1 Me: I should make my own webcomic.
2 Me: {thoughtful look}
3 Me: Naah. Too geeky.
4 Me: {sits behind a pile of RPG books and figurines} I'll stick to roleplaying.

2011-11-01 Rerun commentary: I didn't get into the habit of writing regular annotations until I was several hundred strips in. So most of these very early strips never had annotations... until now!

I got into roleplaying games with the Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set back in 1982, following the game's (brief) appearance in the movie E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. In the film, Elliott's brother and his friends play a game around the kitchen table. It was impossible to tell much of what the game was about, except that it featured "wandering monsters". That short phrase alone was enough to make me insist on getting this game for Christmas that year.

When I opened the box on Christmas Eve (that's when we traditionally got to open the presents in our family) I was still under the impression that it was some sort of board game. Over the next 48 hours or so I devoured the rules and never looked back. I picked up Steve Jackson's GURPS some years later when I felt a desire to run something other than pseudo-medieval fantasy. I ended up collecting a lot more GURPS product than Dungeons & Dragons, and even writing a couple of books for the game system.

So the books in the pile shown here are all GURPS books. And there's some of my dice. And ... miniature gaming figures which will become much more prominent in Irregular Webcomic! later on...

Hmmm. And that book prominent on the shelf right above my shoulder in panel 2 is Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. There are three other Harry Potter books shelved on the left of it, and no other books shelved to the right of it.