Shared Mythologies

I've been asked by a good friend and relation of mine to run a game for him and his group of friends. Turns out that back in the day, that's the mid '90s, they played a lot of games together. This friend, my cousin's husband, who was fairly instrumental in getting me interested in the idea of roleplaying games; I jumped at the chance to run a game for them.

This will be their first time playing as a group for a while, I've never ran a game for them before. It's a tiny bit intimidating. They were AD&D players, I don't think they got into D&D3.x which is the bulk of my D&D/D20 experience. I'm a huge fan of Apocalypse World Engine games and I've heard really great things about the AW-Hack Dungeon World, it's old school style which is good for this group but new school rules, in fact a mechanic set I'm very familiar with and really enjoy. So I'm hoping they'll be on-board with the whole idea for their game. Not least because I don't want to have to relearn THAC0 rules and percentile scores for STR-18 characters...

I'm quite looking forward to this game, I haven't GM'ed high or dark fantasy in a couple of years, I actually stepped out of the long running Dragon Age game that my friends play when my son was born. This gave me a chance to get out of fantasy for a good long while and I feel I'd like to go back to it now, with this new and interesting ruleset and mechanics.

If you've never played roleplaying games you probably wouldn't get the idea of something like this I guess. I really didn't get my own interest in the whole hobby myself until I happened to speak of my love of it to a gent I met at an education conference. He put me onto the idea of shared narrative in oral education and mythology, his own love of horror and especially zombie movies and our conversation evolved over the course of several glasses of port to the point that I finally understood what I loved about roleplaying games as a hobby for all those years; those things aside from the social aspects that keep me playing.

I suddenly discovered that roleplaying games to me were the same as the mythologies I loved as a child, things I would often add to when I retold them. These games are a chance to develop our own shared mythology, sometimes fleeting and ephemeral; dying at the table in a one-shot game. Sometimes more solid, played over the course of years, like my friends' Dragon Age game, a rich tapestry of characters and players.

I think these games are my myths and legends now. I think I see here the Dagda, Nuada the Silver Hand, the Fomorians, Lug, the Fir Bolg. All those beautiful and fierce and imaginative things I loved as a child, things I hope to share with my children as well. I think these are the natural extension of my imagination that was cultivated in these legends when I was only 5 or 6.

It's wonderful to share these legends.