My players loved the pants off the chance to be Space Marines and the podcast garnered interest and praise amongst 40K Roleplay fans on Twitter. Still, though, I’ve learned my lesson about charging for the goal too early with Only In Death, my Deathwatch actual play podcast. The thought of being able to bring as much of myself to the table as they do and get paid to do it is very tempting. Look at Matt Mercer and his players on Geek & Sundry’s Critical Role, Matt Colville and his YouTube gaming advice columns, Will and Syd of the D&D streaming/podcasting channel Encounter Roleplay. In this era, it’s possible to turn a love of RPGs into a serious thing. I can even turn my podcasting skills toward recording and posting actual play.ĭo I have lofty goals? Well, yes, sort of. It combines everything I’ve already been doing and/or loving: writing, voice acting, fantasy and science fiction. Why do I want to become a superhero at this hobby? It feels like it’s my thing, the thing that I can do for people that really beings out everything in me. I want to concentrate on the folks I’ve enticed around my table and making sure I’m entertaining them equally as much as I’m entertaining myself. As gloriously as the rulebooks for the roleplaying games present their rules and worlds, they’re nothing but wishful thinking without a group of people having fun. Some Cairns folks even asked me last year to introduce them to Dungeons & Dragons, for which I bought the fifth edition Starter Set.Īnd it’s on those folks that I want to keep my focus. Moreover, though, I’ve been playing for a great assortment of folks, including an old friend who moved to the UK and one of her solid mates a Canadian podcast maestro his brother, who’s slowly getting into the hobby an American author of urban fantasy novels. Just recently I’ve discovered what might be my RPG sweet spot, Atomic Robo, a game that uses the FATE rule set to tell modern day stories of Indiana Jones- style action scientists. I’ve taken a stab at InSpectres, the awesome indie game of ghostbusting for fun and profit. I’ve experimented with the D&D derived Pathfinder and its Lord of the Rings -meets- Star Wars sequel, Starfinder. In the last couple of years, I’ve been game mastering a campaign of Deathwatch, the Warhammer 40,000 Roleplay game which enables the players to step into the powered armour of the Emperor’s finest, the supersoldiers known as the Space Marines. This impossible aim made me spend much more time nose-deep in sourcebooks than sitting at a table with friends, not to mention quit and re-join the RPG hobby more times than I care to remember.ĭespite my location in Cairns, a small, tourist-focused city in Australia’s tropical North East, I’ve been getting a fair bit of gaming in lately. For years, I tried to make the game sessions match the high I got from buying and reading RPGs and sourcebooks and looking at pictures of cool machines (like those in Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0., Mekton II and Mekton Zeta, RIFTS, Robotech and Macross II, Bubblegum Crisis, Jovian Chronicles and Heavy Gear ).