Well, specifically, Role-playing shaped me.

It has grown me as an artist, an actor, a writer, a world builder and a storyteller.

I spent many years playing Dungeons and Dragons with my friends. We even played IN social Studies behind my teachers back. D&D flourished my imagination and ability to create characters.

I played D&D through Middle and High school. I played with a great group of friends in college, one of whom, John Burris, I collaborated with to flesh out his system, written on 6 note cards and created out own game that replaced D&D at Edinboro University.

When out of school, I played more D&D, more of our own game, named Backwaters of Mysticism, Call of Cthulhu, Feng Shui, Deadlands, Star Wars, Warhammer 40k (ok, not a RPG, but I use a lot of it in my comics). All these worlds they created for their games showed me what I needed to do to create the world in which all my comics exist.

And, yes, ALL my comics exist in the same world. Phineus, Kris Kringle, Creephunter, even Bastard Who. I’m kind of obsessed with doing that, for some reason.

Ironically John and my own RPG doesn’t have a world. We created it so that it would fit into any world you wanted it to.

Many of my Phineus stories came from those games. Rugnar and Maynard are both characters I played in Backwaters. The Kali Saga was based on a campaign run by John, in which I played Brother Maynard. And yes, he did get squished in that one, too.

Many comic creators are also avid gamers. Adam Black, creator of Locus is working on his own game. Brian Babyok, creator of Weirdlings also plays D&D, religiously.

I am toying with the idea of running some Skype based Backwaters games for my fans. As I gather interest and ideas I’ll let you know.

Games are good for comics.

Barry