It's dangerous to go alone. Take this.

So there we stood, box open, all the evils of the world unleashed. Well, that’s a bit much. It was mostly level one monsters, premade characters and cardboard tokens.

There are probably several dozen Buzzfeed articles from the late 00’s early 10’s that list precisely what ones function around gaming table tells you about a that persons character, political leanings, sexual proclivities and favorite pizza. But that format of digital bullshit has been swept into the dustbin of history along with the pit that spawned it and I am severely disinclined to go looking for it on the Way Back Machine. From the beginning, I took on the role of Dungeon Master in my friend group. It seemed the most natural fit, not because I yearned for control, but more so because I wanted to use these tools to immediately breathe life into the multiverse contained between my ears. To this day, many years later and over a variety of systems, I have not once used an splat book adventure or campaign for a tabletop rpg. I have bought them. The 5th edition version of Curse of Strahd sits on a shelf in my apartment along a dozens of other hardcover rules books. But I have always had the tendency to read the books, learn the system and then toss the established worlds and storylines aside to express my own vision.

Chris would many years later state that my talents as a GM lay with creating a narrative and world rather than in the technical aspects. He should know, he has sat in as a player in every session I have ever run. Soon after we started our journey, he too took on the mantel of storyteller, primarily as a means of entertaining and indoctrinating the basketball team worth of children he had created. He succeeded, they are all nerds to one degree or another. In many ways, he is my antithesis as a GM. He works with the pre-written adventures and runs a tight ship where encounters and dungeon crawl are concerned but would be the first to admit he struggles with the grandiose emotions or creating that mystical distortion field that allows humans to easily slip the chains of the mundane world. Ironically, as a player, he favors chaotic magic users, preferring to solve any problem with the liberal application of the fireball spell. The precise target of the spell is largely a secondary concern.

The cultural cliche about GMs is that they are worse than the monsters they puppet. Cruel, capricious gods that lust for the blood of their players’ characters, reveling in their pain while artfully dodging responsibility by pointing to a mass produced resin polyhedron. And that trope certainly has it’s basis in reality, though it is matched by it’s mirror image of the player who, finding themselves unshackled by society’s norms turns into something resembling the unholy union of a frothing at the mouth psychopath and a drunk toddler. “Don’t over prepare.” is a painful lesson every stripling GM must learn the hard way as hours of preparation, notes, picture searches and map creation on Roll20 are gleefully set on fire by giggling “friends” who decided murder was the appropriate response to being asked the time of day or that rather than follow a carefully prepared story path, they want to get on a boat bound for the other side of the planet and now you must entertain the miscreants for 2 hours with some shit you came up with off the top of your head.*But in the end, those are the stories that are the most fun. And that is the entire point of this. Fun. Fun and the permission the game gives you to step outside of yourself. To test out a new self, doing those things you would never dare do. The rules, the mechanics, the feats, skills and stats, to me all these things are mere scaffolding. That includes my beloved world building. All these things exist to allow humans to have fun by, for a few scant hours, shedding their skin and becoming something else entirely. The timid become brazen, the strong may be gentle, the logical dive into chaos and the prudes tear open their bodices with abandon. One of the more remarkable developments I experienced as a GM was watching the evolution of a mousey North Irish woman, a devout protestant who had created a cleric worshiping the most Christ coded god she can find in the rule book (Pelor) subsequently gain the moniker “Kill Stealer”. By the time she left the group, her eyes would flare with a greedy light at the prospect of combat. She didn’t even really care about the loot!

Since those early days exploring the realms of Gygax the Great, I have led my friends into countless other worlds. Cramped hallways where only a thin layer of metal separates you from a pitiless expanse where screams go unheard, or the trash strewn alley ways of a city drenched in neon light and human suffering. Along the way, I have used these tools to bring the stories in my head to life and to allow my friends to explore aspects of themselves that they cannot when within the confines of their own lives. Some choose to be even more themselves, while others find out something new about themselves every session. It has been a wondrous experience.*My favorite rpg story is unfortunately one I neither created, nor participated in. Zac (the third of the triumvirate of brothers from different mothers together with Chris and Rod) had invited us all to attend his bachelor party. To my great sorrow, I was unable to attend. As Zac is a man genetically disinterested in the mainstream trappings of male English celebratory traditions (pub crawls, strippers, projectile vomiting) the heart of the evening would be a rpg session run by one of his two best men. The gentlemen, whose name I never committed to memory, had never even played an rpg let alone occupied the seat at the head of the table. Players are feral wolves, and when presented with a wide eyed naif will go straight for the jugular. For one and a half hours, the innocent fool proved incapable of convincing the group to disembark the boat they had arrived in so the could finally start the adventure. A veteran GM would have quickly asserted dominance by fixing the players with a jaundiced eye and immediately started handing out de-buffs and syphilis infections. But the poor lad was utterly out of his depth and apparently has never approached a tabletop rpg again. I wish I had been there to witness it!