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Everyone is different, and I am interested to know what brought you to the RP World (not just TSN). So I thought i’d share mine, and look forward to reading about yours.
I have always enjoyed creative writing, something about inventing a universe, the characters and story lines fascinates me.
When I was younger I got into Star Trek & Firefly and was always looking for games to play that is as if you are in the series, I found a website that was a text bases post by post RP (much like we have on the forums). The site was called AJJE Games. And I joined a ship called the USS Khitomer as it’s Chief of Security, I did not post very much and only checked it once every few days, it was not something I took very seriously, I started to found that if I in real life had a bad day I would be more active, and post a lot all in one night.
What really got me active in RP world was my mother, she unfortunately came down with cancer, and knowing that I was going to lose her really damaged me as a person, I found myself constantly writing avoiding the real world as much as possible. At 15 people should be out with friends, not locked away writing until sleep overcomes you. I continued like this for a long time, and became ever more active on the website AJJE Games, eventually running the Star Trek Zone on the site, and taking Captain of the USS Independence and GMing four out of the six sims in that zone. Unfortunately my mother passed in December 2010 and I continued writing. Over the years it started to become a hobby rather than an escape. and I began to really enjoy it. I carried on enjoying simming. Unfortunately the site I was on AJJE Games went from having 100+ members to only having six active and a bunch semi-active.
A merger began with Phoenix RP and thats where I stopped with AJJE.
I did not do much RP from then on. After a few years I got into a realtionship and all RP stopped, the relationship went sour, due to mental health on my partners side. This threw me back into the escape and I have now started to come back to the enjoyment again, and this when I found the TSN.So there is how I found my RP Hobby, how about you?
I remember having squeezy bottle water pistols strapped to my bike and playing International Rescue stories with friends. But the first tabletop rpg was original D&D the summer before college. After a couple of sessions of D&D late into the night after fencing club, I bought a copy and ran, Conan/Tolkien type dungeons. I bought Empire of the Petal Throne and loved it but hardly ever played it. There was also a fantasy historical wargame campaign with lots of write-in material. I was very lucky with my Macedonians. After that it was Runequest and Traveller (Roxy the psychic ex-marine later reappeared in CoH). For both of those, bits of backstory were written. And then we played Bushido for eight years. Some of those games involved written intros and scenes. Then there was an epic Dragonquest campaign, with character sheets made bearable by spreadsheets and harking back to currency in pounds, shillings and pence. GURPS was then a great favourite in a Middle-Earth campaign and then an 1830’s campaign that had us writing character logs quite often. Amber diceless was the game that really involved a lot of fiction writing. It is a game we mostly play at conventions with a lot of character generation and prep via email beforehand. Then we discovered weekend-long costumed “freeform” games (like a LARP but indoors and without the rubber swords). Connections there actually reunited us with an old friend from Runequest who got us back into EPT and contacts that got the Amber gaming going. Then we started playing Taiko. City of Heroes was undoubtedly the best online game we ever played, with great characters, storytelling and community spirit. Using Amber rules I’ve run/played in a number of Japanese themed and Firefly themed games. And last year I discovered Artemis RP and now have 122 pages of personal logs 🙂
*in quavery little old lady voice*
Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin…Many years ago, in the last century, when I was but a slip of a girl, I met a few geeks at University who were playing D&D. (I ended up marrying one of them; another married my sister; we are still friends with the others). And then Chivalry and Sorcery came out, and then Aftermath, and then TĂ©kumel: Empire of the Petal Throne, then Traveller. And they were good. Well, not Aftermath. We needed slide rules to work out the fight results… Yes, children, this was in the days when calculators were not allowed in lecture halls. It was also in the days when I knew how a slide rule works. I have forgotten now. I have forgotten many things… But the Computer knows. Trust the Computer. the Computer is your friend. (That’s Paranoia. I’m mentioning it out of order, which is probably treasonous. I like to live dangerously.)
Then it was Runequest, which led me to repaint a whole lot of figures’ armour and weapons bronze, only to repaint them steel when the characters reached Rune Lord rank. It also led to the meeting with someone else who became a dear friend.
And Bushido, where for the first time ever I played a male character; he started as a young landless samurai, and ended up as daimyo of a province, and as his three sons reached majority, he retired to live under the sea with a dragon princess… It’s a long story.
