REVIVAL ep. 1

Conversion is a weird thing. These was a time where my view of the world was one way, and now I cannot imagine how I was so naive. Once one sees the light, one cannot go back. 

A year and a half ago, I found something I loved more than I loved anything else in the world. I know for a lot of people that's being at the beach or something productive like cooking or even, God forbid, accounting. My thing turned out to TTRPGs. Some people get luckier than others, I guess.

However, like a mystic being shown the face of God in the wilderness, I found TTRPG's on my own (aka I watched Dimension 20, and then read the whole 5e players guide in a week, and then read the Alexandrian, and then Knave 1e, and then Principia Apocrypha, and then...Well, you get the idea).

I'm also in a city that doesn't seem to have much of a community for TTRPG's. I know of one guy who runs a long-time campaign and attends GaryCon every year, and there's a game shop on the far side of town. I know a few others who have dabbled, but they are mere admirers of TTRPG's, not true followers.

Having heard this gospel of how much fun it is to play these God damned games, I now set out to share this experience with my peers. The goal is to bootstrap my ass into a community of 40-50 people who all love these games and want to play them as much as I do. In short, I'm looking for

The Story So Far

Right as I discovered the game, I started a campaign with five friends. We've been playing for 18 months now in 5e and then D&D 2024, though this was largely because I didn't know any other system. We play once every three weeks or so, and the primary motivation for most of my friends was just an opportunity to hang out. They are the Sunday TTRPGers, who show up to play but forget what they have learned when they leave the table.

I started two side campaigns, one which went great, and one that went...fine, I think? Up to that point, I had a total of 14 people play in my games. Of those, 1 was reluctant (my wife), 5 I would say played because of who they were playing with, 4 played because of the game but don't have time to play more, and 4 would play TTRPGs any chance they got after those initial experiences.

Last winter, I ran four one-shots; those four true believers played in nearly all of them, and I introduced another 3 players to the game.

This summer, I ran four sessions of an open table campaign using a hack that added classes to Knave, and played in an open world hex crawl, but if we're being honest, I had no idea what I was doing. It went fine but not great, though I did introduce another 3 players, and found that two of them were People of Peace, set up for conversion in a way I could not have planned.

I do have one player who has begun to DM his own stuff, first for his family, then online for some college friends. Now, I believe he will begin DMing for people in person too, which is my first real convert.

In the future, I hope to go back and detail what went well and poorly in some of the games I played above; my adventures trying to make combat in 5e interesting, my discovery of the relationship between rules and tone, and my attempts to teach players a more Old School style of play.

Looking forward though, the next part of the plan is to rewrite the flawed hexcrawl, recreate my Knave hack as its own rules system (more on that soon). I'll document that and other thoughts on games in general in this blog, and then trust that the powers that be will bring what we need; Revival.