Casting Shadows

The standard prompt for Day 30 of the nearly-finished #RPGaDAY2024 event is ‘Person you’d like to game with.’ As usual, the versatility in this specific-seeming prompt is vast. For me, this whole month has had me thinking a lot about the now essentially homeless RPG Podcasting community that was supported by Anchor. While many of the podcasts continue, the functionality ties of the Anchor app which sparked or amplified many of the behaviors which built that community have not been fully replaced by alternate tools. Don’t get me wrong, the community is strong and it will navigate its way through the loss of easy call-in messages, shortlists of regular podcasts, simple guerilla podcast recording or full-on studio recording and editing, music support, segment support and praise options, and a message culture shaped by 1 minute recordings and the quirks of frequent callers. It will survive, and it will change. It will retract in some aspects and expand in others. But with that change, there does come a sense of loss – limited as it might be.

So it is, as I have been thinking about all of that and the effect it has had on #RPGaDAY2024 (almost entirely positive except for the dearth of call-ins) I have been listening to show after show and realizing again and again that I want to game with all of these people. The person that I want to game with is the Anchor Podcaster.

I have gotten to play with a few. I have enjoyed different games with Jason Connerly and Joe Richter, and with BJ Boyd, Karl Rodriguez, and Daniel Norton. There are many more, however, with whom I have gotten to interact, but not to game with.

What I would enjoy most is one of my sprawling shared GM campaigns that give everyone a chance to share their imagination and creativity as players characters and game master, perhaps in something like TORG or Worlds of Wonder – the sort of system and setting which easily presents a broad palette of genres and expectations. That or a sprawling and vibrant galaxy far, far away; and impossible old west that never was but should have been, a bold going where no one has yet gone, or if stars aligned – we could all be for one, while one was for all in a supernaturally swashbuckling France~

Wouldn’t that be amazing?