Starting on a Personal Note

A couple years ago, I crossed a threshold wherein role playing games went from being a thing that I had been doing for a long time, to something I had been doing most of my life. There aren't good words to explain what an odd feeling that is. I've now been reading, writing, playing, and discussing tabletop RPGs for 15 years and I'm just starting to feel old.

My first experiences with the hobby were from an AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide I bought with a box of other fantasy books at a yardsale for a dollar. I didn't have the PHB to go with it, so I wound up reverse-engineering the game based on the tables and hints I could glean from what we had. Funnily enough, when years later we eventually bought the Player's Handbook we weren't extremely impressed. The way we had been doing it seemed to make more sense.

From there, our next love was Alternity, an interesting and ridiculously crunchy sci-fi game that we loved to death despite its flaws. Star*Drive is to this day the only pre-made campaign setting I've ever run for more than a session or two. Eventually, we abandoned the Alternity system for the Cyberpunk2020 rules, but we basically used them to continue playing our existing space opera.

Since then I've read and dabbled in a bit of everything. I love everything about role-playing games, reading, writing, discussing, even when I'm not actually in a position to play. I've probably written a dozen or more amateur games for the groups I play with, some of them simply for myself. In the last couple years, I've gotten a bit more serious about this and along with a couple other people I began work on a game called Band of Bastards, the development of which gave this blog its name, but this isn't about that. It's about getting back into the hobby that brought me here.

I look forward to it.