Dress Up and Make Believe

Hey all. Guess what? I like to role play. Bet you didn't know that, did you? With as much time as I devote to role playing, both table-top and live-action, I figured it was time to create a page for it. So here you go.

Where to start? Well, it all began as a little girl. I used to dress up and play pretend. Didn't we all? What an escape that was. I could be anything I wanted. An astronaut, a princess, She-Ra or Annie. Some people get over their fantasies of being someone else, but I never did. Sometime during my senior year of high school, I became involved with a group of friends playing AD&D. That stands for Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, for those of you who don't know. It's a game where you play characters in a fantasy setting, using various multi-sided dice to determine the success of your actions. My first D&D character is still being played, actually. She was a half-elf/half-human girl named Pandora. She was a fighter/theif in that world. Something of a rogue, and definitely a flirt, I rolled my dice to see if she managed to hit what she was attacking, or open the lock she was trying to pick, etc. I didn't play much then, but when I went off to college, I got more involved.

In the fall of '93 I started college at Illinois Institute of Technology. They had a gaming group called The Gamemaster's Guild. There I continuted to play AD&D, and was also introduced to a number of other game systems, including Torg and Shatterzone, which I played regularly, Shadowrun (which I never played but wanted to), and Battletech (which I never had any interest in playing at all). I also attended my first, and so far only, gaming convention in January of '94. It was Winter Fantasy in Millwaukee, WI. I got to experience both AD&D and Living City, as well as a Paranoia game that I enjoyed immensely. I can't really describe all these games I'm listing, but some were fantasy based, some were techie/sci-fi based, and others were just plain weird. Unfortunately, I left IIT shortly after Winter Fantasy and fell out of the gaming loop for a while.

In the fall of '95 I transferred from the community college at home to Michigan State University. There I once again met up with some fellow gamers, who introduced me to the Palladium and Rifts systems, as well as the White Wolf system and a game called Call of Cthulu. While I enjoyed the Rifts game, it was White Wolf's World of Darkness that really caught my attention. The World of Darkness contains five separate games: Vampire, Werewolf, Changeling, Mage, and Wraith. I began playing sit-down (table-top) Werewolf and Changeling on a regular basis.

Soon after gettting involved in role playing with dice once again, I was introduced to a new form of role playing: live action. Live action role playing, or LARP as it's called, involves dressing up as your character and actually acting out what you are doing rather than just sitting around and saying you are doing something. There are no dice involved in LARP. For any "challenge" that would require a dice roll in a sit-down game, we use rock-paper-scissors to determine who wins the challenge. I became actively involved in a White Wolf sanctioned LARP in East Lansing, playing Vampire every Friday night. I played with this group for about a year and a half before splitting off and helping to form another chapter in Grand Ledge. Unfortunately, this group fell apart due to some personal problems, and after a brief hiatus from LARP, I went back with the Lansing group, as well as playing occasionally at the Flint chapter at their Cam/Anarch and Mage games. In the spring of 2002, White Wolf decided we had a good thing and wanted it all for itself. In a highly political take-over, The Camarilla went from being a non-profit organization to being White Wolf's personal property. Because I felt my principles would be compromised by sticking around, I left the LARP scene and decided to focus on table-top.

In the world of table-top, I was playing with a group who met every Monday. We finished up an awesome game of Trinity and are moved on to d20 Star Wars. Before that was an incredible game of Mage that has us all begging to bring those characters back in a new campaign. Our Monday group has since fallen apart and a few of the old players and some new ones are now meeting on Wednesdays. We're play whatever strikes our fancy, for as long as the current GM wants to run.

Now I've been dragged back into the world of LARP. These are independent games, not affiliated with White Wolf, and run by friends. There is a weekly Camarilla Vampire LARP that is run on Fridays that I try to make as often as possible, and Josh is now running a monthly Sabbat Vampire LARP at our home one Saturday a month. Whee-fun!

I am also a member of the Silverleaf Renaissance Faire Gaming Guild. Check out their homepage for more info.

Active characters and their game systems:

Previous characters being kept around for possible replay:

Please feel free to check out the following links for more information on various games: