A Love Letter to The Legend of Zelda, Famous TTRPG.

    Right after the Wii was released, a friend in high school gifted me his GameCube, and with it a copy of Wind Waker. I guess that’s not really where “it” started, but it was certainly the first noteworthy milestone of the journey that brought me to where I am now in terms of my love of fantasy nerd garbage.

    I had a pretty rough go of it as a kid. I bounced around between foster care, “behavioral clinics”, family members homes, and on the rare occasion I stayed with my mom. Needless to say, I didn't get a chance to play a lot of videogames, or really do anything that kids typically get to do. Whenever I did stay at my cousin’s house I would crush Legend of Zelda on the NES, and in later years he would absolutely destroy me in Golden Eye instead of letting me play Ocarina of Time. 

    My mom was doing her best, but I went in and out of state custody for a few more years until going to live with my grandparents when I was 10 or 11. I have no idea what I did to occupy my time for the next three years other than be an absolute menace to those around me. I guess at this point I had gotten so used to moving around that being stuck in one place was driving my 11-14 year old self absolutely insane. I spent a lot of time roaming around and causing trouble until Zach showed up at school one day and pulled a black GameCube out of his backpack with a matching controller.  To this day, I’m sure Grandma is convinced that I stole it.

This thing is looking pretty rough these days.

    The GameCube was the first game console that I had all to myself. I stayed posted up in my room playing Wind Waker on my own 13” inch CRT, the type with the faux wood and silver knobs. At the time, I had been burying my nose in Eragon and The Hobbit, and spending a lot of time in the woods behind my grandparents house pretending to be a wizard, so adventuring in Wind Waker was perfect for me. What’s more, in Wind Waker, the main character is not “The Hero of Time” or whatever, so it made it even  easier for me to identify with that goofy kid who also lived with his grandmother. 

    Over the years I would dabble in nerd stuff here and there, occasionally playing Magic The Gathering, or reading a fantasy or sci fi novel or whatever, but it wasn't until 2018 that I discovered a love for miniatures, wargaming, and TTRPGs. It didn't take long for me to get hyped on OSR and Warhammer Fantasy, and before long I found myself saying things like "Is this a Bob Olley sculpt?" or "Did you see the new MTG card with Ian Miller art?" or "What is the best size hex for a hex crawl and why is it 6 miles?". My homie Tanner GM'd a 1-on-1 game of Knave once where I played some absolute idiot (shout out my boy Creebus) struggling through the sewers trying to find his lost ring. It felt so much like the first dungeon of so many Zelda games, with a basic sword (frying pan) and a metaphorical 3 heart life bar, that I began to think of all the other strong OSR/Sword and Sorcery vibes in Zelda games that I didn't have a frame of reference for as a kid. I remembered the guidebook from The Legend of Zelda and how it showed you how to make your own dungeon maps and what to look out for in the over world, marking certain areas with an ambiguous “?”. It occurred to me that the overworld map in that game is really presented like a TTRPG campaign map, leaving blank areas for the player to fill in as they explore. I tried to track down an original but they can go for stupid money so I settled for a decent quality scan. Very soon after I decided that drawing my own map was the move, and it's so novel to be able to play a video game and also keep a bit of a journal, logging where the dungeon entrances are and where to find more powerful weapons and shields. 

Hit 'em with the Hand-Drawn-Map + Pink-Mood-Light Combo

    This year I bought a couple cheap handheld consoles designed to emulate and play “retro games”. For less than $50, these things come with all sorts of ROMs, and if you’re lucky some of them will work. I spent a ton of time flashing custom firmware and sourcing better ROMs and eventually ended up with something that I wanted to play games on. I also built and modded a few GameBoys, maybe I’ll make another post about all that another time. These are roughly the size of a GameBoy Color, and laying on the couch play TLOZ and ALTTP on these things will certainly make a person reminisce on the general pre-y2k feeling of not knowing what the hell is going on.

The Anbernic RG35XX and the GAME CONSOLE R36S can run a lot of games, but I really just wanted them for that 4:3 aspect ratio so that I can play Legend of Zelda, Zelda II, A Link to the Past, and maybe Minish Cap. 

    Mentally reframing The Legend of Zelda more as a TTRPG than a videogame was a weird stretch at first, but it began to make more sense to me over time, and now the two are deeply connected in my brain. For me it really all comes down to the maps. Aside from an overworld map, players also need to make maps for each dungeon. Each room of each dungeon looks nearly identical and I easily get lost.

Now this is what I call exploring!

Just look at this thing.

(image from spriters-resource.com)

 

    When playing these games, it's impossible not to consider my 14 year old self, who was constantly skipping class, getting suspended for fighting, and harassing college students to buy him cigarettes outside Store24, even though the whole time he was thinking about wielding a magic sword and questing to save the princess. If anything Wind Waker gave me somewhere to land, mentally speaking, and even as I got older and played in bands and partied, I still kept the GameCube close by for another playthrough.

    This year I've been feeling pretty worn out on the miniature hobby in general. Writing, publishing, and distributing Cauldron absolutely exhausted me, and I only did half the work. I felt like spending less time on Instagram and crushing some old school Zelda games would be the thing I needed to get my mind off minis and games, but if anything it has inspired me to dig deeper into the aspects that tie these two things together and try to incorporate them into future projects as they pertain to tabletop games and my goals when it comes to designing them. I know these themes are not new, and Zelda games certainly don't have the exclusive on sword and sorcery vibes, but nostalgia is a powerful force, and it's The Legend of Zelda franchise that has colored and shaded my hobby up to this point. Even if the influence isn't so obvious to others, it's something that I frequently find myself thinking about when practicing my own personal brand of escapism.