Gaming has been a hobby of mine since about age seven and a passion for years now. The fantasy elements, collaborative storytelling, digital beeps and boops, and vibrant geek/gamer culture has something lurking in it that picks me up and moves me. I'll spare you the details of the video games I'm playing (hint - my favourite Pokemon are...) but I will share a few games that I've made - from Flash to twisted fiction.

I took to Flash and ActionScript pretty well and, at the end of my second week of classes, cobbled this together with a bit of help from google and my instructor.

What the heck is this? Well, let me share some of the details of a bizarre campaign I put together a few years ago while sprawled half-senseless and ill on the couch as my youngest watched the utterly abominable Thomas and the Magic Railroad movie three times in one day.

The resulting creation is a gaming campaign of steampunk horror featuring Thomas the Tank Engine and friends as the villains. It's set in a modified Iron Kingdoms campaign setting from Privateer Press and tells the story of the fall of the world. Emerging from the laboratories of an engineering genius known far and wide as The Fat Controller, a line of smiling-faced trains with Thomas at the head are introduced to the world with all the lack of appreciation technical brilliance usually receives.

Months later cities begin to fall, struck down and conquered by forces unknown. For weeks nothing is heard, then rumors begin to reach the world. Rumors of trains - appearing from nowhere, shattering defences with brute force, and disgorging armies of cruel soldiers into the soft underbelly of unsuspecting cities.

Worse than that is the word on the street -The Fat Controller is here, riding an army of iron to drive the world into a new age. He is unstoppable, the only choice is to join him and his ally; the smiling blue-clad Mr. Conductor.

What's going on? How can this be? Can anybody stop this mysterious army?

While utterly bizarre, and probably perverse in ways that shouldn't be allowed, this campaign has taken on a life of its own with a table of parents and kids clashing with the likes of Thomas, fleeing in terror from Mr. Conductor, and slowly discovering the truth about what has befallen the Iron Kingdoms.

I have even gone far enough to create a trailer for the game by taking the original theatrical trailer, recutting it and rebuilding the audio to end up with a somewhat disturbing video.

If you're still here, check back in a bit once I've had time to flesh this out with more campaign details. Of interest to the hardcore out there, and as something I'm rather proud of, the backstory and game mechanics of the villains all jive 100% with the existing D&D 3.5 rules and cosmology. The plan is to package it up as a .pdf and make it available for download so bear with me.

In the interim, I kicked off a fairly standard Dark Sun 4e campaign that ended dismally due to logistical difficulties. Then I launched into a Mega Man II-inspired gaming campaign. That... well, that's a long story. I hope to run it again sometime and, in the interim, have plans in the works for mapping more iconic children's properties into gaming campaigns. Next up? Sesame Street and the Muppet Show invade Gamma World!