At about that age some friends and myself made some rather nasty devices (one of them had their hands on some kind of cookbook
The legendary Anarchists Cookbook, perchance?
Soooo many variations of that knocking around, with soooooo much BS mixed in with facts... and very little of any serious danger, anyway.
Some of the hacking/phreaking stuff was accurate, some so simple you couldn't really get it wrong, some of it so pathetic it dwarfs the kids on YouTube these days. But this was before the internet, really, so we ended up spending far too much money on black/red/blue boxes that didn't work on UK phones (because the book was from America) and failing to blow up tennis balls.
Some stuff worked a treat..... and I occasionally got the detentions to prove it!!
We never really had any motivations for planning any kind of tactical operation, etc. though.
Bored Army/Air Cadets, and generally people with experiences of an atypical childhood, I guess.
Most of it was nothing you wouldn't find in wargames of old, or in RTSes these days perhaps... just all on paper, with real and local locations. These days we'd be crucified as White ISIS recruits, or something!!