I've played many strange characters from behind the screen. At this stage, I don't really think about how weird or not they are, just about how they think.

One of my campaign world's central notions is that it has a very deep history. It's had sentient life for about three and a half billion years. There's also the possibility of immortality. So over that span of time, quite a few creatures have become immortal. Immortals are weird anyway, but some of them are downright alien.

Davonian life is fecund. Species, as Linnean taxonomy usually uses the term, don't quite work. It's not the case that anything can crossbreed with anything, quite. Dragons can, though, and once a few of them have, normal processes will carry some of that capability down through successive generations. So anything that had an ancestor intelligent enough to appeal to a dragon has a chance of having some draconic blood, however small a fraction. And fiends and celestials, of course, have the same capability. So many of the immortals are of mixed blood.

The upshot of this is that there's a creature out there who has lived for two billion years, will never die, and is half-dragon, one quarter coral-starfish, and one quarter intelligent tree. He's lived long enough that remnants of his birth culture's artworks are turning up in igneous rocks. Every intelligent thing on the planet younger than him is probably a descendant. How do you play something like that?

I've done a lot of thinking about this, and arrived at the idea that any immortal who is out and about, rather than dormant, hiding, or in stasis of some kind, has self-selected for the ability to deal with and understand the world as it is. So while they're alien, they're at least used to getting on with humans, or their immediate ancestor species. That makes it one step easier.

Fiends, celestials, and the like are easier to play in many ways. They have aims that are more or less comprehensible to humans, and they're busily getting on with them.

Second, I don't completely have to understand them to depict them, any more than an actor playing, say, Winston Churchill, needs to understand everything of Churchill's life and thinking. And in a lot of cases, one or two strange habits of mind can account for a lot of alien-ness.

For instance, there was one relatively recent race who left very little trace in the world, called the Siroose. They left little trace because they did very little; their major cultures valued indolence, cowardice, and efficiency above all else. That alone makes for a very alien creature from our point of view; a paranoid couch-potato who occasionally acts very swiftly and decisively in order to ensure it can go on being paranoid and stationary. Playing a Siroose is therefore weird.

A lot of my thinking on the immortals - and indeed, deep history as a concept - comes from Vernor Vinge's books, A Fire Upon The Deep and A Deepness In The Sky. The interactions between different species there, and the communications between them on what looks very like usenet have been a massive influence.

And I take a certain comfort in thinking that even in the selection of weird creatures I've played, I still have things as peculiar as the Tines and the Skrode-riders to reach for.

Once more, the reversal: some thinking about rewards in games from a GM point of view. There's a very simple formula to this: the more mechanical the game, the more the rewards of loot and levels matter. The more story-oriented the game is, the more outcomes matter. This is a pretty stark difference between my campaigns at the moment.

The Fate games, though, and even our older D&D games, from 2nd Ed through 3.0 and 3.5, have always emphasised story rewards. We stopped tracking gold coins in possession very early on - somewhere around 6th level in the original 2nd Ed game - and by this point, we only keep an eye on signature pieces of equipment. Levels, or their equivalents, come slowly, and we're still experimenting to find a rate of advancement that's comfortable - Legends of Anglerre's one skill point per session as in the rules isn't particularly balanced for a regular weekly session in a long-term campaign.

Indeed, material rewards tend to get in the way a bit in the Fate games. They're extra material to keep track of, and there's already plenty of information floating around. It's a natural thing, in a D&D game, to go digging through your character sheet's appendices and find that you actually do have a Staff of the Nine Winds or whatever; it's a lot less so in a Fate game where you're more used to considering how you can bend an aspect to what you want it to do.

Instead, we work a lot more with the story rewards. For characters in organisations, promotions work very well. For a lone artist, an offer for an exhibition is a very nice thing to have in there. New apprentices, family members turning up, a chance to talk to a very notable NPC, all of these work as rewards, and then there's the slightly more meta-game idea of material the player developed entering play.

This kind of thing can carry a lot of meaning even in the more equipment-and-points oriented games. Some years ago, an offshoot campaign, run under D&D 3.0, had a player character called Athel. Athel's player is a military history buff, so he took great pleasure in drawing up plans of the triangular fortress the group were building in a border marches area of the campaign world. Soon after the fortress was built, events conspired to take the group away on a long trip across the planes, and they didn't get back for more than year in-game. By the time they returned, the fortress had had a small town built around it, and it was becoming one of the regional capitals of the new province - and was called Athelstown. The player was floored when this appeared on the map, and he still talks about it now, the best end of ten years later.

