I’m lucky enough to have a man-den at the back of the house. Considering I have a beautiful, better half and 4 children, having a space to retreat to for my nerdery is a god send.
Unfortunately for me, I’ve been smelling a bit of damp in the room lately, so I’ve had to delve behind the sofa for a thorough clean-out. Lo and behold, I have found some rising damp on the back wall and am now in the process of cleaning and treating it. What a ‘lovely’ way to spend a Sunday…
In the process of this, I did find a couple of boxes of my old RPG stuff. There are some Stoembringer character sheets that go back, in some cases, as far as 25+ years! There’s also some of my Vampire the Masquerade character sheets and REF NOTES. In amongst those, there’s a great deal of stuff I wrote and that the players wrote for Project Twilight.
Project Twilight – Year of the Hunter
For the uninitiated, Project Twilight was a supplement for Vampire that allowed the characters to play as FBI agents in the same universe as all of the World of Darkness material that existed at the time (it was a LOT by then!). It wasn’t alone either. There was a whole set of similar products released under the banner of ‘Year of the Hunter,’ but this one was the one that appealed to me the most.
At the time of this release, TV shows like X-Files and Supernatural were pretty popular, so the idea of doing something similar, in a setting that I owned a shed-load of books for, was really appealing. Plus, I was pretty bored with running VtM by then.
It was probably the first time I started looking at my campaigns as ‘seasons’ and my sessions as ‘episodes’. I started writing ‘cases’ for my players to investigate. I reached out to my usual players, and instead of a party of 6, I offered them 3 separate ‘duos’. It was a pretty bold move as nobody had tried to do this before.
Thankfully, it worked! I just found a load of cases that I wrote. All handwritten on A4 sheets.
Some Project Twilight Cases
In addition, I offered my players the chance to earn extra XP by writing up case files. Fair play to them, they dived in feet first. They wrote them fully in character and even created a filing protocol (XV followed by session number). Here is the one from the first case.
XV 102 – Special Affairs Division (SAD)
I do love finding my old notes. This is why I keep all of my old character sheets and notes, where possible.
So, tonight, I ran the Hope’s Last Day one-off scenario for my Stormbringer players. It was the second time I’ve run it, but the first time for this group of mad people.
I was going to do a full write-up, but unfortunately, I’m still suffering from the tail-end of a horrendous virus that wiped out my family’s whole Christmas and New Year, so I’m afraid my brain just couldn’t grab all the information in a way that allows me to rewrite it into a narrative story.
The players seemed to enjoy it, though, and the highlights were three player deaths (dragged off by Aliens to the hive and one burned to death by acid blood).
One of the characters managed to avoid death by facehugger 6 times and went on to kill 2 facehuggers with nothing but a scalpel (extremely lucky rolls!).
At the final scene, the facehuggers came skittering out of the spacecraft and attacked 3 of the survivors while 2 of the backup characters snuck in and took off, leaving the rest of the players to a miserable death in Hadley’s Hope.
A lot more went on, but, as I mentioned earlier, my brain currently isn’t capable of putting into the usual narrative form. I’m disappointed about that as the players definitely deserve a proper write-up. They were awesome.
There were a couple of other events, though. I’d written up some ‘in-between seasons’ notes for my Stormbringer campaign for each player. Gotta keep the interest levels up!
In addition, something totally unexpected happened. I’d mentioned to the players that I was on the hunt for some previous editions of the Stormbringer RPG that I had once owned but somehow, through many house moves and my own forgetfulness, had lost. I’d managed to get a copy of 3rd edition myself, but copies of 4th edition were both rare and very VERY expensive.
By way of saying “thank you” for writing and running the first campaign for them, they had scoured the interwebs, found a copy (from Italy apparently?), and clubbed together to buy it for me!
Now, I don’t do ‘this’ to get anything in return. I would genuinely go insane if I couldn’t get these plot ideas out of my head and see how the players react to them. I do it because I enjoy it.
That being said, I am bowled over that the players enjoyed what we do (it is far from just me, the game is what it is due to the decisions they make and the colour they add to the world that I give them).
I was genuinely moved and close to tears. I am a soppy twat at the best of times.
So, tonight was fun. It was a great session and one-off that it appears we all enjoyed, but the gift was just out of the blue and, to be blunt, amazing.
As a REF, there are times when your self-confidence ebbs. You don’t know if what you are doing, the effort you put in, is enough. Are your players actually enjoying the game, or are they just saying that to not upset you.
Tonight made a difference for me. I always knew my players were ace, and tonight, they proved that without any room for error.
