FAQ U: Why Am I Here?

New year, new me? Sorta kinda. I've found myself recounting the same origin story to multiple people multiple times, so I thought that I would put it on record so there's no surprises anymore.

I think I was first aware of D&D because of my dad, who played some sort of AD&D in the early eighties. Didn't know or understand much of it from him, except that it was a game where you hunted for treasure or something like that. It was more interesting to me that he stuck up for D&D but didn't let us watch Harry Potter because it was satanic—whereas we had Chick Tracts condemning both. It didn't really affect me, though. I don't think I saw the appeal in either, at the time? Now I have a good reason to avoid Harry Potter lol. Anyway.

Flash-forward to my junior year of high school. My best friend (now partner!) got really into an actual play podcast called The Adventure Zone, based on D&D Fifth Edition. The McElroy Brothers, who were popular from their comedy advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me, took the game's starting box and basically made it their own by giving the non-player characters goofy names and quickly developing their own unique story. My best friend had gotten me into fandom culture proper, and TAZ was one of my earliest and favorite ones. The McElroy Empire was all-encompassing.

I didn't think I would end up playing D&D, or maybe I just didn't think of myself as having an actual, direct interest in it. After all, I wasn't into TAZ for D&D (which many people were, since it was the first actual-play for Fifth Edition), but for the story and characters and fandom. During my senior year of high school, though, one of my friends saw that I listened to the podcast and asked if I wanted to play with him. Fuck it, yeah! So I played D&D every Sunday for most of the school year, each session being like five hours long which felt insane to us. Made a lot of characters I thought were funny or cute. When my dad asked if I found any treasure each week, I pretended to know what he was talking about.

I planned my first campaign in December of that school year. It was modern urban fantasy, where the party was recruited by Din Viesel to help him heist a grocery store to secure funds for the funeral of his partner (in crime as well as in love). Fambly. The grocery store was a front for the Green Gang, a.k.a. the Gang Green, which owned the entire small town in which the session was set. Fantasy Rebel Wilson was there, and she had a gun (my best friend and I had an in-joke about how Pitch Perfect might as well become like the Fast & Furious series because of how the third movie ended up going). Her uncle was Fantasy Karl Marx who frequented a male strip club, much to his partner Fantasy Friedrich Engels' chagrin. The overarching plot was about people getting imprisoned so they could be used as magic batteries.

Didn't play much immediately after high school, except that another friend would sometimes run one-page games at get-togethers with my now-partner and I and others. One of them was a game of Honey Heist that he has actually revisited over the years with different people, eventually developing it into his own campaign continuity. I also ran Boy Problems, a hack of Lasers & Feelings where you're trying to heist the 200 unreleased songs from Carly Rae Jepsen's iconic incredible inspired album E•MO•TION from a literal vault (which I decided was owned by a cyborg Martin Shkreli). I only realize now that I must have had some point of contact with OSR blogs because I tracked turns and checked random encounters since I felt like it heightened the stakes of the heist. However, the point of contact was more likely people giving advice on running D&D that I absorbed without the larger context. Anyway, don't spend $7 on that game.

The Coronavirus hit in March 2020. It had been a couple weeks stuck inside, so I had the idea that I could get a bunch of friends together over Zoom to play D&D to escape the confines of our parents' houses. Rather than using Fifth Edition, though, I put together a Frankenstein of Knave, Here Is Some Fucking D&D, and this blog post. You can sort of see how it works from the character sheet above, and you might see the relation between it and my homebrew heartbreaker FIVEY. The campaign was fun, if short-lived. Although by that time I was definitely reading OSR materials, it also influenced me to be kind of suspect of its specific maxims/motifs as well as its approach to play in general. There was a contradiction of my own desire in that it definitely simplified D&D, but also had an angle that I didn't care for.

But I was really into the DIY orientation of the culture. So, when the OSR Pit opened for lack of a central platform like there was in the time of Google+, I made an account to start interacting with people. My tendency with my hobbies is to get super involved in them, and this was obviously far from an exception. My project then and for a while was to make a TTRPG to inspire a literary project about which I had been daydreaming for a long time, about the Evangelical Christian Apocalypse. Pretty soon after, I learned about TTRPG Twitter and began interacting with people on there too. Started using my blog more around March 2021. Gained notoriety for applying techniques of critical theory to TTRPG materials, which I acknowledged early on was a form of play in itself since it's ineffectual for anything in real life (duh???).

At some point I was picked up by a Discord server, at which point I felt half-encouraged and half-pressured to embrace a more OSR perspective after constantly complaining about it. I don't think this was a bad thing for what experiences I got out of it, but it didn't really feel true to my interests or myself. I took on the project of close-reading and then reformatting OD&D. This evolved into Fantastic Medieval Campaigns, which I consider an immanent critique of the OSR.

Now I'm here! Wherever here is.