Hello Void

For the best part of my life I have been obsessed with stories.

As a kid I read every book in the mobile library that used to come by my house. I watched television religiously and after my first job (foolishly) took it upon myself to spend all my hard earnings on about 600 DVDs. There's something about a well told story that I've just always found captivating. I adore the ways authors and film makers capture our attention and mislead us with tricks and turns.

I bring this up because I've been running Table Top Games as a Game Master for 20 years now (jeez I'm getting old) and it's been a passion of mine to be constantly improving the experience I can give my players. Honestly the challenge of creating a story that's rewarding and engaging when you have no idea what your main characters are going to do at any given minute is so much fun to me. I love talking about this so much and chatting peoples ears off that I thought maybe I should just create a blog so I can write things down and get them out of my head.

So that's what I'm doing here and apologies in advance if I ramble at times, I may adore stories but this is in no way a good representation of that, being more of a stream of consciousness about my thoughts on the various hurdles that come with trying to be a good DM. I make no claims to be an authority on this by the way, I just want to learn more and improve. I started running Dungeons & Dragons games when I was still at school. I volunteered to setup a games club for the younger kids and taught myself Dungeons & Dragons so I could run weekly games. After leaving school I was in several groups that started Table Top Games (sometimes as a player but usually as the GM). These were of course notoriously hard to regularly organise but 3 years ago a couple of games actually stuck. For the past 3 years I've been running a weekly game called Monster Of The Week following a group of Monster Hunters in the UK town of Wetwang in 1996. At the same time my partner has been running a weekly game of Dungeons & Dragons that I'm a player. We both put our hearts and souls into these games and talk constantly about how to be better.

So I guess the purpose of this blog is to share my thoughts on trying to be the best Games Master I can and how to deal with the story challenges that entails whilst also occasionally sharing tales of some of players adventures.

Welcome to The Campfire.