Gen X Geek: The Origin Story
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Prologue: Why I’m Telling This Story
This blog series isn’t marketing copy or nostalgia; it’s the record of a long-running quest finally taking shape.
For decades, I’ve carried one goal through every career pivot and creative experiment — to build a place that celebrates imagination the way I grew up experiencing it. Expedition Outpost is that dream finally becoming real: a gaming and collectibles store born from the same energy that filled basements, bookshops, and convention halls when I was a kid.
As I build this venture piece by piece, I want to capture the why behind it — the roots, the people, the philosophies, and the strange, winding journey that brought me here. These stories are the spine of what Expedition Outpost stands for: independence, creativity, curiosity, and the belief that play still matters.
So this first post — “Gen X Geek: The Origin Story” — is where it all begins.
It’s part memoir, part field manual, and part love letter to every roll of the dice that led to this moment.
Born with Dice in the Stars
I came into the world on 5 / 5 / 1975 — about as Gen X as you can roll on a character sheet.
If our generation had a prime directive, it was independence. We were the latchkey kids: cereal for dinner if it came to that, bikes as passports, Saturday mornings as sacred ritual. We grew up between analog scarcity and digital wonder, learning patience from dial-up and possibility from pixels.
My first real memory isn’t a toy or a cartoon. It’s a small gargoyle — demon, imp, something ancient — perched on the baseboard beside my bed, fixed on me with that knowing stare kids recognize before they have language for it. Dream or visitation, I won’t swear. But it was real enough to mark me. I wasn’t afraid of the dark; I was negotiating with it. I’ve been wired for the fantastic from the start — not as escape, but as a way of reading the room behind the room.
The First Theater, The First World
The first movie I ever saw in a theater was The Dark Crystal.
Jim Henson’s creatures stepped out of some collective subconscious I hadn’t known I belonged to. It wasn’t the mythic certainty of Star Wars; it was stranger and older, like finding a door in your own house that opens to a forest you can’t map. I didn’t recoil; I leaned forward.
Decades later, my son came home on leave from the Marine Corps, and we watched The Dark Crystal together in a limited re-release. Same music, same impossible puppets, different eyes. The movie held up beautifully. The circle closed — a small, private rite. It hit me that imagination isn’t a hobby you outgrow; it’s the scaffolding we quietly build between generations. I saw myself, that kid leaning forward in the dark, and I saw him — a man now — doing the same. That’s a kind of inheritance money can’t mint.
The Dice Fall
Not long after that first theater trip, I found Dungeons & Dragons. Eight years old, rulebooks stacked too high, dice like alien relics in my small hands. Teachers whispered. A pastor thundered. The Satanic Panic needed a scapegoat and found one with polyhedrals.
They were half right. D&D is a gateway — not to hell, but to imagination, discipline, and storytelling. It taught me how to lead, how to fail gracefully, and how to make sense of chaos with a table of friends.
I’ve really played D&D twice in my life — two distinct epochs that mirror everything about growing up.
The first was high school: a haphazard crew, a cluttered table, half-eaten pizza, too much Mountain Dew. I was Dungeon Master mostly by default — the one who’d read the rules and actually cared about them. Those sessions were messy and glorious, arguments over falling damage derailing whole evenings, but there was magic there: the first real taste of collaboration, creativity, and consequence that would later define my career.
The second run came in college. Larger group. Bigger stories. Regular games that lasted months, sometimes years. Characters had arcs, worlds had politics, and our table had traditions. It wasn’t just pastime — it was a second life running parallel to the one outside campus walls. We learned how to trust each other through imaginary wars, to grieve through character deaths, to celebrate victories that never existed — except they did, because we believed them.
Those two eras were separated by years but driven by the same heartbeat: the same need to build and belong, to make meaning through shared imagination. They were also quiet apprenticeships in leadership — learning to read a room, guide a group, and keep everyone’s story moving forward. Later, when I was managing real teams on real projects, I recognized the same mechanics: initiative order, conflict resolution, knowing when to push and when to let someone else shine.
Much later that energy found another form — Warhammer 40,000.