All these questions are aimed at players, you know. In my experience, GMs are much more likely to be blogging about their games... so I'm turning this one around again, looking at enemies I've used. Or, rather, why they're enemies, and what they do.

Irichallanak (detailed in Shades of Grey) started out as at least a potential enemy, before he became an ally. Avaldan, a character with a history long enough to feature in three eras, was very definitely an enemy when he first appeared. And of course, the enemies that didn't become allies tend to become dead instead.

In my campaigns, I don't like to designate "enemy" NPCs. I find it leads to those NPCs eventually basing actions on "because I'm the bad guy", and whatever about anyone's cognisance of being evil or otherwise, few people think of themselves as the "bad guy". So instead, enemies are a more fluid category of characters whose intentions are opposed to those of the PCs. Sometimes they want to rule the world. Sometimes they want to rule some small part of the world. Sometimes, there's someone they want to kill, for whatever reason. Or there's something the player characters have that they want. Or they're conservatives, when the party is trying to change things, or radicals of one stripe or another when the PCs like the status quo.

I prefer rational characters, so generally, my NPCs will go for subtle routes to achieve their objectives first, negotiation second, and only go for violence if it's a last resort. But there are some who are not rational - which I've some difficulty playing, I'll admit - and there are some who have gone through the rational process and concluded that direct violence is the only workable answer. Those two kinds will find ways to attack, straight off the bat, and generally, anyone who attacks gets classed as an enemy straight away.

Something that's never really apparent to the players - and deliberately so - are the interactions between these NPCs. Even as the PCs can make allies of someone by negotiating to a mutually satisfactory position, so too can people whose aims they oppose. So at any given time, there are alliances being formed and broken all over the campaign world, some of which are aimed directly at the player characters, and some of which will be much more incidental.

And sometimes, too, those alliances go wrong. Several times, there've been situations where it was clear to me that two current enemies could no longer cooperate, and one of them had to take out the other. I do struggle a bit, sometimes, with how to work that into player knowledge. "In a place far away, one chap you've never heard of has murdered another chap you'd only met once, and who you didn't even know didn't like you. Well done!" - it lacks a certain something. Mostly, they find the remnants of conflict, bodies or just abandoned strongholds, and have to try to work out what happened. Often, a mystery like that can hang around for a while, which isn't a bad thing.

I've little enough interest in the "betrayal" trope so common in fantasy. But sometimes allies, or apparent allies, have their interests diverge. This happened, certainly, with a fiend called Tamergrin, in the Kingfisher's Way campaign, and he definitely turned out to be an enemy. I'm not terribly sure, though, that anyone was particularly satisfied with that outcome.

I think at heart, many of us are happier with honourable enemies becoming strong allies, and dishonourable enemies becoming dust.

To be honest, I have difficulty in conceiving how someone could not make this distinction - and I suspect that the only people who think this happens aren't gamers. And they're probably the people who think that the actions of fictional characters represent the opinion of the author, too.

There's a strip in Knights of the Dinner Table where BA is saying that he spent a long time on the orcish threat gestures, something that has plainly never entered play. That's me. I know stuff about the geology and climatic zones of Davon that will never, ever enter the game - but it gives me a considerable sense of satisfaction to know them anyway.

I do try not make the parallels clear. I feel it's jarring if someone can say, "Hang on, this happened in Spain in the 17th Century!". The material I'm currently studying in a History module, for instance, concerning the Wars of Religion in France, likely won't be identifiable when it appears in the game. But it will appear - though probably separated into distinct pieces, with a weak monarchy there, rapid switching of allegiances over here, and maybe two enemies with the same name in an entirely different campaign.

There's also the observation that if you put the events of real history into a game, stripped of the national identifiers and half-known narratives that surround them, players might well refuse to accept that NPCs could be that stupid, arrogant, or evil, and go looking for the demons or compulsions that are clearly behind such actions.

Likewise, this year's entire sociology module will reappear at some stage, chopped up and made into a sort of narrative soup. Hegemonic ideas have already made an appearance; that was too juicy a concept not to press into immediate use. Effects on societies of inequality will be another one; I've already done a lot of thinking about the effects on human societies of long-lived elves and dragons, and how those creatures' societies would handle, say, inheritance.

