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I have always enjoyed reading about how others got into playing D&D. Many people that I have met have been playing for decades. That is not the case with me. Although I am old enough to have played in the mid-70s, I did not have that experience. Instead, you can keep reading for my origin story below.
It All Started at Work I used to work for a company that took school pictures. In our plant, we edited and printed the pictures. My department did the editing. Our lead had often talked about playing D&D online, and in the Spring of 2018, he asked several people from our department if we would like to play D&D with him. There were three other people and myself that were invited to join the party. One of the three had been in other campaigns with our boss, so he knew his way around, but the other two guys and myself had never played online, and I had never played at all.
At first, I didn’t think I would be good at roleplaying, and wasn’t sure if I would like it. But, after work one evening, we all logged onto his Discord server, and we went through downloading the Fantasy Grounds Demo from Steam.
My first character was a half-elf cleric In reading fantasy books, I had always been fond of half-elves, so the first character that I made was a half-elf cleric named Angelia. She lived with her mother, who was also a cleric, and taught her about herbs and healing. I won’t get into the whole backstory, but she came from a small village where she lived with her mother, who was one of the healers at the temple. She taught her about healing and herbalism, and her father would stop by the village when he was passing through, and she learned about her elven background from him.
Tragedy struck One night, her mother was at the temple and some barbarians raided the village, setting fire to many of the buildings, including the temple. Angelia could sense that her mother was in the temple at the time and she did not make it out alive, so she packed her meager belongings and left the village. Because of this tragedy, Angelia suffered from PTSD regarding large fires.
It was after that event that she headed east and ended up in Red Larch, where she met the rest of the party, and so we began a campaign based on Princes of the Apocalypse with additional homebrew elements added by our DM. I was totally hooked after our first session, and asked, “When can we play again?” Little did I know that I would die in our second session. Seems you need to equip your armor for it to work. Lesson learned. The first among many, and luckily he brought my character back (but not without consequences), and we continued on.
What would Angelia do? Being that I was new to roleplaying, I was unsure at first, and tended to back away from interacting much, when we came upon NPCs. I knew that I would need to improve my skills, and learned to not worry so much about looking dumb at how I reacted, but to just go for it. (This is a good tip for just about anything. If you just jump in, you may be shaky at first, but eventually being bold in the decisions you make leads to a much more interesting storyline.)
Trying to see if I might find some tips online to help me with my roleplay, I googled roleplaying and found the Fantasy Grounds College website, and I joined the Discord and found that although there were no roleplay classes at that time, I was able to learn how to use Fantasy Grounds as a player, and even as a DM.
A new DM is born I have since DMed my own One-Shots, and found that I really enjoy being both a player and a DM. I still need help in describing things in combat, but I’m getting better all the time. My desire to help lead to a Faculty role at FGC When I play D&D I am most often a cleric, because I love to help. This fits my personality as I love to help in real life, and I have been able to help bring people to FGC to learn about Fantasy Grounds in my role as FGC’s Social Media rep. I also teach classes and run games and help Founder Laerun with streaming on the FGC Twitch page. If you haven’t joined our community Discord, I invite you to do so at: https://discord.gg/Ew6nYyw
Would you like to share your Origin Story? If you are reading this and would like to share your Origin story, you can private message it to me as a .txt or .docx file, and if you give me permission, I will post it here on the FGC website with your Discord name as the author. My Discord name is LadyShel. If you’d rather email me your Origin Story, you can do so at – FGC dot LadyShel at Gmail dot com. Put “Origin Story” as the subject and let me know if I can post your story.
We at Fantasy Grounds College are fans of the Fantasy Grounds program and advocate its use in playing D&D and other RPGs online. We are not affiliated or officially endorsed by SmiteWorks USA LLC or Fantasy Grounds.
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