I invented the RPG

I believe the year was 1964, when I was 5 years old. This was 10 years before the first commercially available fantasy Role Playing Game, Dungeons and Dragons, was published. Furthermore I lived on a remote and isolated farm, with no TV and only the socialist state-controlled national broadcasting on the FM radio. I had just barely learned to read and write, and not begun perusing our large home library of classic literature; the local newspaper mainly contained local political debate and ads for groceries and agricultural tools, and the ever popular obituaries. In short, I had no other inspiration for this than the Norwegian fairy tales, frequently including huge trolls and creative ways to dispose of them. And of course the voices in my head...

While playing outside one day, I was gripped by a very vivid daydream. In this, I was fighting trolls. But unlike the fairy tales, where this is a once-in-a-lifetime event and quickly rewarded with princesses and such, my troll hunting was an ongoing event. And most curiously, I seemed to absorb the strength of the trolls I slew: Certainly I did grow stronger over time, and took on progressively larger and stronger trolls (with more heads... I think I was up to 9 at the end). The daydream was rather long and ended only when my mother called me to meal. At this point I started crying, because I realized that I had grown so much that I would never again be able to enter my family's house.

All this came to pass, of course, albeit in a different realm than the physical.

Only today did I learn that the role playing game as we know it was not yet invented at the time. Did my revelation radiate outward to the rest of the world, causing D&D and the rest? Or did the planet pass through a telepathic ray between two older, more mature civilizations where this concept was discussed, and psychics around the world just picked it up? Was it a memory from my future? Or could it be that every child knows, deep down, that growing by slaying monsters is what life is about?