Art by Me
This is MajorMajorMajorThom to my fellow Steemians,
Well Met!
The Journey continues, the path turns from smooth paving to ancient masonry. The road might be a winding one, full of detours and pit stops, but the path ever-continues vanishing into a hazy horizon. The Road Ahead might be daunting, but all it requires is the resolve to set down on it.
An adventurer needs something to bolster the spirits on a long journey: nourishing rations must be consumed to keep the energy up, something is needed to pass the time and keep the mind busy. A band of travelers also needs to camp through the night, find some kind of sanctuary to rest and recuperate the fatigue of the day, for who knows what Monster lurks in the quiet darkness.
Yesterday, I posted about my second step, Major Screen Time, a weekly Film “Review” series which functions as a means to focus my resolve around my passion for Films, and share and discuss it with others. I also posted earlier this week about my first step, Fantasy Fight Club, a collaborative project with @your-nomad-soul to make and grow something unique, based on an idea of collaborative, story-based Fantasy combat.
These projects of various scales are merely points on a map, and to get there a lot of walking needs to be done in between. For me, I’ve found that creative sanctuary, that drive to continue creating, in the Worlds of Tabletop Role-Playing games, or more precisely: Dungeons & Dragons.
In short, I just want to make sure my life, in general, contains:
3) More Dungeons & Dragons
In order to better describe this desire, let’s start by explaining my love of D&D, where it came from, and where its been.
Before two years ago, my only real notion of D&D was from a half-remembered Dexter’s Laboratory episode. There was a vague recollection of some kind of dice being rolled, there was a badass-looking Ranger fellow that had stuck around in my brain, there was Dexter as Halfling with outrageously furry feet. But none of that really meant anything to me, other than vague childhood nostalgia.
Flash-forward about 15 years—past Lord of the Rings, the books and movies—and there I was, 23 years old, and I had discovered TableTop with Wil Wheaton, where I noticed one day a thumbnail for another video with Wil Wheaton called Titansgrave.
Now, Wil seemed like a cool guy and I was interested to see what the video was all about, but most importantly, ravenous devourer of content that I am, I had run out of TableTop episodes to watch. And, lowe and behold, I had stumbled upon my first real look at Tabletop Role-Playing. They weren't playing D&D or anything, but I had my first taste of what TTRPG’s are all about: collaborative storytelling.
Then, a friend of mine from my brief stint at Film School asked if I was interested in playing some Dungeon’s & Dragons—his first foray into the Dungeon Master role. That seemed like a cool idea to me, so I proceeded to wrangle some other friends together for the occasion.
So, armed with the vague concept of TTRP’s from Titansgrave and the aforementioned nostalgia-tinged notion of D&D, I figured I’d give it a try because it seemed cool and I’d be playing with a whole group of friends who had never played before either.
The session happened, I made my first character (Oberonius Char, a half-elf Ranger and full-on rip-off of The Dude from The Big Lebowski), and a couple of hours later, I was hooked.
Storytelling was always important to me and I was never a very extroverted person, so I was enamoured by the idea of being able to combine my love of storytelling with a sociable experience, the concept of telling a story together, and having fun doing so. I liked the idea of being able to play as a different person and tackle situations and events that would never happen in the real world with only the imagination as a controller.
The D&D bug never quite took hold of any of my other friends I played with, except the one that ran the game for us, and we didn't know anyone else who played, so I turned to my constant companion: YouTube, and then later Twitch Streams
To cut a long story short: a Glorious and Grand Binge was had over the next year. I had time, being a lazy University student, so why not? I devoured Acquisitions Incorporated, practically inhaled Critical Role, stuffed myself with Dice, Camera, Action!, greedily guzzled HighRollers, and a few others as well. (My absolute favourite has to be The “C” Team, with its completely different style of gameplay, far more conceptual and abstract, to an extent erotic and personal, with just the most amazing people running and playing.)
A notable pitstop on this quick tour of my D&D obsession, is when I discovered The Provokers around the first quarter of last year (and the more recent campaign, The Provokers: Bleak Wrath).
