Howdy from Lisa M!
O Hai, it’s Lisa M! I am a bit of a Jill of All Games, master of none. I got my start at geekdom with cartoons. Specifically, X-Men, Gargoyles, and Batman the Animated Series. For video games, I remember trying to play the old Ravenloft game, which I believe was back when we were running Windows 3.1. I say trying because I was a little too young to make much sense of it, but creating characters and killing the one enemy in the beginning was fun. By the time Menzoberranzen came around, I was able to play a bit more, and I loved it. When Baldur’s Gate came out, that was spectacular. By that point I had an idea what D&D was, and a desire to play it, but it would still be many years before I sat down for some tabletop gaming.
And that was at Running GAGG, SUNY Geneseo’s annual gaming convention. I met Margaret and Caitlin as students there (Caitlin – we had Rocks for Jocks lab together! Where I promptly hermited myself and didn’t work with anyone else ever. So.), and met Ang at my first convention. It was a blast. A friend who had been actively involved with the con for years set up my schedule so I would get to play a number of different types of games. Shadowrun, X-Men, Paranoia, and other systems I didn’t even know existed. I was hooked. Later that year, I went to other conventions, including Arcon, where I met Alana.
Since then, I have played in a few campaigns, as well as played in and helped run some LARPs, and branched out further. These days, I am a bit more of a casual gamer. Having recently moved, I am not currently in any campaigns, but hoping to change that. I am on a quest to replay Final Fantasy games 6-12, which should be interesting and, at the rate I play video games, will likely take several years. I still try to get to either Origins or Gencon each year. I mostly succeed.
Overall, I expect my articles to run the gamut. Ideas in the pipeline include: my quest for a gaming group; a guide to grappling (I was a wrestler in high school); researching characters before play; and probably a lot of things involving parentheses since I really like them.
Lisa's introduction to geekdom was the X-Men animated series as a child. From there, it progressed to raiding the quarter bin at the local comics shop, hunting for Elfquest volumes that she didn't yet own, and being completely confused by THAC0 in Castle Ravenloft and Menzoberranzen on the computer. A brief stint in middle school and high school of being anime-and-Final Fantasy obsessed followed. Slash fiction was read; terrible slash fiction was written. Tabletop gaming did not properly get introduced until college; from her first campaign (Shadowrun, playing a medic adept Medical Doctor who somehow managed to keep the Hippocratic Oath), she has had a fondness for offbeat characters (feel free to ask about the time the party got Gnomed). Nowadays, she enjoys Pathfinder, still replays Final Fantasy games on the regular, and recently spent over a year on Skyrim while still not getting all the trophies. Lisa would describe herself as a casual gamer, an angry feminist, and a lover of small gaming conventions. She is kept by one spoiled dog.
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