Ang

It’s Stewart actually. Anyway, as they say, I was born wherever gnomes are born, usually in winter. I was introduced to RPGs at a pretty young age, sort of against my will. My big sister Brie and her friends were introduced to the game via the HeartQuest novels and forced me to play Muddfoot, their characters’ pack mule and torch bearer, sometimes by literally sitting on me and refusing to let me leave. 

Stewart

Ang

Well, there were occasional fun moments, and truth be told, I had a crush on the DM. Her name was… god, this was so long ago… Julienne. Well, she asked me to help her collate her notes after the game one session, and that, as they say, was that. You should have seen the look on Brie’s face when in the middle of a hard fight deep in the dungeon, Muddfoot the pack mule just walked away carrying all the party’s loot, the map to the surface, and of course the only light source. This was back in the day when PCs needed a light source to see and monsters never did, so that fight didn’t exactly work out in their favor.

Stewart

Ang

Well, after Julienne let Muddfoot get away with all the treasure and leave the party to die, Brie and her friends gave me the silent treatment for weeks. For Julienne though it was even worse. They pretty much “Mean Girls”ed her for the rest of high school. DnD was such a big passion for her, and with few friends left, she and I kept meeting at the local library to play. But she had a hard time DMing after that. It made her miss everyone too much, so I suggested she make a character and I ran games for her. She made a tough as nails fighter type, I don’t remember the character name. I wasn’t a very good GM, who is to start with? But I got better with practice. 

Stewart

Ang

Well, like many high school friends, college happened. She was a few years older than me remember, so she went off to school… University of Michigan I think, and by the time I graduated, we had mostly lost touch. I did hear that she published some RPG stuff of her own, but I don’t really think it would be fair to her to dredge up ancient history just because I want to name drop, so we can leave all that alone.

Stewart

Ang

I ran a few pick up games during the last few years of high school, tried a few new systems. I think I had the distinction of “running” a Traveller game where every single character died in character creation. But for the most part, the people I tried to run for didn’t really “get” how I was trying to run. This was back in the 80s, where everything was hack and slash dungeon crawls, but of course I had been introduced to the hobby indirectly through romance novels. When I was running solo campaigns for Julienne I was half just DMing the way I had seen her DM for Brie and her friends and if I’m honest, half trying to flirt with her by having NPCs flirt with her character. That’s generally a bad idea, but it worked because we were somewhere between good friends and crushing on each other so neither of us minded. Anyway, picture it if you can: a table of teenage boys playing hack and slash dungeon crawl in the late 80s, they come to the temple for healing and the DM, another teen boy starts RPing the priestess flirting with one of their characters. It did not go over well.

Stewart

Ang

I think it’s one of those unique little islands of play that came about pre-internet. Every game table had their own reading of the rules and the intent of play and aside from writing into trade magazines and talking with locals at your FLGS, who was to say if you were right or not?

Stewart

Ang

By the time I got to college I had learned that not everyone wants to flirt, but people are generally cool with other relationship building, so I was leaning on that as a major component of my games. Then it was 91’ and the lid blew off the whole “Lounge around wallowing in RP Angst” scene and I was in my element. I had never been a proper goth. I was a pretty upbeat kid, and I never really got the fashion, I don’t know how many eye rolls I got for mixing a black dress shirt with a wallet chain, but it didn’t matter because if people wanted to play in my game, they had to make fun of my abysmal fashion sense out of earshot.

Stewart

Ang

Right now I’m running Brindlewood Bay. Think Murder She Wrote meets Call of Cthulhu. I’ve fiddled with a handful of PbtA games. I like their easy narrative lens and their focus on the actions of the characters and the consequences of those actions. 

Stewart

Ang

I figure I’ll start with what I know best: Building NPCs that will make players want to emotionally invest themselves. Building complex relationship webs, maintaining headspace and rapidly switching between NPCs, that sort of thing. 

Stewart

Ang

Well, you know, play your cards right…

Stewart

Ang