About

Ah, the obligatory About page. This site centers on my gaming. The majority of stuff on here is 7th Sea-related, but I'm hoping to expand the materials here to other games I've played. And if I start running games again, I'll probably document that here.

So what do I mean by gaming? When I talk about gaming, I mean something pretty specific: role-playing games. RPGs. I didn't play RPGs in middle school or high school. I didn't game. I played plenty of video games of the Nintendo variety (we were a Nintendo household pretty much exclusively), and the occasional game at an arcade, although I must admit that as a kid, I always preferred the Nintendo's digital controller to the joystick at an arcade. But with the exception of the various Zelda games, I played no RPGs. Didn't even realize there was a whole genre devoted to them.

The closest I came to gaming was sometime in elementary school, in 5th or 6th grade, when a couple of friends of mine tried to run a D&D-like game and invited me to join them. My imagination soared, imagining playing in worlds like Middle Earth (I may not have gamed, but I was still a geek-child). I remember creating characters, although I don't remember using dice. I remember being concerned that my character had enough quarrels for his crossbow. But after creating the characters, we were stumped. Where was the game supposed to go next? We were too young to realize that there had to be more to it than that, and too inexperienced to fill in the gaps: creating a world, a plot, NPCs, &c. So my character lived only in my 10-year-old imagination and on that grubby page, made gray from the erasing my obsessive fiddling brought about. In time, we forgot all about it and moved on to other things.

I didn't game again until the end of my freshman year in college, almost 10 years later. My next-door-neighbor in Greycliff, my freshman year dorm, was a gamer, and had been gaming for a long time. Board games, card games, and especially RPGs. And another of my classmates was talking about running a Dungeons & Dragons campaign, set in some world called Dark Sun. Towards the end of the year, the game finally got off the ground, and we read up on Dark Sun and began creating characters. I decided to play a Psionicist, which sounded cool. And because he was a Halfling, he'd also have to be a Thief. What can I say; I succumb to stereotypes, just like everyone else. Although that campaign fell apart, I was hooked, and I wanted to make up for the lost time of my gaming-less decade.

My gamer next-door-neighbor became my roommate for the next three years, so I was always able to hear stories of games past. And he introduced me to the gaming club at BC, which was finishing a truly epic Vampire campaign. But after the abortive Dark Sun campaign, my next gaming experience was in the world of 7th Sea. I loved the concept. I loved the world. And I threw myself into it, playing in various one-shots with the same character (a doctor who was also tolerably well acquainted with a blade). I took the next step, and began running games myself, starting with 7th Sea one-shots. I tried a campaign with a co-gamemaster (my roommate, of course), which eventually ran out of steam (classes, papers, and deadlines are not conducive to maintaining a long-term campaign), and then another campaign as the sole gamemaster. I had a ton of fun.

I've also gotten to play in various game systems: Star Wars, Vampire LARP, Werewolf, Shadowrun, Call of Cthulhu (both LARP and mostly not), TORG, Marvel Superheroes, GURPS. I'd like to at least include my characters from all those games, although with all the one-shots I've done, it'll be difficult to include everyone. But this is where my gaming pages live. That's what this site is about.