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Feb. 10th, 2013
Tabletop Roleplaying Games and Me
Feb. 10th, 2013 04:58 pmI was pretty much a young adult when I first stumbled across tabletop roleplaying games. If you know what I'm on about, skip the next two paragraphs.
Tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs for short) are products such as Traveller, Legend, Vampire: the Requiem, Mage: the Awakening, Call of Cthulhu or Dungeons & Dragons.
These games are played in groups of between two and nine people, involving pen & paper, dice, optional miniatures and settings, where one member of the group - called the Games Master, referee, Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Keeper or whatever - sets up a scenario, a kind of fictional adventure, and lets the players generate characters, kind of like characters in a play or movie, and pit the characters against GM-created antagonists, monsters and hazards.
For those of you who already are familiar with RPGs, you can rejoin the conversation here. Sorry about that; always have to think of the newbies, don't you know.
Most people who follow my blogs and forum appearances on the Mongoose site and Shadownessence are likely aware that I have been into RPGs for a very long time - since my first exposure to RPGs with Marc Miller's Traveller back in 1981, to be specific. What few people may have stopped to wonder is why I've been into RPGs for so long - why I allowed these games to fill my life to the extent that it has.
Truth to tell, until lately I've never been able to work it out myself. And here, for the first time, is what I think.
When I started getting involved with roleplaying games, I began to write.
That was it. The first few games I tried out, namely Traveller, RuneQuest (I didn't get into D&D until much later - RQ3 was my first exposure to fantasy roleplaying games), Call of Cthulhu and, later, Harnmaster, Ars Magica and ultimately White Wolf's games, all had the same effect on me. After the first few games of each setting (the 3I, RQ3, Ringworld, Harnworld) I'd usually fall in love with the place and begin writing fiction pieces - mostly short stories - exploring aspects of the places my mind was visiting.
I'd write bluebook logs of a Traveller explorer investigating a system in the Spinward Marches and discovering a temple lost in an alien jungle; I'd write a short story about an apothecary's son in the mythical kingdom of Brognia growing up to discover sorcery; or an account of the discovery of an abandoned Protector's lair with a Slaver stasis box, just inside the hyperspace limit of the Plateau system.
My Shek-Pvar Fyvrian Order Journeyman discovered grey magic and fought a Nolah (a species of Harnic troll) in one story, while a House Ex Miscellanea witch fought Hermetics in another tale, and another setting. My redneck Ranger from the village of Reaming, Toldar Toi, vastly amused the rest of the group by confessing that he'd begun his Ranger career as a scout with the troop called the Reaming Beavers.
My story writing took off from around 2000 or so, when Hunter: the Reckoning really caught my attention, shook it and set it on fire. This was the first time one of my stories could be set in the contemporary world, which meant that the stories could address contemporary issues, or involve contemporary imagery and phenomena. My Reckoning stories also gave my characters such incredibly human motives and motivations - one of the imbued, a straight alpha male, had been married before, but the loss of his son cost him his marriage. Another time, he was rejected by the woman he'd grown to love because he'd gone a bit insane; nonetheless he did find love again, at the end of all things.
Nowadays, I have completed a number of projects for both my favourite RPGs and fiction; articles for Mongoose Legend (a spinoff from RuneQuest using RuneQuest's d100 engine) and Mongoose Traveller (two Ro Focale stories and a psion article currently being looked at by Freelance Traveller), and loads of stories with my own settings - the short stories of Sullup Lurth, my neuro stories, my two novels The Silver Touch and The Gilded Saidara, with a third one in progress.
And that's not counting what's already published and out there - the Traveller articles I wrote for Signs & Portents magazine, the articles published in Dogs of War and two books for Hunter: the Vigil and the self-published articles on the Basic Roleplaying Central website.
I think that, through thick and thin, whether I've had a group to run games with or not, whether or not I've been able to game or run a game, whether I've been a player or a Games Master, the reason why I have stuck with roleplaying games all this time is because without RPGs, I'd never have had imagination enough to become the writer I am today; and even now, I still use roleplaying games to inspire new ways of thinking and new paths of the imagination.
