RPGaDay: When did you start Gamemastering?

After playing rather sporadically with the friends who got me into RPGs, due to them living in a different town, I finally joined a regular D&D group in 2007.  These guys were long term RPG nerds, and some of them had been playing since the early 1980s.  Despite that, they weren't 100% committed to D&D.  They'd played other games from time to time, including Cyberpunk 2020 and various Warhammer RPGs, although they all agreed they were never playing Shadowrun again after what happened last time.  D&D was definitely the main game though.  I had no thoughts of GMing, not with this highly experienced group who'd been playing D&D since childhood.

Then in April 2007, White Wolf released Scion.

I got invited to play with the long distance group.  Having been thoroughly immersed in Greek mythology from an early age, I created Kallista Malekides, a scion of Apollo, skilled in both medicine and athletics.  I played a game or two.  But then it dawned on me.  I knew a lot about Greek mythology, and had a solid grasp of Norse as well.  The rest I could (and did) pick up easily enough from library books.

A few weeks of reading later, I decided I was ready.  The D&D campaign came to an end, as things normally did with that GM, with everyone dead after accidentally destroying the moon, and I asked if people would like to give this new game a go.  They said yes.

So I ran my first campaign.  I drew heavily on my knowledge of mythology to send them on a globetrotting campaign, encountering different challenges themed to whatever country they were in.  It introduced a few themes that I've come back to on future campaigns, in particular the importance of having proper toilet facilities in your secret underground lair.  After all, if you're building a temple to the Aztec goddess of filth and childbirth, she is absolutely going to want a few loos.

It took me a few weeks to really get into the swing of things, and my descriptions were pretty lacklustre to begin with, but it was all a learning experience.  In particular I learned a lot about the unpredictability of player actions, when one of them suddenly decided a certain NPC must be some massive monster and attacked him, only to kill him in one hit because he was actually just a Daily Mail reader in a Darth Vader voice changer helmet.  And I learned how to incorporate things like that into the plot, where the players now had to do a mission to deal with the fallout of killing the aforementioned Daily Mail reader, which had upset some powerful entities.

And that was how I got started. I ran a second Scion campaign before we collectively decided we couldn't deal with the janky system any more and moved onto other things.  (I'm told the second edition has overhauled it extensively and is probably a lot better.)  I was now part of the group's GM rotation, with a particular focus on urban fantasy games, and went on to run campaigns of Victoriana and The Dresden Files.

That's never changed, really.  While I occasionally branch out into GMing sci-fi and other genres, and will play pretty much anything, urban fantasy is where I started and what I always go back to.