An Opportunity for Community Creations

Hello to the two people who have visited this site in the last 30 days!

I write this blog post with exciting news to share and an amount of motivation I have not experienced for a while! I hope that I can continue to post with motivation such as this, and continue to have good news as this opportunity develops!

The other day, I was approached by my local community center here in Southern Vermont to host a role-playing game program for the local youth and young adult population! This was an opportunity that came out of the blue, but one that I think will serve as a great first step to where I'd like to bring Cingdom Creations in the future. There is still a lot of planning and coordinating to be done before I'm actually at a table with any kids, but my ambition has a tendency to take off without a long-term plan to guide it!

I have already been thinking a lot about what I want this community program to be and to offer, and I find myself overwhelmed with all the themes and lessons and morals that I want to explore with the young adults here.

Obviously, I have considered exploring Cognia with them, but I suspect that that is not the most accessible story with which to start a program such as this.

Thinking back on my own experiences having been a student and consumer of community programs, I have always valued the way that such programs can cultivate a sense of community and inspiration for societal action. For this reason, I think that I will GM a game where the children explore their local community as an RPG setting!

I recently read an article about community involvement that introduced me to the term "social capital" - referring to the pool of individuals in any given community that participate in development of that community. The article was long and certainly there was more to glean for me if I continued to read and reread, but one point that it made that I think I want to incorporate into this RPG program is the idea that the more people feel connected to their community the more they want to engage, and therefore increasing the social capital available to the community which, consequently, improves the rate and quality by which the community develops!

Having read this article, my first instinct was to create a setting based on the local community that shares a name and history with it! What this would look like then, is that my young players would literally be adventuring through their own town where I would get to present them larger problems that may actually be threatening the local community. My hope then would be to inspire action and dialogue about these issues with the kids playing!

I've not gotten much further than this one article and my initial reaction to it, but I'm very excited and curious to hear what others in the space think of this idea!

So, again, to the two people who have visited my site, what do you think!? Do you think a gaming program like this would be successful amongst the young adults here? Do you think kids would be interested in exploring their community in this way? Or would they just think it's lame? What other kinds of stories could I tell through play that might help grow their sense of community?

Thank you for your time to read all this!

Please, continue writing your own story, and be well!

Matthieu A.F. Fortier