When I was an engineering undergrad at École Polytechnique de Montréal back in the early to mid-1980s, I finally got to try role-playing games; I’d been reading about them but could not manage to get a game going in my quiet home town. But Poly (as we call it) had a gaming club, cleverly called Polyhèdre (Polyhedron), which met every Thursday night. With a school of 1600 engineering students at the time, it was super-busy — it was like a short convention every week.
Everyone once in a while we got students from outside the school; if they attended Université de Montréal, with which we were affiliated, it was sort-of OK, but if they were from outside the pale, it was against school rules for student clubs. However, we generally pretended not to notice unless they behaved poorly.
At one point, we had some attendees that were clearly high-schoolers; there was this 14-year-old kid who was desperate to run Ravenloft so a couple of friends and I humoured him. He was a terrible DM, but most of the club members were 18 to 25, so we could remember quite well what is was to be 14 and we put up with his learning curve. (I still get a warm feeling nowadays, thinking about we could have been dicks but weren’t.)
However, last night it hit me like a ton of bricks that today, he would be about 44 and might have kids older than I was back when I felt so patient and mature for putting up with him. FFFUUUUCCCK! I’m OLD!
Credits: The top picture is “The Big Adventure” by zazB, and the bottom one is an illustration by Claudia Cangini for Evil Hat Productions’ FATE Accelerated.
The Reef 