Session 0

Hi! My name is Julia and welcome to my blog called Sessions + Sentiments; a website built on an idea and fine-tuned to function by my wife (thank you <3).

The "idea" came a lot from me trying to figure out how to take something I loved (Game Mastering) and raise it to the next

level. I toyed around a lot with the idea of becoming a paid GM or offering up my services to help another GM on their own project. Unfortunately, I kept running into the same brick wall: time. A fickle mistress that I can't quite figure out, even at the ripe age of 32. So, I landed here; a place where I could provide my own opinions, thoughts, and suggestions in my own format and on my own time.

Now that we have that out of the way, who am I to you? Why should you care about what I have to say? Well...I'm not quite sure (though I appreciate you being here anyway).

Let me give you my "resume" to start:

I've been Game Mastering since 2020 after playing two sessions of D+D 5e as a player and knowing I wanted to immediately get behind the screen. My career is in people management - construction specifically - where organizing, scheduling and "working on the fly" is the only way to succeed. My hobby before all of this was creative writing as early as elementary school. My first "book" was a handwritten horror novel about snow white I wrote in 2nd grade. (My parents probably should have intervened but I think they were just happy I was reading.) Since then, I've written several fanfiction novels between 100,000 to 150,000 words that were read by over 50,000 people (no, you will never know what they were). Does it mean I'm a good writer? Debatable. But it does mean I have a hell of an imagination.

What my plans are for this blog:

I'm looking for a place where I can put down my thoughts on being a GM and a player. On where I think I need to improve and offer suggestions to other people on how to run games better and be better players. I'm also hoping this can be a place of fun and exciting revelations, where conversations are possible and new ideas are made. I don't intend for this to be specific to D+D, though that is my primary experience and I will probably reference it frequently in examples.

Am I going to sound a lot like other "GM Advisors": Definitely, or at least at the beginning. Why start on a new path when one already exists? Blah, blah "path least traveled by" and all that, but the GM space doesn't really have a "path least traveled by", it's kind of just a large open field. I'm going to have similar opinions to people that have responded to things long ago and I might even reference them from post-to-post. I'm sure this will chance over time and morph into something that's unique all on its own but it feels only fair to try and address some of the low-hanging-fruit while I have it available to me.

In closing, I hope this can be a fun place for everyone. At the very least, I'll have fun listening to myself talk.

Looking forward to your sentiments.

I'll see you next session.

Julia