My First Steps as a Storyteller

So far being a storyteller has been one of the best new things I have tried after turning thirty! Certainly it beats the karaoke singing and most other ways to spend time.

Love for Mythical Creatures

I have played tabletop games over 15 years solely as a player. Jumping into the role of a storyteller was not easy. Before that I had only vague idea how to design and run a game. From outside it seemed people just wrote some notes, read a story and bought a rule book.

What pushed me into trying this was my love for fairy tales. In 2016 I got my hands on the first edition of Changeling: The Dreaming, a tabletop RPG. It was love at first sight! Even though I had been familiar of the other World of Darkness games, this was a novelty for someone who started playing in the 2000s.

In my youth I had read my fair share of local mythical creatures, mythologies (Greek & Finnish folk tales) and all the fantasy books our local library had in its shelves. My favourite characters in Finnish stories were trolls, Finnish näkki and peculiar house gnomes. CtD is a great way to make those stories come alive.

A Leap of Faith

I asked few people from my game association about their experiences on CtD. Some had played it few times, most never. Nobody was really as excited as I. Noticing that meant it was up to me to start running this game.

At first I really didn't had any concrete methods how to build a game, so I wrote up loose ideas. I really like to be prepared well in new things, so I didn't trust to run a game based on them. Finally I got a taste of CtD in a form of a larp session in a local game convention. Being there gave me experience on the different Kith types and what they do, as well as the concept of CtD. After that it took just few weeks to put together my first one-shot game.

Running the first one-shot game for people I had known years went somewhat well. I had prepared prints that helped to create the mood of 1920s, and also to help give clues. I remember being nervous about improvising, which nowadays isn't such a big deal. The session itself had some hicc-ups at the end, but the overall good mood of the players encouraged to move forward.

My First Campaign

After the one-shot I changed the edition of the game for my first campaign. The 20th anniversary edition had come out, and I craved for more detailed information on some things. I guess I was a bit over-excited to go on, and could have used more time on preparing! However jumping into campaign gaming helped to figured out my strengths and weaknesses better than mere planning. 

So far we have played about eleven sessions before the pandemic. This has been great, and with thyroidism sometimes unexpected path to being a storyteller. The break during pandemic has given time to catch up on how I want to continue to make the best of the time spent together with players.

All in all Changeling: The Dreaming is a game that fules my imagination. Running games myself has changed the way I feel between the game sessions and during them. I am definitely more involved in for this hobby. What really seems to make it worthwhile is seeing how imaginative the players are and how they carry on the atmosphere and story!

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