While all the other shows I’ve mentioned are particularly heavy on the DM’s control of the game, in my opinion, The Provokers, as well as the indie RPG publishing company Absolute Tabletop that sprang-up from around it (because of four relative strangers that got together one day to play a D&D One-Shot and really enjoyed creating together, and wanted to continue playing together—that One-Shot became the first episode of The Provokers), introduced a whole new form of Role Playing to me, a style of RP that was far more collaborative, cinematic and was incredibly inspiring.
The players are the ones that drive the actual story with levels of RP and insight into their characters and decisions on a whole new level to anything I’ve seen before. All-the-while the DM masterfully uses narrative and cinematic techniques to tell the story. And these guys weren't voice-actors or Twitch-streamers, they were just regular guys playing D&D for fun, which was the most inspiring of all. All of a sudden I became aware of a whole community of people that just played D&D and made D&D content for fun, as a hobby.
One-by-one, these all these D&D shows have become completely and utterly enmeshed in my life, and I absolutely love them all.
Through The Provokers and AbTab, I discovered playing D&D online both video/voice and text-based, and found some great people different countries to play D&D with. There is also a growing local South African D&D community centered around Discord and in-person. Even so, I feel like I don’t play enough, and I want to change that.
If you couldn’t tell already, up till now D&D for me has been (mostly) a passive experience, and that has been becoming more and more painfully obvious. I want to play more, because playing D&D is an active creative experience, it's just another form of storytelling, and in the end of the day, storytelling is what I want to do in life.
Last year, while I was working full-time at a crummy job doing nothing at all related to what I wanted to do with my life, every month I would buy a D&D Core Rule Book. And now that I have the whole set, by The Pantheon I’m going to use them!
Fantasy Fight Club is step towards that goal, it’s a great and exciting project in and of itself, full of fantastic narrative and community possibilities, but in addition to that, I also want devote more time to playing D&D in general. I also want to develop my own DMing skills, so that I can facilitate others’ stories, centred around the hobby I enjoy so thoroughly.
So, while my previous posts have been about clear goals and projects for present and future, this one is just about a general desire to work on this Fantasy-tinged flavour of my creativity as well.
Be it the odd post here and there as I chronicle my path from n00b to full-fledged DM, or general thoughts and advice, or even running and recording a Campaign when I’m ready, I want to share this passion with you wonderful collection of human-beings on Steemit.
I can’t wait!
My next post will be about the last objective on this Storyteller’s Journey of mine:
Writing Fiction
Till then, I’ll to see you in the comments!
On a side note: Critical Role started a new campaign last week, with all-new characters and setting, so the time is nigh if you want to join in on the action, but don’t want to watch through the roughly 500 hundred hours of CR D&D content of the previous campaign. Over 100,000 people tuned-in live to watch the first episode live on Twitch last week, and you’re now only one episode away from being there next week!
Also, in terms of D&D content, I’ve already posted previously, A Girl Named Apokalypsis, a four-part D&D Backstory for one character of mine, which I initially started writing just get to grips with how to Roleplay her, as Nadira was quite a dark character concept I wanted to explore. You can read them here, here, here, and here.
This is MajorMajorMajorThom, over and out.
Scribo, Specto, Lego, Cogito, ergo sum
I, also, need more D&D in my life! I've started three campaigns in the past two years and they've all fallen apart (mostly due to people losing interest /life getting in the way). I really want to start another one (or five).
I've loved rpgs my whole life, but it wasn't until D&D that I realised I was actually hunting for free choice, cooperative, story creating.
Thanks for reminding me! 😁
Same here! I tried starting a campaign in a very particular world that I was working on, but I hated the idea of having to tell players, "no, you can't be that because that's not how the world works." I learned that I prefer to build a world around PC's and let them mould it, instead of the other way around. But need players first :P
More D&D is good as long as it's good D&D. My DM dosn't compare favorably to Mercer from CR (I'm sure a lot of DMs fall short in comparison) so I've been filling my cravings with more CR, Reddit and Creating various interesting characters and character backstories.
I hope I'll get to play more this year but considering real life time constraints I somehow doubt it.
I'm still waiting for my friend in Finland to have the time to GM Shadowrun for me.