Friday, May 16, 2014

Homecoming

I'm not a big fan of Blogger, so I've moved everything over to nagafeathers.com.

There was a time when I was an avid gamer. About seventeen years ago. As you'd expect, this was back when life was simple: I lived in one place for a prolonged period of time, I had nerd friends around me, and life was relatively relaxed so I had time, too.

Then I "grew up."

"Uhtred of Bebbanburg" by Caio Monteiro


Let me take a moment here to strenuously object to that crap phrase. There is a prevalent attitude in our society that certain things are inappropriate beyond a certain age, and that responsible adults should give up those things in exchange for regular pay, family, and soul-crushing monotony. The things we're expected to give up seem to include creativity, humour (beyond what you'll find on sitcoms), and weirdness.

Mostly my absence from the creative, funny, weird world of gaming was due to international moving, a lack of nerd friends, business busy-ness and all the usual suspects, but I have to admit there was also a bit of "I'm grown up now" stupidity in there too.

Right now I'm in between things in my life. I live in Germany but I'm moving to Denmark soon. I've been sporadically freelancing for a year, but really need to focus on work again after the move. I've been very involved in some personal projects, but they've mostly calmed down for now. So I unexpectedly have quite a bit of time on my hands.

In this time, I read a post on my old friend Joel's blog, An Abominable Fancy. My brain was obviously pretty damn dry after seventeen years without gaming, because the spark that Joel's blog threw set my mind on fire.

Now I've literally spent the last few days catching up on what the hell's been happening in the roleplaying game scene, discovering long lost friends who stayed nerds, learning opaque jargon (OSR, OGL, SRD anyone?) and searching for a game to sink my teeth into. I've settled on 13th Age for starters. I read all of Rob's mammoth review (yes, I'm quite proud of that), and it sounds like the right mix of comprehensible rules and emphasis on (or at least encouragement of) collaborative storytelling, which should be a good fit. The hefty book arrived in the post today.

The whirlwind of excitement and hunger for info and play that's been spinning my head around for the last few days makes it clear to me that I've missed this nerd tribe. Reeeally missed it. It's good to feel creative, funny and weird again. It's good to be home. I missed you guys.

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