Storytelling is primary to being human, to being human here and now in the 21st century. Telling stories helps us understand who we are, what’s going on around us, and how to imagine a better world. Storytelling is also what separated the roleplaying game from the wargame, and why the former has exploded in popularity as people were finally able to watch game sessions from the comfort of their own homes. Instead of devil worship and all the other terrible things Christians made up, viewers found stories, and good ones.

My name is Aaron Marks, and I’ve been writing about roleplaying games in one form or another for about fifteen years. For the last nine or so, that’s been as the writer-at-large for Cannibal Halfling Gaming, a site I co-founded with my friend Seamus Conneely. ‘Writer-at-large’ is kind of a made up title, but it basically speaks to the fact that while Seamus administrates the site and is the official mouthpiece (the ‘Cannibal Halfling’, so to speak), I write most of the content. I’ve written one piece a week every week for the last nearly nine years, with maybe 6-10 exceptions. To be perfectly clear, I’m not planning on stopping now. The tabletop RPG hobby is still growing and still moving, and while I certainly risk being a bit cynical about game design and the commercial RPG world these days, there’s still a lot to write about.

As much as there is plenty to write about when it comes to what people are designing and distributing in the RPG world, my continued analysis of the hobby keeps on coming back to a universal truth. While I still can’t abide anyone who insists mechanics and rules don’t play a role (heh) in roleplaying games, the confounding element of the entire hobby is how little all the rulebooks actually relate to the experience you bring forth at the table. Sure, there are modules, and in the case of conveying a specific, static story, there are plenty of bad modules which do that. But when it comes to how people actually play and what’s actually interesting at a game table, it means that you and the people around you are going to contribute as much if not more to the game than anything in any book, be that core rules, supplements, or modules.

So what? I’ve made a stand in the great ‘System Matters’ war, what of it? Well, writing about roleplaying games and writing about the experiences I’ve had playing them has made me realize that there’s a fruitful void here, somewhere between RPG critique and literary critique. There’s so much to say about storytelling which is generative, which requires intervention and mediation between the author, the tools, and straight-up randomness. More RPGs are getting at the elements of story which make readers (and players) care. They’re demanding your investment in a character rather than building a scaffold for designing that character and then letting you choose whether or not you’re going to take the next step. Thanks to my experiences playing games which succeed in making me care, I’ve begun to feel that talking about the games themselves is insufficient.

Here you’re going to see me talk about storytelling, especially generative storytelling. That means fiction; I’ve been writing fiction at a much quicker pace over the last three or four years than the 30 or so before them, and I hope to write even more (and yes, share it with the world). It also means talking about story generation, both through RPGs and other methods. Of course I’m still going to be discussing RPGs, though the technical and theory discussions will stay over at Cannibal Halfling. Here there will be more discussion of games as in game sessions, about how story has come from those sessions and what worked. I’ll be doing some story generation through Tarot, talking about how we use that sort of symbolism to trigger apophenia. There will likely be discussion of story in other interactive media as well.

So in one way, this is primarily a fiction site. At least once per month I want to be putting up a story or part of a story, and hopefully people will be interested in reading. At the same time, I’m doing a lot of consideration about how fiction came back to me, what finally broke the dam on my writing. That means game analysis, generative storytelling, even shipping when it comes up. I know I’ve built an audience when discussing games; even if not everyone agrees with my takes we have a pretty sizable audience over at Cannibal Halfling. I’d like to think I can do something similar here. And if I do, if I actually get people reading, then I’d also love to share other folks’ pieces, show the world what tabletop games and other story generators can really do.

And if not, that’s ok. It’s New Wonk Media and, ultimately, I’m the wonk. If I’m so genuinely serious about telling stories, I’m still going to do it when no one’s watching.