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Greetings and salutations. It is I, Graham.

Clevenger can make his snark all he wants. There is a reason I never say ya’ll, yonder, hun, and all the other southern styles of butchering the English language even though I’m in Alabama. It’s because I am in Alabama and loath the thought of being a “southern bumpkin redneck”. I know plenty of worthy, upstanding people who are proper “southern folk”, drawl and all. But it is not me, will never be me, and will be something I avoid my entire life. So suck it, Clevenger! Ha!

But as he also said, we are kicking off a bonus week of influences, something we both mentioned but did not get to explore. Magic and talking animals. I mean, pen and paper tabletop roleplaying games. I’m sure that Clevenger will regale you with lies and slander about how I conned him into his first roleplaying game with me and another acquaintance, but I shall stick with my own experiences.

I mentioned in one of my earlier mental health posts about my parents raiding my room and finding one of the original Red Boxes for AD&D when I was 14. That absolutely led to some hearty arguments. My parents couldn’t see past the “Satanic Panic” of the 80s to provide any rational reason why I shouldn’t enjoy roleplaying games. A year or two later a book series came out called This Present Darkness, which dealt with a bunch of Christians running around with literal invisible angels and demons fighting over them as they went about these big suspense mysteries. And when I say fighting, I mean I recall a scene where the MCs are trying to drive somewhere to stop the BBEG, and a couple of these invisible demons start shoving their car to try to send them off the road and over a cliff, so an angel starts pushing from the other side of the car. So literal, invisible beings interacting with the physical environment. Suddenly my parents were all about cooperating with me and compromising, encouraging me to create an entire roleplaying game system where the players are angels, collecting power from Christians’ prayers as points they can somehow spend on abilities to fist-fight demons. Somehow this was a great idea, but D&D was still satanic. Go figure.

Then I made it to college. The studying didn’t go so well, but I managed to run into a group of guys playing a superheroes game called Champions. Finally, real roleplaying! Then, even better, I discovered they had a fantasy version of the same game, the Hero System. Heaven! A use for all the Elves, Paladins, and Rangers I had been painting. And thus I was able to start practicing my love of improv storytelling and deep character backstory. Tabletop roleplaying taught me so many lessons. I learned never putting a character to paper without knowing where they came from. I learned problem solving and cooperating with a team. I learned how to do the worldbuilding I had fallen in love with watching Star Wars. I learned about resources and techniques for generating names of locations and background characters. And more important, I learned a hobby that I loved, which led to other hobbies I loved.

Tabletop roleplaying has been a great catalyst for much of my storytelling, both from a skills standpoint and from an ideas direction. Our current book came from roleplaying. The world started as a roleplaying game I was planning to run for Clevenger and our other friend. The magic system may have started from an idea Clevenger had been working on, but it took significant shape once we started asking the questions needed to codify it in order to be able to explain it to others, and have game rules associated with it. And some of the biggest villains from the Stories of Sainan series are repurposed from when I first introduced them to Clevenger in his first HERO System game I ran for him back in the day. There is a street in my current neighborhood that shares one of the villain’s names, and to this day he can’t pass that street sign without scowling and wanting to flip it off.

For those of you who don’t know what tabletop roleplaying is, picture you and a few friends getting together and deciding on your own Main Character for a book you want to write. Then have one other person there who lays out the opening scene for all of you. He tells you about the village you are standing in, and asks what you all want to do in the village. You describe to one another how you would like to interact with the environment and the people in it. That one person tells you how the environment and its people react back. Together, you and your friends, along with the Game Master, Storyteller, Dungeon Master, whatever your game system of choice calls their position, come up with some deep and amazing stories. And they are very personal stories, since you and your friends created them.

There is one other thing that I learned from tabletop roleplaying. For many years I played many systems, but always avoided going back to Dungeons & Dragons. I always claimed it was because it was a bad system that encouraged bad gaming. But deep down, it was for the same reason that I fight to keep the “southern” out of my speech pattern, embarrassment. I still suffered from the stigma placed on the game by the whole “Satanic Panic” attitude of my parents and their church, and had internalized it. Eventually I got over it. I pretty much had to, when our entire gaming group switched over to D&D 5E. And I have enjoyed the gaming system. I even finally admitted the faults and flaws in my beloved HERO System. But the lesson it taught me was basically, I needed to quit finding excuses to be ashamed of hobbies and activities that I loved. Message received, universe!

So anyway, there it is, one more source of influence in our lives. I’m interested in seeing what Clevenger has to say on the subject, and how much flack he gives me about dragging him into such a terrible hobby! I kid, I kid. But seriously, if you take nothing else away from this blog entry, love your interests, and don’t be ashamed of them. Don’t deprive yourself of your passions just because of someone else’s perceived opinions, as long as your hobbies don’t put others in harms way, of course. And as always…

Don’t forget to love one another.

Graham