Preparing to DM

I've been thinking a lot about the nature of the role-playing game, and lo and behold, Matthew Rossi at Blizzard Watch pretty much wrote the article that I was thinking of writing.

My experience with tabletop RPGs is limited. Somehow, I grew up without Dungeons and Dragons - instead, I played Magic: the Gathering, which is fantastic, but built far more around the mechanics than the narrative (also, like all other CCGs that it spawned, Magic has the problem that as soon as money gets involved, the game shrinks down into a few winning strategies.)

As a kid, I played some of the Sierra Entertainment adventure games - primarily Space Quest, as its profoundly geeky humor meshed well with mine. Of these, only the Quest for Glory series really incorporated any of the real RPG game mechanics. These games had a pretty wide breadth of interactivity, but everything still had to be pre-programmed, and usually a unique action would simply function in that one unique situation it had been designed for.

I've been thinking a lot about Dungeons and Dragons, as I'm finally in a position where it looks like we're going to get my game going. My dream job is to be a (financially successful) fantasy writer, and so it was a joy for me to come up with a setting, with key figures and factions and histories. My friends are mostly actors (in fact, many of them belong to the same Shakespeare company,) so I have the advantage of playing with a lot of people who have a strong sense of character. I expect that this will be both challenging and entertaining from a DM's perspective.

I'm jumping into the deep end here, of course, having never actually played D&D as a PC. I have read the books cover to cover and I've watched probably all of the Acquisitions Incorporated games that they do at PAX. I'm hoping this will allow me to at least function until I get the hang of it.

My hope is that in the future, I'll be able to blog here about what happens in the game's story. The freedom of the tabletop RPG genre seems well-suited to converting it into a narrative. But I think the burden is on me to give each session an interesting hook.

For a few months (since buying the core books as a birthday present to myself in June) I've been constructing the setting, a world called Sarkon.

Most of the action takes place on a continent called Karsiya. Until about five years ago, the entire continent was ruled by the Lupinian Empire, from the far-northern capital of Wolfenholm. The continent is divided into three cultural and geographical regions - the spooky northern forests and mountains of Volpon, the hot deserts of Sedsalaki, and the hilly peninsulas of Gesenas. All throughout history, there have been legends of an advanced civilization that had been lost in some catastrophe whose people were known as the Parthalians. In recent years, Parthalian technology had been discovered, largely in the deserts of Sedsalaki. Sedsalaki, which is united under the Church of Yad, has attempted to break away from the Empire, claiming these artifacts for themselves, while the Empire sends its Legion and its elite "Reapers" to preserve the peace that their rule has established.

Anyway, I've written pages upon pages of backstory for the various cities and kingdoms within the Empire, and I'm chomping at the bit to see how it survives contact with my players. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, I'll be able to post about who my friends will be playing and what they wind up doing in this world.