...And A Player With A Handful Of Dice.

I have a very clear memory from when I was a child of sitting on my knees on a chair in the dining room watching my father play Dungeons & Dragon with some of his friends. As far as I was concerned, the best part of D&D was the dice. My father kept his in a Crown Royal bag. There were a few that I particularly loved - 4 d20's, one red, one blue, one green, and one golden-yellow - that were translucent when held up to the light. I used to call them "the gem dice". I used to kneel at the table and play with those dice while my dad ran his game. Sometimes I pretended I was a princess in my castle counting my treasure. Other times I imagined I was an architect, and I built myself impossible towers with as many dice as I could gather.

When I got older, I started developing an interest in creating a D&D world of my own. I was twelve when I started seriously drawing maps. My dad used to keep pads of graph paper, the green kind that engineers used to draw on before CADD, and I would steal them away along with his dice and his books so I could generate towns and dungeons of my own. I taught myself cartography and geography, the rules of weather systems and the logical placement of towns. The summer I turned 17 I got lucky enough to go to England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland for three weeks. We toured towns and castles, palaces and gardens, and I took notes, made sketches, and wrote stories. When I got back, I had so many ideas that I thought I might explode if I didn't find someone to share them with - it never occurred to me to see if my high school friends were interested in playing.

Thankfully, when I got to college there were a lot of people who were interested in table-top games. I even learned that I was "cool" because I played "old-school" 1st edition AD&D. I started acquiring books and dice of my own. By my junior year I was running two semi-regular games, and my senior year I continued one of them. I was also introduced to the world of White Wolf via LARPing. I never fell in love with LARPs - I adore the idea but am entirely too timid to pull off the reality - but Changeling: The Dreaming (Thank you, Phil!) is a story-world-concept I love.

After I started teaching I despaired of ever finding a group of people to game with again. None of my teacher-friends were interested. A few people said things like, "Oh yeah, I used to play that," and they'd laugh like it was a part of their life they were embarrassed to remember and wanted to forget. That made me terribly sad and extremely lonely. Then it occurred to me - why not ask the students? Most of them won't be interested, but the few who are might benefit. It got me started thinking about just how I'd manage to explain an AD&D game as a school-appropriate activity and what I would even call it.

Enter: The Storyteller's Society. A casual club where members work together to create characters and use role-play to interact with each other inside the construct of an imaginary environment, or in other words "Let's get together and make up stories!" And yes, I too keep my dice in a Crown Royal bag.