{"id":260,"date":"2005-07-06T01:07:39","date_gmt":"2005-07-06T01:07:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=260"},"modified":"2005-07-06T01:07:39","modified_gmt":"2005-07-06T01:07:39","slug":"orciversary","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=260","title":{"rendered":"Orciversary"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><i>(A well-earned break from the G8 stuff&#8230;)<\/i><br \/>\nThe Tuesday that just ended, 5 July 2005, is the second anniversary of ORC Edinburgh, the Open Roleplaying Community here in Edinburgh.  When I leave here in the not-so-distant future, this is the most significant thing I&#8217;ll leave behind.<br \/>\nI&#8217;ve been into roleplaying games most of my life.  My aunt and uncle were to blame, but once I got a taste I never looked back.  The mix of creativity and collaboration seized my enthusiasm like nothing else.  Those two words are still fundamental to who I am &#8211; creativity and collaboration.<br \/>\nI want to spread the love of roleplaying games.  I&#8217;m an evangelist for the form, and I genuinely believe it offers cool fun you can&#8217;t get other ways.  I&#8217;m always looking for avenues to push RPGs to a new audience or in a new way.<br \/>\nWhen I came to Edinburgh I noticed a chain bookstore, Ottakars on George Street, carried some RPGs.  One day I went in and noticed they&#8217;d set up a small noticeboard to be used by gamers looking for people to play with.  This, needless to say, is a huge rarity.  I seized my opportunity, contacted the lovely woman responsible for the noticeboard, and asked if I could run a demo day instore.  So I did.  And it went well.  Not too many people came by but those that did became the core membership of what was to come.<br \/>\nWhat was to come was the Roleplaying Club, which inevitably became known as the Ottakar&#8217;s Roleplaying Club.  Eventually we realised we&#8217;d created one of those cutesy acronyms quite by accident, so ORC it became.<br \/>\nTwo years of regular Saturday meetings, with an all-welcome vibe and more young people than I&#8217;ve ever seen involved in gaming before.  With some tremendously creative folks stretching their creative muscles.  With a bunch of people learning new things about themselves and other people.  With a whole heap of fun being had.<br \/>\nIt&#8217;s been demanding.  Almost every Saturday for two years I&#8217;ve gone along to ORC.  For the first year, I structured my holidays around it, and carried a heavy load of organising gatherings and running games.  But since then it&#8217;s taken off, and it now runs itself fine without input from me.  It has hit a critical mass of people, acquired a niftykeen website, and generally matured into something really solid that should be on the scene here for quite some time.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m really proud of what I&#8217;ve started here, and I&#8217;m even more proud of all the people who took that small thing I kicked off and through their enthusiasm and effort made it so successful.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m going to be back in Edinburgh some day.  It&#8217;s my second home and I&#8217;m going to miss it horribly when I&#8217;m gone.  I hope and trust that, when I arrive here again, ORC will still be going strong.<br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.orcedinburgh.co.uk\/\">http:\/\/www.orcedinburgh.co.uk\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(A well-earned break from the G8 stuff&#8230;) The Tuesday that just ended, 5 July 2005, is the second anniversary of ORC Edinburgh, the Open Roleplaying Community here in Edinburgh. When I leave here in the not-so-distant future, this is the most significant thing I&#8217;ll leave behind. I&#8217;ve been into roleplaying games most of my life. &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/?p=260\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Orciversary<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8D9ZE-4c","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/260\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/morgue.isprettyawesome.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}