I've been meaning to talk about my experience with Dungeons and Dragons for a while. I got involved in A D & D in my teens, and because I couldn't afford the books, a friend allowed me to borrow his. I copied out the Player's handbook, the DM's Guide, and the Monster Manual by hand, and then made a world. I used my love of map-making to create a series of maps for the main continent, covering climate, languages, races, and physical features. I also created two thousand years of "back story" to explain how things got to be where they were when the players would arrive. Overall, I probably took close to two years just getting it to that point, when I moved, and no longer had a group to play with. Then in one of my many moves, I lost all the stuff I had created. The only thing of that period that may ever see the light of day was an idea I had for a story that would take place in that world, and I may at some point actually write it. Ah well.