Today, chilly and at the very end of January, I feel good again. My mind is clear and lite in a way it hasn’t been for a couple of years. Since I always wish that I would have done so when looking back, I will write about these feelings and try to describe the tiny things that are special to me right now, in this fleeting ephemeral state.
Late last year we started a ritual of games. The table-top kind that you can’t find at big-name stores, but are popular amongst those who are in the know. Any time my friend Matt sampled something he enjoyed in one of his friend circles, he’d pick it up and give my partner Mark and I a safe, slow, introduction. Getting our toes wet while holding our hands.
Game night has gone over so well that we’ve since found a local game store to supply our needs. It’s all new to me, and like any completely new experience, the endorphin rush of a frontier unexplored is exhilarating.
For my entire life, RP gaming has been this unobtainable white whale that I’ve hyped and romanticized. I’m the type of person who has a handful of individual friends that I’ve curated, but never a group. A pack, the likes of which you’d get together and embark on multi-week campaigns with. While it’s a stretch to call the three of us, my partner, myself, and best friend, a group, I’m glad we’re able to enrich our lives in this new way. However small, we have each other. We are enough.
This week we played two of my bestie’s new games, “Escape from Dark Castle” and “Elder Sign”, both dice rolling games with some story-telling elements. Both are horror-fantacy in theme, in step with my bestie’s tastes.
While we enjoy his pick well enough, our plan was to visit our newly acquired game store the following day to scout new games based on my interests. I wasn’t sure what to look for or where to start. But once pressed, by way of title, box illustration, or staff recommendation, I found almost a dozen potential candidates!
As niche as I thought my personal preferences were, a now post-covid hermit who tends to mainly plants, caterpillars, and robots, I found titles that match all of these things in theme, and were on par with my personal flavor of chaos and silliness. My friend encouraged me to buy one without doing any further research, but I’m not so brave. I did take a picture of those that sparked my interest so I could listen to the rules of each once I got home.
But this wasn’t the end. I fell down another rabbit hole: dice. Matt directed my attention to hand-made dice on Etsy. Seven hours later, it was 3am, and I was still sitting in the kitchen scrolling through endless listings of resin dice, liquid core dice, sparkly dice, glowing dice, and precious stone dice. Enough shapes and colors to black out the mind and completely numb the senses. When I finally went to sleep, I was spent.
This morning, I awoke after being trapped in nightmares which I could only escape from if I rolled high enough… but I didn’t have dice and could not. Over coffee I made my choice of which to buy, knowing I’d likely get more in the future. I figured these precious totems would be a hallmark of now. The beginning of an epoch in our lives. The exciting start of something new: still formless and without constraint.
After the choice was made, my first memento decided, I felt only vaguely fulfilled because it was a purchase to create a problem rather than solve one. We had never played a table-top role-playing game before, the likes of which would require dice. I did not technically need a set. The only reason to buy any was to make a promise to the void that I would put them to good use. I view it as such.
We need to choose a game now, Matt insisted. Though varying slightly, the three of us have overlapping tastes in genres. We all prefer science-fiction to fantasy, and story-telling to crunching numbers. I hear RP adventures can get bogged down with the rolling for numbers. While this in itself is what some love, we all collectively decided to stay clear of frameworks heavy with technicality and ere on the side of improv.
I was already aware of one such role-playing game. The author/illustrator of the single webcomic I’ve followed for the past eight years has also created an RP game rulebook, so I laid it out as a suggestion of something we might look into. It’s called Broken World, by the author of Kill Six-billion Demons. Matt put forth the research and confirmed that it ticks all the boxes. As I’m a writer and story teller, it seems like the cards are falling into place for me to Dungeon Master my very first campaign. Amazing how a short weekend can change your life, if you intentionally make room for change.
While I wait for my dice to arrive, I’ll be jotting down ideas for the type of story I might tell. A universe springs from nothingness. My heart warms with the presence of these sparks. I’m alive again.
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