High school brought with it a number of new opportunities in gaming. I attended Loyola Academy, another Catholic school. It was also an all boys school at the time. My brother Matt would be a member of the last all male graduating class a few years later, but in my time there wasn't even a hint that all girls Marilac was going to close and get merged with Loyola. Regardless of what that did to my chances to socialize with and date members of the opposite gender, the all boys nature of Loyola did allow for new horizons in gaming.
For one thing there was an officially sanctioned gaming club at Loyola. I can't recall the actual name of the club, but it was pretty clever. Strategic Simulations Association or some such. In theory it was about honing our minds through tactical conflicts. In practice, it was about letting the teacher in charge play his collection of boardgames.
But you know what? That was fine with me.
I got to play Cosmic Encounters, Succession Wars, Talisman, Fortress America, Shogun, Dungeonquest, and Axis & Allies. Lots of Axis & Allies, which was our game of choice for most of a year. Old favorites that I'd played in my younger days like Battletech and The Star Trek Combat Simulator got some love too, but mostly it was the big board games of the day that prevailed after school.
But that didn't mean I stopped roleplaying. Quite the contrary, between friends I made in band and people from the club at school, my gaming circle grew into something pretty impressive. We played a slew of the games of that era, albeit rarely for very long each. There was a one shot Cyberpunk game, the time we used the Marvel Superheroes rules to do a big Aliens vs Predator game decades before the movie for it. And then we topped it by throwing a bunch of superheroes into the fight, beating the Stormwatch vs Aliens comic by a few years too. Vampire: The Masquerade came out and we used the rules to go on bloody rampages through Chicago, though Steve was still around at that point and actually ran a Vampire game that was as close as I ever got to playing it correctly. There was the Mechwarrior game where we got stuck with a gamemaster controlled character who was better at everything than all of us and rode a better giant robot too, which was suck that turned into awesome when we found a loophole in the charging rules and managed to totally upstage him. Another time we were playing D&D and the game sucked so bad that we started setting up and playing a board game in the middle of the game.
That last one was a pretty mean thing to do, and not what I'd do now...but we were high schoolers and cruelty came as easy as breathing back then.
Two major developments occurred in this era. The first was that I reconnected with Jamie when he pulled my phone number out of somewhere and gave me a call. It turned out that the D&D game he was playing in needed more players and he remembered that I played. So after years of no contact, I ended up in the basement of someone I'd never met before on the word of a guy I hadn't seen in ages. That's gamers for you. The funny thing was, Jamie himself dropped out of the game pretty soon thereafter, and I never saw him again. I stayed with the game. It was my first long term campaign as a player. People kept joining and leaving the game, but there was always a core group. There was me, Matt (not my brother, a different one), and Caleb as the players with Joel as the DM. I've given Joel a lot of shit over the years for being an asshole DM. And, to be fair, much of it was deserved. But it was in learning to overcome the ruthless crap and abuse that Joel threw our way that caused me to grow as a gamer. Many of the power gaming skills that I use even today came from trying to survive Joel's game, so for that I am grateful. Plus, you never forget your first real campaign, and Joel's was my first.
So thanks, Joel.
The second development was that I met Luke and Drew. At the time, they were just other members of the Loyola gamer gang. It wasn't until we all got to the University of Illinois together that we became a unit. But the UIUC gang started at Loyola. Now, granted, since by sheer happenstance Luke was the closest member of the gang to where I lived, he became my closest gaming friend. Especially after Ryan transferred out of Loyola after Freshman year and Steve graduated a year ahead of me. Luke was the only player to regularly play with me and my brothers in my home game. The three of them formed the "Corsairian Empire" after conquering an evil town in the Forgotten Realms and rather than leave, they took over and started empire building. It was a fun game, and some of my better gaming stories come from it.
So after four years of craziness, it was time to head to college, which is where we'll pick the tale up next.
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