On Roleplaying Clubs
Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of ORC, the Open Roleplaying Community, an RPG club that I founded in Edinburgh and is going stronger than ever almost 3 years after I was involved. I always meant to share some of the knowledge I picked up from the ORC launch, and this seems as good a prompt as any...

So you're thinking about starting a new RPG club of some sort.
Cool. Before anything else, though, there's two starting questions you need to answer. Sort these ones out first, or the whole venture's going to be on unsteady ground from the word go.

Why launch a new club?
There are all sorts of reasons why you might be motivated to set up a new club. I wanted to create an entry (and re-entry) point into roleplaying for people who had curiousity but nowhere to go. Check your reason - make sure you have one. Then interrogate that reason. Is there another club in your area? Maybe you could better achieve your goal by adding another aspect to that club? More importantly, make sure you really do care about going for it. It takes effort and commitment sustained over a long period of time and your reason should be enough to keep you coming back week after week.

Bonus tip: "so I can have people to game with" is not a valid reason. What you want there is a group, not a club.

Why you?
Second main question. You have a good reason, but are you the right person to do this? Do you have the free time, the energy, the people skills, the support networks to make this happen? If you feel you're lacking something, is it an insurmountable gap or something that you can overcome? Be realistic about yourself and what you're doing here. It might be that this isn't the right thing for you just now. If that's the case, sit tight, and work towards the time when it will be.

All right - those are your first things first. Now it starts getting a bit more detailed.

In fact, enough of this "advice guy" register. The best thing I can do is talk from experience, so I'm going to rabbit on about how things went down with ORC, and then pull out some lessons from the experience.

It was 2003. I hadn't been in Edinburgh terribly long when what became ORC got underway. I'd dropped in a couple of times to the main other RPG centre in Edinburgh, GEAS, a university club, but GEAS is the home of long-term games and drop-ins usually didn't have any way to get involved unless they were very lucky. But that was fine; everyone there was nice, and I made some useful contacts I'd involve more later on.

The idea proper appeared when I dropped into a central branch of the chain bookstore Ottakars, and saw that not only had their RPG section increased in size markedly over the last month, but someone in the store had put up a "find gamers" noticeboard right next to the section. I was surprised - I'd never before seen a high street retailer take such a step. Asking around in the store I tracked down Claudia, manager of the SF/F section. She had been a gamer years before in her native Germany, and had built up the RPG section and decided to add the noticeboard. (I didn't know it then, but there was another key RPG person in the Ottakars chain - Dave Chapman, designer of Conspiracy X and the upcoming Doctor Who RPG, who was editing the Ottakars SF/F newsletter and always included some RPG content in there).

For many years I had been thinking about and working on ways to broaden awareness and appeal of RPGs. As an evangelist for the form, and I decided that this was an opportunity too good to miss. I met Claudia for coffee and offered to run a demo day for the RPG section - I would run short D&D demos all day in-store. Claudia was delighted, and the store was happy to have someone volunteer to help sell books, so it was win-win.

I knew I had to run D&D, because that was what the store sold. I had to pull some snazzy demo game experiences off, and I wanted them all to be 15 minutes from saying hello to sending people on their way having had a rousing RPG experience. I decided I needed several short demos, as modular experiences, in case someone wanted to stick around and try some more. I knew of one place with expertise in short demos: The Forge, whose legendary GenCon booth was renowned for packing innovative game experiences into incredibly short timeframes. I jumped on to the Forge and asked for advice, getting much help including from an Edinburgh local (rpgactionfigure).

We put up some posters in-store in the week prior, and I drafted a media release that Claudia fired off to local radio and newspapers - I don't think any of them ran it but maybe someone did. In any case, we did our best to get the word out. When the day arrived, I mostly spent the four hour window standing around alone in the book section. A friend from GEAS (marrog) turned up for a while to help, which was manifestly unnecessary but appreciated. But while there weren't a constant run of keen people, there was a slow trickle of interest. A few people came in specially because they'd seen posters; others just saw the signage on the day and wandered over. Most of the people interested were young teenage boys. I ran three demos during the day, and took contact details from everyone who wanted to give them to me, and handed mine out to everyone who'd take them, and there was enough interest that I thought it might be worth trying to do something again.

I spoke to about nine people all told on that day. It didn't seem like much at the time, but incredibly, of those nine people, seven turned into regular attendees at the club that was to come. So I was doing something right.

Lessons from this experience
This part isn't even about a club - this is about an event that became the basis of the club. However, you've got to start somewhere, and something like this is the way to go. Test the waters and take careful steps, and don't get too far ahead of yourself.

A second important thing is that I got lucky. I had been thinking about this for years, and I literally stumbled upon a golden opportunity. Your story will, of necessity, be quite different. Look for the chances that come your way, but you might need to create your own luck a lot more than I had to.

But the main thing to note was this: people were interested. I see a lot of people on forums and in blogs say that "pretty much everyone who would be interested in RPGs is already playing them". This is complete nonsense. My experience shows that there is an absolutely enormous untapped pool of people who would enjoy being casual players, and a smaller but still large pool of people who've only the vaguest idea about RPGs but, given the chance, will become for-real enthusiastic gamers. And that's what its all about.