(i.e. Angela Murray, or Orikes13 on Twitter and Instagram)
I have been an author at GnomeStew since 2014 and recently (this year, in fact) became Co-Head Gnome with John Arcadian. I've also been the primary host and cat wrangler of the GnomeCast, or podcast.
My gaming journey started in 1986 when a new kid in high school lunch saw me reading a big, fat fantasy book and started talking to me about it. Pretty soon the conversation came over to, "Do you want to come play D&D at my house?" "DO I!? YES PLEASE." I very quickly became obsessed. Initially, it was all D&D, all the time. When I was in college, though, I fell into another group and there were other games, like Champions, Shadowrun, GURPs, and eventually Vampire and the rest of the World of Darkness.
I never GM'd during those days. There was no obnoxious, "Girls can't GM" with the guys I gamed with, but back in the 80's and 90's, the GM role was considered sacrosanct and only the most competent of players could run. About the mid 90's, my college group faded away. Since we were so dependent upon very specific people to GM, when they couldn't, we didn't play. I went without face-to-face gaming through the last half of the 90's and into the early 00's.
Then in 2003, I said screw this and sought out a new gaming group. It was through a D&D Meet Up thing and I did the smart thing and met the GM out in public. He seemed like your typical gamer nerd, so I figured I would give it a try. He was awful and horrible in many ways that would fill a whole other post. I mean, creepy and just a bad GM all around. BUT... BUT the players in his game were cool. I liked them. They seemed fun, so I put up with the game. Then in late 2003, there was a game convention downtown that I went to, where I played games that reminded me of what decent GMs are and good stories are, and there was no way I could go back to that awful basement with the creepy ass GM and his innane plots and all the NPCs named Bob, Jim, or Jim-Bob.
I figured that maybe I would have to just wait for conventions for gaming to happen. Then I got an e-mail. One of the other players from the awful game asked if I was interested in starting a new game that wasn't run by awful GM and held at someone else's house. I tentatively said yes until I found out that awful GM was not being invited (said player's wife declared that the creepy dude was not allowed in her house) and then I was like, "HELL YES."
This new group settled into a nice routine and then they started asking when I was going to GM. My insistence that I couldn't possibly GM was ignored and they kept gently nudging me towards the GM's chair until I finally gave into the right kind of peer pressure and ran a game. That was about 2005. And now I write for and run a blog that writes a whole lot of GMing advice and I do a podcast about GMing advice and...
Well yeah. Hi, I'm Ang.
