Stranger Things - D&D

My friends and I were the Stranger Things kids long before the hit Netflix show. I was introduced to Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) somewhere around the fourth or fifth grade. It was about 1979 and I was roughly nine-years old. This would have been 1st addition D&D.

I've always been a monster fan and was initially drawn to the Monster Manual.  

I first saw the Monster Manual in Walden Books around 1979. Sadly, I don't believe Walden Books is around any longer. It was about the coolest book I'd ever seen. A whole book devoted to monsters with detailed descriptions and statistics. What did all these stats mean? I simply had to find out and that led to falling in love with D&D.

I was joined by my friends, Jace, Gene, Robert and Charlie. We played D&D constantly from 1980 until about 1987 and then off and on after that. On Friday or Saturday nights we were either watching some horror movie like Alien, Dawn of the Dead or American Werewolf in London, or we were gathered around my parent's big dining table, drinking Mt. Dew, eating pizza and playing D&D.

I've had to update this section as the timeline has been bothering me. I originally thought Grimlock and Vigilante were born in 1984. I thought that because I still have a D&D character sheet of Grimlock with the date of 1984, but they were originally created in late 1983.

Grimlock was my barbarian ranger and Vigilante was Charlie's thief/acrobat. It's easy to assume Grimlock was inspired by the Transformer's Dinobot, and he is my favorite Transformer, but that's not actually where his name came from. I was looking for name ideas and thumbed through the Fiend Folio, sequel to the Monster Manual, when I came upon creatures called 'Grimlocks.' I thought the name was awesome and it fit with a big barbarian warrior. The Fiend Folio was published in 1981 and I think I got my copy around 1982. The Transformers came out in 1984 and it was all the better to have a T-Rex robot dinosaur with the same name. 

Charlie named his character Vigilante based on the DC character which first appeared in The New Teen Titans Annual in August 1983.

Vigilante wasn't a super popular comic, but Charlie loved the character. He has since become more well known with appearances in the HBOMax series, Peacemaker.

Fast forward to September of 2022 when I began seriously outlining Relentless Blades and of course these were the two main characters. Grimlock morphed slightly from a human barbarian into a half-skron, but his personality and size remained constant.

Vigilante didn't seem right for an actual character's name, so I changed it slightly to Vigilanton. Over all these years Charlie and I have always referred to them as 'Grim' and 'Vig' so that is how they are mostly referred to in the novel anyway.