Hall of Fame Interview with John McA at NWVault

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In its series of Hall of Fame interviews, NWVault has just published one with John McA, the author of the Sands of Fate - Shadows over Heliopolis module. Here's a snip:

1. Could you please introduce yourself including your history with D&D?
I first played D&D at school when I was 13 years old during rainy lunch breaks. That was 1st edition, when the game seemed a lot more cruel than it is now. I remember a game of lethal rot grubs, lethal ear seekers, lethal explosive kobolds (first custom content experience), lethal green slime, lethal … you get the idea. Round each corner was a near death, or just plain death, experience, and we got RSI from rolling up new characters all the time. We would poke into the (probably randomly generated) dungeon a few yards and then run out again after about two encounters, having ridden our luck as far as we could. It was then traditional for players to kill each other at the dungeon exit so that the treasure was divided among fewer survivors. (PCs with their starting gold were so much less challenging than the dungeon denizens). I never got above 3rd level, and each new character had to wade through the mounting piles of corpses of his former incarnations at the aforesaid exit as I wasn’t good at playground politics!
So playing NWN many years later is a somewhat different experience, where PCs rack up thousands of kills as they inevitably progress to levels I never even imagined. But there’s something about the raw fear of my initial experiences that I still cherish.

Read the whole thing at NWVault.