I played one long, expensive session back when I worked for Vigil Games on the unreleased 40K MMO. Our office was filled with lore hounds and mini-painters. Friday nights became small cathedrals of dice, paint, and plastic — wars fought in miniature that mirrored the passion we were pouring into the digital version. It was ritual, not hobby. A kind of communion among creators.
That’s the thing about D&D, about Warhammer, about all of it — the game is just the surface. Beneath it are the same forces that shape art, friendship, and legacy: the will to build something that outlasts the night.
Ren Faires, SCA, and the First Armory
High school was a braid of dice, computer games, and weekends at the Renaissance Faire. The Society for Creative Anachronism felt like home — a parallel nation where courtesy mattered, craft mattered, and a person could build a small kingdom out of canvas, wood, and a code of honor. It was play, yes — but not frivolous. It was practice for how to carry yourself, how to build something with others, how to make the imaginary solid.
Somewhere in those years I started assembling what would become the Family Armory. First a blade, then another. A coin here, a buckle there. Things you could hold that carried story the way oak carries years. The Armory isn’t about aggression; it’s about memory — a museum of intent. Each piece is proof that I showed up for the things I said I believed in.
College followed, and the campaigns continued. We’d run sessions in dorm lounges and basements, caffeine and ambition in equal measure. That era taught me the civic virtues of a good table: listen, contribute, improvise, don’t hog the spotlight, and for the love of all that’s holy, take your turn. A good DM could run a Fortune 500 in their sleep.
The Mythos of a Generation
Gen X’s unofficial curriculum was self-sufficiency and synthesis.
We fixed our own bikes, our own mixtapes, our own busted LAN parties. We learned to wait — for downloads, for rides, for our turn at Street Fighter — and we learned to make the waiting meaningful. When the ’90s hit, the basement walls cracked open. Comics exploded. And somewhere in there, I dialed into Neverwinter Nights on AOL — the 1991 version — and listened to the modem sing me into Faerûn.
All those hours preparing worlds suddenly looked less like “hobbies” and more like training. I didn’t just want to visit worlds. I wanted to build them.
Rolling for Initiative: The Career Years
The 2000s were a blur of code, caffeine, and collaboration.
I became a professional game designer — The Wheel of Time on PC, Unreal 2 on PC — deadlines like weather fronts, breakthroughs like lightning.
And then Tabula Rasa.
That one was led by Richard Garriott — Lord British himself — creator of Ultima, the man who smuggled ethics into video games and made virtue a mechanic. When I was younger, I’d sent Richard a note — half fan letter, half job application — telling him I wanted to work for him someday. I didn’t expect an answer. He wrote back. Personally. “Reach out to my HR contact,” he said. I did. That’s how I joined his team.
That single exchange rerouted my life. Richard became a mentor and a friend. From him I learned that world-building isn’t carpentry for the imagination; it’s stewardship. The point isn’t spectacle — it’s meaning. You invite players into a space and owe them more than pretty walls. You owe them questions that matter and systems that tell the truth about cause and effect. If you’re going to build a world, care what it does to people.
The kid with graph paper was suddenly helping shape digital worlds for millions.
It was intoxicating — and exhausting. Dream jobs come with their own dragons. Crunch steals birthdays. Publishers can roll your fate with dice you never see.
Eventually I stepped out of that world and into another kind of cockpit: aviation, nuclear, technical product management. I got respectable — degree finished, PMP and CSM alphabet acquired, tie properly knotted. I taught people to fly and learned (again) that checklists are just ritual with consequences.
But I never stopped playing. Between flights and spreadsheets, I conquered Dark Souls III on both Xbox and PlayStation — 100 percent completion, because apparently I like to suffer symmetrically. I logged hundreds of hours in Baldur’s Gate III. Two Warhammer armies waited like patient wolves on the shelf. The Funko Pop wall crept past three hundred figures, cataloged, insured, and — let’s be honest — loved.
Some people collect stamps. I collect proof that imagination is a renewable resource.
