GMS_XPLSN

would you look at that… blink and suddenly it’s been, um, 16 months since your last blog post.

in my defence i was left unsupervised.

maybe you’re asking yourselves ‘what has distracted nook to such a degree that he’s not been able to post on this blog? this blog that was still new and only a few posts in when he started it…’

i’ll tell you.

COVID ushered in a golden age of role-playing for me, where games and groups flowed by in numbers not seen since i flunked my degree. at one point i was running three (3) different games and systems a week! this volume of games ebbed and flowed until october last year (i’m back down to two a week at the moment) and ate my spare time. i’m not even mad. it was great.

the main commitment that ate my time was setting up a weekly gaming club for a local mental health charity: Headspace in bolton.

we started in may 2023 with me and about eight new players, and now we’ve got four separate weekly games, 20+ regular players, hoodies with logos on and a games library. it’s been great.

Headspace provide creative workshops; photography, comedy, filmmaking, music, writing, production; for the local community, helping people be creative, comfortable and confident.

an RPG night, with the social interaction and creative part inherent to the hobby, was a perfect fit and i am really happy that it’s taken off. it’s been quite the labour of love, creating a community, finding other gm’s, teaching groups of people how to play d&d and other games.

so far we’ve run:

• dungeons and dragons 5e
• alien
• mork borg
• vaesen
• warhammer fantasy role-play
• honey heist
• root
• blades in the dark
• the walking dead universe
• monster of the week
• trail of cthulhu
• adventure skeletons

we’re looking at halloween one shots this month: walking dead, ghostbusters, dungeons & dragons. after i’ve finished blades in the dark i want to look at werewolf: the apocalypse, fear itself, more alien, more walking dead, maybe deathmatch island.

what else is pulling on my time and preventing me from focusing on this blog?

my weekly vampire: the masquerade game blew up, and knocked my confidence for a bit. i’m playing a weekly online d&d game, and have managed to get my warforged armourer artificer’s ac up to 25. i have contributed to a couple of episodes of frankenstein’s rpg podcast and even tried doing my own podcast (turns out that they’re hard).

plus there’s having a full time job and a family and stuff.

this blog has sat unattended and ignored for too long, so this is me, making a conscious effort to revitalise it.

not just necropost.

this is not a very punk rock post…

nook, october 2024. running blades in the dark, playing d&d 5e, playing cyberpunk 2077 on xbox series x, planning vampire: the masquerade, alien, dungeons & dragons, the walking dead and blog posts.