Welcome to my humble abode

Greetings, and welcome to the Badger King's Den. I decided to start this blog as a way of not only musing on various gaming ideas I may have, but also as a journal of my attempt to get back into live, face to face role-playing anfter being out of the hobby for many, many years.

This first post is just a little background on me. I first became aware of the plethora of gaming blogs earlier this year, when a message board I frequented pointed out an excellent article on Grognardia. After reading the article, I began exploring the links to other blogs from there, and the rest, as they say, is history.

My gaming background goes back about 29 years. I was 8 years old when a friend of mine introduced me to D&D. Ironically, even though it was my first experience, it was already a homebrew - he modified it heavily and used the rules to help tell stories for his incredible selection of Micronauts toys. At the time, we were using the B/X rules, but often running them in AD&D modules. After a few years of exclusive D&D/AD&D playing, I moved on to junior high, where my obsession began in earnest. My best friend and his older brother were both hardcore gamers, and I feel in with this reprobate crew of gamers. Now, we played not only AD&D, but Traveller, Top Secret, Twilight:2000, James Bond, DC Heroes, Marvel Heroes, and dabbled in almost every game we could get our hands on. At one point, I took part in an AD&D campaign that had 2 groups of 7 players, all working on the same campaign from different ends. We also had a massive T:2K game which featured a dozen players in one group, and some very memorable Traveller and Top Secret campaigns. My role-playing slowed a little in high school, as my friend's older brother and his friends fell into university, and I ended up going to a different school than the rest of my gaming group; even though, I fell into a new group, who exposed me to the joys of Car Wars and Cyberpunk. As I moved into university and beyond, our core gaming group grew progressively smaller. I still bought games like a fiend (Star Wars RPG, Cyberpunk 2020, WH40K, Call of C'Thulhu), but our opportunities to game became less and less. Eventually, the group broke up, as the winds of fate moved us around the country. Since about 1996, I have not played, much less even thought about, RPGS.

Then, last year, the itch started to hit me again. I had always kept up with gaming, buying games that struck my fancy (Unknown Armies), and at least keeping an eye on D&D (for the record, D&D stopped being D&D after AD&D 2nd Edition), so it's not like I was ever totally out. I was now teaching in a little farm town in rural Canada, and with the opportunities for creative minds being EXTREMLY limited, I started to explore the possibility of introducing a new generation to RPG games. And that's how I got here.

Anyways, that's enough of an intro. Hopefully, I'll have some content up here fairly regularly.