Blank slates

There is nothing as intimidating as a blank slate. It's kinda funny how true that is. You sit down and think and ponder and come up with all these great ideas. Then you sit down and that first, blank page just stares at you and says, "Ha! You thought you were so big with your grand ideas, but now you don't know how to start them!" This is true no matter what you're doing, from meeting four strangers on the internet and creating a campaign for them to writing the very first post of your blog. Well, at least it's true for me.

However, I have no troubles with actually building the world. For me, that's the easy part. I've been designing campaign worlds for a lot longer than I've actually been roleplaying. I found a copy of the red box Basic D&D books in the neighbor's trash, and fell in love. I devoured those books, and created many, many dungeons that never got played as I didn't have a group. As I grew older, I played a little 2e AD&D, but not much. Eventually I came across Rifts.

Now, I know that tons of people hate on Rifts for valid reasons, so I'll just say that a few house rules turned that system into one I loved. Plus, that game marked a turn around. I managed to convince my brother and a couple of friends to play, and that was what we did. And I pretty much always ran the games. But, boy, was I a lousy GM. I railroaded the players on half-baked plots that I was improvising as I went along. I'm surprised they played along. I'm sure it was mostly the setting, as that was what really made me love the system.

Over the years I would still design campaign stuff, but, outside a few small games that never went on for longer than a couple months, didn't play. Then, a few months ago, I met some folks on Reddit, and we started gaming. Well, the D&DNext game I joined started (and has been great fun) but the 3.5 game we tried to start never took off. So, I eventually decided I would DM and built a world.

Now, it's been 10 years since my last attempt at running a game. And I was pretty burnt out on always being the DM (seriously, I think there have only been like 3 games I've been a player, not counting games that ended up being just a single session) back then. Fortunately, I've found that the joy of creating a dungeon has come back. And, unlike my early dungeons, I've also got people to go through my dungeons!

Anyways, I've started this blog to chronicle the game I'm running and my thoughts on it, as well as how I set things up vs how they actually come out in the game itself. Because, if there's one very important lesson my railroading self needed to learn, it's that players always ruin the game you set up, and that makes it better.

Ha! Take that first page! You are blank no longer!