Hello friends! Welcome to 2026. This year marks a special occasion for me. This coming July will mark the 40th anniversary of the very first tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) session I played. My first time Game Mastering. I want to mark the occasion with an official celebration in the summer, and activities throughout the year, including a series of posts here on the blog.
Let me start with a caveat I’ve shared before, but one I think is essential. Sometimes I see people throwing around their “years played” as if it were a rank that made their games superior. Let me be clear: Playing longer does not make you better. If you are having fun and your players are having fun, that’s what matters—whether you’ve been playing for four decades or four days.
Forty years is a personal milestone. It reminds me that I’ve been playing these games I enjoy so much for over half of my life—77% of my life, to be precise. I’ve formed lifelong bonds of friendship and camaraderie, and it continues to drive me to support gaming in my local communities. Forty years is a big deal to me; I want to celebrate it and share with all of you what it means.
In previous posts, I’ve touched on some of what I will talk about today, so rather than repeat what I said, I’ll try to summarize and link to the relevant posts in case you are interested in reading those.
I started playing TTRPGs, specifically Dungeons and Dragons, in the summer of 1986, but my love of fantasy and storytelling did not begin there. In a way, I was primed to love fantasy, sci-fi, superheroes, and telling stories from an early age. My family always read to me as a child, even before I could read on my own. I loved comics from an early age and still read them today. Before I was in school, my grandmother would take me to Old San Juan, buy me comics at the newsstand, and sit with me at the Plaza de Armas in the old city, reading them to me.
Her reading so enthralled me that neither she nor I noticed a photojournalist snapping our picture, which was published in a local newspaper. You can see the image below.
Sunglar’s grandmother read El Chapulín Colorado to him.
I don’t recall when I first saw it, but Disney’s Robin Hood and Rocket Robin Hood were a significant influence on me as a child. For years, I played Robin Hood every day, and my grandmother played every other character. I would often dictate to her what her response should be.
I was also interested in tales of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. When I was four years old, my grandparents travelled to New York City and brought me back four Mego World’s Greatest Super Knights. If I remember correctly, I had King Arthur, Sir Launcelot, Sir Galahad, and the Black Knight.
Like any kid my age, I was influenced by Star Wars and Star Trek. Still, movies like the animated Lord of the Rings, Excalibur, the original Clash of the Titans, Conan the Barbarian, Beastmaster, Fire and Ice, the Sinbad movies, and the animated version of The Hobbit shaped my view of and expectations for what fantasy was.
I read The Hobbit the Summer before I started playing D&D, but I knew about the story and the world of Middle-Earth because I grew up with a relative who loved Professor Tolkien’s works. She would often gift me Tolkien-themed calendars for Christmas. I would examine the art pieces for each month in fascination, even before I read the books.
One such gift was the Hildebrandt Brothers’ 1982 Atlantis Calendar, which fascinated me. As I said in this 2015 post, when I got this calendar, it fired up my imagination. My mastery of English was still developing, so I did not fully understand the brief descriptions of each painting. I would look at that calendar over and over and come up with different stories each time. This calendar, and specifically that piece, had a significant influence on my ideas about how to organize an adventure into a story and the events that unfold along the way: challenges, allies, failure, and triumph.
One year before, in 1981, I also got an Odyssey 2 console along with a deluxe cartridge game, Quest for the Rings. Here is the original post I wrote about the game almost 16 years ago. I never understood the game, but the components, the board with a map, the art in the rulebook, fired up my imagination.
All this really prepared me and shaped my play patterns, so I was ready to embrace fantasy gaming, even if I didn’t know it, first, with my love for the electronic fantasy boardgame Dark Tower. The game was published in 1981, but I got it in 1982 and played it incessantly—Solo against the tower, with my friends who would be my first players. Despite being an electronic game, it had so many tactile components, the board map with the different kingdoms, miniatures, like a traditional TTRPG, it used all of those to spark the imagination.
But most of all, what prepared me the most for playing TTRPGs in general and D&D in particular was LJN’s Advanced Dungeons and Dragons toys. I won’t go into deep detail, but figures like Strongheart and Warduke were totems of the game for me long before I understood the rules. Here is the 2010 post about toys, where I discuss my memories of the toys and how they influenced me. These toys, along with the D&D cartoon and TSR’s D&D comic ads, trained me to be interested in and play D&D.
Two other significant influences on me as a proto-gamer were the Choose Your Own Adventure books and their variations, which I wrote about here, and which taught me to conceive stories with branching, divergent paths and outcomes depending on the protagonist’s choices. The other one is the ElfQuest comic book, which I’ve written about often on the blog, the latest one being this post about inspiration, which, apropos, is very relevant to the topics in this post. ElfQuest is another fantasy classic I read before playing TTRPGs, and it was equally, if not more, influential on my storytelling style than Tolkien.
All the above, along with some other details I might have forgotten, shaped me as a child and young adult and influenced my role-playing games, even before I opened a TTRPG book.
These days, I continue to share my love of storytelling, not just with the players in our weekly gaming group and the fellow TTRPG enthusiasts in Puerto Rico Role Players and Dungeons & Dragons Puerto Rico, but with my son. I tell him a bedtime story every night, with ongoing plots and recurring characters, and ask him what he would do. I hope to continue sharing my love of storytelling with a new generation.
I’d love to read about your experiences becoming a gamer. Please leave a comment below.
