How I got into fantasy and RPGs

There’s this new initiative going on where RPG bloggers make a post about how they got into roleplaying and how things progressed from there, started by Sami Koponen at Mythopoeia. (http://legendmakers.wordpress.com/) The idea seemed nice, so here’s my piece. This also delves heavily into how I got into fantasy in general, as that was a far stronger turning point for me than my discovery of RPGs. I can track all my current hobbies and all but one remaining friend to the day I discovered fantasy. For an inestimable debt owed in favors you don’t know you did me; thank you, Thomas Abrahamsson.

You are advised to consider every statement I make to be prefaced by several doubt-conveying and indefiniteness-marking statements such as “I think but I’m not sure”, “As best I recall”, “What most likely happened was” or some such. Especially as regards chronological distances and sequences.

I got introduced into RPGs by a friend called Jukka, who dragged me twice into an RPG session with Tommi and the Niku also referred to in his history. I don’t remember when this was, but before I started highschool. (As I wrote that, I had a flashback to sitting in a bus and hearing Tommi and Niku, who I didn’t know at all at that time, discussing Orcrist and Glamdring from the Hobbit. Huh.) I have this impression that Jukka was more along for and after the shits and giggles, as evidenced by the Paranoia session, which was anathema to me because I generally don’t like playing against friends no matter who’s winning or if victory as such is even possible. I don’t think the Paranoia session was my first; might’ve been, my memory sucks, whatever, no one *coughelsecough* actually cares at this micro-of-a-level.

I’m not sure how it managed to happen but I started to play with Tommi and Niku fairly quickly after that, without Jukka there. Though there was always the healthy sense of self-irony of anyone discussing fantasy, they regarded RPing as something apart from mild and temporary amusement, and that elusive sense of seriousness struck home. There was a lot of a session of this and two of that back then, with pre-designed systems and homebrews that I barely recall, and D&D 3e. The first character that I connected with was an elf archer in one of Tommi’s homebrews, named Kisfal in a groundbreaking move of precedence-setting as regards the naming of my dime-a-dozen elf characters. The name was actually reused from a certain forum where I made such an ass out of myself that my very memory shies away from that whole topic. Brr…

It now seems odd to me that I got in as deep as I did. This for background:

There was a time I wasn’t into reading, fantasy or RPGs. Then I found Elfwood. (Just Google it.) I wish I remembered when that was, but it was long ago. The site’s bound to be nowhere as novel as it was back in the day, nor commercial-free, and nor am I impressed so easily, but the impact then was immediate and immense. (If you can, think back to a time when video game webcomics were a new and novel concept, a site with some thousands of members could boast to be the largest fantasy art site there was and how slowly the pages used to load…) I could and would show you the exact picture that served as the soul hook, but it’s not there anymore, nor anywhere else that I can find. On the Very Off Chance that anyone knowledgeable enough reads this, it was Min Rho’s coloring of a picture by Adele Sessler, of Faeren holding a sword to his throat.

From there I got into fantasy art (meaning Elfwood). From there, Tolkien. I started reading in the upper grades of comprehensive school, but only really got beyond Tolkien in highschool. After Tolkien the next stop was RPGs – which would never have stuck if I hadn’t been a fantasy fan at the time already – and the broader scope of reading came last. So as a checkpoint summary; Elfwood -> fantasy art -> Tolkien books -> RPGs -> literature (first Star Wars and then all things fantasy).

Back to where what I say has something directly to do with RPGs. The One Game that stands out to me was a D&D-based game where Tommi was GM and three players (soon two) played dragons. My character, Animagynth, was actually reused from another game that had been far more of a oneshot. I don’t know if the others thought of Dragongame as another such short jaunt, but it never seemed so to me. The other player lost interest in the game far sooner than I did and his character’s death ended the D&D incarnation of the game.

It was resurrected in a homebrew system of Tommi’s, where I later also submitted large stacks of material. (The process of thinking up stuff and the discourse which passed for “quality control” are fondly remembered.) It was a solo campaign with me playing and he as GM. In the best times we could play almost every day of the week, several hours a day, with almost no time sacrificed to working out detailed battle tactics or counting roll modifiers a’la D&D. Long story short, I have a Log, over fifty pages long, written in small print with no marginals to speak of and not much more space between the lines – really, just imagine enough digital text to choke a donkey – that sometimes brushes by weeks of playing in-game and out of game with a couple of sentences (this somewhat balanced by going into excessive detail at times. Ke ke ke…). Shorthand and acronyms galore.

Before, after and during that there were other games with the two other players in our village, but they didn’t stick in any way. I wouldn’t have minded another long-term game but it was simply not happening with that group, and there already was the epic solo of the Dragongame going on, which eliminated any interest I might have had in another solo game. There was a short interval somewhere with a game posted on an internet board, which quickly provided evidence suggesting that I’m far better at “actual roleplaying” (I hate even saying that. Duh) online than face-to-face.

As an aside on that topic, while I do understand that there are people who can best relate to the acting and dramatics of intense conventional roleplaying as opposed to any other element the hobby can offer, it might as well take place in a different galaxy for all the part that it I can find for myself there. I’m not that expressive.

My RPG hobby or at least its interactive ground to a halt after Tommi moved away from town. I was never interested enough in RPG theory (and indeed I hate the whole scientific analyzing approach to anything with a vengeance), hadn’t made any new contacts in my playing days that I’d uphold later, and had bad memories of trying to be an active member on forums (*shudder*). That lasted for about a year or two or so, up till I started playing at the Tampere university of technology (TTY), with a group consisting of myself and various members of Excalibur, the RPG club based there. For more on that, read every other post I’ve written thus far. Unless I’m mistaken, Niku studies at TTY and is an Excalibur member. If not, I’ve at least spotted his name on the roster of one of the campaigns hosted for first-year students there. (So-called fuksi-DD. And I do hope I didn’t make an idiot out of myself my mistaking the meaning of the word ‘fuksi’ here.) Haven’t spotted him at the club so far, though.

~ by gastogh on May 7, 2009.