I was born amongst ghoul-haunted forests and mouldering cemeteries. In midnight skies, the echoes of witches' cries are carried on moon-limned clouds. Crumbling piles of bespotted rock tell where old Puritan homesteads once stood.
My home is the place where H. P. Lovecraft and Nathaniel Hawthorne found both inspiration and horror. It is the place Edgar Allen Poe called home until family quarrels drove him southward. It is where Native American tribes lived and warred for centuries before European interlopers proved to be the more perilous threat.
Mine is also the place where starry-eyed utopians, Transcendentalist, Quakers and Shakers tried to fulfil their dreams, but failed. It is the first place in the New World where educators choose to found a college. It is where revolutionaries plotted to overthrow a king.
I have always been proud to be a native of this peculiar Commonwealth, Massachusetts. Although its history has not always been pleasant, kind or noble, it has always been fascinating.
Was there really any doubt that I and my friends would find fantasy and fantasy role playing irresistible?
