These three started off my role-playing career. I dropped in on Pete's room in South Quad at the University of Michigan in the fall of 1976. They were playing an interesting new game called Dungeons and Dragons. I asked if I could play. They said no. There wasn't space in the game.

I decided that I could learn this tabletop "role-playing" game on my own...

In 1986, Anton came up to me at work and said "You're a sleazy GM. I need some help." He was referring to his role as Todd Enfield, in Twenty Years After, a murder mystery written by Roberta Berry. Anton was the killer. He showed me his character sheet. I was intrigued, and started to figure out the various plots in the game.

When the game was over, I asked how I could get into the next game. He said I couldn't. The games were always full, with a waiting list, and there was no way to get in.

Given that I really wanted to play, and that I'd seen one character sheet, I said "how hard could it be to write one?" I had a new Macintosh computer (128k memory, with a floppy drive and 9" screen), so I was all set. Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll was the result. Jill, who I was married to at the time, gave me the chance to write the game. When it was done, Jill and I called a bunch of friends to help play. Surprisingly enough, it was a success.

This was where Tim Lasko and Charlie McCutcheon got pulled into LARPing.

Communicating over the Internet, there was this person in Chicago who also wrote murder mystery games. (You can actually buy one of her early works, one of the boxed sets, in quality game stores.) She wanted to try out The Treaty of Berlin game. I sold her a copy.

GMs play parts in Berlin. Her character did something unique to the game, in conjunction with another player — Dig Freedman. The two of them are married now, in real life, and they hold Berlin partially responsible. It was the start of an amazing friendship.

My life had some very dark moments after my separation. Ryan was running this game called Elysium, along with John and Matt. He called me up and asked if I wanted to play, even after the game was starting up. He insisted that I should play, if only to get out. I decided to take him up on the offer. I asked for a character as different as possible from who I was, and worked with John to flesh out the part. Valjean Guy was the result — a womanizing Impressionist painter who lived as a result of his service to female vampires. I had to do some research for the role, and fell in love with art as a result.

In game, I played it as outrageously as I could, and there were some people who gave me the opportunity to really push myself. Tara Halwes, Carolyn Day, and especially Lisa Patacchiola and Mark Simpson will always be memorable as a result.

Talk about being in the right place at the right time. I was visiting Rebecca when Sean called to worry about one of his players dropping out of Sic Semper Tyrannis. The person was supposed to be playing Mycroft Holmes, one of the central characters in the game. Despite Intercon XI, I was still a little leery of the trip down south, and how I might be received. When I heard that Sean needed a detective, I decided that it was a part I would be interested in going out of my way for. With Rebecca's help, it was arranged.

I consider myself fairly reasonable at detection, as I have to be in order to plot murder mystery games. Mycroft is Sherlock Holmes' smarter brother — very big shoes to step into. I wasn't sure that I was up to it.

When I arrived at the game, I was thrilled by the reception I got; it was like walking into a room with a bunch of old friends (who I'd just met at Intercon XI and wasn't even sure of their real names).

The game rocked. With Dirk Parham and Gary Rumain as James West and Artemis Gordon, I felt like I was in a great episode of The Wild, Wild West, which I'd loved as a kid. With Denis Roma as John Wilkes Booth, and John Corrado, Jr. as President Johnson, I had my own Holmesian crisis to decipher.

On Sunday morning, I had a Mycroft moment, when I transcended my own limitations and cracked the case. It was sublime. I was hooked, and trips south to LARP have become a regular occurrence.

After Intercon XI, there was talk about running an Intercon in the Boston area. There were many who were interested, and several urged me to help organize it. I'd met a lot of people who were willing to help.

As the time drew near to organize a bid, it became clear that it needed a focus. I put together a bid. Less than six months after Intercon XI, I was the con chair for Intercon the Thirteenth.

In eighteen months, we organized the first of the modern Boston Intercons. Intercon the Thirteenth held the record as the largest Intercon for eight years. Intercon has grown significantly over time, all with great slates of LARPs filling the schedules, with lots of players, new and old. I am thrilled to have played a part in these efforts. (There are so many who deserve credit for making this happen.)

They wrote Balance of Power and gave me the part of Virgil Thorne, a Toreador painter. I hadn't painted anything since grade school. Nevertheless, I decided that if I was going to play a painter, I was going to paint! In the third game session, when the Toreador were hosting, it was set at an art showing. Between the works that I had painted to that point, and the works that Amy Reed had painted, we had a real art gallery.

The works continued, as Virgil's story continued in some very powerful ways. I ended up with almost twenty works. They hang in "Virgil's gallery", where you can trace Virgil's emotional state through the series of works. They would not be so profound without the play of Amy Reed, Kathryn Goldenoak, Scott Lutz, and Shawn Zimmerman, as the others involved in our intense little clan. Vortex, the image on the left, is the last of Virgil's works.