News and current events are an obvious thing to add to the mix. I keep notes for myself; abstracted out so that I don't connect them with the real events, and look back on them every couple of years for stuff to include. I don't know where "weak leader establishes power-base by clever use of gutter journalism" came from, nor "personal beliefs cause rift between politically aligned families". But they're good things to integrate into a game world.

I've done a lot of reading in geography and economics over the years, and that turns up in the games too. Climate science, chaos theory, causality, all those are elements from the pages of New Scientist and Focus that have landed here and there.

I can tell reality from fantasy perfectly well. But I get great entertainment out of bringing one into the other anyway.

Quite aside from the fact that I disagree strenuously with the article, this is one of the things that drives me spare about computer game reviews. I'm sure it happens in other fields as well, but I don't read many film or book reviews any more. That is, the reviewer plainly doesn't like the genre. Jonathan McCalmont doesn't like open world games. So why have him review one? It seems clear that he'd be much happier reviewing something with a wholly pre-written storyline - there are excellent examples out there like Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age: Origins.

Indeed, it's worth arguing that unless you like the genre, you can't identify good or bad within it. Broadly speaking, I'd be hard put to identify good or bad country & western music, because it all makes me grind my teeth and look for a hammer.

But in this case, McCalmont sits down, ploughs his way through the game, and then proceeds to whine through a long article (as web articles go), wherein all the points can be summarised as "I don't get it". If you don't get it, a) play something else, and b) review that instead.

Each has their place. I like dungeon crawls, because I don't have to think after I've written the scenario. I like mysteries, because it's often fascinating seeing how players and characters go about solving them. I like freeform roleplaying, because it immerses me much more in the campaign world.

My main groups don't do dungeon crawls much. That's mostly reserved for the D&D 4E crowd, although one of the main campaigns is venturing into the Underdark soon, to try to work out what's happening down there to push all kinds of unpleasant creatures to the surface. Even that, though, won't be the open-the-door-roll-for-initiative-kill-the-monster-and-grab-the-treasure routine; the group just doesn't work that way. On the other hand, the 4E game is essentially a series of dungeon crawls, some more blatant than others. They're entertaining, but they're... not really RPGs, more sort of a scenario-based tactical boardgame. And that's ok, too.

Mysteries underlie a lot of my game sessions. There is some piece of information that's being sought, or there are unexplained events that need to be stopped. Someone has to be located. Unknown information, and the assembly of new facts into a coherent (or semi-coherent) whole has been a major focus of most of my longer campaigns, so mysteries are important to me.

Freeform roleplaying is a fuzzy enough term; I'm choosing to interpret it as conversations between PCs and NPCs taking most of the session, with a minimum of dice-rolling. In any campaign I've ever run, this becomes the default play-style for a good chunk of time toward the end. It can crop up earlier, as well, of course, and I find that the decisions that guide the rest of the campaign usually happen in these sessions. Players from Spellbound still recall the long session of discussion about who to give a particular artifact to; they were down to two choices, which looked about equal. Eventually, they settled on one. Had they given it to the other, I'm pretty sure the entire history of the campaign world since would have been different, and involved a lot more in the way of smoking ruins and glowing craters.

Political intrigue has been a varying factor. Sometimes, it's an absolute mainstay of a campaign, usually in the early-to-mid stages where the player characters are still working out who's in power, and who's not. And sometimes it never comes up at all. It seems to depend on active decisions by player characters, rather more than most styles of game, and that varies greatly from character to character.

Economic maneuvering has never been a major factor in any of my games, although it's starting to appear now in the D&D 4E game. It requires a few things in the system - specifically, explicit tracking of equipment and money - so any game that has, say, a Resources skill can't run anything meaningful in that field. Within the rules constraint, there are two ways it can come up; a player character can decide to get rich, or to take down someone whose power depends on money, or alternately, it can be the background reason for missions and jobs the PCs are sent to do by some mentor or employer. The 4E game is headed in that latter direction.

