After publishing my last post, I spent some time thinking about my statement that I was “gaming in a bubble.” After some reflection—and a few conversations with friends—I realized some nuance is in order.
I was writing about the period from 1993 to 2006. At the start of that era, I was still working at Metro Comics and meeting other gamers there. But after I graduated from college in 1995, my focus shifted heavily toward my career, my family, and my relationships. I never stopped gaming, but it happened entirely within a closed circle of close friends. I heard about other local groups and knew people who played TTRPGs, yet I didn’t actively interact with them for a long time.
As I got married and started my master’s degree, my general interests evolved. I felt burnt out on fantasy and sci-fi literature. Aside from being a huge fan of Babylon 5, my consumption of genre media shrank. Instead, I spent a few years diving deep into classic literature, history, biographies, and true crime.
During that time, role-playing games (and, to a lesser degree, comic books) became my sole outlet for fiction.
The Dial-Up Days
I got online relatively early in the 90s. My mother worked in the technology field, so we had a home computer when I was in middle school, and I was online before graduating high school. I can still hear the distinct chirp of the dial-up modem.
I had CompuServe, visited the forums, discovered the World Wide Web, and absolutely hunted for gaming content. I vividly remember discovering the legendary tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo and reading through the Evil Overlord List. I scoured the web for conversions and rules for Palladium games, incessantly trying to hammer them into a cohesive, usable system (spoiler: I never did!).
But when I found useful information, I usually just printed it out and took it to the table. I even played a play-by-email game for over a year, and a play-by-post game on Yahoo Groups for over two!
Yet my internet use was highly targeted. I wasn’t active in online gaming forums and didn’t follow TTRPG message boards closely. I got most of my gaming news the old-fashioned way: from print sources like Dragon Magazine and Knights of the Dinner Table.
Bursting the Bubble
This bubble wasn’t a monolith, mind you. Things started to change gradually.
Sometime around 1999, I read A Game of Thrones, which reignited my interest in a different sort of fantasy literature. After Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR in 1987, and as rumors and information of a brand-new edition of D&D began to swirl, I found myself online constantly searching for information. In 1999, Eric Noah’s Unofficial D&D 3rd Edition News became mandatory daily reading.
After we transitioned to D&D 3rd Edition around 2003 or 2004, we moved our weekly game to Sammy’s house. Sammy was a true personality in Puerto Rico’s gaming community—I’ve written about him before. To the best of my knowledge, he operated the island’s first dedicated TTRPG store out of his house in the late 80s. He had a dedicated game room with a massive table where multiple groups played. Suddenly, I was regularly interacting with old acquaintances and people I had previously only known in passing.
Other stores opened (and often closed) during those years, and we’d visit them. A friend of a friend opened a small FLGS, where I ordered a whole brick of all the early D&D miniatures released from WotC. Slowly but surely, I met and got to know other gamers on the island, many of them from the younger generation.
Plugging In
In 2005, I got divorced. With my life shifting again, I began spending much more time at Sammy’s house. I started dropping in on the other groups playing there and hanging out with fellow gamers away from the table. For the first time in a long time, I broke my strict “one-game-a-week” rule and joined a second weekly campaign as a player.
Online, I became an avid reader of The Order of the Stick. I loved their forums, as well as EN World, and started dipping my toes into the discussions, even if I felt a bit unsure about how to engage in those spaces at first.
By 2006, I was fully plugged into the TTRPG internet. I started reading blogs—Stargazer’s World caught my attention very early on. I also reconnected with Daniel Pérez (aka Highmoon), a friend who had moved to the mainland US and was actively creating TTRPGs and promoting the Puerto Rican gaming scene.
All this networking, reconnecting, and hanging out at Sammy’s house eventually led to a plan: a group trip to Gen Con in 2007.
That trip kicked off a markedly different era in my gaming life. But that is a story for the next post. See you then!
