As careful readers of my blog may have noted in between the weird stories and disturbing attempts at poetry I have occasionally made reference to my gaming hobby. I've been involved in role playing games since I was a teenager - too many years ago to count without wincing - and most of those years have been spent taking on the role of games-master, referee, dungeon-master, keeper or whatever the term de jour happens to be. Basically in those games of collaborative and communal story telling I always tended to be the one who laid out the framework of the stories, administered whatever rules were appropriate and played all the characters in the universe who weren't played by the players.
It's been a great hobby and I thought I knew it inside out and I suppose I'd become fairly set in my ways. That changed recently and though I've never considered myself to have a particularly narrow outlook on gaming it's started to widen out incredibly. I've looked into new games, new rule types, new genres and it's revitalised my gaming life as I've managed to find myself running games not only for my usual and long term gaming partners but also for their family members, for work colleagues who've expressed an interest and for people across the sea who I've never met except virtually.
There are a lot of reasons for this (displacement from some fairly trying times personally being one of them) but it's been facilitated by my discovery of new vistas of gaming mainly by my recent discovery of podcasts. I have a long commute to and from work and I recently decided to investigate the podcast app on my phone which I'd previously ignored. Were there, I wondered, any podcasts concerning my beloved roleplaying games.
Oh hell yes was the universe's answer.
One in particular has become my favourite.
