Introduction
Hello to everyone in Internet Land. I'm Jack Kellum, gamemaster, worldbuilder, and amateur mythologist. You can find me @JackGogsbane on Twitter, and Of Gods and Gamemasters here and on Facebook, and on the Tube of You, and Tik Tok.. On Deviant Art, I’m Jackgiantkiller.
Welcome to “Of Gods and Gamemasters”, a website focused on tabletop roleplaying and LARP, from Dungeons and Dragons 5e to GURPS to Mutants and Masterminds, to Chronicles of Darkness. Future installments might focus on systems like FATE or Genesys, who knows. But throughout all of it, the main thread will be worldbuilding, with a healthy side of mining myth and folklore for stories, antagonists, themes and tropes.
As a bit of background, I'm a partially disabled stay at home dad, homeschooling my kids during this lovely pandemic. I've been playing and running games for 40 years. While this doesn't make me an authority, it does give me some insight. The fact that I've played all the systems above, plus, just for example, 7th Sea, Legend of the Five Rings, every edition of D&D, Pathfinder, Villains and Vigilantes, Traveller (the original), Star Frontiers, Gamma World, etc means I have a different perspective on game systems and worldbuilding than some others might. Not better, just different. I'm hugely inspired by the work of Tolkien, primarily when it comes to thoroughness...that doesn't mean my worlds are all Tolkien pastiche. I also love Norton, L'Engle, Le Guin, CS Lewis, Susan Cooper, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Zelazny, McCaffrey, and more recently Seanan McGuire, Laurel K. Hamilton, Kim Harrison, Steven Brust, Brandon Sanderson, Jim Butcher. Stories come from everywhere, and I think that an important part of being good at making them, especially for roleplaying games, is reading or watching a lot of them as well. I cut my teeth on Greek and Norse myth, and never stopped searching for more, from the tales of the Amatsukami to the ancient Sumerians. Faerie tales, from Grimm to Andersen and far beyond. Again, this is all just so you'll know where I'm coming from. I don't have any degrees, no claim to authority. I do my best to get my research right, but I'm bound to screw up somewhere. For our purposes, the specifics aren't as critical.
We're here to build worlds, and tell cooperative stories in them. Stories about heroes and villains, and people just trying to get by. Stories as gritty as Renaissance crime dramas about Thieves' Guilds, and as fantastic as riding a golden barque around the Sun. Stories, most importantly, about the characters your players bring to the table, and the world you built for them to have their stories in. Or built with them, in some cases. We'll get to that.
Welcome, Gamemasters. Let's talk about gods.
Our first real content article is up next,
“Gods: Filing off the Serial Numbers”
