Hello and welcome back to Inspire Confidence! I am you host Monica Marlowe, you may remember me from such projects as Paizo RPG Superstar 2015, Pathfinder Society Season 7 episode 13, Childhood Adventures, and much, much more. As you may recall, June 2018 I put Inspire Confidence on hiatus due to a new job posting with a 12 month probationary period, which I am happy to say that I have complete! Now that Gen Con 2019 is behind us, I have asked my friends at the Know Direction Podcast Network to dust the cobwebs out of this corner of the internet so I can return to writing on a biweekly basis.

This blog is going to be a brief recap of what has come before, what I have done since then, and where I’m setting my sights for the future.

As I mentioned before, I have done some modest amount of game design and writing, but I began in what was the most spectacular way someone could hope (but not plan) to achieve – I won Paizo’s RPG Superstar contest in 2015 without any previous game design experience at all. No really, I knew how to make a player character and that even usually required some reviewing of the process and reminders. It had never been my goal to become a game designer and until the time leading up to the 2015 submission deadline, I swore I would never enter the contest because I didn’t want to win. I am undoubtedly the most reluctant game designer in the industry. Or at least I was at that time.

Since winning the contest (which I’ve written about elsewhere, so make sure you read my back catalogue for that tale and other fun things) I have designed a little gaming stuff, written a lot of fiction and blogs, and launched a live stream actual play with my husband and fellow blogger, Andrew Marlowe, on Twitch on Friday nights. My passion has always been to create a warm and inviting environment for all people who seek a seat at the gaming table. I believe that there is no upper limit for the number of gamers we can have in the world, and if there are seven billion of us, then awesome!

I am also actively involved in a local gaming cooperative that helps new game masters who do not identify as men, we meet once a month and each of the party members take turns GMing an ongoing adventure.

My blog will once again center on the concepts of creating safe and inclusive spaces, how to engage in meaningful ways with other gamers, getting the most out of your experiences, and to some degree welcome the novice GM into the fold and help develop those early skills. The KD Network has also grown and moved from only covering Pathfinder to other gaming systems, so you are definitely going to see stuff in my blog that is system agnostic as well as other system specific posts.

As before, I am open to any topics or subject matter you are interested in reading, so please leave me a message through the network, on Facebook, Discord, passenger pigeon, or any other means of contact you might have with me, I love to talk games and growing the gaming community. See you next blog!