I was lurking in the Tabletop/DND community when I saw that they had a weekly initiative going where they want people to write up something about how they got into the world of Tabletop-gaming. It instantly made me want to do a write-up so here we go.
You can check out the initiative in this post. It would be interesting to get a post on this from 
The Early Beginnings
My journey starts out in the summer of the year 2008. I was visiting my mom for the summer and a German family member, who had just moved to Norway, asked me and my younger brother if we wanted to go for a game of D&D. I was 15 at the time and my brother was around 10.
We had never played before so this was a pretty rule-free affair. He of course took on the role of DM and improvised a story for us. If I remember correctly I was an archer with some low-key magic abilities. I remember having the levitate spell at least.
The story was quite a simple one. We started out as prisoners having been captured by a band of Goblins. Being complete newbies we struggled for a while with what to do until a Paladin came and freed us. We decided to travel with him to the capital city of the region. On the way we met an Ogre or something similar and the Paladin took the role as tank while we stood back and dealt the damage.
I remember at one point the Paladin had his sword knocked out of his hand and I used my levitate spell to get it back into his hand. The DM liked that and gave me some bonus experience points. The battle ended in victory and we marched on to the capital. There we met with the king who gave us a quest to find an amulet of sorts.
That's pretty much where it ended and we sadly never picked up the game from there. I loved it to bits though which should be evident from all the details I remember of this short adventure. I have no idea if we utilized any sort of system or not because we didn't use character sheets or nothing. We basically just wrote down our name, HP some weapon damage and got going.
The Real Beginning
My next meeting with the hobby then came in 2013. An old colleague of mine invited me and a bunch of other freshlings to give D&D a try. He would be the DM and we would be the players. I didn't even have to think twice before saying yes and jumping into it.
We played at the DMs house which was just perfect. He lived in a mancave of a basement that was pretty much made for D&D. A big table, dim lighting, nerdy stuff lining the walls and shelves. A perfect tabletop gaming room.
I played a Dragonborn Fighter in this game named Rhogash. I still have his character sheet lying around here with a bunch of notes from the game. I'll add in some pictures below. The other members of the party included an Elven Ranger and a Human Wizard. We played using the 4th Edition system.
This was a great campaign thanks to our great DM. He was a great narrator and had a wide array of voices to play out his NPCs. He never looked like he was using any kind of script but still perfectly portrayed all of the NPCs with a lot of great voices and lines.
As in my last campaign we started out as prisoners. This time in a sort of castle on an mostly abandoned island. We escaped our cells and was met by an unlikely ally who took us off the island on a ship. I remember doing some fishing off the boat and managed to catch an old dirty boot.
From there on we started traveling the realm. We fought bandits, goblins, drakes and other monsters on our quest for glory and riches. We played bi-weekly for a couple of months but sadly we never got to unravel some of the big plot points before our party disbanded. Some members kept cancelling and went awol which totally sucked. I guess that's the ultimate fate of most D&D groups eventually.
I ended up joining another group the DM was playing with but it just wasn't as fun to jump into the middle of a campaign. Eventually that group disbanded as well.
The Present
About a year later I started playing with a group of people from my new job. I joined the group with a Cleric and we played through the free Death House adventure that's tied to the Curse of Strahd adventure. We played through that and a small homebrew campaign that the DM made before we had a long hiatus.
Being fed up with not playing I decided to take up the DM mantle. We started playing the Curse of Strahd adventure with the same group and we're still going at it. This group doesn't get to play that often due to the very uneven schedules all of us have. Such a shame but we're slowly working through it.
I'm also playing the Storm King's Thunder adventure with another group. We've been going at it for almost a year now and we're just over halfway through by my estimations. We've had about 40 sessions in this campaign but I've done a lot of homebrewing and extra content to supplement the campaign. When we end up finishing this it will be the first big campaign I've ever finished in D&D. Unless I just jinxed it.
Presenting Rhogash
I'll end off the post with some pictures of my very first character sheet, Rhogash the Dragonborn Fighter.