Creeping horror is a thing I've used touches of here and there. There are two major ways I've approached it; one is the subtle (or not so subtle) implication of really physical, gross aspects of bodies and interactions. This, I find, can creep players out, but can also result in them being too grossed out to actually continue playing. The other approach is the more cerebral; is this NPC actually on your side, or has he been stringing you along? Betrayal is a very visceral horror. I use it lightly, though - it's such a staple trope of fantasy that I don't find it all that interesting anymore.

The action mission is a very simple concept - go here, do this thing, fight if need be, come back when you've achieved your objective. There are a million and one episodes of TV shows based fairly directly on this, from Charlie's Angels and Mission Impossible to Star Trek. It's well suited to episodic play, and also to situations in which the player characters are members of an organisation that can direct their actions. This gets a lot of use in my main campaign at the moment, and also in the 4E game. It's possibly too broad a category to really be useful, though.

Swashbuckling rescue is a specific kind of action mission, but it seems to have its own tropes and rules. "Go here, rescue this person, come back" is obviously the core, but there's a lot of swordfighting on stairs, swinging on ropes, swinging on chandeliers, and climbing up balconies implicit there too. I've mostly encountered this in convention scenarios, and I tend to think of it as more single film than TV series. Rescue missions of any kind are not a thing I've made a lot of use of, since it hinges on there needing to be someone to be rescued. That means using the player characters' contacts as an "X is in danger!" motivation. Any more than a little of that, and the PCs start to maneuver toward having no friends because they're clearly a liability, and that's not a kind of game I'm interested in.

High-fantasy exposition is a particular type that has come out of me trying to pin down types for sessions I've run. Plain old exposition for a full session is boring, but occasionally you need to provide a massive information download so that the campaign gets moving again. This works far better if the player characters take a trip through a new plane in which they see bits of history and prophecy rendered as dreams, or find a talking magical item which has the information but has to be coaxed into letting it go, or a massive archive of books and objects collected over centuries, or... you get the idea. Anything other than "So, the sage says..." and then the GM talking non-stop for three hours.

I'm sure there are a few I've missed; I might have to return to this question again.

I'm not a competitive person. Sure, winning is nice, but it's hardly the point of a game. If it was, then we'd all play nice, easy, solo games, which we could win every time. If there are other people involved in a competitive game, you're sometimes going to lose, and if that's a problem, you shouldn't play them. So the collaborative/competitive divide isn't as stark for me as it for most people, I think.

Collaborative efforts result in good RPGs. This is particularly true of the newer breed of RPGs, where player input helps shape the setting and the story, and where building on what someone else has contributed makes for a better experience for everyone. While my main group has been slow to take up the notion of guiding a narrative in play, they're old hands at contributing material to the world - a number of priesthoods, an order of paladins, and more cities and kingdoms than I can track have been formed either around small details provided by players, or fully developed by them.

The simple (or, in the later stages of a campaign, not so simple) process of coming up with a plan is one of the things I really like about RPGs. It takes the Irish tendency to bluesky, the process of logic, knowledge of the campaign world, and the burst of inspiration, and blends them all together.

On the competitive side, a little internal conflict isn't a bad thing, but it has to be carefully managed. It can very quickly become the focus of the game, and therefore uninteresting for anyone who doesn't have a stake in the conflict, and it's remarkably easy for an in-game conflict between characters to wash over into being an out-of-game conflict between players.

So overall: I don't mind competitive games, but I really like collaborative ones.

If you believe that you have played a character that is purely good, I would like you to study some philosophy, even just a little bit. The only people who think they can even define purely good are thoroughly deluded. Of course, you can play a character who is deluded.

That out of the way, yes, I've played plenty of characters who are greyer than white, some worse than that, and some who are outright evil. Strangely, some of the outright evil ones are regarded as some of the "best" as far as the safety of worlds goes.

So it follows that some of the most notable characters are evil. Let me illustrate a few...

Mazaqual is a pit fiend. He runs a chocolate shop in a small but well-connected Prime city, on a world noted for its planar connections. He does a side trade in information, and most of the time, doesn't charge for it. On the face of it, Mazaqual's only real evil is his persistence in using liquorice as a flavouring for some of his goods.

On the other hand, other fiends defer to him, even the tanar'ri. The sphere of Davon suffers far less than it otherwise might from planar intrusions because it's known as "Mazaqual's World". So what's going on here?

