Ben Parkinson's page

Some may remember that a few years back, the team here at Paizo, helped a small Ugandan group of roleplayers - Patrick, Joseph, Brian and others - who were running their own roleplaying campaigns and Pathfinder modules and taking part in a Kingmaker campaign that I ran for them. We will be forever indebted to Paizo for the encouragement they gave us and support in the form of core rulebooks and bestiaries, campaigns, modules, pawns and maps, none of which we could have afforded without them.

While the roleplaying has been instrumental in teaching so many things to these young people, especially problem-solving, through creativity, the need for reading has meant that roleplaying has been less accessible to many. Also, the modules written were targeted to a life experience that many of our children were unfamiliar with. To combat this we have been running Nyambe and other campaigns, with less diverse storylines, at least for the new members. For the long-term members, anything is fine now and we have been running Rise of the Runelords, where we are currently storming Fort Rannick! (Level 9)

What has been more successful has been boardgames and last year we ran the incredible first Uganda Village Boardgame Convention, where we taught children a wide range of boardgames from the simplest, to more complex games like Robo Rally and Legends of Andor. Not only this but last year, we had very few adults who could teach board games, so our teenagers did it all themselves - the planning, the graphics, the training, the organising, the budgeting and even some of the food provision.

This year we are doing a second convention - details at https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/uganda-village-board-game-convention - which is going to happen in May 2018. Last year we started up new boardgame clubs in nearby Gulu and the children there will be coming to this convention. However, we are also starting at least four new board game clubs in remote places in Northern Uganda and we will be inviting representaives from each of these clubs to attend the convention this year on a residential basis.

However, we are reliant on outside support for this event - food transport, security and even games - so we are looking for your help to achieve our next stretch goals, which will be to add four further clubs and upgrade our facilities to accommodate additional people on our site.

If you would like to contact me about the project my email is socentafrica@gmail.com - you can see more about the charitable work at http://cyen.org.uk/gamechangers

Thanks for reading this far!

Quite a few people seemed interested in this blog post - Go to blog Teaching Changemakers using Kingmaker - where we were discussing the potential of Pathfinder for developing vision, creativity and leadership skills among youngsters in Uganda.

I am running a project known as the Butterfly Project and we have been training young social entrepreneurs since 2009. We are just a small project, which allows us to try innovative things and thus recently we decided to try out Pathfinder, to gauge interest and enthusiasm for roleplaying with our young beneficiaries.

Specifically, I am interested in training up those capable of making good leadership decisions and thus the Kingmaker Adventure Path seemed to be the most suitable for our needs. By the way, we don't tend to work with those who are 18+, instead those in the 9-19 age category. Currently, we are working mostly in slum areas, but the plan is to expand our work into rural villages very soon.

I chose seven young people to be part of the Kingmaker group, who we believe have the potential to be leaders, but are also very bright and able to speak and understand good English. For added colour, I decided to offer the new classes, so we have an alchemist, a summoner, a monk, a druid, a witch, an oracle and an inquisitor.

I am posting here really for ideas. My intention is to move through the campaign and, each week, post a summary of events. I'm not the greatest GM, but I will try to keep the story on track. I will also try to give you the flavour of some of the discussions we have had and demonstrate how the game has become a real teaching methodology. Our party will be making real decisions about their own kingdom, as it develops and often they will be forced into choosing from a list of complex and difficult options, where no solution is a brilliant solution.

We have been running the campaign now for about three months. The characters are moving towards Level 6 and they have a kingdom of just 10 hexes. There will be many spoilers in this post, so I apologise in advance, if you had wanted to play Kingmaker and I revealed too much. Also, I will ask some of the kids participating (they range from 12-14 years of age) also to post here with their comments. English is sometimes their third language, so please be forgiving of spellings etc...

My next post will be an introduction of the various characters, a quick summary of what has happened so far and then I will post weekly on the events of the campaign, as they happen.

Lastly, while Kingmaker is perhaps the most interesting part of what we are doing, Pathfinder roleplaying is being played very regularly these days and there are three regular DMs - Patrick, Brian and Joseph. Perhaps 30-40 kids have now participated. Gradually I expect numbers to increase and I want to see these young people spread the idea to a wider group of young people, eventually perhaps even to rural villages.

I observe carefully the impact on the participants and clearly we are avoiding any situations far outside cultural norms. The land I hope they develop will be uniquely theirs, formed from their own ideas and priorities. Maybe we can learn something from this.