Wednesday, June 24, 2020

Thank you again...



....for all the lovely feedback about the RPG essay. If you have the time or the inclination, do please tell your NPCs and plug it on soshal meejah. 



A bit of background...

As explained in the essay itself, I used to be big into role-playing games and don’t really play them at all nowadays.

About three years ago, when I was still doing the Spider-Man thang, I had an ideas that my next project might be The Campaign To Get Andrew Rilstone Role-playing Again. (Readers of a certain age may remember Esther Rantzam’s Campaign To Get Britain Singing.)

I had a number of ideas, including

*getting in touch with people I used to game with and finding out if they still play and if not why they stopped and whether they would want to start again

*asking people who are still gamers to propose games they thought I would like

*buying some product with nice covers from a game shop and seeing if it sparked joy

* posing as a neophyte in one of those back room game clubs they run in shops

* walking into the D&D session in the local pub (there is one) or the boardgame cafe (there are two) and saying “I’d like to get back into gaming, you might even have heard of me”

* writing a short fun one-session Star Wars adventure, phoning up some of the old guard and saying “Hey, I’m getting the band back together”(this was before Zoom)

I was thinking that the whole thing might be written up in blog posts or podcasts or vlogs and eventually turned into a book.

I figured that “I used to like role-playing games, and whaddaya know,I still like them” and “I used to like role-playing games but after giving them a fair shot I think I’ve just grown out of them” would be equally interesting conclusions.

Anyway, I finished writing about Spider-Man and started writing about Jesus and never quite got around to it.

I decided that the best way to get the project running was to write a short essay talking about my history with gaming and why I think I stopped and putting it out on the blog and going from there.

Last November (November being the traditional time for embarking on big writing projects) I started to write, and carried on, and on and on.

I deleted some material, but the extended essay is pretty much as I wrote it.

The Aslan 15 label is really a joke; you will plainly see that it has nothing to do with my old fanzine, apart from being all about me, which means it probably has quite a lot to do with my old fanzine.

I have put the whole essay online here: I thought that a very long post might make a bigger splash than several shorter ones. In maybe a week I am going to take it down and re-release it in small sections, so that people who are intimidated by the long essay might give it a look. 

The whole thing is available, in all the usual e-formats, for free, for anyone who backs me on Patreon.

I am hoping this will make a bit of a noise in online gaming circles; so it would be lovely if as many people as possible promoted it to as many of their friends in cyberspace as possible.







3 comments:

Mike Taylor said...

Hiya. Just wanted to say that I read it and found it just and fascinating and perceptive as I expected to (i.e. very fascinating and perceptive) — I didn't comment because there was just so darned much of it I didn't know where to start. But I feel the richer for having read it; thank you for writing it.

Andrew Rilstone said...

Thank you again. When I start reposting it in sections maybe you can comment as we go along?

Andrew Rilstone said...

And do please tell your friends....