Without RPGs, my career, and I, would have been so incredibly dull. Clearly I owe my career, my mind and my personality to them.
Tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs for short) are products such as Traveller, Legend, Vampire: the Requiem, Mage: the Awakening, Call of Cthulhu or Dungeons & Dragons.
These games are played in groups of between two and nine people, involving pen & paper, dice, optional miniatures and settings, where one member of the group - called the Games Master, referee, Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Keeper or whatever - sets up a scenario, a kind of fictional adventure, and lets the players generate characters, kind of like characters in a play or movie, and pit the characters against GM-created antagonists, monsters and hazards.
For those of you who already are familiar with RPGs, you can rejoin the conversation here. Sorry about that; always have to think of the newbies, don't you know.
Most people who follow my blogs and forum appearances on the Mongoose site and Shadownessence are likely aware that I have been into RPGs for a very long time - since my first exposure to RPGs with Marc Miller's Traveller back in 1981, to be specific. What few people may have stopped to wonder is why I've been into RPGs for so long - why I allowed these games to fill my life to the extent that it has.
Truth to tell, until lately I've never been able to work it out myself. And here, for the first time, is what I think.
When I started getting involved with roleplaying games, I began to write.
That was it. The first few games I tried out, namely Traveller, RuneQuest (I didn't get into D&D until much later - RQ3 was my first exposure to fantasy roleplaying games), Call of Cthulhu and, later, Harnmaster, Ars Magica and ultimately White Wolf's games, all had the same effect on me. After the first few games of each setting (the 3I, RQ3, Ringworld, Harnworld) I'd usually fall in love with the place and begin writing fiction pieces - mostly short stories - exploring aspects of the places my mind was visiting.
I'd write bluebook logs of a Traveller explorer investigating a system in the Spinward Marches and discovering a temple lost in an alien jungle; I'd write a short story about an apothecary's son in the mythical kingdom of Brognia growing up to discover sorcery; or an account of the discovery of an abandoned Protector's lair with a Slaver stasis box, just inside the hyperspace limit of the Plateau system.
My Shek-Pvar Fyvrian Order Journeyman discovered grey magic and fought a Nolah (a species of Harnic troll) in one story, while a House Ex Miscellanea witch fought Hermetics in another tale, and another setting. My redneck Ranger from the village of Reaming, Toldar Toi, vastly amused the rest of the group by confessing that he'd begun his Ranger career as a scout with the troop called the Reaming Beavers.
My story writing took off from around 2000 or so, when Hunter: the Reckoning really caught my attention, shook it and set it on fire. This was the first time one of my stories could be set in the contemporary world, which meant that the stories could address contemporary issues, or involve contemporary imagery and phenomena. My Reckoning stories also gave my characters such incredibly human motives and motivations - one of the imbued, a straight alpha male, had been married before, but the loss of his son cost him his marriage. Another time, he was rejected by the woman he'd grown to love because he'd gone a bit insane; nonetheless he did find love again, at the end of all things.
Nowadays, I have completed a number of projects for both my favourite RPGs and fiction; articles for Mongoose Legend (a spinoff from RuneQuest using RuneQuest's d100 engine) and Mongoose Traveller (two Ro Focale stories and a psion article currently being looked at by Freelance Traveller), and loads of stories with my own settings - the short stories of Sullup Lurth, my neuro stories, my two novels The Silver Touch and The Gilded Saidara, with a third one in progress.
And that's not counting what's already published and out there - the Traveller articles I wrote for Signs & Portents magazine, the articles published in Dogs of War and two books for Hunter: the Vigil and the self-published articles on the Basic Roleplaying Central website.
I think that, through thick and thin, whether I've had a group to run games with or not, whether or not I've been able to game or run a game, whether I've been a player or a Games Master, the reason why I have stuck with roleplaying games all this time is because without RPGs, I'd never have had imagination enough to become the writer I am today; and even now, I still use roleplaying games to inspire new ways of thinking and new paths of the imagination.
Without RPGs, my career, and I, would have been so incredibly dull. Clearly I owe my career, my mind and my personality to them.