A brief stint through a superhero system, I forget which one, it didn’t click.
A fun run through a Dragonquest campaign – when you end up captain of a magic flying sailing ship, life is good.
Pendragon: didn’t play it nearly as much as I would have liked.
Many flavours of GURPS, from Tolkien’s Second Age to a Victorian Cthulhu-ish setting (and one of my favourite characters, but I mustn’t froth), to an adaptation of M.A.R. Barker’s TĂ©kumel (more new and wonderful friends) to Hyboria…
And Amber Diceless RPG, which led to AmberCon UK, and AmberCon US, and AmberCon NW, with more amazing friends. We go to ACNW every November in Portland OR; where I am currently in the 10th year of running a Firefly game, with a wonderful crew of not-quite-criminals; and last year concluded a short series of MiddleMan-themed games.
And John Wick, author of Legend of the 5 Rings, 7th Sea, and Houses of the Blooded, lives locally, and we see him occasionally but haven’t managed to get into a regular game together yet, because taiko practice. But it’s Comicon next weekend so we might manage some time to play, when we’re not busy shepherding new cadets through the Artemis bridges!
So now you know.
This is a very neat topic!
How did I get to this to this hobby? It all started back in my middle school days between a friend and I on AIM. Often in our looooong after-school chats, we’d randomly break into stints where we were trying to verbally one up each other like B-grade super villains. We quickly realized that these were becoming personas, and started calling them the Pink Bunny of Doom and the Master of Shadows, respectively. It wasn’t long before they evolved and we started narrating their adventures in Generic Unnamed Fantasyland #24601. That evolution was accompanied by the characters receiving actual names. Meaning that my Master of Shadows was suddenly going by the name of Ellas Aramond. Yes, my SN is that of a character I made up 15 years ago.
When all this was going down, “roleplaying” was a term I had yet to hear. We were simply telling ongoing stories with these characters. That all changed when I found a book in the school library talking about the hobby as a whole, and specifically D&D. I must have read that thing 10 times, and then slowly bought the three “core” books for 3.5. Not that I had much of a chance to really put them to use.
High school is when things really kicked off. The aforementioned friend and I found more people interested in this odd tabletop thing, and we learned 3.5 together. Our early games even saw the birth of characters we still break out occasionally nowadays. Hell, if you ever hear me speak with a vaguely Russian accent, I’m channeling one of these characters.
On the real life side, 3.5 turned into Shadowrun (the first time I even GM’d) and then Exalted and Pathfinder, Deadlands and Rogue Trader, Mutants & Masterminds, Star Wars Saga, and countless other smaller games. I’m glad PDFs are a thing, otherwise I’d have a ton more rule-filled tomes.
Not to mention all the games I’ve done online, either through Play-by-Post or some form of video chat. The most notable (and actually recorded) of these would be a four year long Exalted game, The God-Kings of Lotus; and The Aeon of Strife, a Dark Heresy game that would see me playing three separate characters due to the system’s lethality. I don’t actually recommend reading/watching either of these, as they are long, and contain the kind of had-to-be-there silliness that can only be found in a tabletop game. I do believe I’ve found the first character journal I’ve ever written though.
Nowadays, I’ve got the weekly shenanigans of the TSN, and the Star Wars Saga game I GM on Sunday evenings. I wouldn’t trade them for the world.
This is very interesting to read.
I got into my own version of RP when I started playing Final Fantasy VII, so about 18 years ago. In the game you have many characters, and I would fill all the silent times with their talk, imagine how they behaved in a combat, what they spoke of while traveling through the map, and so on. It’s a practice I keep alive to this day; in each game I play, I imagine the life of the characters.
The first real RP experience came in the form of D&D 3.5 in early high school (about 12 years ago). Somewhere around that time, I also played a basic forum RP. At university, I continued playing some more D&D, Pathfinder (GMed for cca 2 years), and Savage Worlds. And a few more sessions of D&D here and there after graduating (mostly playing, but sometimes GMing).
I found the Artemis game via this video, which I saw a couple of years ago, but I never tried finding an online community; rather, I waited to play it with friends in the same room. That took until the day I actually joined TSN, which was 3 months ago.
I have also spent a great deal of time fantasizing about worlds, events, characters, etc. I wrote some of the stories down, but nothing complete. I love writing, but I’m mad at myself when it’s not perfect, so I rarely write.
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