Mazaqual is ancient, even among fiends; three billion years old. And he never died in the first place - he was a mortal summoner and demonologist of such skill and power that over time, he became a pit fiend. He worked his way up through the hierarchy of Baator, eventually emerging at the top as one of the Nine Hells' first absolute monarchs. And then, after a few million years of ruling hell, he stepped aside, in order to focus on his own home world; his "garden". Davonian history since has been the story of Mazaqual's subtle guidance, pressing it bit by bit into a form he likes, and which entertains him. It's not clear if he bows to the gods, or the gods bow to him. Certainly, he's more powerful than some of them - but he remains, in effect, a mortal, and comes and goes through Sigil as he wishes. He rarely intervenes directly in the growth of cultures or civilisations, although he "plants" and "prunes" from time to time.

From the point of view of anyone dealing with him on a day to day basis, Mazaqual is a benevolent guardian of the world. This assumes, of course, that you are not a member of a culture he's "pruning", or someone looking to damage his world, or topple him from his control of it. In that case, he will take the most efficient possible route to remove you from existence, and feel no qualms about it at all. It is, after all, his world.

So from that point of view, Davon is a world where the evil overlord won, and has continued to rule.

On a lesser scale, there's Irichallanak. His brother became a god; he got stuck in the body of an ancient green dragon he killed. Of course, godhood has plenty of problems, and having a draconic body isn't at all a bad thing, particularly when you can shapeshift anyway. These days, he's the king of a mid-sized, mildly impoverished kingdom, and second in command of a league of kingdoms that stretches across the continent. He's the kind of ruler who embodies Machiavelli's thinking, with the additional wrinkle that if Machiavelli had lived in his kingdom, well, Machiavelli would have had a nasty accident, and his books would never have been published. No sense in helping out the opposition. Irichallanak considers fear an adequate tool of state, and uses it often. He's also conscientious about eliminating threats, and indeed, often does so without actually notifying his allies. They might bring in tedious things like process, or the notion that thinking about something isn't equivalent to doing it.

He has the mild foible that he has an intense dislike of slavery. Peculiarly, this has brought him into conflict with his allies more than anything else - although they seem to have been careful never to get on his wrong side in other areas. He's also the one they look to when there's something unpleasant that needs to be done - information to be got out of someone, for instance.

So, do I enjoy playing these characters? Oh yes. Very much so. Neither of them - nor indeed, many of the other evil characters, be they allies or opponents - is evil for any purpose than a pragmatic, straight-froward approach to existence. They know they're evil, as such things are defined and measured. They don't much care about that designation, as long as the job gets done. So there's nothing in there that's difficult to comprehend.

I think it might be a lot more difficult, to be honest, to play a really good character.

Ew. No.

More precisely, no, and I've no particular intention of doing so. I have enough difficulty with NPCs from other people's settings, let alone taking on a character who's so intensely associated with someone else. It'd be faintly like... I don't know, wearing someone else's underwear.

This seems to be the direct opposite of how some authors feel about fanfic. I don't mind anyone picking up, or straight-up copying my characters for their own use, but I'd really, really rather not pick up anyone else's.

By and large, this hasn't been a problem for me, except when it comes to Planescape. Planescape relies on Sigil, Sigil relies on the factions, and the factions have leaders. Factols, even. And those are distinct personalities that someone else wrote. My campaign setting uses the Planescape cosmology - more or less - and therefore has to deal with the factols.

There've been few enough encounters with these characters; most of the time, players in my campaigns are either passing through Sigil, or laying low. But Rhys has appeared a few times, and Erin Montgomery once as well. And I really didn't like playing them. I still have plans to run a Planescape campaign at some point, so I'm going to have to bite down and get over it, I think.

Actually, that probably explains why I've never got the hang of published modules, either.

Yes, there is plenty of documentation. But I've only learned to properly track what happened in a campaign in the last few years, and a lot of the material that could be really good if it were brought in again for continuity doesn't work, because what I wrote down and what happened were different, and then I didn't take proper note of what did happen. Certainly, I have the broad strokes, and sometimes I have some detail. Most of that, though, is material which immediately got folded back into the campaign, rather than getting lost. I have hundreds of things that were resolved, and then trailed off and were never significant again, or that never really resolved properly and got lost anyway.

So I've learned to keep a campaign journal, as I think of it. That's what the notes for this week's game will become next week - an annotated, scribbled upon, clear account of what happened, what didn't, what NPCs are still around, what NPCs got killed, and which ones have a grudge against the player characters or other NPCs, no matter how slight.

