When I was younger I played a lot of games.  I got started in gaming with an introduction from my Dad.  He was an old school gamer.  He had these enormous hex maps and these little 1/4 inch square pieces of cardboard.  He would play by mail with other people and spend something like a year playing one game.  He was always receiving new games in the mail.  Everyone wants to be like their Dad a little bit.  This is like the one thing he did that was cool.  He would let me have games that he did not have any interest in.  Mostly the fantasy and monster battle games.  He was always more interested in historical and "what if" scenarios.  But, I was never very patient and I never read the instructions.  I played the game out in my head. In many ways it was not really a game.

  When I was older, my Dad took me to DallasCon.  Anyone old enough will remember that this was one of the few conventions that we had locally.  I was introduced to all sorts of gaming.  Table top miniatures, competitive board gaming, card games and lots more.  But it was here that I was introduced to role playing games.  This was very much like what I had been doing with my games at home.  Rules were not as important here, mostly created so that they could sell a rule book.  It was here that I had the most freedom to do as I pleased, to create worlds; and it was here that I spent most of my time playing.  I got into Palladium's role playing system.  Before you groan too loudly, we will only spend a short moment here.  Where I am going starts here.  In one of many many Palladium role playing games, there was a character class called Reformed Demon.  It was designed as a super powerful level one that actually got weaker as it increased in level.  The idea was that it was leaving its evil ways behind it and was becoming something closer to human.  Now, anyone who knows me knows that I was a messed up kid, teenager and young adult.  This idea stuck with me.  Many other sources strengthened this notion. Deadpool, Incredible Hulk, Leon the Professional to name a few.  I wanted very desperately to be to a good man, but I had no idea how.

  All of this culminated in a character I created as Storyteller in a game of White Wolf's Vampire: the Masquerade.  The party was this extravagant group of Gangrel and I love to bend and break system to create a vibrant environment and story, so the characters had gotten quite powerful.  Introduce a character that was quite literally built as they encountered him, wembler.  He simply started out as just someone indescribably horrific, that you had to make skill checks to look at him.  Then I had the idea that he was a magically constructed vampire as an experiment by the Tremere protagonist that they were facing off against at the time.  I gave him every weakness and strength of every clan, including Sabbat.  He was able to learn every discipline.  He was a monster.  But as the story progressed, he was not the bad guy.  He actually assisted the party and cleaned up the mess they had gotten themselves into.  The campaign we were running wrapped up and we were looking to start a new one.  During my planning for the next campaign, I built more back story for wembler.  He was trying to build a group to try and save the world from Gehenna.  He was trying to find a way to save as many people as possible. 

  I wanted this very much.   Even though we never played through that campaign, I remembered what I wanted wembler to do.  I remembered what I wanted for wembler.  I remembered what I wanted.
 
  I want to help the world save itself.