A Role Playing Games Blog
As you probably know I love to interview interesting people from the roleplaying industry. Yesterday something really surprising happened: Gordon from “Blog of a new RPGer” asked if he could do an interview with me.
The result is an in-depth interview with me which you can read over at Gordon’s blog. We talked about how I got into gaming, running Call of Cthulhu, blogging and a lot more. Check it out!
Some of you may have noticed that Stargazer’s World was extremely slow recently. Today it got unbearable and I decided to call the company that hosts the site. After a few minutes looking into what may cause the problem, they offered me to move my blog to another server.
The move just took a couple of minutes and as far as I can see the blog is much, much faster now. Thanks, Strato! If you guys encounter any issues with the site, let me know.
I am Sven and I am one of the new contributors that Stargazer took aboard. I feel that it is only appropriate, that I tell you a little about myself.
Let’s start with a shocking revelation:
I haven’t played a pen&paper RPG for about five years!
“So what’s that guy doing here??” you might ask. I’ll come to that in a minute.
Of course I am no stranger to roleplaying games and I have played lots of RPGs in my late teens and early twenties. Actualy I was a member of Stargazer’s gaming group back then and we enjoyed many sessions together. I started with Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, which to this day remains my favorite. But I also played (and partialy GMed) Star Wars D6, Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and AD&D – just to name a few.
As many of you will have experienced themselves, after people leave school, many gaming groups just fall apart. Some players move away to university, some completely lose their interest in gaming, others prefer to spend more time with their signifcant other and most people just have less and less time to commit to a hobby like roleplaying.
I am one of those people: After I moved away, it became harder and harder to arrange gaming with my old group. At the same time I just didn’t find a lot of interesting roleplayers in Frankfurt, where I live now. The few times I managed to join another group here, I just didn’t get the same enjoyment from it, as I had with my old gaming buddies. At the same time, my girlfriend never really “got” roleplaying – she tried it a few times, but she just doesn’t like it. So after a few unsuccessful tries to get into groups at my new location, I slowly gave up on roleplaying.
That didn’t mean I quit the gaming hobby altogether: I love boardgames. When I was a kid I always bugged my parents to play Monopoly with me and my first kind of “geeky” gaming was the Battletech boardgame – even before roleplaying. So boardgaming became my replacement drug: It doesn’t require as much preperation as a roleplaying session, you are more flexible with the number of players and it is often easier to find players. The top reason: My SO also likes boardgames.
So coming back to the question, what I want to do here:
I want to be your correspondent on the planar side of gaming. I know, that many roleplayers also enjoy boardgames – just as there are many hardcore boardgamers, who are ex-roleplayers like me.
I would like to introduce you to interesting boardgames, that you might have missed otherwise and of course I will focus on games, that I feel should be especialy appealing to roleplayers: Games, that generaly have a strong theme (often Fantasy or SciFi).
And don’t worry: I will not flood the blog with lots of postings on boardgames – Stargazer’s World is a Blog about RPGs and I just want to add an outlook on another aspect of the gaming hobby.
So…to get a bit of a feel for my audience here: Do you even play boardgames? What are your favorites? What was your worst boardgaming experience? What kind of games are you most interested in?
Well my name is Youseph Tanha. I am a 29-year-old working as a facility manager in Juneau, Alaska. In the past I have worked in the tech industry for web hosting and Internet providers, as well as in computer graphics. I also consider myself a very musical person. I play the drums and have been involved off and on throughout the years with several bands.
I have written on my personal website for several years now. Writing is something I have always enjoyed doing. Sharing my thoughts and ideas with others has always appealed to me. Writing has also been a struggle as I am Dyslexic. I have had to teach myself to just slow down and check everything twice when it comes to writing. I think that method has made me a better writer as a result.
My first experience with a roll playing game was Dungeons & Dragons 3.5 when I was 25 living in Oak Harbor, Washington. Everyone in our group of 5 had played D&D before except for myself. Our Dungeon master could not have been any nicer as he helped me create my first character and explained the rules as we went.
Having never played anything like D&D before, I was always asking if my character could do some crazy off the wall thing in trying to take out bad guys. I remember seeing the look of excitement on my Dungeon Master’s when I would ask him things like that.
Even though I only played half a dozen games of D&D 3.5, the memories of how much fun we all had always stuck with me. Last year I found myself in a local Juneau book store where I saw a copy of D&D Fourth Edition RPG Starter Set. For seventeen bucks I picked it up, if only for nostalgic reasons. Quickly I became captivated by it and before long I bought the three core rule books. Soon I had a group of friends coming together to play D&D once a week.
Juneau Alaska is a very beautiful place to live. But we do have six months out of the year where it is very dark most of the day. Starting up a D&D group is one of the best things I think anyone can do in Juneau. Once a week I have my friends over to play D&D and eat dinner. The best thing about D&D is the socializing. It gets everyone together, we all have a good time playing the game and visiting with each other. It makes the 6 dark (and what can be depressing) months tolerable.
I’m excited to be joining Stargazer’s World and looking forward to posting my thoughts, ideas, and reviews of this great game.
I was able to recruit two new regular authors: Andrew Modro aka Corvus, who you perhaps already know from his blog Polyhedral Dreams and Roberto Micheri aka Sunglar, who is giving his blogging debut here!
A few new guest bloggers have also decided to post irregularly for Stargazer’s World: Youseph Tanha and Sven Reuter. Youseph has posted quite a lot about D&D 4th Edition on his own blog already and I am sure he’ll be a great addition to the team. And so will be Sven, an old friend of mine, who is an expert on boardgames of all kinds. He will provide us with some insight on what’s happening in the boardgame scene.
I also made a few minor changes to the site in order to reflect the changes:
I sincerly hope that you, the readers of this blog, approve of the changes I made. I can assure you that we will keep up the high post quality you are used to and even try to improve on it. And I am sure that we can achieve these goals with such a great team! These are exciting times!
For quite some time now I have thought about opening my blog to other authors. Aside from a few guest posts, 100% of the content on this site has been written by me alone. And keeping up a “one post per work day” schedule is hard work if you are just one guy.
I gave it some thought, and I am finally ready to open Stargazer’s World to other authors. If you want to join the team, there are a few things you need to know:
If you still want to join the team, send me an email (info(at)stargazersworld.com) and tell me, why you want to join the team and what you want to contribute. I will try to reply as fast as possible. If you get accepted you will get a nice entry into the newly-created Team page, a stargazersworld.com email address, and the right to write and publish posts on this fine blog! Welcome to the team!
