My 
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PageAs I mentioned earlier, I've been a Dungeon Master, or just "The DM" to my friends for about 19 years; we started out with the flimsy little starter set and the soft dice, rolled up our characters (myself included) and started off on our adventures, eager to brave the "mysterious dungeon not far from town".
And died. And died. And died and died and DIED and died and died. I swear, I wasn't TRYing to kill 'em off... we just.... died. It got to the point where we were going back into the dungeon (B1, In Search of the Unknown) and finding the remains of our former characters. Then, one day, I saw a book in a local hobby store: Advanced Dungeons and Dragons: Player's Handbook. Two of us created Rangers, another, a Paladin, and a fourth, a Halfling Thief... named Bilbo... sigh.. not much imagination there...
BUT!!! 
We survived!! We went in as our newly minted selves, killing kobolds, beserkers, goblins, orcs and the odd Gelatinous Cube. We discovered traps, pits and magical pools. We fought as a team, carried each out of the dungeon (beaten within an inch of our dice-generated lives), and divided up the treasures, such as they were... but we had survived!!! And after several such hair-raising adventures... we had garnished enough Experience Points to make Second Level (if you don't know what that means... it'd take too long to explain.... )
A second book, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and a third, the Monster Manual, soon followed... and that was it... we were hooked!!! We had new creatures to defeat, new treasures to discover, and even published adventure modules to give me (by now the "official" Dungeon Master of the group) ideas.
And then... we discovered.... something new... a world... a place that was not just a series of "mysterious dungeons not far from town".. but.. a whole continent, with maps, and ideas, and much, much more.
Within a couple of years, as some of my gamers came and went, I found I wanted a couple more victims...er.. players.. so I advertised at that same hobby shop (whose owner by now knew me, my life story, etc.). To my surprise, a number of people answered my ad... and, with some specTACularly bad exceptions, were some of the best I've ever had the pleasure to DM for. For the most part, we're still friends... one of them was the best man at my wedding, 7 years ago.
So, after that unintentionally lethal start... nineteen years later, we are still adventuring on the same continent, having discovered but a small fraction of its mysteries (and, as the DM, I can say that with, shall we say, confidence). For awhile we played the children of those first characters; born to adventure, grown up in the saddle; tempered in the fires of a never-ending battle of Good vs. Evil. But now we've started a new campaign, with newly minted First Level Characters.. and the fun begins all over again.. And the war against the Old One's minions is still in the balance.... no matter what the books say..
Nineteen years, and untold thousands of hours of love-labour later, (not to mention what I've SPENT on it!).... I still enjoy the game. For those who love it, and play it well, AD&D is like writing an on-going, never-ending fantasy novel, with ordinary people pretending to be heroes among villains, going from bravery to cowardice, greed to self-sacrifice, and learning more about each other as they do.
And we love it.. and play it well.
Here are some links, that may increase
your own interest in what has given me such enjoyment, for so long.