When you are (mostly) a forever REF and when you get a reputation for a particular game, you are lucky enough to get a queue of people who want to play your game (which I am always humbled and eternally grateful for).
It also means that you get to a point where it feels like you’ve done it so much that you are at risk of repeating yourself. You know, the old law of diminishing returns.
In the early 2000s, this was where I found myself. I’d run so many Stormbringer campaigns, explored so many aspects of the Moorcock books and tried so many storylines that it felt like the intellectual cupboard was bare.
I was on the verge of shelving the book for a few years in the hope that I’d get inspiration while running something different, when I had an idea.
The Idea
I was lucky enough to have a big player base to choose from and there were at least 3 distinct social groups that they came from. So, what if I wrote a big scale campaign with 3 parties, one for each ‘alignment’. So, one Law, one Chaos and one for the Grey Lords of Balance. I had 6 players in each gaming group.
That’s a campaign with 18 players to keep entertained…
The basic premise of the campaign was that this was a plane of the multiverse where Elric was dead. The events leading up to the battle at the end of time would still happen but a prophecy here foretold of it being enacted by mere mortals instead and the decisions from each alignment would decide what alignment would form the new world. The Horn of Fate was a big McGuffin.
In essence, each team were heading towards this battle but competing to see who could get the upper hand by learning more about the prophecy and the location of the Horn of Fate.
A huge part of making this work was a strict rule regarding character death. There was no recreating characters. Everyone had one shot and, for me as the REF, this meant the campaign would slowly get easier to manage.
The Logistics!
This was by far the most ambitious idea that I’d ever attempted. Luckily, it was at a time in my life where I had some free time, I only had one son at this point if my life (I now have 4 children). What followed was an intense 6 months or more.
I would run for one party every week (so each party would play every 3 weeks). That probably doesn’t sound too bad to you dear reader, but that wasn’t just it. Through the course of play, parties would split which meant bespoke sessions at some point mid-week for just them.
In addition, due to the fact that the main ‘engine’ of the campaign was that they were all in competition with each other, every action and decision of every player would have an impact on the world that all the rest of the players inhabited.
If one party got to a key location before the others, whatever state they left it in was what greeted the next group to go there. I kept track of the cosmic balance rating of each location which would also affect how the inhabitants and ‘named characters’ would behave so that too would affect how people would fare once that party arrived.
I also had the ‘main plot timeline’ planned out (that’s how I write all my campaigns) and if a party did something to affect that timeline, the global impact would be felt across all 3 parties.
Then, of course, there are the crossovers. Quite often, whole parties or parts of each party would meet up in game so we would have a joint session. Sometimes, this would be amicable but in most cases, it would result in player vs player friction and a character death at this point was common.
In Summary
In summary, I ran 3 campaigns, in parallel with each other, all in the same universe as each other, all affecting each other and all heading to the same place.
The amount of effort it took to juggle all of that and try to make sure everyone was enjoying it genuinely made me feel queasy contemplating trying to do that at this stage of my life.
But somehow, it worked. Everyone told me then (and some even still tell me now) that they loved it. It was probably my best attempt at creating a truly epic scale story.
By the time we got to the finalé, the 18 players had shrunk to around 9 characters who still lived. A handful of the players who had lost characters continued to turn up as they wanted to see how it would end.
One of the Final Sessions (I still had lots of not-grey hair!)
In the last episode, the remaining characters made it to the end of time. All of the Law party were dead so the final battle was fought between Balance and Chaos. Once the horn of Fate was blown twice, it all came down to a duel between the Agents.
Balance prevailed.
Once the third and final blast on the horn was made, the world swirled and formed into the world we now know as our own.
As I uttered those final words of the campaign in the large echo chamber of the main Church Hall that we used for the games club every Sunday night, something utterly unexpected happened. There was silence for a second and then a couple of people started clapping. Then everyone was clapping. It was the most surreal thing I’ve ever experienced. It hadn’t happened before and certainly hasn’t happened since.
It’s not something I think about often to be honest, but now that I look back, the effort that I put into that story alone was insane. That was before you even think about the logistics of managing the 3 different parties and the many smaller sessions through each week that I had to manage. I was running, rewriting, reacting and then running sessions between 3 & 4 times per week for about 6 months.
Verdict?
So, did I enjoy it? Hell yeah! I had a grand idea for a story bigger than anything I’d attempted before and it worked. It was genuinely a full-time job for 6 months but it worked!
