The History of Our Roleplaying Group
In case you're bored by reading this history, you can look at this amusing animation instead.
In order to make things clearer to those reading this website, I am offering here a complete history of our roleplaying group.
1. THE BEGINNING
Like many other great stories, this tale begins, truly, before it even begins: with the complicated back-story which led to this tale's inception. In the year 1987, West End Games published a roleplaying game of the popular movie series, Star Wars. Like many other Star Wars fans across the country, our Gamemaster's older brother, Evan, bought a copy of this game, and began playing it with his friends and brothers. Jay, his youngest brother, who was seven at the time, grew up playing this game under the tutilaige of Evan's superb Gamemastering, and soon came to love this game as his brothers did.
2. THE INCEPTION
Flash forward in time seven years, to the summer of 1994. Jay had joined a group of friends which included myself and several other people, who spent most of our spare time playing video games and watching movies. We needed something to fill those empty hours -- some new, previously unknown form of entertainment to keep us busy during the summer. Jay remembered the glory days of roleplaying with his brothers and their friends, and, borrowing Evan's SW rulesbook and sourcebook one night, brought them over to my house and took up the job of Gamemaster, with two players: myself and Cory. We enjoyed it, and Jay promised that we would do it again as soon as possible. A few weeks later, we met again, this time with five people sitting around the roleplaying table -- Michael and Bryan had joined. Thus was formed the original group, the core of the roleplaying group, whose beginning characters were Bail Kane (me), Race Smith (Bryan), Ramierez Starr (Michael), and Mack Williams (Cory).
3. THE GROUP GROWS
As time passed, more people joined our little group. Nathan and Will (Kaiyan) began in November, although neither of them would play again after that initial mission until several months later. The golden age of our group had begun, and for the next year, everything ran smoothly. We roleplayed every few weekends, generally having short missions, although these gave way to longer ones after a while. During 9th grade, however, Cory began to distance himself from the group, and stopped roleplaying on a regular basis.
4. WEDNESDAYS - THE EXTENSION
Up until this time, we had been roleplaying only on Friday nights (and occasionally Saturday afternoons). Then, many of the regular roleplayers began showing up for RAs (a church youth organization led by my dad), on Wednesday nights. RAs did not start until 7:00, however, and school got out at 3:00. We had found a time when we would all be at one place together during the week, and we took advantage of it. At first, we roleplayed with Jay GMing SW, and Lawson (Ito) and Bryan's brother Daniel began roleplaying with us. Soon, however, Jay tired of showing up every Wednesday, and began to be annoyed by Daniel, and so Jay stopped showing up. With no Gamemaster, we could no longer roleplay -- or could we? Over the past few months, Michael had been working on a new roleplaying game of his own creation, entitled "Rebels of Faulklin." It seemed that the time had come for the group to proceed to the next level of roleplaying.
5. "REBELS OF FAULKLIN"
Though we still roleplayed Jay's game on Fridays, Michael introduced Rebels to us as an alternate roleplaying game for Wednesdays, when Jay was not around. It was a simple game, with the basic game structure very similar to SW, because that was the only game any of us had played. We started off with six players: myself, who played Garion Hunter, a mech pilot; Bryan, who played Race Smith, a fighter jockey; Nathan, who played Perrin, a commando; Will, who played Dagger, a cyborg; Daniel, who played Mark "Carnage" Soler, a demolitions expert; and Wes, whom we knew from school but who had never roleplayed with Jay, who played Grimlok, a Dinoc tough. "Rebels" is not documented on this site as of yet, but as it was a signifigant part of our roleplaying history I will eventually include it. We played every Wednesday before RAs, generally playing either short (thirty minutes or less) missions in one sitting or extending some missions to several thirty minute or so sittings.
At first, we played in the Church library, which Nathan's dad was the keeper of at the time, but we were constantly haggled by people who thought that we were gambling in there and so eventually wound up wandering around town, stopping to roll or sit down for a minute in parking lots or on sidewalks as we walked throughout the town. We would often save our leftover money from lunch and pool it on Wednesdays so that we could go to the Pizza Hut, which was not far from the Church, and order a pizza while we roleplayed around the table. "Rebels" continued well into ninth grade, before being discontinued when Michael bought and began GMing Shadowrun, finishing up with a climactic mission. We later began a brief "several years later" campaign in the summer of '98, but it did not last very long, and, once I left for a different church in late '98, Rebels seemed to dry up completely.
