Malkryst
I started playing videogames and boardgames aged 5 in the mid 70s, then pen & paper RPGs at school from 1980, before the E.T. movie in '82 made roleplaying seem cool for a while (before the "panic" made it uncool/worrying/nerdy again). Back then we mainly played MERP/Rolemaster. In 1989 2nd Ed AD&D took over and my friends only wanted to play that. In the 1990s I started GMing/DMing my own long term group. My usually 6-8 players and I preferred percentile dice test rolls over additive ones, so we mainly played Warhammer FRP 1st Ed and RuneQuest/Elric!/Pendragon/Call Of Cthulhu. I also dabbled with running various classic World of Darkness RPGs (mainly Vampire: TDA though), Shadowrun 1st/2nd Ed, Earthdawn 1st Ed, Deadlands 1st Ed, Rifts, Palladium Fantasy, Paranoia, SLA Industries, and all sorts - I bought a lot of books - but we always ended up going back to WFRP & RuneQuest/Elric!
As the 90s progressed my work pressures (offshore finance), pubbing/clubbing, and friends who now mostly wanted to wargame at weekends with WH40k/EPIC, BloodBowl or BattleTech led us all away from RPGs. Then videogames started dominating our time - Diablo in 1997, Unreal in 1998, EverQuest's launch in 1999 and Diablo 2 in 2000 - they absorbed all my free time. In particular the age of the MMORPG soon killed all tabletop gaming stone dead, for everyone I knew. Suddenly we were raiding every night in EQ1-2, Asheron's Call, WoW, etc. Sometimes I was working 50+ hour weeks, pubbing/clubbing every evening, then coming home to play MMORPGs with US and EU friends through the early hours of the morning, then maybe a couple of hours sleep, back to work, rinse and repeat. I'm not sure how I survived the late 90s and early 2000s lol.
I moved to the UK in the early 2000s. A bad internet connection at home in Yorkshire meant I was console gaming more than PC gaming now, with lots of in-room multiplayer with housemates (Halo: Combat Evolved, Virtua Tennis, Micro Machines, Re-Volt, Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye 64, etc.), and we all got back into boardgaming too with Catan/Carcassonne/Alhambra/Ticket To Ride - though these days I mainly play Terraforming Mars, Dune: Imperium, Wyrmspan, Viticulture, Raiders of the North Sea, & Lords of Waterdeep (online as much as face to face). Nobody was roleplaying, that I knew. I was surrounded by gamers, but I never knew anyone back then who played D&D 3.0 or 3.5 or even talked about it.
Through the 2000s and early 2010s my love of first/third person shooters led me to the Battlefield games and Planetside 1-2, into Destiny 1-2, Fortnite, Overwatch, GTAV Online, plus survival games like 7DTD and Valheim. I ran small and medium guilds, I ran 500+ person online communities, but the writing was on the wall and the age of massively multiplayer gaming was waning and coming to a close - online gaming was getting small again. During COVID I played lots of co-op games like Deep Rock Galactic, the Vermintides, and lots of silly physics games. Gamers I knew were getting tired of the scope of gaming getting smaller though. Gradually the zeitgeist swung back towards the unlimited possibilities of RPGs. I did some online roleplaying within my online gaming communities - mostly 5e, some Pathfinder and various WH40K RPGs. The old RPG bug bit hard. D&D 5e seemed to be what everyone I knew was playing, or wanted to play. Everyone was watching Critical Role.
I started roleplaying face-to-face in 2022ish, in 5e or 5e-adjacent RPGs. My DM asked us all to buy a miniature to represent our player character in 5e - I bought one to represent my female dragonborn sorcerer... then I bought some more for other characters I wanted to play, then I started buying monsters, in box sets and singles, from my FLGS or from Amazon. I also bought a lot of minis (and still do) from Goonalan on eBay, who told me about this website (where he uses the same username). Now I own many hundreds of minis, dozens of 5e books, lots of dry-erase Loke BattleMap books (some of which I've kickstarted), and many other accessories - and far, far too many dice (even though I already had lots of dice left from the 80s/90s).
