{"id":390,"date":"2009-05-17T02:14:02","date_gmt":"2009-05-17T00:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/?p=390"},"modified":"2020-01-02T20:25:31","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T20:25:31","slug":"my-roleplaying-history-4","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/2009\/05\/17\/my-roleplaying-history-4\/","title":{"rendered":"My Roleplaying History #4"},"content":{"rendered":"

The last part of my history progressed to late ’90s, so here I’ll continue about how came to encounter the Forge – this was a major turning point in my roleplaying hobby. In between high school and college was my year in military service in… -99 to 2000, unless I’m mistaken. Continuing from there:<\/p>\n

Meeting the Forge<\/h2>\n

After I came back from military service and moved to Helsinki for my university studies, I was pretty distanced from practical roleplaying. My brother Markku introduced the local university roleplaying club to me, but I didn’t take any strong initiative in that direction – partially this was because I had no real creative direction for my roleplaying, part was just my natural reticence.<\/p>\n

My memories of these years are somewhat hazy when it comes to roleplaying, mostly because of the lack of direction I mentioned above. A pretty definite turning point comes about in 2003, when I wrote what I called a “tabletop larp” called Temppeli<\/em> for the Ropecon of that year<\/a>. The game was an ambitious piece that strived to combine immersion and director-stance, utilizing techniques that would probably be considered hybrid Forge\/jeepform today. My deal with Markku then was that I’d write the scenario and he’d run it, which we did – I myself spent the convention in ticketing duty.<\/p>\n

But those first years of the millennium, those are somewhat more vague in my memory… what did I do then, exactly? I literally have to delve into my archives to see if I have anything that I worked on then that’d jog my memory. It proves that while I didn’t have a gaming group at the time and didn’t play a lot, I still thought about roleplaying then. Roleplaying was so meshed with my creative process that even during my major fairy tale binge early this decade I wrote extensive notes for a fairy tale roleplaying game, it seems – I’d forgotten about this one, I haven’t touched it since early 2002. Another similar thing is a large Kalevala-based superhero campaign\/rules framework I seem to have worked on during the next winter; this one I remember well, I often draw on those experiences when interacting with other designers who seem to be stuck in the same place I was; I spent enormous amounts of time then fiddling with the logical end-point of my late ’90s play. The rules-set I ended up with has its starting point in Basic Roleplaying System (not a coincidence that it’s one of the most prominent unified mechanics ever), while the end-result resembles the Whitewolf Storyteller system on crack: the entire rules-set in all its minute detail is dedicated to a point-buy with a player-defined skill\/ability system that’d allow the players seamless control over the strengths and weaknesses of their character. The whole game has practically nothing else to it, it’s all a huge character creation system. A bit like GURPS in that regard.<\/p>\n

I worked on many other things during this period as well – now that I trawl my archives the picture is starting to emerge. Here’s a rough timeline of what happened through those years:<\/p>\n