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.

Social Glue

I'm a gamer, I like to play games, all varieties of games in fact. I enjoy card games, board games, pen and paper roleplaying, computer games and even the occasional wargame though it's a rarity thanks to the fiscal and time costs. I play games for a variety of reasons, escapism, decompressing, creativity and simple enjoyment. I'm lucky enough to have a group of friends who are also gamers and for at least one of my kids to have developed an enjoyment of board games, we can play together from time to time.

The games I play most nowadays are pen and paper roleplaying games, like Dungeons and Dragons and the plethora of other games out there. I've been playing these since I was about 14 or 15 years old. It started with a wargames club I had joined in school, turns out a couple of the guys, from Australia, were D&D players. Specifically Ravenloft. I was a huge fan of fantasy at the time and have always been a horror fan, I read Bram Stoker's Dracula at quite a young age, it was pretty formative for me, so this looked like just about the most amazing thing I had ever seen.

Being teenagers these games were sputtering at best, I don't even remember much by way of details connected to these games but I do remember the feeling that creating something with my friends gave me. It was exciting and fun and simple. After those friends, whom I still miss, moved back to Australia when I was about 15 or so, another friend of mine had found his way into another social circle, which I became part of over time. This social circle also happened to be gamers, mostly computer games, but they were huge fans of Baldur's Gate, Neverwinter Nights and Icewind Dale. Between that and the fact that a few of them were into online play by post gaming we ended up going through a phase of making our own games, back-engineering the rules of D&D out of these computer games, adding our own twists and ideas. Some were successful, most weren't, but we had fun all the time.  

My friend, the one who introduced me into this social circle, calls these the Lost Years, on account of our lack of funds for buying actual gaming books and just cobbling what we could together. I prefer to think of these as the years I really found myself and the people I would be friends with to this day, nearly 15 years later. We still game together, even with jobs and marriage and kids, we find the time to game together. We play as reluctant heroes, smuggling goods between planets; as wizard detectives in modern London, desperately working inside a deadly political system; as hardened survivors of a psychic apocalypse, trying to make our way in world out to kill us; and as sword swinging adventurers, employees of a swarthy rogue. We do other things as well, obviously, we still have get togethers in each other's houses, drinks and chatting, our non-gaming friends and families hanging out, but I think games have definitely helped keep my circle of friends cohesive.

I'm pretty thankful for this.

It's a Start

So, I’ve often thought about this whole blogging thing. Like very often. I always say to myself I should start it on Monday or next month, then I get to thinking about what I could write? Why would people want to listen to what I have to say? What do I have to offer? Today, as I was reflecting upon things on my morning commute, I suddenly realised that I was thinking about this the wrong way. Why should I be trying to offer anything to anyone? Why should I worry about what I can write about and if it’s interesting? I came to a decision: I’ll just write about things I find interesting, I won’t write some sort of column blog or try to pick a theme or anything else. Instead I’ll just write for me, sounds selfish but why shouldn’t I use this as a place to reflect? If anyone reads it and writes a comment maybe it will offer me a new perspective, why shouldn’t I just get something out of this for myself?

So here it is, after what is probably the better part of six months of having this blog set up and waiting, idling, taken up space on the internet and not doing anything with it, here’s my first 500 or so words. I’m going to keep a journal here, of my thoughts, what’s happening in my life and maybe, hopefully, a bit of reflection that will lead to positive changes.

I’m a pragmatist, in the philosophical sense. The value or worth of something like an idea or an object is described in the consequences of believing in or using that something. Let’s see what the consequences of this blog will be for me and what its value to me will be as well.

I think I should start by taking a little inventory about myself, what do I think about myself and how do I think about myself, maybe I’ll look back on this at some point in the future and see improvements. Maybe not.

 So here goes, two things I like about myself:

• I am a father and husband, possibly not the world’s greatest, probably not the world’s worst. I make mistakes but I try. I love them in a way I simply can’t put words to.
• I am flexible, I can learn quickly by doing, I improve the way I do things with each iteration of doing it. I thrive in chaos, things do not need to be neat and orderly for me to work, this works well with my wife who is very orderly, she brings structure to our family, I help deal with the unexpected.

Two things I’m not so pleased about

• I am not entirely comfortable with my body, I am usually quite comfortable with it but I think I would like it to be a little bit stronger, a little bit slimmer.
• I’m not the world’s best manager of time, I sometimes become focussed on something to the exclusion of other things, or procrastinate when I’m stressed. Maybe this will keep me on track?

Ok, it’s a start.