Would I do it again? That, is a hard no I’m afraid. I have a very serious job that takes a lot of my ‘bandwidth’ to cope with. I have 4 children and a better half who are my world and they are my time priority. I just couldn’t commit to the huge amount of time and work that something of this scale requires.
Now, I just write a season (campaign) at a time and I max my players at 6 people (although 4 is the ‘sweet spot’ for me). One session a fortnight and between 6-8 episodes (sessions) per season. This is about all I can manage these days.
I still have that 18 player campaign as an achievement from my past. I know I’m capable of doing it, but I could never commit to it in order to do it justice.
Dragondaze is a local (Newport, South Wales in the United Kingdom) charity event that started as an annual day for a limited amount of friends to meet and have a whole day of gaming with a little extra effort put in to make it a day to remember.
Then in 2013, Simon Powell a local businessman and lifetime gamer in Newport had the idea to re-launch it but to make it bigger in every way and most importantly to use it as a platform to raise money for a great cause. He enlisted the help of a few people that included the original creator of the small event and also the chairman of the local games club (me!).
We have raised money for a few charities over the years including Barnardos Young Carers, Sparkle Childrens Charity and many other charities through the Lions group who became part of the organising committee.
Simon Powell. The main man (and main organiser) without whom, none of it would happen
Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, we haven’t been able to put one on since 2019. What made this worse was the closure of the Newport Leisure Centre which we used as our venue every year.
Over the years, we’ve held 7 events in the Newport Leisure Centre which was always a good venue but the cost of the hall and smaller rooms was always a large drain on the amount we were able to raise for the charities due to the costs there.
Over those 7 years, we managed to raise over £13,000!
When you are running a charity event, it’s more difficult than a commercial event as you have to save as much money as possible. That being said, we managed to get a lot of people volunteering to run RPGs as well as getting gifts for the raffle from the stallholders. Given how tight our budgets were, we managed to cram quite a bit in, such as –
Local artists & authors
Games retailers (board games and role playing games)
Local T-shirt companies
Comic vendors and many other businesses
The main hall, early in the dayBug Hunters looking for bugsThere he is!Darth and his boys, fresh from cheating at the X-Wing Tournament
In addition to this, we had separate areas that hosted:
Role playing games and wargames for our customers to play for free.
The RPG hallSome wargaming!Can’t beat a bit of Battletech!
We also had a group called “Counters” who host a Board Games café with a library of over 500 games to choose from free of charge as well as being on hand to teach anyone who asks how to play any of them!
The Counters gang with the mayor of NewportOne of the amazing Counters team teaching people a new game from their library
We had Cosplayers from around the country including Daleks, Stormtroopers, Darth Vader and many more. In recent years, we have held a Cosplayer competition with a cash prize for juniors and adults
Some impressive looking power armourThis guy was brill. He stayed in character all day and the kids loved him
A Starship Bridge Simulator where participants can take over the role of Captain, Engineer, Comms and all of the others you would expect to see on Star Trek
The bridge!Weapons stationEngine room
A Bring and Buy stall
A raffle that we usually raise in excess of £1000 worth of prizes donated from local and national businesses
We have had celebrities from TV, Films and Computer Games such as Christopher Ryan (The Young Ones, Bottom, Doctor Who & Absolutely Fabulous), Doug Cockles (The voice of Geralt from the multi-million selling video game The Witcher), Virginia Hey (Mad Max, James Bond & Farscape) to name just a few
Huge fan of this guy. Got an autograph to go with my Rik Mayall oneVirginia Hey from Farscape is one of the nicest people you could ever meetDoug sold some of our merchandise at his stall and raised around £200 for us
And much more
Of course, this is all with the aim of what we really do which is raise money for great charities. To date, we have raised just over £13K and have given thousands of people a day to remember.
We have been covered by local and national news outlets such as the South Wales Argus as well as a spot on Radio Wales on Wynne Evans show in 2019. We also have a couple of videos on YouTube. The Argus have covered our event most years and there are many other videos on YouTube too.
One of the things that I loved most about Dragondaze was the way it brought everyone together. All of our local games clubs (including mine, The Great Escapism) volunteered to contribute. It was an amazing feeling.
I’m very proud of my involvement in these events and we are hoping to do it again next year. We are in talks with a new venue, albeit a bit smaller than our last but hopefully, our fixed costs will be cheaper meaning more money for charities!
After a 3-year hiatus, we live in hope that we will fly again!
So, as I mentioned in Part 1 of this examination, the hobby of roleplaying gave me a level of confidence and a skill-set that I didn’t know I had. These discoveries allowed me to use them in my real world life and succeed as a result.
