Thursday, March 31, 2016

March 31 - Afterimage

On my birthday, I heard the news of the passing of Karl Inge Refseth, a man who had quite the impact on me in my teens. When I was around 12 years old, I had my first encounter with role playing games, playing my very first game of Dungeons and Dragons with my good friend Jan Are at another friend's house. Jan Are and I had been exploring Fighting Fantasy books, which were like solo role-playing adventures where the books typically had 400 entries, and you read only the ones that you were steered to by your choices. For example, you could walk along a path and see a pouch laying on the ground. If you pick it up, you go to one numbered entry - and if you don't pick it up, you go to another one. Sometimes you ended up not making it through the adventure, and you started all over again. We were hooked on this, and we were really excited to try D&D. The first attempt didn't quite do it.

But not long after this, Trondheim's first gaming store opened up. It was called Spillspesialisten and it was housed right above one of my favorite record stores, Utopia. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. Anyway, the owner of Spillspesialisten was Karl Inge. I remember looking at all the games they had, including Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (ADD), which I had started playing - and I had started liking it. I think my favorite memory was when 2nd edition ADD was released and Karl Inge and his assistant Ronny seem to have had to hold people at arms length as the boxes were opened. This was in 1989, way before any internet marketing campaigns would tell us what the differences would be - so we were all very excited about getting this new edition with updated and hopefully more streamlined rules.

Karl Inge was also very instrumental when it came to me feeling at home in Hexagon, Trondheim's gaming club. I don't remember when I first went, but I remember going with Jan Are and feeling completely lost walking in the door. However, thanks to Karl Inge's generosity - as well as the generally open and accepting atmosphere in a club where I think Jan Are and I at that point were among the youngest, as most were college students, at least it seemed that way, and we still were in middle school - we felt quite at home and continued going for a long, long time.

My last memory of Karl Inge was one of the last times I was in Trondheim. I am thinking it was when I was there for Elin's wedding, which was in 2006. I saw a new gaming store I hadn't seen before - I think it was called Outland. I popped in and there he was again. Karl Inge. Just like he had been when I first started gaming. We chatted for a while - and as usual we touched on one of our shared favorite bands: Rush. So today's song is in memory of a very warm and generous man. It is also the one song that stands out to me when it comes to loss that has been written and recorded by Rush. From one of my personal favorite Rush albums, 1983's Grace Under Pressure, here is Afterimage.


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