Character Backstory

Since I’m now going to post about TTRPG stuff, here’s my domain-specific About The Author.

In my tweens I was gifted the D&D red box. I remember playing the solo adventure on a plane—probably a flight from Florida to Texas. A friend I made in Boy Scouts soon thereafter was into AD&D—2e was just a couple years old at that point—and he drew me into that, though honestly we spent most of our time getting ready to play and very little time actually playing. He was obsessed with grand world-building, and I was obsessed with ripping off comic book characters for my PCs. Throughout our teens we came back to it occasionally but never got a group together.

Then I didn’t really think about it for over 20 years.

During mid-to-late COVID I took an interest in what was going on with D&D and turned my too-much-YouTube time toward the topic. After going down that rabbit-hole on my own, I happened to look into what my FLGS might offer, and it just happened they were restarting their weekly D&D Adventurer’s League night the following week. I played there pretty regularly for a while, learning a lot from some pretty good DMs (and some pretty mediocre ones). Then I started DMing there, getting a lot of practice with inexperienced players. But before long I got pretty frustrated with the constraints of DDAL, running in a store as part of someone else’s “night,” and 5E as a system.

I don’t recall the steps or signs that pulled me toward other systems—maybe one of the DDAL DMs mentioned the great GM advice in ICRPG? In any case, the Shadowdark Kickstarter came along at just the right time to provide an easy transition toward a lighter-weight game, and I’ve found some local people to play SD with semi-regularly. I very much appreciate its (more-or-less) elimination of the Character Build meta-game. I’ve also studied, played, or run Knave, Cairn, Mythic Bastionland, FIST, and Mothership (and would love to play or run any of those even more). That sort of OSR/NSR neighborhood of games is where my interest remains for now.

That’s already too much backstory for a character this squishy. 👋🏻