I realised that self-confidence breeds confidence in those around you. I realised that managing a team of people was like running a game of RP. I realised that the art of managing a meeting was ‘exactly‘ like running a RP game (manage the loud ones so they don’t drown out everyone else, give the quiet ones an opportunity to be involved, concentrate on people’s strengths etc).
The results were astonishing. I went from a shy, quiet ‘part of the scenery’ to a genuine leader. Most astonishing of it all was, I was bloody good at it!
I think anyone in this position also needs to have certain attributes for it all to work. Having been bullied as a youth and being lucky enough to have compassionate and caring parents, I had, installed in my baseline programming, a sense of justice and emotional intelligence. This is a must for any leader or Games REF.
So, I went on to run many games as I said earlier in Part 1. I was lucky enough to get a good reputation and was in demand. It was/is a great feeling.
As I also said in Part 1, life overtook my time for the hobby but I never stopped altogether. At the time, I didn’t know why but in hindsight, I now do. More on that below.
The club I started (The Great Escapism) took off. I was regularly running games and so were the ‘old guard’ who were now sharing those things I loved with others. In addition, there were youngsters coming in and trying it all for the first time and loving it all too. A new generation of gamers was being born.
I loved that and it’s something I’m still proud of today.
Some friends of mine who had moved to various parts of the UK started an online group too (before there was many tools out there to do so and before it was popular. It seemed like the perfect solution as you could still game but it was less strain on personal life commitments. I tried it. It didn’t take.
I just didn’t get that same ‘electricity’, that same buzz from it that can only be found face to face. The one quality that I now realised I could not do without in my games. It was not for me.
So what was it that I loved so much about this hobby that kept me coming back for more? What effect did it have on me that I took for granted? I was about to be forced to find out by a little thing known as a global pandemic…
I’d reached the point where I was running one campaign a year. My writing style had ‘evolved’ into what I call “seasons”, like a limited TV series and I would create story arcs that were 3 seasons (campaigns) long which would play out over 3 years. This worked for me and I could fit it into my personal life without issue. It was just enough to get the ideas out of my head in a way that others would enjoy.
Then COVID happened.
Having already tried gaming on-line and not enjoying it, I had an enforced drought. I did not like it one bit. I had several new ideas and got to writing (I wrote outlines for Blades in the Dark, Tales from the Loop, Cyberpunk 2020 and, of course, Stormbringer) but I was unable to run them. I was unable to see the reactions of my players as the plots unfolded. I was unable to test if my plots were good enough.
I was unable to express myself in the way I’d taken for granted for so many years and unable to share that with anyone. It affected my mental health but still, I wouldn’t appreciate how much until I had the opportunity to run again.
The pandemic was a lot to deal with in and of itself of course but, as I was lucky enough to have a job that could be done from home, that constant remained. I was home with my family so I didn’t have to be alone. We managed okay. We were certainly luckier than a lot of people but something was missing.
As we got to the end of the worst and the world started to open up again, as soon as I could, I organised a face to face game. The players I approached said they wanted to play Cyberpunk so I dusted off what I’d written and gave it a polish. We agreed on a date for a session zero to create characters together at a friend’s house.
That was the moment. That was when I realised how much I needed it, how much I’d missed it and how much happier I felt as soon as we had a solid agreed date.
So, across the 2 parts of this musing on my mental health and its connection to roleplaying, what have I learned?
1. Roleplaying gives me self-confidence
2. Roleplaying improves my communication and social skills
3. Roleplaying allows me to release my stories on people
4. Roleplaying allows me to truly escape
5. Roleplaying gives me joy by allowing me to give others joy
I have more to say on the matter but I think that’s the core of it.
Dear reader, do you have any thoughts on this subject? Has this hobby done the same or similar for you? Comment below if you have some positives to add.
I wanted to write something a bit more personal for this blog, rather than just talk about my past and present games. I wanted to write about how much this hobby has improved my life, my mental health and just me in general. In this, the first part of that rambling, I wanted to share how this became a huge part of my formative years. The second part will be where I share how much it helps me in this later part of my life.
I’ve been a roleplayer for a very long time. I was about 12 and one of my best friends’ mother bought him a copy of Tunnels & Trolls to try. We were very dubious about the concept but we gave it a go.
We absolutely loved it and never once looked back.
Roleplaying has given me more than I could ever pay it back. Through this strange, beautiful, ludicrous hobby I’ve become a stronger, more confident and more able human being than I thought was possible. In addition, I’ve met some frankly amazing people, most of which I now call my closest friends.
