It’s been a while but this months blogging carnival which is being hosted by The Bone Scroll hit me like a carrot on a stick. After Viri Cordova had to pull out of hosting it at the last minute The Bonemaster stepped in to keep it going.

This month we’re looking back at a previous carnival hosted by unclebear where we commented on our resolutions for the year. This isn’t something I normally do so I took a different slant on things and talked about how I thought the year would go both for myself and for everyone else in the RPG Bloggers network.

ChrisL AK @ Flickr

So to cut to the quick I have to say that I failed but you guys took the ball and ran with it. From a personal view point almost everything I touched and took part in has remained unfinished and in some case have been forgotten about. I signed up for the RPGBN collaborative campaign setting which seems to have died a death. I had to pull out of helping start up Nevermet Press and my contributions to Geek Dad have dried up as well.

I could lay blame on a lot of things but it comes down to two very significant events in my year. In April I was diagnosed as dyslexic and despite feeling good about finally understanding my failings and realising I wasn’t as stupid as I usually felt I was at the back of my mind it’s became the new excuse. It’s my go to answer for not being able to do anything. It really isn’t an excuse but I’m only just beginning to come to terms with what it means and after fighting with my work for the last 8 months to get help has mostly fallen on deaf ears I’m now taking voluntary redundancy in order to start a business up and look into returning to university later in 2010. I’ve lived for 33 years without knowing I was dyslexic and managed to get by so why should that knowledge change matters now.

The second event was the birth of my daughter. I just didn’t have the time for writing and gaming in 2009. She’s great but only now am I able to do anything other than look after her and her brothers and sisters. We had so many worries with her sister that even the slightest cough or illness gave us sleepless nights.

So why, I hear you ask, does this have anything to do with gaming and blogging? Well my involvement with the groups I pulled out of and my Geek Dad articles were aimed at pushing people towards others great work. I managed to help out a little bit but nowhere near as much as I’d liked to have.

Nevermet Press has had a hugely successful year and with the upcoming work they are about to release I can only wish them even more success especially as I can’t be as involved as I’d like to be.

The RPG Bloggers Network has grown that huge in such a short period of time that they now have the writers of the games we play joining us in our blogging ways.

The RPG Circus podcast has taken off and has found many followers as well and wouldn’t have worked without collaboration between the bloggers involved.

There were many more collaborations this year that ended well and it didn’t just have an impact in our blogging field. The building of grassroots following of games helped launch new systems and places like GenCon managed to see just what can be done when gamers and writers from across the world can do when they get together.

I may not have been involved directly with most of these success stories but I like to think that indirectly I helped out in any way I could.

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I’m sure I’ve mentioned my old gaming club before and what happened as it broke up but for those that missed it here is a brief recap.

In the beginning there was the original band of brothers that learned the true meaning of power gaming and the phrase munchkin. Then there was my brothers group of friends who I started gaming with so that they had a GM for their group. When I was sixteen I signed up for the new gaming group that was being organised by our FLGS but it wasn’t until I was leaving school at eighteen that I decided to actually go along. I brought along some of my brothers group and one of the players from my original group expecting to find this huge club. When it originally started they were getting something like 20 members coming along every night but when we turned up they had six players. By the following week my players accounted for two thirds of the club.

After a year or so the rent on the room we had in a local school became that high we couldn’t justify the expense so we went through a stage of hiring local community halls and when we knew the numbers would be low holding the sessions in each others houses. At one point myself and a few of the othe more experienced gamers were asked along to the original groups Saturday night World of Darkness game. This ran for a couple of years but eventually both the club and the Saturday night group disbanded. One of the original players ran off to Ireland to get married and never came back and a few others had to get night shift work. We went back to playing as an amalgamation of my first group and my brothers friends after this and very rarely seen any of the old club members.

On occasion we’d see Geordie out at the Cathouse Rock Club on a night out and I’d bump in to one of the Ian’s every so often purely because I’m sort of related to him in a “his brother is the father to my cousins who’s mother is my mothers fostered sister” kind of way. But that’s it. Or was until last night.

I was at our local shops buying a few essentials for dinner when I realised the guy in front of my was our old DM and club organiser. Apart from aging a few years there was really no difference and whilst I do have a beard these days it’s hard to not recognise me either. He stared indifferently around the store but when he seen me you could see his brain working overtime and then became a little hostile. What the hell had I done? Did he mistake me for someone else? I was sure the group disbanded on good terms but obviously there was something not quite right there.

I did have many happy memories of those gaming sessions but this morning I’m struggling to remember even one of them. Nothing happened other than being given an evil look, in fact if he’d have been a vampire his eyes would only have flashed red, but it’s still left a bad taste in my mouth. I know folk have problems with players or DM’s that just don’t get on with their groups but I’m failing to make much sense this morning of what happened. It was a complete non-event but it’s still had an impact on me.

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As a teenager I cannot remember a single campaign that didn’t start for most of the characters in the local tavern/pub/nightclub.Yes it works but it gets very monotonous and this is especially the case if you go through a lot of games.

Jim Forrest@Flickr

Personally I blame the Dragonlance novels for my groups inability to start with any other location. For those that have never read the novels, and there are a couple of you out there so I’m told, the main characters had been spread out adventuring on their own with the aim of meeting up in the Tavern in Solace. The books start with a couple of the characters having a little bit of trouble with the bad guys just to let you know everything isn’t they way it should have been but other than that all the other characters meet at the tavern. It’s a pattern that crops up time and time again and is up there with ‘the shady guy in the corner of the tavern that has a quest for your style of play. It is also a reason why I love the Dragonlance novels though.

So how do you break that rut? Over the years we’ve tried many ways of starting off campaigns just to say we didn’t meet in the pub at the beginning and do you know what? What actually ended up coming back to start games off at the tavern as it just worked far better than most of our other attempts. A few examples of the successful attempts are below.

Start With A Bang
One of house rules meant that during gaps in gaming if the GM wanted to he could have the characters go off on low powered adventures to tide them over financially and depending on the amount of time that went by maybe even give them a little XP bonus. It was never anything huge but just enough to make it believable that they had been away clearing out a cave system of beasties for the village.

What this meant though was that we could start the new campaign midway through the fight at the end of the ‘gap adventure’. The players were always going to get out alive and no permanent damage would be done to them but it get them straight into the action from the opening seconds of the game. It then allowed the players the choice of what they did afterwards and where they would use as their base for the new campaign.

*Flashback*
When the players usually meet up in the tavern to start thier adventure we usually had already arranged the job by this point. so what we did was to throw the players directly into the recruitment drive for the adventure or into the meeting with whatever benefactor happened to be funding the group. Whilst the DM had to be careful that the players didn’t do anything that might endanger to campaign or go against anything that had already been planned it meant that they got their roleplaying feet wet straight away and hopefully this meant there wasn’t a slow start to the game once the actual campaign started.

The other option we chose was to pick something from a players past be that a fear, a person or an object that will have a bearing later on the story. Think of Indiana Jones where he goes into the crypt full of snakes and you’ll get the idea. Your accentuating something that will have an impact later in the story giving your players a taster of what to expect. With this option it also has the bonus of being able to include the ideas behind the Start It With A Bang example.

You could of course just go down the route of finding some other location for them to start in but when it comes down to it the location doesn’t really matter as where ever it is they will go through the same traditions and routines anyway. Give them something different to do and they’ll thank you for it.

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