A Ballad of Days Gone By
Or in less flowery terms: my history with tabletop.
It's been longer than I had initially intended between my first post and now, but such is the way of things. Ktrey over at D4Caltrops suggested that I should write about my history with the hobby leading up to now to get back into blogging. So, with that said, stay a while and listen.
In the Beginning
The fascination with dungeons, little figurines and funny-shaped dice began when I was 7 or 8 years old in the back room of a dollhouse shop. My older brother had been playing a wargame with some folks for a while and they invited him to join in with their D&D game (this was around the time 3rd edition and 3.5 were the current edition). He was too young for our parents to feel comfortable letting him go alone and I was too young to be left in the house alone, so along for the ride I came.
I remember walking in to that back room and being in awe of the big war gaming table set up with a 3d terrain map of the dungeon the players were going through. As a kid who dearly loved reading fantasy books about heroes delving into dangerous places in search of evil to smite and treasure to loot - Dragonlance was my favourite - this was everything I wanted. Something that really stuck with me was how welcoming those guys were. They were all adults playing after a long day of work - other than my brother of course - and even though I was only there to watch they included me in the game. They helped me roll up a character and when they asked what race I wanted to play I excitedly proclaimed "I want to be a dragon man!" and to my delight they accommodated that desire and even had a painted figurine ready to go.
I couldn't tell you any of the events of the adventure or any other specifics; but that image of the table laid out with a dungeon, the funny shaped dice and the notion that in this make believe world I could really be anything I wanted to be began what has been a lifelong love and fascination with the hobby.
The Dark Ages
Eventually, the game in the dollhouse shop came to an end for one reason or another, but I was still excited to play. My mum had bought me a Player's Handbook when I had a stay in hospital and I had voraciously read it cover to cover. Over the course of the next year I managed to get my hands on a Dungeon Master's Guide and a Monster Manual. This, however, was long before the explosion in popularity this hobby has seen over the past few years. Try as I might, I couldn't find anyone at school who would play D&D with me and I couldn't find anything in my hometown online despite many hours spent searching. I resigned myself to creating characters and imagining the adventures they went on by myself for the next 4 or 5 years.
A Light in the Dark, Cruelly Snuffed
Eventually, a handful of my friends agreed to play D&D with me if I would run it for them and I was overjoyed. We set a night everyone would come over for a few hours, we made pizzas and sat down around the table ready to play. I, being a kid possessed of a sense of drama and excellent fashion sense, pulled on the hooded robe my mum and I had made when I dressed up as a jedi for the town fete. We were ready to play.
We had a fantastic time playing, the heroes began in a tavern and heard about a blue dragon - always my favourite because of the artwork in the 3.5 MM - in the area with a vast hoard of treasure. They jumped into the adventure and we ended up playing a good 5 or 6 sessions before things came to a bitter end.
One of the players came from a very religious family, and his grandma had heard all about the evils of Dungeons & Dragons back in the 80's and she knew for a fact it was devil worship and we needed saving. She and the rest of that player's family forbade him from continuing on with us, and sadly, that brought our game to a screeching halt. We never played again, though we often talked about how fun it was.
The Second Dawn
Over the next 8 or 9 years I was unable to find any more games, and sustained myself on early actual play shows, predominantly RealRollPlay from ItMeJP. I particularly loved Steven Lumpkin's West Marches show on there, it felt classic and weird in all the best ways. Eventually though, I ended up getting into the first campaign of Critical Role while it was still airing, and into what at the time was a fairly small community. As part of this I joined a discord for people playing D&D online that was advertised on a CR fan group facebook page. It wasn't long before I ended up in a game, playing Balthazaar the Silver Dragonborn Paladin. The GM for that game has since become my partner of nearly 5 years, so that game has come to mean an awful lot to me.
Finally, after a decade of desperately wanting to play, I had found a group; even better, I found multiple on that discord. Suddenly I was playing games 4 nights a week and staying up far later than I should given I was getting up for work at 3am every day. It was great. I started running a game a couple of years later and it was awful in hindsight, I had no idea what I was doing and just tried to emulate the style of CR and other actual plays I had watched. My prep was absurd, railroady to the extreme with literally every word I said written out ahead of time. Thankfully I got out of those habits quickly. I had a lot of trouble running games though, it never felt quite right and every campaign fell through after just a few sessions.
The Light-bulb Moment
Eventually, I began to feel general dissatisfaction with 5E D&D and felt it was playing a big role in the troubles I had running games. I decided to give Pathfinder 2E a shot since it was the big alternative to 5E that I knew of. I threw together a starting town and put some adventure seeds in and around it for us to do a test for a few sessions, letting the players engage with whichever they found interesting. Those few throwaway sessions turned into nearly 30 sessions, a little over a year of gaming. This was longer than any campaign I had run up to that point, I and all the players were having a blast with this campaign. But I erred, and thought that what had worked for me was the system and not the way I had approached the game.
I kept trying to run PF2E after that initial game came to a close, and went back to the more plot-heavy style of game I had been running before. Surprising no-one but myself I'm sure, I was exhausted quickly and the game imploded. For 2 years, I didn't run another campaign, stepping back from GMing although still thinking about it endlessly (a topic for another time).
During this time, I was subscribed to WebDM's patreon, and they released a podcast episode where they talked with the Referee for their Troika! game, Greg Blair. As I listened and took in the conversation, I was blown away, what was presented was an approach to running games that I was vaguely aware of - and had indeed run - but had never fully considered. Greg talked about holding on loosely to the game and letting the players lead, and how he was involved in the OSR scene. It made me realise that what had worked so well about that first PF2E game wasn't the system - though I still like it - but rather my approach to the campaign. I was very hands-off and laid back, everything was sketched in lightly until my players expressed interest in it. That podcast episode in general was pretty formative to my current philosophy with regards to TTRPGs.
Thus began my interest in old-school gaming and the sandbox style of play I had come to love. I ended up joining the purple/rainbow OSR server on discord and getting involved in a couple of games, reading all the interesting conversations there and loving the community that had been created. It aggressively stood for all the same things that I do, and I felt very welcome there very quickly. I started planning to get back into running games and worked on setting up a sandbox; I was unsure of what system I wanted to use as I found OSE to be too dry and was uninspired by many of the new-school offerings. Gin suggested I take a look at Swords & Wizardry, and I'm so glad that I did. I immediately clicked with Matt Finch's conversational writing and the game presented seemed very elegant.
Cut to today, I'm writing this blog post the day after I was finally able to run Session 0 for my first OSR campaign using S&W Whitebox. I'm excited to see where it goes, and I'll be sure to write up some posts about it as we play.
Whew, that felt like a long post. If you made it this far, thanks for reading, I hope it was entertaining or interesting in some way. And thanks to everyone in the purple/rainbow OSR server, though particularly to Gin (linked above), Mr Mann and Thriftomancer for helping me get my groove back. I appreciate you all.
I'm going to aim to release at least 1 blog post per month this year, let's see if I can stick to that! Take care folks.