What’s in a name?

Juice the brick.

It’s a bygone phrase from a time when video cameras were huge and worn over your shoulder. They had batteries bigger than the media they recorded to. When the batteries needed to be charged? You would “juice the brick.”

For most of my childhood and youth, I spent a lot of my hours imagining fantastic worlds, the rules that shaped them, the denizens who inhabited them and the events that moved them.

As I grew older still, I fell in love with fiction. The terrifying creatures and realities of H.P. Lovecraft, the mystic adventure of J.R.R. Tolkien, the quirky science of Isaac Asimov. At the same time, another force pulled at me: collaborative storytelling and games.

It all culminated in a siren’s song that calls to all geeks at one point: pen-and-paper games, most popularly Dungeons and Dragons.

When time was infinite, worlds were created, lived in, scrapped, and remixed. At the time, the motivation was to win. The lessons that stuck were the imaginative landscapes we created and the stories my friends told with me.

As I have grown older and my friends have grown more far flung, the stories we tell don’t happen as frequently. However, there are still more stories to be told. More importantly, there is inspiration to be given and gained.

What will follow this post are tips, tricks, and case studies into the psyche and character of stories told and games played together. One could only hope that it would lead to someone else to experience the joy for the first time or rekindle an old love. Failing that, I hope it “juices” at least a few “bricks.”