I just read Andrea’s post where she mentions she’s 24 and new to Birthright.
I’m wondering what is the average age of Birthright Players/DMs/Fans (based on this site’s fanbase)? (Maybe a poll could be run?) And how are the new (read: younger) people discovering Birthright? Is it through this site? That would be great!
For myself, I’m 38 years old and I remember buying the PS of Ilien as my first BR product. (I thought it was an adventure, which led me right back to the store to pickup the boxed set.:D)
After The Iron Throne novel, I mean I saw the product before, but wasnt sure if it suits me till I got “enchanted” by the mature RPG Birthright feeling…
40, and one of my friends bought the boxed set and Talinie when they came
out. I fell in love pretty quickly, and eventually bought the set from him,
and went on to buy everything else published (I think), except the novels.
I’ve begun my FRPG rampage only 10 years ago with a custom AD&D 2nd edition setting my friend DMed. I’ve heard of it before but never got any chance to play. So when I heard that he’s in it, I begged to let me play with his group.
Soon after, he tried to run a BR. That was my first contact and I was pretty lost. But we never played it more then once. Then, some 4-5 years ago, another friend started a campaign that is still active (with minor or major breaks), you can see my sig.
Always wanted to get everything from it, and D&D in general. So, I was happy like a little kid when a month ago I finally got the BR novels (that is, all except War). I had a hard time finding them since 99% of all online shops don’t ship to my country, they’ve never been sold here and they are not published anymore. So, if you have a copy you don’t need…
26, loved BR since it came out, never got a chance to play it tabletop, only in PBEMs, unfortunately. Played plenty of other RPGs, but couldn’t get enough people together for BR who liked the strategy game feel–at least not when we had time to do so (one group might have, but we were engaged in an epic campaign prior to it, anyway).
35, been playing Birthright since about 1999/2000, when I joined an already started AD&D campaign (called rather imaginatively Team D) with a 3rd level Druid. Brokk is now 12th level but still lets everyone else do the bulk of the fighting… I’ve got love weak True Neutral characters (Str 10, Dex 8)!
Started playing about a year after the game was first published; dismissed the setting as another trashy TSR product when it first arrievd in my local gaming store…how wrong I was
Have played standard P&P domain games, P&P adventure games, PBeMs (not only as RoE DM, but as a player in several short-lived ones) and an EPIC BR P&P adventure/domain game.
It seems like the people who really love the BR setting don’t get to play it enough. I myself have never played as a PC but I 've had a few attempts at DMing. I would appreciate the time and ability to play a campaign myself. I must admit that this site is full of great information and I wish I was a member back when I ran my first BR adventure. It would have helped alot.
Well, I’m 28, nearly 29, and I’ve been interested in Birthright since roughly 2000 or so. Although I’ve been playing AD&D/D&D since 1997 (and reading it prior to that), I only really got into world settings in the last five years or so (except Planescape in 1999 and BR in 2000).
26 here. I’ve been playing Birthright since it got out (I got to know it by pure chance as one of my friends got if from the UK on a holiday trip).
I’ve DM/Played lots of games at the domain level on the setting and I really love it for that. For adventuring I haven’t had so much luck (as a DM or as a player).
Got the boxed set when it first released. Instantly fell in love with the more “realistic” poltical aspects of the realms and the lower magical nature. Forgotten Realms where everyone ones multiple magical items and munchkinism abounds drives me nuts.
33, I saw a battered boxed set in a secondhand store and remembered it from the Dragon magazine conspectus. Bought it thinking I might skim it once for ideas - and thereafter got everything as it came out and read it all multiple times.
I’ve played some short lived tabletop, some recent PBEM’s, and spent years more dreaming stuff up for it.
Still never got hold of the old warcards that were missing from the box though :o
22, well i was a young DnD player that ended up with a group of older players( that was in 2001/2002 ) playing a birthright domain game in local rpg club.
The game sucked, the group sucked( all they did was backstabing one another ) but the setting enchanted me. I managed to find some books but i haven’t played it until i found a crew on university that loved Birthright( well we are history students:D ). That was 4 years ago and we are playing non stop by then ( with major pauses during exams ), currently we are playing 3 different campaigns on Cerilia.
