Who We Are (non picture version)

Some four or five years ago, I decided that I wanted to put together another role-playing group. I already had one group that met pretty regularly for a fantasy RPG, the kind of classic hacking-monsters-to-bits-while-eating-Cheetos group that everybody reading this pictured when they read "role-playing group". The only difference between us and a bunch of disaffected youths was that we were less crippled by angst and had mortgages. Anyway, I decided that one giant batch of nerdery in my life was insufficient, so it was time to get some more rolling. Only this time around, I wanted to pull in an entirely different group just to get a different feel to the gathering. Changing up the atmosphere would allow me to try and recruit some folks who might not otherwise consider joining in.

Saska was an obvious choice, an old friend of mine from way, way back that I didn't get to see nearly as much as I liked. Megan and Heidi I wanted in the group because they were interested in trying RPGs, but didn't feel very comfortable in the other hacking-and-Cheetos based game. I invited Eli because I again didn't get to see him much, and I knew that he'd be up for trying some of the oddball games that I wanted to try. Cory is the only crossover from the other game that I play in, again someone willing to try out any RPG. Katy joined us later mainly to hang out, and Dan is the most recent addition to the group.

Well, things worked out great. We started meeting on Tuesday evenings, which was the only hole in everybody's schedule, and thanks to everybody taking it seriously, it has become a permanent fixture. We probably only miss four or so Tuesdays a year, and we always have a fantastic time. We played through the entirety of Beyond the Mountains of Madness, which was awesome, and have played stuff like Deadlands, Amber, Paranoia, The Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen and other stuff. But the other interesting thing going on has been the food.

Since we were meeting on a weekday, we really needed to feed people dinner to have a chance of getting any gaming done. If everybody ate at their own place and then came over, it would be tough to make it happen. Well, Megan and I have always taken pride in hosting things properly, so we did our best to make the food a real enticement. Lots of cheese and good bread ahead of time, nice wine, quality desserts and something good to eat for dinner became part of the usual routine. And as we started to have other folks host, they took up the challenge of making it a real event. These days, people pull out the stops - homemade cheese, ice cream, bread, baked goods, great wines, lots of fun snacks and a nice meal usually from scratch. We're still playing RPGs and having a great time with them, but I'm actually pretty convinced at this point we'd get together every Tuesday anyway just to eat ourselves into an ecstatic torpor. Heck, Katy is a regular, and she usually skips the RPGs. It finally occurred to us the other night that it might be fun to share all this with the rest of the world, because sometimes our experiments are pretty spectacular. So that's our story: an RPG and foodie get together.