I played in so many different games and loved it. I tried to run my own games but didn’t quite crack it. Through it all, there were three different friends of mine who, in my opinion, were at the top of the tree.
One was a meticulous story planner with a skill for world-building and description that would rival the best of today’s film writers. He still runs games today and has written and organised many successful Live RP events.
Another was a much more ‘freeform’ type of REF. His skill was much more in the imagery of individual scenes and he had the ability to be able to react to the ebb and flow of the game in a way that used to leave my jaw on the floor. He wrote very little by way of prep but still had the ability to come up with wondrous stories pretty much on the spot.
The third was another meticulous planner but his was the ability to create long and intricate campaigns. One of his Cthulhu campaigns went on for decades (It probably still runs even now!).
I became a sponge. I soaked up everything I could learn from all 3 of them and I used what bits worked best to mix with my own style and suddenly, the games I ran started to work. People wanted to play in my games! All thanks to the specific elements of the styles of these amazing people. I’m still friends with all 3 today.
I started with the Ghostbusters RPG as I liked how ‘light’ it was, both in terms of rules and in humour. Around this time, I’d been voraciously reading as many fantasy books as I could get my grubby little hands on and was in love with the works of Michael Moorcock, specifically the Elric books. The decision to run Stormbringer was an easy one.
I’ve run many games over the years (Vampire, 50 Fathoms, Deadlands and many others) but Stormbringer was the one that I kept going back to. It was also the one that I couldn’t get away from as players kept asking me to run which was flattering but I started to feel like I was being typecast.
I ran it so much that I started to run out of ideas. (I’ve always written my own campaigns). I now only run when I get what I think is a really good plot idea.
As the years went by and life started to get a bit more serious (I met the love of my life, started a family, 4 amazing kids and took a Business Degree at 30 to make a better life for us all), the time needed to game just kept getting deprioritised. It was starting to become ‘one of those things I did when I was young’. I didn’t like that idea so I started a local games club so as to bring all the existing talent back together and also have a place to bring new blood into the game.
I think that’s a good place to leave part 1. I was bullied quite badly at school, like, really badly. I was shy and thought myself worthless. RPGs, the people I met and the skills and confidence it gave me allowed me to get stronger. I became so confident that I worked from a part-time waiter in a Hilton hotel up to 3rd in command of that hotel by the age of 23. A bit later, it gave me the confidence to go out and get a Business Degree.
It made me a better person, full stop.
In Part 2, I’ll blather on about how running games got me through some bad times such as my mother passing away and how an enforced hiatus caused by lockdown, made me realise how much running games improves my mental health.
I’d be interested to hear if anyone else feels similarly. Feel free to comment if you do.
I’m always looking for supplements for my Stormbringer campaigns.
There was a time when I had all of the editions of the main rules and a handful of supplements but, over the years, I’ve lost all of them.
So, periodically, I scan all the Marketplace type sites hoping that I’m going to find books I once owned for a price that doesn’t require me to sell my children or get an OnlyFans account (and that’s something nobody needs to see happen!).
I found these and, thanks to the generosity of the seller, I managed to get all 3 for a price that isn’t that far away from their original selling prices.
Sailing on the Sea of Fate
As my new campaign is largely based on the sea (or under it), this book has proved to be even more useful than I’d hoped it would. Stats for different boats and some nice simple mechanics on how best to manage sailing, weather systems, other boats, sea creatures and much more. This book is going to make my life a lot easier.
It also has some ‘boat specific’ fumble tables which is one element of this system that I do use a lot. These ones look like they could be fun too.
The Bronze Grimoire
There’s a lot in this book. This is a good thing but it does mean that I could only skim it today and will have to take it in properly over the next couple of weeks. The key takeaway for me though, is that it fleshed out what little there is in the main rules for sorcerers in the Young Kingdoms. I’m already updating one of my campaign NPC bad guys and am already considering throwing in a new one (a Necromancer!).
There’s new stuff on Rune magic, Necromancy, new spells, new demons, new chaotic abilities, new spell tomes and lots more!
Fate of Fools
This one is likely to sit on my shelf tbh. I’m not normally a fan of running pre-written scenarios. The very principle of it is too ‘narrow’ for my style of reffing. Like the Rogue Mistress which I used some elements of, for one of my previous campaigns, I may use some parts as elements of future campaigns but even that is unlikely tbh.
All in all, I’m super pleased with the purchase. 2 of the 3 books will get used immediately.
Cruising for a Musing 