Your name: Tom McGrenery
Location: Hong Kong
Age: 25
Sex: Male

Religion: Christian (Roman Catholic, specifically)

Education: Went to fairly ordinary primary and secondary schools in Hertfordshire, in England. After that, for some reason I did a
Bachelor's degree in modern and classical Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.

What is the most frightening thing you've ever done? I used to work on an
Elizabethan-style galleon (as one does) – it was my first job after university, in
fact. You get pretty used to working high up, and that's never fazed me. However,
one day while the ship was berthed on the Thames and I was alone on watch,
everyone else having gone into town, I spotted a bit of rigging work that needed
doing, so I climbed up and sorted it out. However, as I was going back down,
I lost my grip on the shrouds beneath the fighting top – the point at which you
can't tie on your harness. I caught myself, obviously, but I realised that if I
hadn't, there would have been no one to see me fall and I'd have been swept
downriver to the sea. I never went aloft by myself again.

Did you have any embarrassing nicknames as a kid? Not as a kid, no. Though I did briefly acquire the nickname "Sneaky" at university after some cunning long distance sniping in a
game of Delta Force 2.

What is your favorite mode of transportation? Sailing, in all its various forms: dinghies, yachts, square riggers… though not windsurfing. I really suck at windsurfing.

If you could pick any other time period to live in, which would it be, and why? I've long been interested in the interwar period of the 20th century, particularly London and Shanghai at that time, but I realise it wasn't really all that great. I'd probably rather visit than live there.

What is your favorite section of the newspaper? Er, the news? That seems too obvious. What do other people say?

Do you have a useless talent that no one else that you know can do? Yeah, no one else I know can play the harmonica, but you'd be surprised how rarely I am called upon to do so. Okay, it's never.

What are three things you can't live without? Books, cheese and music. Not necessarily in that order.

Tell us about your favorite RPG character that you've ever played. Oh, there are
so many to choose from. And I am so bad at remembering their names.

I think my favourite would have to be Johann, a foppish, sneaky and
(eventually) murderous cad-about-town in a WFRP game, run by Garrett
Lepper, that I played while I was at university. Things were going great for him while
he lived in the city, but then – irritatingly – his father died and he and his brother were summoned back to take care of the family estate in Nowheresville. He wasn't a bad
guy all in all, but he had a real problem with incompetent authority, so no one should
be that surprised when he helped murder his liege lord. Who turned out to be under
the sway of Chaos, not that we knew that at the time.

What are your favorite RPGs? WFRP, Feng Shui, Heavy Gear and Call of Cthulhu are the games I return to time after time. I've also had great games in the old World of Darkness too.

What was your first RPG session like? The first RPG session I knew was an RPG session was WFRP. I joined a campaign of The Enemy Within that was already underway at my secondary school, playing an Elf bounty hunter. However, before that, me and a couple of friends had sort of invented RPGing for ourselves with one person reading out Fighting Fantasy books and the others making group decisions about what to do. We later got a copy of Advanced Fighting Fantasy (the one with a weretiger on the front, if I recall correctly)… but it was only at the time of that WFRP game (and an Elf with the now awful-sounding name "Shahalaran Quickblade", which I thought was way cool at the time) that I really understood the idea of what an RPG was.

What was your WORST RPG session like? It would have to be a one-shot I played in Beijing where I hooked up with an existing group. It was a poorly thought-out homebrew system
(always a warning sign) that just didn't work, coupled with a stupid SF future war background. I've suffered massive blows to the head that were more enjoyable than that game.

We were a tank crew dropped onto a planet in an incomprehensibly botched military operation and left to fend for ourselves. All our choices were meaningless. Here's an example:

"Do you want to take the road that leads up the ridge or the one that heads off to the east?"
"What's the difference?"
"You have no way to tell."

Yeah, great. The fact that the villains turned out to be "Christians, because Christians are bad" was merely the bigoted icing on the bad-gaming cake after a few hours of that rubbish. I didn't go back.

Who is your all-time favorite person to game with? I played a Buffy demo game run by CJ Carella once, that was pretty cool. I've also always really enjoyed the games at the various
SteveCons in London, so I recommend them to all and sundry.