Brennen: An Introduction

The Dice of Life has a new member of its team, Brennen Reece. Brennen's our new indie/small press RPG enthusiast, and this is his story.

I'm Brennen Reece. I'm a professional jazz/blues guitarist, songwriter, aspiring illustrator, game designer, and recovering graphic designer. I'm married to Sarah, who is a beautiful woman and skilled artist, and have a 5-month-old son, Parker. We live in Alabama with our four cats.

When I was 9, one of my mom's friends had a son a few years older than me who was into comic books, Japanese cartoons and Dungeons & Dragons. We never played D&D, but he lent me comics; we spent hours upon hours drawing home-brewed super heroes.

On my tenth birthday, my grandmother took me to a toy store and told me to pick out whatever I wanted. I was drawn to the Dungeons & Dragons basic set. The red box with the guy fighting the dragon on the front.

For the next three years, my friends and I were obsessed. We made up heaps of characters, drew piles of maps, and read voraciously: fantasy, mythology, and history. We played constantly, even if we never really followed the rules, and only rolled the dice if it really, really mattered. It's fun to look back and think that we were early adopters of free-form dice-less role playing. The stories we told were awesome, and I still remember some of them today.

Almost all of my role-playing buddies began playing musical instruments around age 13. We still played together, but usually it was music rather than role-playing games. By the time we were 15, we were getting together to jam every day after school, but none of us thought about RPGs anymore.

Twenty years later, I was a graphic designer. I was fascinated by the advances in virtual worlds and computer graphics, so I started playing MMORPGS. I could never find one that could hold my interest for more than a couple of weeks, except for Star Wars Galaxies. I joined an RP guild, and soon found myself in the midst of all sorts of betrayal and intrigue. Slowly, the guild fell apart, I became bored with SWG as well, but I had been bitten with the role-playing bug again.

I thought about how much fun I used to have as a kid, and how I grew out of the RPG gaming circle and didn't know anyone who still played RPGs. I figured if people were forming guilds in MMOs, there must be a subculture of people playing online, therefore there must be some homegrown software to support that.

I Googled "online tabletop role-playing games" and found Fantasy Grounds and MapTool. Within weeks I was playing in a D&D campaign using Fantasy Grounds.

After that campaign fell apart, I joined a few other games, but none of them satisfied me so I decided to run my own. "Gothic Adventures" took place in a mythologized Transylvania called "Vorpavia" and used the d20 system. The campaign ran weekly for 8 months.

Players kept commenting that my GMing style was really unusual, and I didn't really understand what they meant until I'd played in a few games myself. First off, I didn't do any prep and improvised nearly everything. Secondly, I kept my combats to a minimum and preferred to concentrate on investigation. Third, when I was stuck I'd ask my players what they'd like to see happen, and I'd let them run NPCs (with a small bit of guidance).

I'm a tinkerer by nature. I can't leave well enough alone. I was very disappointed in d20 as a system, so I started looking around and house-ruling like crazy. I found a ton of alternative d20 implementations like True 20, Simple 20, Perfect 20, Passages, but none of them gave me exactly what I wanted.

And then I found FATE.

FATE turned me on to the small-press/indie role-playing games scene, and the concepts I've learned from it have helped me so much not only as a GM and player, but as a writer as well. I've been ensconced in the Indie gaming scene for a little over two years now. I'm constantly surprised by the creativity, thoughtfulness, and originality of these games.

Right now, I'm designing two games. "The Flowers of Evil," is a competitive board game/role-playing game hybrid which can best be described as "Lord Byron, Vampire Hunter." "Haunted House" is a game, believe it or not, about a group of strangers trying to survive the night in a haunted house, and I hope (crosses fingers) to have it finished in time for Halloween so I can get work on my NaNoWriMo novel in November without distraction.