It's a fairly simple mechanism, really. My notes consist of paragraphs, each one with a bullet point beside it, which describes one event or chunk of information for this week's game session. Sometimes there are sub-bullets, mostly lists of names.

Each bullet gets marked off as it's communicated to the players. So bullets that are marked off "happened" - that also covers NPCs who appeared. Those things are now "in the record".

If something happens such that a bullet can't happen, it gets crossed off. These things are now definitively out of the record.

And if something gets altered, or I need to make a note of "now hates PC X", or "secretly lusts after PC Y", or for a place "west wall knocked in", that gets written in - I leave gaps between bullets and a wide margin for this.

There's also the possibility, since we're playing in Fate, that a player will pass me a Fate Point and say "I want this character to appear again", or even "I want to come back to this place". That gets noted here too, and if it's something that I feel might not happen otherwise, I'll make myself a note on a post-it, and stick it in the front of the binder, where I'll see it every time I look at the notes.

This makes such a difference. I'm pretty sure that any details that have been dropped in the last two campaigns have been very minor, and it makes me feel a lot better about the history. I just wish I could go back and do it all for the older games!

I've never played a female PC. I've played plenty of female NPCs, and for a long while I wasn't at all sure if I was "getting it right". And then I decided that "right" was a matter of playing them as people, and not worrying about gender, sex, or the like, except as one more characteristic.

Certainly there are cultures which have male or female primacy, or gender roles. One race of near-humans hold that all magic is for women, and anything purely physical is for men. The drow are matriarchal. Dwarves are patriarchal. Some cultures in one era use a Celtic-style inheritance, where a man's property and titles pass to his eldest sister's eldest son. I'm allowing for a slight bias toward men in the militaries of various nations and cultures, and maybe a slight bias toward women in spellcasting. But the notion that any player can say "I want to play THIS character", and have gender be just another choice to make, is important.

As it happens, the vast majority of players I've dealt with have played characters of their own gender. Thinking back across thirty-odd players in the last decade, I can think of only one who chose to go the other way.

I've also poked a little at some of the middle ground between sexes and genders. A number of the notable NPCs in two out of three eras have been openly gay or bisexual; there's one entire culture which revolves around "quads" of two mostly-gay couples. There was a prominent ruler in one campaign who was referred to as "the Baron", who wore male clothing, and used a male pronoun, despite being evidently female. There've been a few more who I decided were working harder on passing, and the player characters never looked close enough to realise anything different - although I'm not sure that makes a difference anywhere outside my head.

Obviously, a great deal of this is idealistic. But I reckon I get to choose which biases and unpleasantnesses from the real world I want to represent and deal with in my own world, and sexism, in any direction, is something I mostly want to leave out.

I'm pretty sure there's no such beast. I like my dice, certainly. I like my folders of notes. But I am capable of sitting down and running a game off the cuff with no dice and no notes, and it'll still be a good game. It'll probably wreak utter havoc on the campaign world as I veer off from established plotlines, merrily barrelling straight ahead where a plot was supposed to turn left, or worse, end. But it'll be backward consistent, and forward hasn't happened yet. Besides, the players do that every third or fourth game anyway, so it's not a major problem.

I've been playing without a screen in recent months, too. I like my screens, but in the current configuration of our kitchen, people are constantly passing behind my seat, so there's not a lot of point, and my handwriting is still difficult enough that accidentally reading it upside-down is unlikely. I trust the players not to do so deliberately.

I've never used soundtracks much. In theory, I like them. In practice, they're rather distracting. And my voice is of a particular pitch that seems to be blocked by background noise very easily, so unless I deliberately re-pitch and project, it'll be hard for the players to hear me over it. Besides which, I'm never 100% happy signing over atmosphere to a band or composer; it's never quite right.

So, short answer: Ain't got none.

It varies wildly. Sometimes it's obvious what a character is going to be called from the moment they enter my head. Other times, it takes a long, long time to settle it.

I do sometimes make up names, and I try to settle on rules for names in a given region. They end in -o, say, or they have a preponderance of slender vowels, or all the surnames contain colour words.