As I type this, my first DM in three decades is now one of my players. I started DMing face-to-face again in early 2025 - in 5e, of course, because it seems easy to teach - and that's important because this first group I've DM'd in 25+ years includes not just my former DM and another player more experienced with 5e lore and mechanics than me, but also someone who had never played 5e before, and a player who had never roleplayed at all before (he's totally addicted now). As I sign up for this account we're 10 sessions into a campaign in my home-brewed world, Syldaria, and I'm hoping I can find the time to start typing up my session reports here soon.
Here's to gaming without boundaries, and without limits on our imagination, in worlds where we can be anyone or anything - the most inclusive kind of gaming there is.
As the 90s progressed my work pressures (offshore finance), pubbing/clubbing, and friends who now mostly wanted to wargame at weekends with WH40k/EPIC, BloodBowl or BattleTech led us all away from RPGs. Then videogames started dominating our time - Diablo in 1997, Unreal in 1998, EverQuest's launch in 1999 and Diablo 2 in 2000 - they absorbed all my free time. In particular the age of the MMORPG soon killed all tabletop gaming stone dead, for everyone I knew. Suddenly we were raiding every night in EQ1-2, Asheron's Call, WoW, etc. Sometimes I was working 50+ hour weeks, pubbing/clubbing every evening, then coming home to play MMORPGs with US and EU friends through the early hours of the morning, then maybe a couple of hours sleep, back to work, rinse and repeat. I'm not sure how I survived the late 90s and early 2000s lol.
I moved to the UK in the early 2000s. A bad internet connection at home in Yorkshire meant I was console gaming more than PC gaming now, with lots of in-room multiplayer with housemates (Halo: Combat Evolved, Virtua Tennis, Micro Machines, Re-Volt, Mario Kart 64, Goldeneye 64, etc.), and we all got back into boardgaming too with Catan/Carcassonne/Alhambra/Ticket To Ride - though these days I mainly play Terraforming Mars, Dune: Imperium, Wyrmspan, Viticulture, Raiders of the North Sea, & Lords of Waterdeep (online as much as face to face). Nobody was roleplaying, that I knew. I was surrounded by gamers, but I never knew anyone back then who played D&D 3.0 or 3.5 or even talked about it.
Through the 2000s and early 2010s my love of first/third person shooters led me to the Battlefield games and Planetside 1-2, into Destiny 1-2, Fortnite, Overwatch, GTAV Online, plus survival games like 7DTD and Valheim. I ran small and medium guilds, I ran 500+ person online communities, but the writing was on the wall and the age of massively multiplayer gaming was waning and coming to a close - online gaming was getting small again. During COVID I played lots of co-op games like Deep Rock Galactic, the Vermintides, and lots of silly physics games. Gamers I knew were getting tired of the scope of gaming getting smaller though. Gradually the zeitgeist swung back towards the unlimited possibilities of RPGs. I did some online roleplaying within my online gaming communities - mostly 5e, some Pathfinder and various WH40K RPGs. The old RPG bug bit hard. D&D 5e seemed to be what everyone I knew was playing, or wanted to play. Everyone was watching Critical Role.
I started roleplaying face-to-face in 2022ish, in 5e or 5e-adjacent RPGs. My DM asked us all to buy a miniature to represent our player character in 5e - I bought one to represent my female dragonborn sorcerer... then I bought some more for other characters I wanted to play, then I started buying monsters, in box sets and singles, from my FLGS or from Amazon. I also bought a lot of minis (and still do) from Goonalan on eBay, who told me about this website (where he uses the same username). Now I own many hundreds of minis, dozens of 5e books, lots of dry-erase Loke BattleMap books (some of which I've kickstarted), and many other accessories - and far, far too many dice (even though I already had lots of dice left from the 80s/90s).
As I type this, my first DM in three decades is now one of my players. I started DMing face-to-face again in early 2025 - in 5e, of course, because it seems easy to teach - and that's important because this first group I've DM'd in 25+ years includes not just my former DM and another player more experienced with 5e lore and mechanics than me, but also someone who had never played 5e before, and a player who had never roleplayed at all before (he's totally addicted now). As I sign up for this account we're 10 sessions into a campaign in my home-brewed world, Syldaria, and I'm hoping I can find the time to start typing up my session reports here soon.
Here's to gaming without boundaries, and without limits on our imagination, in worlds where we can be anyone or anything - the most inclusive kind of gaming there is.
- Location
- Guernsey
Trophies
-
1
Avatar
You have an avatar! Now people know what you look like. At least, virtually.