31 - Picked up the boxed set around 96/97. I love the way magic is handled, the elf/human conflict, the simplified but rich cosmology (limited gods, only one other plane, etc), the war game aspect of domain rulership, and the “cohesiveness” of the setting (as opposed to the “kitchen sink” mentality of FR and other worlds).
Oh, and no Orcs! I hate orcs - sooo overdone!
Oh, and the way dragons are rare, majestic, powerful, near-legendary beings. None of this “a dragon in every cave” nonsense like in other campaign worlds.
I’m sure I can come up with more, but that’s most of it.
I’m 35 and I discovered Birthright at the hobby store when it was new. It sat for a while, as I finished another setting. As I read it, it had all the parts I was looking for in a RPG setting.
After many camapigns as DM, it is now my favorite setting.
Im old as dirt.... My first RPG product was a badly produced little tan booklet (little more than a pamphlet, really) with some of the most childish ink "art" imaginable and two staples for binding. Back then nobody had heard of dice that had more or less than six sides, and finding appropriately geometrical objects to stand in for them was like searching for the Questing Beast after it had swallowed the Philosophers Stone. There were no computers smaller than a Chevy,
telephones had dials, John Travolta was a Sweat Hog, and if anyone
had ever heard of the acronym “RPG” at all they would have thought it
stood for rocket propelled grenade. Back then many people preached
that D&D was thinly veiled satanism corrupting the youth like sex,
drugs and rock `n roll. (We were in much cooler company back then…)
We gamed the way others drank or chased girls until we discovered
drinking and chasing girls, at which point things changed. Dungeons
& Dragons went into the background not just because it was replaced
by Booze & Babes (after all, we soon discovered that one can game with girls and drinking…) but because something was missing. The
authors seemed tapped out, or otherwise locked into their own rules
like a genie that has just swapped his bottle for a magical lamp.
I was attracted to the BR setting when I read “Seeking Bloodsilver”
in Dungeon, which I still read even though I didnt really game. That adventure illustrated a lot of dynamics that Id always
found lacking in gaming, but were the things that I find the most
interesting about the possibilities of RPGs. Id stayed away from actual gaming for a good ten years before that adventure came out (only reading Dungeon and a few periodicals as a kind of distraction) because of exactly that deficit between dice and device, or artifice and art (if I might wax alliterative and allegorical.) BR brought me back, and Ive muddled along ever since, so in a very real sense
gaming is Birthright to me now. All gaming experiences I am
interested in have some sort of BR-like dynamic to them, even if that
dynamic is so abstractly conceptualized that most folks wouldn`t
recognize it anymore.
Played AD&D with DL and even the D&D known world setting with the AD&D rules cause my friends had a lot of the materials for those worlds. Since then I’ve played all the D&D settings except Greyhawk. I made a point to collect all that I could for a later day of gaming and exploring perhaps up and through my golden years. Ive been able to get most of the books, maps, and other spreads on .pdf through my spymasters and other nefarious means. Just yet to read up on the Greyhawk world.
I was into Birthright the day the Boxed Set and I think even Roesone PS and Blood Enemies. Was Ilien and Medore also all released together? I can’t remember. Anyway I was into this setting long before I even explored Tolkien world so I have a unique experience with it. However, since I’ve read up on Lotr I see a lot more interesting possibilities.
The point made earlier about us not getting to play BR enough I think is accurate. I find however when I go around playing other games there is a long-term goal in the back of my mind to take what I’ve learned and bring it back to BR in hopes of making it better somehow. Even when I went to college I took a lot of classes geared towards this goal. I quit playing WoW cause it is a dead end where BR allows for much more and challenges the player to learn more through reading and research and even innovation and imagination. I still like WoW more for the orc factor since they in my opinion have revolutionized that race like a player in a BR pbem did for me when he played the Goblin king of Thurazor for goblins. Sadly though I’ve taken up learning the drums and that is taking up a lot of my free time now. So if its true that we stick with BR cause we don’t get enough, then I’ll probably be with it for a long time to come.
which led me right back to the store to pickup the boxed set.:D)