A running series for the TAPAS blog. I wrote down names on little slips of paper, the names of everyone currently in the TAPAS Facebook group and Discord server, 41 people altogether, and will be drawing one name every so often to write about them and their history with the group.
Let's see... like a few others, I think the first time I met Randy Wolfmeyer was on Is He Dead?, having become acquainted with his wife Gretchen in the previous production I was in, She Loves Me.
From there, I think the time he properly joined TAPAS was in discussion of the construction of the TAPAS roleplaying game, thoughts catalogued in the many blog posts you can find in the latter half of 2020, trying to piece together the world and system. I wasn't interested at first in using his system, figuring ta the time that it would use the 5th Edition Open Game License, but I eventually changed my mind and wanted to do something new.
Randy's system is derived from Mistrunner, a system he assisted in creating some time ago, and from there we've shared thoughts on its basic design intent, which led me to name the system, or at least the multiverse of fantasy stories I've been working on, AE:GIS - an "adaptive engine" for "gaming, interactivity, and simulation". One of the pillars was storytelling, not interactivity, but, you know, this way it spells something. There are other indie RPGs called Aegis, more than one, hence the stylization.
Somewhere amid the RPG talk, Randy played Uncle Gary in Better Yet? and afterward became the voice of Lambert in Irregular Fantasy! - he certainly knows the gaming material IRF is based on, and apparently he even read Irregular Webcomic! back in the day.
All the while, he's hard at work in the local theatre community, providing not only performances - like Lefou in Beauty and the Beast - but doing a lot of effects work, from the magical rose in that show, to Smaug in The Hobbit, building and operating an amazing massive puppet. Per my own request, I got to operate the mouth while I performed the dialogue; I figured that'd make for the best performance all around, if I was doing the voice and the mouth, and indeed Randy got a lot of compliments that whoever was operating the mouth in time to the dialogue knew what they were doing. It was me! And after the show, he kept the puppet intact a little while longer to use as a Halloween decoration.
In conclusion... I'm really unsure about TAPAS's future, but I do hope there's more Lambert and more gaming/world development.
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