{"id":392,"date":"2009-05-17T18:48:42","date_gmt":"2009-05-17T16:48:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/?p=392"},"modified":"2020-01-02T20:25:31","modified_gmt":"2020-01-02T20:25:31","slug":"my-roleplaying-history-5","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/2009\/05\/17\/my-roleplaying-history-5\/","title":{"rendered":"My Roleplaying History #5"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>This last part of my rpg history concerns the last five years or so. This stuff is probably pretty well-known to my friends, I&#8217;ve left much more documentation behind in the Internet and other places lately than I used to earlier. Still, it won&#8217;t hurt to list some of the gaming that feels particularly significant to me.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a list of links to the earlier parts of this narrative:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a title=\"My earlier blog post\" href=\"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/2009\/05\/14\/my-roleplaying-history-1\/\">Part #1<\/a> discusses my childhood and how I learned about roleplaying in the first place.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"My earlier blog post\" href=\"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/2009\/05\/14\/my-roleplaying-history-2\/\">Part #2<\/a> tells about my first cycle of roleplaying and my first real gaming group.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"My earlier blog post\" href=\"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/2009\/05\/15\/my-roleplaying-history-3\/\">Part #3<\/a> is about my quiet years at the end of the &#8217;90s; it also discusses my experiments with larping.<\/li>\n<li><a title=\"My earlier blog post\" href=\"http:\/\/isabout.wordpress.com\/2009\/05\/17\/my-roleplaying-history-4\/\">Part #4<\/a> tells of my university studies and how I got over my rpg-less slump.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>Arkenstone Years<\/h2>\n<p>The last part of my history stopped at 2003, and with good reason; after the Ropecon of that year my roleplaying was again obviously on-track: the Bextropolis campaign I wrote about last time was proceeding solidly and I was actively writing and reading games. I&#8217;ve never been very active in buying rpg material (never learned to rely on material culture in my rural youth, I might say), but I read everything the Internet had to offer at the time, and it was a lot &#8211; I knew the Forgean design precepts of games by heart even while I owned nothing but <em>HeroQuest<\/em> and <em>Sorcerer<\/em> in my game library (having left most of my games up north).<\/p>\n<p>So while I was active in design and quickly becoming acclimated to the Forge socially, my gaming was simple, consisting of 1-3 sessions of my Bextropolis D&amp;D weekly all through the winter of 2003-04. This changed when I accepted the post as the editor of Alterations, the rpg &#8216;zine of the university roleplaying club. At the time I was pretty interested in club activity and wanted to see whether I could do anything to make the rpg club a more active and interesting place. (Proved that I couldn&#8217;t, but that&#8217;s a different story.) A part of that was the notion that I&#8217;d demonstrate communal interest in roleplaying through the &#8216;zine with a special roleplaying event: I&#8217;d gather many people to play the same game to allow them to share in a common experience, perhaps bringing the club together a bit and giving the members something in common to chew over.<\/p>\n<p>This shenanigan was relevant mostly because it made me contact <strong>Paul Czege<\/strong>, the designer of <a title=\"Halfmeme Press Website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.halfmeme.com\/\">My Life with Master<\/a>: MLwM was the perfect small, experimental and celebrated game for my project, so I asked Paul whether he&#8217;d allow me to distribute the game for free to the project participants to facilitate everybody playing the same game. In hindsight I&#8217;m pretty surprised that he graciously allowed this &#8211; Paul was probably smarter than me, he knew that this sort of thing is prone to reaping unexpected benefits.<\/p>\n<p>So in 2004 I played a lot of MLwM in Helsinki, and I wrote my own game: my D&amp;D homebrew had solidified enough for me to imagine that I might be able to write it down. Bextropolis was in many ways a very progressive campaign; it was head and shoulders above its nearest comparison, <em>HeroQuest<\/em>, which had earlier voided my superhero game with its superior method. With Bextropolis I wanted to make a game that was even better than HeroQuest in terms of system elegance and powerful tools for narrativistic adventure gaming. Ultimately another American designer, <strong>Clinton R. Nixon<\/strong> would again pre-empt me by publishing his <a title=\"Clinton's website\" href=\"http:\/\/crngames.com\/the_shadow_of_yesterday\/\">Shadow of Yesterday<\/a>, which fulfilled the design mandate of Bextropolis to such an extent that I ultimately couldn&#8217;t justify continuing my own writing project.<\/p>\n<p>In the summer of 2004 we of course started our own independent publishing company with my brothers, <a title=\"Our website\" href=\"http:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/\">Arkenstone Publishing<\/a>. This was a direct consequence of my earlier correspondence with Paul, as our purpose in starting the company was to publish a Finnish translation of <em>My Life with Master<\/em>. This is not a history of Arkenstone, so I won&#8217;t go into details on that, but I should say that ever since then my gaming has been majorly influenced by my publishing and retail endeavours: Arkenstone retails foreign indie games in Finland, which practically means that I buy games that I like and play them and sell them. We&#8217;ve also translated a bunch of games, all of which I&#8217;ve ended up playing in large amounts &#8211; look at the Arkenstone oeuvre and you&#8217;ll see what I&#8217;ve been playing through the recent years.<\/p>\n<p>An important consequence of all this has been a new change in the social environment of my gaming. Ultimately I moved out of Helsinki (ending our Bextropolis campaign) and back to Upper Savo because I decided to abandon my academic aspirations; my recent roleplaying experiences had convinced me that I wanted to be an artist, not a scientist (a rough dichotomy that has haunted me ever since my early teens). This of course meant abandoning my friends in Helsinki and finding new people to game with. Consequently I nowadays boast two different circles of gaming buddies: on the one hand I have the local teenagers whom I groom into gamers as necessary; we play boardgames and roleplaying games, often playtesting something for me or playing historically significant games to widen the horizons for the teenagers. On the other hand I have people such as Sami Koponen and Olli Kantola, to name a couple, who live in different parts of the country, but with whom I play whenever I have a chance. The latter I&#8217;ve met and grown friendly with largely due to my cultural endeavours in roleplaying: Arkenstone has brought me friends, in other words.<\/p>\n<p>Aside from pointing at the Arkenstone oeuvre and my own game design projects (about which I&#8217;ve written in this very blog lately), I can&#8217;t really say anything very definitive about my gaming through the last five years. It has all been very rich and varied, to such an extent that there&#8217;s hardly a corner of the roleplaying field that I wouldn&#8217;t have trawled lately. For example, just this last winter I&#8217;ve been playing a lot of dungeoneering adventure and playtests of the new edition of <em>The Shadow of Yesterday<\/em>, the two of which are in many ways quite the opposite ends of the roleplaying spectrum. When I&#8217;m not playtesting something of my own, I tend to end up playing something other designers are working on; I like helping others, so I might as well play their games and give some feedback if I&#8217;m going to play something anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>This last part of my rpg history concerns the last five years or so. This stuff is probably pretty well-known to my friends, I&#8217;ve left much more documentation behind in the Internet and other places lately than I used to earlier. Still, it won&#8217;t hurt to list some of the gaming that feels particularly significant [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,32,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-392","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-culture","category-volume1","category-roleplaying"],"featured_image_src":null,"author_info":{"display_name":"Eero Tuovinen","author_link":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/author\/eerotuovinen\/"},"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.arkenstonepublishing.net\/isabout\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}