three and probably playing in at least one game too. Our club must have closed in September 1992 with its members either heading like me to University (a minority), drifting into real life or returning to the progenitor club in Manchester, which as I recall was now using a pub function room. The cellar would continue to see gaming action on and off over the next five years when I was on vacation from University but the heyday of Geeks in the Cellar seemed to be over ...
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