/hello

Jim greets you with a hearty hello!

Welcome to RoleCraft! My name is Jim Moreno, and this is a blog /point(ed) at all my fellow World of Warcraft (WoW) players who roleplay, and most especially for those who want to learn how to roleplay, this great game. I started playing WoW about two months after it went live, and since then, I’ve been learning about how to RP (my) characters as best as possible within the whole WoW realm. If you care to /listen a spell, I will do my utmost to /tell you all that I have learned and am learning, in hopes that you will also find something that helps you to fully enjoy your WoW roleplaying experiences.

Before I begin any discourse, a bit more about me and why I think I’m qualified to help those who wish to acquire more WoW RP knowledge and skills.

Like many roleplayers my age, I lost my RP virginity way back in 1980 when I opened a certain little red box containing the game Dungeons & Dragons. It was almost as profound an experience as the first time I read Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, though little did I realise it then. However, I do remember the /happy feeling that I had just stepped through a door leading from a tiny closet into another world. I was ten years old then. I’m now thirty-six, and I still feel that way whenever I happen upon a good RP session and when in the company of other RP’ers.

Since then, I have had the honor to play many of the D&D editions, some much more than others: Basic, Expert and Advanced rules; Dragonlance, Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms and Oriental Adventures settings; and been Player and Dungeon Master with such fantastic campaigns as Dungeonland, Against the Giants, Oasis of the White Palm, Ravenloft, Tomb of Horrors, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and so many others, including a few original worlds inspired by these games. One of my fondest memories is that of a campaign I made called Race of the Giants, which I spent no less than a year of writing and drawing to create. Sadly, it was never played, and has since been lost to the unknown, but I will certainly never forget it.

Throughout the Eighties, as what seemed to me to be a natural effect to being so closely involved with D&D, I encountered dozens of others who introduced me to a wide variety of pen & paper RPG’s. Star Frontiers, Cyberpunk, GURPS, Top Secret, Twilight 2000, DC Heroes, Gamma World, Car Wars, Star Wars (d6), and probably a few others I have forgotten about. Being a voracious reader, I also read every Choose Your Own Adventure and Sorcery! styled book I could get my hands on. As mentioned earlier, I also spent more than a few days and weeks writing my own material, so much so that to this day I still have a callous on the middle finger of my right hand.

Now, about a year before opening that D&D box, I had played Pong, my very first computer game. Through those same teen years, my gaming passion on the electronic medium also grew, though a bit slower than my pen & paper adventures. Systems like the Radio Shack TI-99 computer, the awesomeness that was the arcade, to the Atari / Intellivision / Colecovision / Odyssey2 / Nintendo gaming consoles, all played their part in keeping my love for gaming alive well into the early 1990’s.

Then came Ultima Online, and I haven’t been the same since. Suddenly and with much /victory, I was feeling a renewed sense of wonder with another RPG, except that, instead of sharing the wonderment with only four or five other people who smelled like Mountain Dew and Doritoes, I was now in a world with thousands of others just like me, and there’s no /stink! Well, there was my own to deal with, as UO sucked away the hours from the clock, along with my notions of bathing, sleeping, even of making regular trips to the toilet. Don’t laugh, I know many of you reading this can relate completely.

Well, UO lead to Everquest, which lead to Asheron’s Call, which lead to more EQ, then more UO, still more EQ, much more UO, which lead to Anarchy Online, which lead to Eve Online, more AO, more UO, and to finally catch up my story with current time, World of Warcraft.

To sum it up, I have /played roleplaying games of one genre or another, online and offline, on both console and computer, since 1980. I probably should’ve said that from the start, but then it wouldn’t been such a pleasant trip down Memory Lane for some, and a history lesson for others, eh? So, in an effort to insure my past 26 years have not been wasted (too late?!), I wish to use this blog as my virtual table, and I /invite every RP gamer who cares to to come, /sit with me, let us share our RP ideas and tricks of the trade. The Mountain Dew is ice cold, I have Dominoes on speed dial, and plenty of chocolate.

Jim beckons you over.