Luma's Blog and Grill

Over the years, we’ve seen many iterations of the classic Super Mario Bros. From heroic plumber, to doctor, to professional kart racer, to sports star, and even a pie factory worker, Mario’s got a massive grab-bag variety of games under his belt. Perhaps my absolute favorite genre involving Mario is the RPG side of things. Two series come to mind when I think of Mario RPG’s: the first is the witty Mario and Luigi series on the many different handheld devices throughout Nintendo history, but more pertinent to today’s article is the titular Paper Mario franchise. One day in 2005 for Christmas, I was given a copy of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, an innocent-looking GameCube title that I had passively seen demoed at a local Wal-Mart a couple weeks before but didn't remember much of. It looked kinda fun, but I had no idea what I was getting into. After a couple hours of playing on Christmas day, I was immersed in the story and combat mechanics. Within the first couple ho...

I started playing D&D when I was 8 years old in 3.5 Edition. My dad had spent several hours helping my brothers and I create character sheets, explaining all the stuff my child brain would end up forgetting 5 minutes later, and then delivering my very first roleplaying experience in a tabletop setting. Overall, the game went as well as you would expect for a family session in a world at the mercy of a small party of prepubescent boys with character sheets and an immature imagination: us at the table playing with the models we had painted the day before and not the game at hand, not paying attention until it was our turn, characters trying to pickpocket guards because they can, and otherwise testing the limits of the anarchy in a game with no real lasting consequences in the real world--you know, the average game. Nevertheless, I was so enamored that I wanted to learn how to create my own worlds and deliver the most-exciting narrative possible for my players. Several years late...