Its never too late

I read a FB post once that said something to the effect of, "I can't wait until this generation retires, the game nights in the home are going to be epic."

Like many fellow gen-X nerds, I played rpgs semi-regularly through high-school and university, then more and more intermittently while the old group slowly broke apart as life happened. I myself ended selling a lot of my old rpg stuff (I kept some and don't miss what I've given up. RIFTS crap takes up a LOT of room) and moving halfway across the country to get married. The good news here is that I completely missed 4th edition fiasco.

But I never stopped following the hobby and when life settled down enough I started going to pick-up games run out of the local-library (which is an AWESOME way for trying out new and different games and for playing with new people).Through them I ran a Ghostbusters game at a small con and found the notice from Autism Nova Scotia. With that going well, I ran some weekend pick-up games at a bar on behalf of a card-store, earning me my first paid DM's gig. All that gave me the confidence to approach a group I found online of local D&D gamers who run a collective group here in the city.

[I'm gonna digress here for a minute and explain how the group works: Organized on facebook, its a collective of about 20 gamers all living in the city. They meet up every few months and break into gaming groups. The DMs run an adventure over a couple of months and once all the groups are done, they meet up again, share stories and break into different groups. All the adventures take place in the same gameworld, so what you do might affect other games. Characters can be ported back and forth, or you can make a new one for each adventure. If you can find a group like this or know enough people to start organizing one, I highly recommend it.]

I'm at least ten years older than they are, but I've just started my second adventure and I'm having a blast.

Just last weekend I get a notice from the game/comic store where I run my Wednesday night group. He's looking for someone to take over one of the store groups and after some scheduling decisions and a discussion with my wife, I said yes.

As my mid-forties loom I'm playing more now than I ever did as a kid or teenager, and with dozens of different people from every walk of life, most of whom I'd never be lucky enough to meet or play with if I just stuck to finding three of four people to hack out an endless campaign with, which was kinda the way I though rpgs was suppose to work.

Learn sumptin' new every day.

                                       ---

Met with the new group last night and hashed out some ideas about where they wanted to go. I'm too overburdened to write another campaign whole-cloth, so I've decided that I'm going (unbeknownst to them) to use a pre-written module as the basis of the game. Narrowed it down to six or seven choices (depending on what I own and what I want to play). Next session they will begin in a tavern and I'm going to toss out some hooks out to see what they bit on.

The only issue I can see is that the old DM is joining as a player, and he wrote the gameworld they're playing in. I respect that kind of stuff a lot, but I'm worried how my more free and gonzo style is going to affect him. Not planning on anything world-breaking, but I also didn't have anything in mind for the wed night group when they were first brought together by the ghost of a little girl trying to keep her brother safe ... and now they are climbing an alien tower trying to stop the Mindflayer at the top from opening a portal to the nethersphere and summoning forth an invasion fleet of Illithid dreadnautilus and squidship.(the brother is the human henchman and the little girl's brain powers the bio-computer than runs the tower.

Whew! Just needed to vent a little. Thanks for reading.