6. THE HIGH SCHOOL YEARS - 10th GRADE (96-97) THROUGH 12th GRADE (98-99)
Our group's population shot up drastically our Sophomore year, with the addition of Joel (Cyruss Remmington) and Brian (Dean Malenko), although by this time Cory had left the group completely. Nathan had also stopped roleplaying by this time, after his third character, Uno, had been killed, although he still ate lunch with us at school and we saw him on a regular basis. It was also about this time that Jay began to Gamemaster his second game, MERP (Middle-Earth Roleplaying, set in Tolkien's world), under the Rolemaster game system. We had experimented with a game of the original MERP, which Evan's group had played for quite a while after they began SW, during the summer of 1995, GMed by Jay's older brother Mike, but we only played a few missions before Mike found other projects and the whole thing was cancelled indefinitely. Jay salvaged the project in early '97, however, using the Rolemaster game system which he had purchased, and GMing the game himself. Only one character was transferred from the previous MERP game -- my character, Baalek Songheart. Most of the major roleplayers from SW played this, but some of the less serious non-regulars did not, because the characters required so much more time to create (around three hours, as opposed to SW's five minutes). It was not long, however, before we had many interesting characters, and another legendary group began. It was also around this time that Michael began GMing his own, Michael-style game of SW, which was much less serious than Jay's game and seemed to consist, like Rebels, of a more comic-book style storyline. During our Junior year, Lawson finally became a regular, although he still did not make a Rolemaster character. Also, Trinity, Jay's longtime girlfriend, began roleplaying with us about this time, playing as Jade, although she did not play very often. During our Junior year, cracks began to show in the facade of the group, as we dealt with the abscense of Zach (who had been forced to move shortly after he had begun roleplaying), and suffered various arguments and fights. The members of the group thought of as regulars began to change, as Michael and I began showing up less and less, and Joel began showing his zeal for the game by showing up just about every time Jay was there. We finally reached the point where we were roleplaying every weekend, sometimes roleplaying one game on Friday night and the other on Saturday night, and it began taking a toll on us all. Late in our Junior year, the infamous "split" occured, in which several members of the group began boycotting the game, and although it lasted only a few weeks, it was a shock to everyone's system. We began to calm down, and, by the time the summer had started, the group was back to normal. By our Senior year, the game began reaching the pace it had before at an enormous level, and the missions became longer and more often. Eventually, we were roleplaying both Friday and Saturday nights, and the missions would last an average of six or seven hours per sitting, sometimes longer. Very few missions only lasted one sitting anymore. By the middle of our Senior year, I could not take the stress of such a hectic schedule anymore, trying to balance roleplaying and school, and took a breather from the game for several months, shortly after Kane's rescue from High Inquisitor Tremayne, which followed the infamous "Massacre" mission. After about three months, however, everyone was ready to finish up the year, and we all roleplayed the last few missions together, leading up into the cumulation of Jay's SW campaign at the Battle of Endor, which coincided with the release of "SW: Episode I" and our own graduation. Rolemaster had been put away until the summer, and, after we graduated, we pulled it out once again and for a time enjoyed a few more missions of it, but our hearts were not in it, and we soon stopped roleplaying completely, except for the group which roleplayed Michael's games on Wednesday nights. Toward the end of the summer, Joel started a game of SW, which we all got interested in and played a few missions of before everyone split up for college. Joel, who is one of the ones who stayed at home to go to a Community College, still GMs his game for everyone who is close enough to come play once in a while. The group has split up, for the most part, but there are still several summers ahead of us, and we have always intended to hold "roleplaying reunions" when we have class reunions for high school.
Well, that's our story. I hope you enjoyed it. Now that you've read it, you might be able to better understand some of the things which have been written on some of the other pages -- but then again, you might not.
Some of the animations at this site are by Bill Smith of the Blockade Runner Home Page
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