The Hobbit, the Map, and the Road
Before all of that, before careers and credentials, there was Tolkien.
My father read The Hobbit to me when I was five, his voice turning living-room air into Mirkwood and the Misty Mountains. I remember the cadence of it more than the details — that steady promise that somewhere beyond the next hill was a door worth knocking on. That’s not just a story; that’s a lifelong operating system. “Roads go ever ever on,” and if you’re lucky, you learn to follow them with equal parts courage and humility.
I think about that when I look at the Armory, or when I watch my son in uniform, or when I unlock the shop door in the morning. It’s all the same road, just different weather.
Why We Play (and Why It Matters)
We’re trained to call play childish and work adult, as if one is rehearsal and the other the show. I don’t buy it. Play is how we stress-test reality safely. Every campaign is a lab for courage. Every ruleset is a small constitution. Every collection is a way of sorting meaning from noise — a taxonomy of what you care about.
D&D taught me leadership and empathy. The Ren Faire taught me community and decorum. Flight training taught me procedure and respect. Game development taught me consequence. Collecting taught me patience. Painting taught me precision. All of it — every die roll, every blade hung, every project shipped — taught me to keep showing up.
And mythology? I learned it from monster manuals before I learned it from classrooms. Greek, Norse, Celtic — I came in through stat lines and saving throws. Then I went looking for the real stories behind the entries and found out those “monsters” were just old anxieties wearing names that survived. The Beholder is paranoia. The dragon is greed. The lich is the fear that your work will outlast your soul and say the wrong things about you. Once you decode that, fantasy becomes a compass, not a distraction.
The Return: Expedition Outpost
Through all the side quests — the corporate tours, the credentials, the good paychecks — the main quest kept glowing on the map: build a place.
A real one. Shelves. Tables. Paint racks. Dice jars. A bell on the door and the smell of cardboard, acrylic, and new books that says you’re home.
Expedition Outpost is that place.
It’s the store I dreamed of as a kid and the one I needed as an adult — a forward operating base for wonder. Commerce, yes, but more than that a campfire. People come to roll, to paint, to argue amiably about editions, to show their kids how to drybrush, to trade cards, to talk shop, to be with their own in a world that’s not always hospitable to focus and joy.
When I unlock the door in the morning, it doesn’t feel like “going to work.”
It feels like stepping through a portal where the things that shaped me — Tolkien’s maps, Henson’s creatures, Gygax’s tables, Lucas’s galaxies, the old SCA banners, the Parkman Armory’s quiet testimony — are live coals instead of museum pieces. The Outpost is a place to warm your hands and then get back out in the weather and make something.
The Outpost as Symbol (and as Address)
Yes, Expedition Outpost is a literal space with rent and inventory, and we’re running it like the serious venture it is.
But it’s also a symbol — for me, for my family, for anyone who steps through the door. It says: we meant it. All those afternoons with dice and glue and lore weren’t a phase. They were apprenticeship.
The Outpost is where the Parkman Armory meets the toy aisle, where the collector shakes hands with the creator, where the past makes room for the possible.
If you squint, you can see the longer arc: a Gen X kid leans forward at The Dark Crystal; a father reads The Hobbit aloud; a DM learns to manage a table; a designer learns to manage a team; a pilot learns to manage a checklist; a parent watches his son square his shoulders and step into the next chapter. The Outpost lives at the convergence of those roads — as business and as beacon.
Roll Initiative
Every generation leaves cairns to mark the trail. Ours aren’t cathedrals or castles; they’re code and comics, campaigns and collections, mixtapes and mechanics. When the world feels smaller than it used to, I go to the Outpost, pick up a d20, and remember:
The dice don’t care who you were yesterday.
They care who you are now — the courage you bring, the friends at your table, the story you’re willing to help tell.
That gargoyle on the baseboard is probably gone. Or maybe he’s just moved — perched now on a shelf over the register, keeping an eye on things. Either way, I’m still not afraid of the dark. There’s work to do in there.
— James H. Parkman
Founder, Expedition Outpost | Pilot & Instructor | Game Designer | Forever Dungeon Master