I’m Ed, and this is my blog. The majority of posts on this blog will probably be about playing and running tabletop roleplaying games. While it is not my only hobby, it seems to be the only one I’m obsessed with writing about. What can you do?
My first exposure to published RPG material was in 2nd grade, when a friend walked up to me on the playground with the inserts from Expedition to the Barrier Peaks. We spent the next several weeks “roleplaying” with it during recess. We discovered that the G/T room had copies of the DMG, PHB, and Monster Manual soon after that, and I was doomed. I’ve been playing pretty regularly ever since.
I developed the habit of talking about roleplaying in the mid-90s, when I discovered usenet, and more importantly, rec.games.frp.advocacy. Participating in that newsgroup had a profound impact on the way I played and gamemastered, and instilled a fascination with discussing RPG theory and practice.
In the last few years, I’ve watched the rise of the indie-rpg scene, as embodied by The Forge, with a mixture of fascination and annoyance. Ron Edwards, and the Indie movement in general, have been responsible for introducing many extraordinary ideas, and extraordinary games to the industry, and on the whole, I think they’ve done a tremendous service to the hobby. That said, they also indulge in a lot of needlessly divisive language, and are in some ways annoyingly narrow-minded. Oh well.
So, while I love much of what the Indie scene is doing, I’m also still pretty traditionalist, and more interested in integrating indie elements into a more traditional style of play. That’s likely to be a frequent topic of conversation here.
When I am not being a game geek, I learn me quite a few books, listen to a wide variety of music, play with computers, and work in management in the healthcare field.
Amen.