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Library Gaming - introduction
Feb. 24th, 2025 08:37 am
In 2023 I started running TTRPG for the teen room at the town library. The librarians, bless them, wanted this to happen, knew that there would be some sort of demand for it, and did a lot to facilitate it. There are some places where their strictures and and metrics for success don't match with mine: they need to have an adult running the program, to be the ones managing the advertising, attendance and headcounts, and handle the scheduling of the room. All this 21st century stuff.
I wanted it to be the seed crystal of the sort of anarchic "we have this room every Saturday morning for kids to gather and game" that I had as a kid in the 1980's, with lots of the kids running their own games. This was wildly unrealistic.
Still things were popular enough that I had to split the overlarge group into two alternating week groups, and then the Teen Librarian (who was hired last year and is also a gamer who gets what we are doing) managed to find another adult DM so we were able to split into 4 groups. The other DM is running her kids in D&D 5e (or 5.5? or 5e2024? whatever it's called) running Curse of Strahd for one group and Ghosts of Saltmarsh for the other. while I am using one group to continue the 13th Age campaign that I started in 2023 and Knave, which I started this September, both with campaigns of my own design.
If you know anything about TTRPG game design, you'll see a huge gap between what 13th Age produces as a game session and what Knave produces. The former is geared completely towards epic heroic fantasy: the PCs are dialed into the worlds power structure as heroes from word one, and by 10th level are saving the world, with finely tuned rules to give fights emotional arcs and force resource management. The latter is ultra stripped down Old School design set up for player driven, random world sandbox play. I'm enjoying the heck out of them both. They tell different sorts of stories, but the kids are all super engaged with their stories. (When we did the campaign prospectus to determine which kids would be slotted into which groups all 9 of the players between my two 13th Age games wanted to stick with that - not possible, but a vote of confidence!)
I'm going to start using this space to chronicle what the kids have been doing, because I think saving these stories matters.
I wanted it to be the seed crystal of the sort of anarchic "we have this room every Saturday morning for kids to gather and game" that I had as a kid in the 1980's, with lots of the kids running their own games. This was wildly unrealistic.
Still things were popular enough that I had to split the overlarge group into two alternating week groups, and then the Teen Librarian (who was hired last year and is also a gamer who gets what we are doing) managed to find another adult DM so we were able to split into 4 groups. The other DM is running her kids in D&D 5e (or 5.5? or 5e2024? whatever it's called) running Curse of Strahd for one group and Ghosts of Saltmarsh for the other. while I am using one group to continue the 13th Age campaign that I started in 2023 and Knave, which I started this September, both with campaigns of my own design.
If you know anything about TTRPG game design, you'll see a huge gap between what 13th Age produces as a game session and what Knave produces. The former is geared completely towards epic heroic fantasy: the PCs are dialed into the worlds power structure as heroes from word one, and by 10th level are saving the world, with finely tuned rules to give fights emotional arcs and force resource management. The latter is ultra stripped down Old School design set up for player driven, random world sandbox play. I'm enjoying the heck out of them both. They tell different sorts of stories, but the kids are all super engaged with their stories. (When we did the campaign prospectus to determine which kids would be slotted into which groups all 9 of the players between my two 13th Age games wanted to stick with that - not possible, but a vote of confidence!)
I'm going to start using this space to chronicle what the kids have been doing, because I think saving these stories matters.