I met Brian at Intercon 13.5, where we were at odds in a game called Nepenthe. At the last minute of the game, I double-crossed him terribly. In the very next game, Intrigue in the Clouds, I found myself in just the opposite position, having to convince him that I really was up to good, that I wasn't the heinous bad guy I appeared to be, which was all true. That was the intense start to a stunningly brilliant game. We plotted our way through several difficult situations, surrounded by some of my all-time favorite LARPers. The result was simply the best possible ending to the game I could have dreamed of.

I invited Brian to come over to the US again, to play at the northern Intercon, and maybe to bring one of his games with him. He did, and he brought his friend AJ — and they've brought other friends with them over the years. I love our British contingent at Intercon — they are wonderful friends now, and they always bring some fabulous, must-play games with them.

We were the BYOG team for Intercon 15.5. You couldn't ask to partnered up with a better team of LARP writers. Over the span of the weekend, we wrote and ran the first run of Collision Imminent! That's probably why it's been run several times since — it may, in fact, be the most successful Build Your Own Game effort so far. I love that game!

I'd never written with such a big team before. It was an enlightening experience. The games that these people had already written! Wow! It was great to be in the room and in the mix with them.

This led to many other BYOG experiences...

Early in 2004, I played in Tales of Pendragon, and was just blown away by the Tale-telling structure of the game. On the plane flight back from the game, I started scribbling furiously. The ideas would not stop coming, and I wrote a lot — a crazy number of pages. By the time I was done, Across the Sea of Stars would fill two 4" notebooks of printed materials. It is a monstrously huge game. (Even with my duplex laser printer that prints two sided materials, the game is still huge.)

And it was produced in pain, as there was too much Real-Life™ involved during the process. However, after two years of work, we ran the game — and it was amazing to watch.

What's been even more amazing to watch has been the other authors who were influenced by the game. There have been several other wonderful games that were birthed out of their experiences from Across the Sea of Stars — and I've enjoyed playing as many of them as I can get into.

I've been a single parent for a long time, and the three of us frequently talked about LARPs and LARPing as we've gone about our errands. When Jules was away at school and now living away from home, it's been just Jordan and me.

Jordan doesn't LARP, but he reads everything I write. When I was thinking about The Tales of Irnh, I'd often have ideas as I was driving, so I asked Jordan to take notes. He asked questions along the way, some of them perplexing, but always very insightful, and often inspirational. Then he started suggesting things when I asked questions. It evolved into a series of very interactive and heady design discussions. We'd come home from those trips and I'd just start working with the latest notes. Jordan is responsible for many of the best ideas in the game, and gets and deserves full credit as one of the authors of the game.

It didn't stop there, either. We continue to have errands to run. He has brilliant ideas. He's turned into the best creative partner I've ever worked with. I create and write nearly everything with him now.

The Tales of Irnh has inspired me to write several other well-received Tale-based LARPs with Jordan. I'm very flattered that it also inspired other authors to take the format and experiment further with it. I've played in several of those games, which I've greatly enjoyed. I've also learned from their efforts, and Jordan and I've built some of our games using those ideas.

Across the Sea of Stars is the most GM-intensive game I've ever written. When the Lime Green Shirts at RPI wanted a big game for people to play in the fall of 2019, Stephen Kohler asked me if I would run it for them. My only problem was that TNT Productions was no more, so I didn't have my original GM team. Mel, Will, and Allan had already played and loved the game, so they volunteered to help GM it. I sent them the materials, and they dived in.

Jordan and I had also been talking about the game. I'd tweaked the overall framing for every earlier run; it had improved things, but I still wasn't satisfied. We brainstormed, finding the right framing and motivation for the epilogue.

The game ran phenomenally well, and everything fell into place. Mel, Will, Allan, and Rob were brilliant floor GMs, making my job the easiest one I've had across all the runs. I even dragged Jordan to Troy with me, and he was there to help me GM.

Mel, Will, and Allan also helped me to set up and run The Tales of Irnh at Time Bubble 2023. Rob saved me by bringing an important prop for my sanity, after I left it home. They are the best.

I'd signed up for the Wilmark Dynasty's On Location weekend-long LARP after I started my transition, but before I came out. I spoke privately with Elyssia explaining that I really wanted to play a female character, but didn't give a reason why, other than doing something different. In hindsight, it was probably pretty obvious.

Based on the character description, my first choice was to play the Grande Dame of Hollywood, the long-time leading lady of the silver screen. They gave me the role!

We were just starting the workshops to develop the characters and relationships when I came out. Everyone was great, and it was so much fun to develop Gwendolyn Mayfair. She was my first huge in-person female character as Jennifer, and there's more to say about that...