It’s always exciting to learn about celebrities with RPG skeletons in their closets, and here’s a particularly fun one: the NYT is running an article about Joe Hill, an author recently outed as the son of Stephen King. It’s a nice piece about the challenge of carving out your own career in the shadow of a famous parent. But the really interesting item is way back at the top of page 3, where we learn that a certain roleplaying game factored into life in the King household.
What roleplaying game, you ask? Three guesses, and the first two don’t count:
The King boys grew up riffing on each other’s fantasies; in what they called the Writing Game, a literary version of tag, one brother would write for a few minutes and pass the story to the other. “We used to play Call of Cthulhu,” Owen told me, referring to the role-playing game based on the H. P. Lovecraft story. “Joe was always dungeon master. You had sanity points, and it was like, if you encountered Yog-Sothoth one too many times, you were crazy. You could only have so many adventures, and then you had to have a new character, and I thought that was brilliant.”
Truly, a finer summation of the Call of Cthulhu experience has never been uttered. It all makes perfect sense now. The Dark Tower series always struck me as awfully RPGish, in a very good way…
(Thanks to the M-Pire for the link.)
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Good post. Its always good to know what the celeb gamers are (or were) playing. Here’s a link to what Will Wheaton (of Star Trek NG fame) plays (other than poker):
~Adaen
Looks like the link got lost there, Adaen–do you mind re-posting it? Sounds interesting!
Oops….sorry. Here’s the post where I found it:
http://jeffro.wordpress.com/2007/03/23/munchkin-joins-car-wars-and-illuminati-on-wheatons-will-always-play-list/
Cheers,
~Adaen
Woops again,my html-fu needs some work. trying to type this while being mauled by wild ferrets…..er, my offspring. I’ll try to repost them later….or if you would be so good….
~Adaen
Not all of the HTML survived my attempt to fix it–my apologies. But the link does work. Thanks much!
No. Thank you.Cheers,
Best,
~Adaen of Bridgewater