The Rascal community recalls their first ever RPG session

When programming our history week, we didn't want to forget the idea of personal histories. We're in an era where we finally have well-researched, accessible, published histories of the roleplaying scene. But for a long time, and for most people, oral stories were the main source of knowledge about the hobby's past.

To capture a little bit of that, we asked the Rascal Discord to send me stories of their first RPG sessions. The goal wasn't to collect the weird or outrageous. We wanted the ordinary, the mundane. We didn't quite know what we'd do with them, but my hope was that we could stitch them together in an interesting way. Not to make some grandiose statements about the hobby but to share the whimsical nature of its starts, its stops, its curious meanderings.

The end result is the following set of blackout poems. Or to be more clear, they're blackout anecdotes that occasionally get poetic. Like when Steve Schulz said his first session "felt as though my friend was playing for me." Or when Aaron Warner remembered his first game of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles happening on a day that was "both sunny and chilly" — despite it occurring in 1987. And, as you will soon read, Erica's entire essay about teasing through the slippery question of what counts as her first session is poetic, especially as it's told alongside a story about the slippery nature of identity.

[Because this story is full of images and Ghost has a character limit on alt-text, there's a machine-readable version with the full text of each anecdote available. This page is also hard to read on phones so please save it for when you're at a larger screen.]