Author: Josh Fox

I have been roleplaying since I was ten years old – that’s over twenty years – and it has formed the core of my spare time and social life for most of that time.

It all started when a guy named Peter moved into my neighbourhood and brought Dungeons and Dragons with him. Yes, Dungeons and Dragons – much mocked, little understood. It was great. My limited social circle were basically only interested in football at that point. And I. Hate. Football. Suddenly we had a regular social activity that I actually enjoyed. Together we beat up carrion crawlers, troglodytes, dragons – whatever random monster of the week came up. It wasn’t really much more than a board game at that point, but it captured my imagination.

Since then I branched out, always creeping closer and closer to the kind of gaming I wanted to do, the kind that was about characters and epic stories, the kind that matched the exciting descriptions you heard about in the marketing blurb for virtually any rpg you might happen to read, but which were a million miles away from the games I played as a ten-year-old. Don’t get me wrong: I like beating up a dragon as much as the next nerd, but it wasn’t what I wanted the core of my gaming to be. Still, it was the thing that brought me and my small circle of friends together in secondary school (which I hated, and which roleplaying made bearable). Oddly enough, I didn’t do much *actual roleplaying* during this time. I devoured dozens of massive textbooklike roleplaying books, learning arcane trivia like what “SCUBA” stands for and the furthest distance anyone has fallen and survived.

It was when I got to university that the hobby really exploded for me. I joined the Oxford University roleplaying games society, and was united with dozens of fellow gamers, all bright, enthusiastic and energetic. They ran games. A lot. I found myself trying out LRP – stood up, in a room full of strangers, physically pretending to be my character. Really it wasn’t any different from an amateur dramatics night, I suppose, but it was very exciting for me. At OU RPGsoc I ran the first proper campaign (in the sense of one that ran for more than a handful of sessions) of my career thus far, a game about an attempt at space colonisation gone horribly wrong. I learned how to manage difficult players, how to manage a team of referees, and I saw some fantastic roleplaying.

I have dozens of friend from OU RPGsoc who I am still close to. It gave me the foundation of the next ten years of roleplaying. Because of it, I had the confidence to show up in London and recruit about a dozen complete strangers to play in First Born, an epic fantasy game. It’s funny, but I don’t think I appreciated at the time what a big thing that was. Thanks to First Born I met dozens more roleplayers, and was introduced to their strange world of 24-hour roleplaying. (Think Blair Witch Project… on second thoughts, don’t. Ask me if you’re interested.)

These days I don’t have time to run LRP events for dozens of players, as much as the idea frequently tempts me. But my entire social circle, more or less, is made up of roleplayers, and an awful lot of time I spend with them is spent playing a fictional character of one kind or another. And it is still the most fun you can have for the cost of a train fare and some snack food.

Strangely enough, my work colleagues are not aware of my hobby. For whatever reason, I have felt that talking about it with them would be A Bad Plan. Every time I go roleplaying I tell them I’m just hanging out with friends, not really doing anything. They must think I have the most boring life ever. I occasionally tell my fellow gamers that I can’t “come out” because I’m a manager and it would undermine my authority if people felt I had a nerdy hobby. Whatever, it’s probably just an excuse. I’m pretty jealous of Admiral Frax, who told her colleagues when she joined her company and has never looked back. If I told people now it would just look weird that I never mentioned it before.

Anyway. Thankyou roleplaying, you’ve been a positive presence in my life all this time and still carry on giving. And by the way, thanks to all the fabulous roleplayers I know, who have made it all so much fun.

This has been my contribution to speak out with your geek out. A day late. Meh, whatever.

It’s Friday, Friday, gotta play games on Friday… yeah. This is the first installment of what will hopefully be a series of writeups of Final Friday. What is Final Friday, you ask? Final Friday is an event I’ve started whereby a randomly-generated group of my friends come round on the last Friday of the month to play a new boardgame or RPG, or to try out an experimental game concept or mechanic – in short, to try something new.

I must admit, my first Final Friday was not exactly well-attended. It didn’t help that I announced the idea two weeks in advance. Oh, and not technically on the last Friday of the month; I’m on holiday then. What can I say, I just couldn’t wait until September. So in the end it was only Ben, Kat and me who sat down on Friday night. That was easily enough people to create a very fun evening.

We decided to try out Fiasco. For those who don’t know it, Fiasco is a GM-less roleplaying game in which, with the help of some skeletal setting material and some random tables, the players work together to create a trainwreck story on the lines of a Cohen Brothers movie.

Now I should say here, to my knowledge I have never seen a Cohen Brothers movie. And I’ve never played a GM-less game. So there was clearly the potential here for a little trainwreck of our own. And indeed, it took us a while to get to grips with the concept. But after a slow start we got into it.

We decided (against my express wishes – nobody listens to me…) to play the Ice Station playset. Ben was Archie White, an introverted trucker who ended up at MacMurdo Station when his wife Elena (Kat) moved there. Now divorced, his only real friend at the station is The Voice, a mysterious presence at the end of a CB Radio who is blackmailling him into smuggling illicit goods in and out of the base. Archie has become dependent on their relationship for human contact – he needs to hear a voice… anyone’s voice. Unbeknownst to him, The Voice is actually Gilbert Stringer, an embittered naval comms officer who dreamed of making Admiral but never made it past Ensign. The loops is closed when we learn that Elena has asked Stringer to help her move some stolen experimental material from her lab, with which she hopes to make her career away from the stultifying grip of the MacMurdo hierarchy.

It’s difficult to explain exactly what happened in the game. Things came to a head when Archie, already some distance down the road out of MacMurdo, gets a call from The Voice, demanding he turn his truck around and return the package to the base. Elena, who for reasons of her own had stowed away in the truck, overhears the conversation and steals the package back, heading out into a blizzard with it in her clutches. Stringer, hearing that the package has gone, goes off the deep end and comes after Archie on a skidoo, ending in a shootout, then a second shootout at the MacMurdo airstrip where Stringer tries to stop Elena leaving by airplane. The story ended with Elena flying away in her plane while both Stringer and Archie lie in pools of their own blood on the airstrip.

I really enjoyed our first outing in Fiasco-world. I really want to give some other playsets a try, in particular the suburbia playset, because I think with some of the others there’s too much of a temptation to play off the setting rather than focusing on character interaction and pure mayhem. If you don’t like the idea of having no GM and no real rulebook to fall back on, and just improvising wildly to produce an interesting story, Fiasco may not work so well for you. For this group, this time around, it worked well. We got a good mix of poignant story that we had deliberately made happen collaboratively, and random chaos that emerged through play.

By the way – epilogue to the story: Stringer wakes up paralysed in hospital. He is alone, except for a CB Radio. The last thing we see is Stringer picking up the radio to call Archie, just to hear his voice… anyone’s voice.