"Playing fantasy role playing games when you're a goblin makes about as much sense as playing Goat Simulator when you're a goat."
- Me
Just so we’re clear on who it is I am, I’m the Supreme Marketing Goblin at Beadle & Grimm’s. I plan the strategies and execute the finely honed machinations that convince you to spend money on our products.
I am, to be clear, the villain.
But I’m a goblin, so it comes with the territory, being that I’ve been trained for subterfuge since a young age. When you’ve got 13 siblings and dad’s job is guarding room 8D on level 2 of the neighborhood dungeon, you get quick and vicious or you go hungry. But there was, when I was young, room for optimism. Dad always told me that the neighborhood dungeon was “Good, steady work, and there’ll always be a place for you here.” But then the layoffs hit, and his entire group was replaced by rust monsters. More edgy, they said. More tactical opportunities they said.
And besides, they said, everyone is bored with goblins.
But here I am coughing up material best left for my memoirs, which, unlike this blog, I can charge for.
So back to the present. I’ve been marketing here at Beadle & Grimm’s for almost 6 years now, and I’ve never played TTRPGs. I never saw the point, honestly. My opinion, when asked, was that playing fantasy role playing games when you’re a goblin sounds about as appealing as playing Goat Simulator when you’re a goat.
But after a fair amount of badgering from the junior marketing group, and some admittedly vague promises of compensation from the founders, I’ve decided to try my hand at running one of these games. After trashing around a bit for something that fit our personalities, and frankly wasn't going to get us in trouble with various and sundry corporate overlords, we settled on Wizards and Weasels, an older game that remains in print, barely, nurturing an increasingly grouchy and geriatric fan base.
And it has to be me running it, because all the junior marketing hacks that want to play are terrified (rightly) of running a game with me in it, lest they don’t give me an adequate amount of loot, or, god forbid, kill or otherwise inconvenience a character that I was running. Character death is recoverable. Career death is not.
So this then, is my story, or blog I guess, of running these nitwits. Specifically, the nitwits in the junior marketing department, meaning they are all eminently replaceable or fireable if they really get under my skin. Their names, and job titles at the warehouse, for those keeping track:
- Fish Faced Phil - Analytics
- Hammer Head Harry - Coffee and Donut Procurement
- Sneak Attack Sally - Copy Writer
-
Useless Lou - Office Chair Maintenance
As for their character names, and what those characters actually are, we find out next week, when I do my first “Session Zero”, whatever the hell that is.
See you then.