It annoys me occasionally that so many fantasy worlds seem to have a notion that only one person, ever, will have a particular name. So many of my elves are called Issalion, for reasons of tradition and history, and many dwarves are called Durok, for similar reasons. All dragons have an x in their name - Veratryx, Corex, Enxo, Irixichallanak, and so forth. And I reuse the names of kings quite often, as happened in the real world. I try to keep a reasonable limit on this, though - there's no point in taking things to the level of our own history, where three men, all called Henry, fought a series of bitter wars to become Henry IV of France. Well, two of them wanted to be Henry IV, one already was Henry III. You get the idea.

And of latter years, I've been able to get historical references within the campaign world here and there, sometimes switching a language along the way. The master summoner Valencia dell' Demonifossa, for instance, has a family history thousands of years long, starting off near a place called the Demonpit.

Names aren't always all they might be in my campaign world, but I'm getting steadily better at them.

There are two, really. One was as a player character, the other as an NPC. The player character was Dimitri Eminescu, a Moldavian folklorist turned superhero (for certain definitions of superhero). The non-player character was - and is - Thunder Lies Dreaming, whose background can't really be usefully compressed, but who was full-on anachronistic crazy, and a joy to play.

Thunder Lies Dreaming started out as a player character when I was a teenager, in one of those multi-planar, multi-setting, Rifts-esque "campaigns" that are completely impossible to recount to anyone else without sounding like you found a patch of good mushrooms, and ate the lot. He was a drow. He had multi-coloured hair, a green trenchcoat, a pair of misfiring pistols, and a special ability to get into bizarre trouble, and apparently a tendency to hop from one world to another when the going got too hot. To this day, actually, I don't know if that was a capability of the character, or a habit of the DM's when he ran out of plot. So when I was looking for a creature to epitomise "chaotic good" in the campaign world I created in my early 20s, he came right to mind.

In his modern incarnation, then, he was one of two creatures left over when an ancient chaotic good plane sealed itself away from the multiverse in order to likewise seal away its lawful evil counterpart. He's full-on chaotic, and fantastic to play, not least because he could be so incredibly frustrating for the player characters to talk to. He'd hare off on tangents, insist on weird and temporary rules of conversation, sometimes leave you to talk to his answering machine (a cupboard full of stuffed, dressed, animated mice who spoke with one high-pitched multi-toned voice) instead, and maintained that his cat was a being of ancient and terrible power. She is, admittedly, but that was hardly the point.

Some of Thunder's plotlines have been resolved by now, so he doesn't have to be quite such an Avatar of Chaos & Good anymore. He's still fun to play, but it's not the full-on gonzo how-can-I-dodge-that-question-in-the-most-bizarre-way-possible style. Fortunately, my current main campaign is set ten thousand years before, and Thunder's earlier incarnation, Rêve de la Tonnere is in full flight. So I get to do it all over again.

Well, when I started playing, we were all kids...

One of my current gaming groups has a guy in it who's just gone 14. Campaign started when he was 13, and it's his first. I'd put his level of maturity about level with the rest of the group, to be honest, and the rest of us are in our 30s and 40s. One of the other players is his mother. I reckon that once you pass a certain threshold of attention span, and the kid is actually interested, you've no real problem. You have to watch the content a bit, but that happens with adult players just as much. Indeed, I've had adult players - thankfully only in the short term - who were way less mature.

And then there are convention games, where you may well be confronted with a kid who can just about see over the table, but who plays really well, and at a same table, an over-caffeinated 30-something guy whose reaction to everything is "I stab it!" and who seems to still have trouble reading the dice.

Obviously, there are content issues. I wouldn't be comfortable dealing with sexual content, or horror-movie levels of violence at the table with a kid there. But the adult players wouldn't be terribly happy about that either, in some cases, and I grade that level of content very carefully depending on what everyone's comfortable with and wants out of the game. Dealing with a kid is no different to dealing with a player who's squicked by the notion of eyes being damaged, or doesn't want to hear about atrocities perpetrated by the bad guys in any detail.

I've run games, very occasionally, and mostly when I was in my teens, for younger kids, and then it's a matter of attention span. They're not interested in anything for more than half an hour, at best, and even then sitting around a table talking about stuff you're doing is a lot less fun than doing it. Not something I'd have the patience for or interest in on a longer-term basis. But again, there've been adults who fit those criteria...

So overall, I don't see a major difference. You adjust your games to your players, and age is just another factor to consider.