Ranger's Keep

Hello and welcome!

When I was a wee lad of about 10, I began to become aware of this strange phenomenon known as "Dungeons & Dragons". Living in Malaysia at the time, there was precious little access to any information about this game. All I knew about D&D was the animated TV series, and the cryptic references made by Elliot and his brother in the early scenes in Spielberg's E.T.

Keep in mind that this was the 1980's and there was no Interweb, Google or Wikipedia to check. What's a kid to do?

Well, I thank my mom for having the sense to be Singaporean and as a result, spent many an end-of-year vacation in Singapore staying with relatives. On one such vacation, my aunt brought me to the Toys 'R' Us store in Marine Parade. This in itself was a major eye-opener as we didn't have such toy megastores back in Malaysia in those days. The store was also one of the biggest on the island, and amazingly, had a shelfload of Dungeons & Dragons product. Not really familiar with the game itself, I was drawn toward the action figures they had of various D&D characters. Of course, they didn't have the ones from the cartoon, but I managed to persuade my aunt to get me two figures for myself and two more for my younger brother.

I picked up "Hawkler, Good Ranger" and Bowmarc, Good Crusader". And there, from the blurb on the back of the action figure cards, my fascination with D&D and rangers in particular began. This eventually led to my first brush with D&D itself and the conception of the original Ranger's Keep in my homebrew game world of Deryn.

But that's another story for another time. In the meantime, get a load of this as a blast from the past: