The Beginning

I figured I would start this blog in the beginning... well not my beginning but the beginning of my creative journey.

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You ever just want to be part of something cool? Maybe lend your voice, your vision, or even a little piece of your soul to something you’re genuinely excited about?

My heart always gets pumping when I start a new endeavor, especially when it’s something creative. I was an art kid, a music teen, and eventually became an adult who spends way too much money on hobbies. Now, as an old kid, I find myself going back to my roots and rediscovering the things I wish I had chased when I was younger.

Growing up, my family was fairly poor, so imagination became our playground. My brother and I didn’t have a TV, cool toys, or even a ton of friends. We made a good portion of our “toys” ourselves, or adapted whatever we had to fit our current interests. We played with sticks and dirt clods and became heroes, villains, and everything in between. We got older, we found new ways to express that creativity.

The first TTRPG we played was BattleTech. It was a small, white-page book with some basic rules, and we just ran with it. I mean, giant robots fighting each other? As young boys, that was about the coolest thing imaginable.

More importantly, it gave us a framework. Suddenly, our games could become something more than who found the best stick that day.

We found other people to play with us, and soon we had a game we could even play indoors if we had to. We still played outside, of course. In those days, we weren’t allowed inside unless there was a tornado or a blizzard.

Eventually, though, we started feeling constrained by the game, so we changed things.

And I don’t mean we just added a few new characters or weapons. We started messing with the fundamentals of how the game worked. If anyone remembers some of those early white-page games, you probably remember that the rules could be pretty loose.

Before long, superheroes from comics, aliens, mutants, and whatever else captured our imaginations were all competing in the same world alongside those giant mecha.

Then came D&D.

We started with 2nd Edition. We were still very enamored with creating our own worlds, and I’m not quite old enough to remember Chainmail or the original D&D releases firsthand. We did, however, lose ourselves in the old D&D cartoon.

And that was it.

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A Quick Side Note

I’ve always believed you can tell whatever story you want with whatever system you want. The real question is how you want to tell that story, because the system inevitably shapes it.

Before our foray into D&D, we were using BattleTech as our foundation. That meant things like hit locations and modifiers for those locations naturally became baked into the stories we told.

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Then D&D opened everything up. It was amazing. Sure, it had specific classes, races, monsters, and rules, but it also gave us this glorious amount of content that we didn’t have to invent before we could start playing. For the first time, we didn’t have to constantly figure out how to balance our imaginations against the game.

We could just create.

We found other kids who wanted to play, and D&D became our game for the next ten years. Friends came and went. Groups formed and died. Eventually, my brother and I each had groups of our own.

I apologize for wandering so far into my past, but I think it’s important to set the stage for how I became a true side-quest nerd.

The music, the stories, the drawing, the painting all of it sprouted from the same place most things do: childhood.

More specifically, from two kids without a lot of stuff, but with more than enough imagination to build worlds of their own.