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Now I'm an expert!

A birthday present to myself arrived in the mail yesterday: An unplayed copy of the D&D Expert Set from 1981. Even the dice are still in the bag!

 Or maybe it's more apt to say a belated birthday present to my inner 11-year-old self...

 My first D&D-related purchase was the 1981 Tom Moldvay-penned Basic Set.  A friend's older brother had introduced us to Dungeons & Dragons a year or so before (I vividly recall that he brought the Holmes Basic Set to my house on a Sunday afternoon circa 1979-80).

 After playing D&D for a few months using just the Basic Set, I was quickly enticed into accumulating the Advanced D&D 1st edition books. A precocious kid, I thought there was no good reason not to skip right over what I thought was the intermediary Expert Set. I'm confident my thinking went something like, "I don't need that Expert Set stepping stone...I'm ready to dive into the Advanced game!" My 11-year-old mind didn't realize that D&D and AD&D were intended to be two distinct, independent game systems; I assumed AD&D was simply the "more adult" version of D&D, fixing all the stuff left out of the original. 

 So...Having skipped this Expert Set altogether, this year it felt like a good opportunity to pick up a D&D product that I was wholly unfamiliar with yet was released smack in the heady period of my first enthrallment with the game.  I'm very curious to read through this edition and try to conjure what my prepubescent mind would have thought of it if I hadn't zoomed right past it on a speed ramp directly to AD&D.

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  1. goodhalgarageFebruary 15, 2018 at 2:24 PM

    I received my copy of the Expert Set the same time as the Basic, Christmas 1981. We immediately started playing AD&D and I never used them, until 2016. We've been playing a campaign since June 2016 using Basic D&D, and I don't miss AD&D one bit!

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  2. Stephen WendellFebruary 15, 2018 at 5:19 PM

    I stayed the course, absorbing the Expert Set in its turn before succumbing to AD&D a couple years later. I hope you're able to capture the magic. For me it was Designing a Wilderness and the revelation, in the opening pages of X1, of the Known World.

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