I have not made a secret of my long time playing tabletop roleplaying games and things very much like them–RPGs, generally. Indeed, I recently discussed yet another game in which I participated and which has drawn to its close, and I’ll be discussing another in a more formal context, as well. So it might well be guessed, and rightly, that I am fond of the RPG. More than two decades of persistent play show as much, as do the hundreds–perhaps thousands, at this point–of dollars I’ve spent on the hobby.

(That’s part of the reason I am so envious of gaming streamers and professional players as I am. I never thought to monetize the hobby, and I think I’ve missed my window. That I have the other things going on that I do doesn’t help, either.)

I’ve remarked, following Mackay, on the nature of the RPG as a storytelling activity. For a tabletop game, the storytelling is extemporaneous and (generally) ephemeral; without recording devices–and most of the tables where I’ve played haven’t had them, although I know they’re more and more common–the stories being told exist only in the moments of utterance and are lost but to memory. For the online forum games I have played most in the past many years, though, there is a lingering record. Absent server failures and data loss–always perils, to be sure–a player can go back years later and look over what they did in game, find the character’s voice again. Or a new player can stumble into and through the intertwining stories left behind, grow enamored of them, and come in to participate in making new ones.

As much happened in the game I discussed in the previous post. The player in question swiftly became something of a favorite in the community, and I join several others in hoping to see that player in future games. (There are more games coming. I’ll be running a couple, at least.)

Part of why that player became a favorite, and part of why I continue to engage with forum-based RPGs to the (excessive) extent I do, is that they generate as much art as they do. The player was a fairly prodigious writer, not only narrating character events and thoughts at some length, but also drafting a collection of poetry as supplemental material for the character. I’ve done similar things for games, not only doing the background work of detailing milieux and characters for others to play in and with, but also producing my own characters’ materials. For one, for example, I wrote a fight song and alma mater for his high school–the character is a bandsman, if on a different instrument than his player. For others, I have written dozens of poems in a variety of forms. For still others, I have done other things yet–and the players with whom I have played have done no less, and often more.

While no few of the things that were made and shared have gone away–data loss is ever a peril, as noted–no few others remain, in memory and elsewhere. Because I have gotten to play, I have gotten to experience that art, and I am the better for it.

I’d be happy to put my talents to work for you; let me know what all you need written, and we’ll talk!

I know that I have written on several occasions about my ongoing engagement with the Legend of the Five Rings Roleplaying Game (L5R); I’ve played in each of its iterations save the most recent translation into D&D rules, I’ve run games or helped to run games in most of them, and I’ve done some scholarly and semiformal work on at least a couple. It shouldn’t be a surprise to learn, then, that I’ve been recently engaged in yet another L5R game: Sapphire Ambassadors.

Sapphire Ambassadors has its origins in an earlier game in a campaign–a series of linked individual games taking place in the same overall narrative milieu–and had been intended to be a fun diversion from the main line of that campaign, a useful side-game to help flesh out the specific vision of the world in which the game’s story occurs. In the event, it became the concluding game of the campaign, some personal factors on the part of the specific milieu’s originator having led to the dissolution of that campaign’s main narrative line. It was something of a sadness; I’d done a lot of writing for the game before the decision to close out the campaign came down, and the originator is a long-time friend and colleague whose personal life is of some interest and concern.

Another game master–centralized narrator and referee–and I decided to press ahead with the game, anyway, allowing players who’d participated in the earlier games in the campaign one last chance to tell their characters’ stories and bring some closure to narrative threads that had been drawn out in those games. We also welcomed new players–we always do–and we tried out a few new mechanics to help enrich matters despite the looming end of the game-world.

In all, I feel the game to have been a success. I’m not pleased to see the campaign end, of course; I enjoyed playing in it when I could play in it, and I enjoyed running games in it when I have done that. I’ve learned a lot about how to do the latter, certainly, and how to design events for forum-based iterations of games. (I’ve got some work in progress that goes into some of that business, so I won’t go into great detail here. Later, I promise.) And I will be taking some of the ideas that I feel–and that players tell me–worked well into the campaign I am working on even now (see this and this for more information). How well it’ll continue to work, I don’t know. How long I can keep it going, I also don’t know. But, as Sapphire Ambassadors and its campaign wind down, I am reminded of why I do it.

Telling stories with my friends is fun.

Like the writing that I do? Reach out below, and I can do some for you!