The first weekly episodes of RPG Storytime had to be the classic where it all began: Dungeons & Dragons. And what better adventures to do than some of the early classics from back in the '70s and '80s when I first began playing?
I've taken these adventures from my childhood and adjusted them to fit into my current world of Angepa. I'm hoping to tie it all together as one large world where everything connects.
One of these D&D series is Indiana Jane & the Lost City.
One of the most absurd and even comical scares in history was that over Dungeons & Dragons in the early '80s. The game had been released a few years before, and many kids of my generation were fascinated by the imaginative nature of it.
I remember first walking into my cousin's bedroom to find a bunch of pencils and paper and strange looking dice around the floor. I asked where the game was and they said that was it. I didn't get it until about halfway through the game when I started picturing everything in my mind. Our whole party got killed, (that often happened in first edition,) but I was blown away by the possibilities.
Of course, since it became popular, the parents all had to panic over it, especially the religious ones, which was the community my family lived among. I even went to a religious school, and there were outcries for the books to be burned or buried and for kids to stay away from the evil. God forbid any of them should actually do any research and learn what D&D actually was.
There was even a TV movie made about it starring Tom Hanks in his very first ever role where he loses his mind to the game. I was excited to watch it thinking it was going to be a D&D story made into a movie. You know, something productive. But instead it warned about a danger that didn't exist. News specials followed, and warnings to parents. Of course, none of them actually did any research into what was going on.
Even 60 Minutes fell for the hype, doing a whole special where they described kids who had been "hooked" to the game that killed themselves. In every instance the kids had other problems, such as substance abuse or child abuse problems, or sometimes poverty or something like that. But no, it's the game that's the problem.
I didn't realize until recently how much of this was a generational gap issue. It took me a long time to accept the fact that the Baby Boomer generation is simply the laziest and most judgmental in a long time. They are absolutely the type of generation that would see something unusual and, rather than learn about it, they just pass judgment on it. Far from the social change generation they pretend to be, they were the generation that expected conformity, and adjusted the change worse than anyone.
The '70s and '80s were a period of fearing the unknown. The Cold War was winding down. Terrorism and the ambiguous war in Vietnam left people uncertain who and what to trust. That mixed with the strong religious ties that generation had made for a mixture of manufactured fears. Additionally, being a pre-internet time, learning the truth, or countering rumors took effort that was hard for anyone to do, especially a generation of entitled people who didn't want to do any research.
And thus, the fear mongering of D&D took hold, giving it the Satanic reputation it had. This video below gives an even better in-depth description of this fear, and of the generation gap that caused it.
I
started my series RPG Storytime on Youtube with the intention on doing one
season of four different shows every year.Each show would have six episodes per season.Star Trek would be in the spring, D&D
would be in the summer, Outbreak Undead would be in the fall, and Star Wars
would be in the winter.
Somewhere
deep down in me I knew this was unrealistic, but I hoped I would rein myself in
enough to make such a schedule possible.
I
didn't.So it's taking longer to make
the videos.But something bigger has
interrupted the schedule.
At
a certain point I found myself writing one series while planning a game for
another series while playing yet another and recording stuff for the
other.Added to that was another future
series I'm planning on doing, and some other games I simply like to play.It was getting confusing!
I
also discovered that the Star Wars game, which I admittedly overdid a bit, has
grown into many storylines, all of which need to be clear to the audience.In fact, they all have multiple storylines,
but the Star Wars one is the most complex.I started realizing that if I told that in 6 episode chunks, no one
would understand it.I didn't even know
what 6 episodes to play with one another.Added to this was the fact that I wanted to get Outbreak Undead out of
the way to make room for Deadlands.
So
the decision was made to run entire series together, rather than 6 episode
chunks over several seasons.Outbreak
Undead is first.Its first episode back
is today and will run until Halloween. There will be a break while I finish the rest of those episodes, which will come out in December.I'll have a
couple other games, then I'll be running my Star Trek series until it reaches
the end.
The
one exception I'll have to this is Dungeons & Dragons.I want to have some episodes come out when
Game of Thrones plays, so I'll have a few episodes of it in the spring.Then, once I've put out some other game
videos I've meant to edit for a really long time, I'll begin releasing the huge
epic of Star Wars, which will run until the end of the year, coinciding with
episode 9 in theaters.
I'm
planning on doing a separate channel that is only RPG Storytime which will play
all the videos in order without interruption.I'm not sure when I'll do that, but I won't start shows on that until
the last ones are finished.
