So that brings me to the role playing part.  I am sure I had strong influences somewhere, but I seem to have come up with roleplaying games in a similar for to the way they exist, independently of actually knowing much about any of them.  I simply got fed up of the adventure games I would play with my neighbors while we were running around in the woods.  It was always "I hit you" "No you didnt" "Youre dead" "Nuh Uh" "Time Out!" "Theres no time out in a battle!?"
My overactive imagination made elaborate scenarios for who we were pretending to be while running around in the woods hitting each other with sticks, even if it was majorly drawing from Star Wars or Narnia or whatever.  Eventually, after the one time I have ever actually role-played in a traditional setting (dungeons and dragons at a friends birthday party) I devised a game we called the castle game.  Friends had all their imaginations to come up with a primary character and several secondary characters within a mostly-realistic medieval setting.  With enough prowess or conniving, they were able to create their own castles, fortresses and cities.  My friends and I played this for a while, with some of them squaring off against each other and I discovered how much I enjoyed playing out scenarios, creating scenes, and the humor that invariably worked its way in.  This game eventually led to several other with various changes in play and local; a spy game that lasted a scenario or less, a were-creature game with a very elaborate map that I got to play in too, a cowboy game with a very full and nicely depicted equipment guide and a game of survival for a enclosed land of tribal dinosaurs that I still want to make into a comic book and that had a physical representations for all the dinosaurs, sculpts of the nests and eggs, and food tokens .  But we kept coming back to the developed characters and world of "castle"  Somewhere in here I was introduced (by the guy who is currently my roommate) to the Star Wars Roleplaying Game by West End.  Being a lifelong star wars buff, I loved it.  I really loved the idea of playing not a character from the movies, but someone who just fit within the universe.  After a while we had a whole giant supporting cast of characters and wonderfully distinct player characters.  This led to some re-adaptions of the castle system but eventually that faded to us always playing star wars.  As I got older and was finishing high school we played less.  Toward the end it was just the group of us who had been around for everything, my next door neighbor and soon to be other roommate Tom, his little brother Eli, and my little brother David (our brothers were the same age).

So I come home from college, pla Star Wars a few times with David and Eli. Eventually I come back into contact with Nick (my current roommate whom I had played many of the earlier systems with and the only one who has ever run me as a character through a game ((at that dungeons and dragons game at the birthday party)), other than that I have always been the GM and run everything). Nick was hired along with Eli to build a deck behind my parents house. Eli and I were playing WoW a lot then and Nick had recently stopped playing, so we talked a lot about goofy things in games and roleplaying. Eventually we reminisced about some of the old stuff and some of the goofy adventures and crazy improbable saves in star wars (things like sticking a lightsabre into a fuel tank, which we reference a lot as the ultimate amazing feat, as Eli survived due to a one in a million roll). Then comes one year ago last night. I meet up with a buddy who was a huge fan of the old castle game. He tells me that I should resurrect it and put it up on the net as he has friends that play on play-by-post and forums and things like that on various roleplaying sites. My mother soon after tells me I should collect all the stuff I have designed in making these "games" (now she wishes she hadn't said that I think, believing it to be a huge waste of my time and a bad influence). Soon Nick, Tom, David, and Eli are all playing Star Wars again and my scenarios are getting more complex and I realize how much I enjoy that aspect of it and how much I like to tell stories (seventeen pages into this email can you tell that? lol) Somewhere in late winter, I decided I would do it. I would make my world into a roleplaying system. Flush with inspiration, I designed a basic system similar to the one we used for star wars as designed by west end, with lots of the house rules and modifications we had been using and a few things from our castle games thrown in to boot. I drew scores of characters, overhauled the culture, came up with the aygeemya and the magic system, created the schools of adventurers and many of their abilities, invented a few technologies that would fit within an alien bronze age world and we began to play. Eli picked a quixotic slightly amnesiac prophet who became quite quirky and the groups comic relief as he was played out (Ombra, see http://www.alatha.com/roleplayingcharacters ). David, always wanting a character in the middle of too much danger, made a lithe deadly female assassin, somehow not forseeing that he would not be able to act seductive at all haha (Saykoo). Nick, preferring a character that gets through on problem solving rather than brawn or battle, made an illusionist with dreams of grandeur (Jarakeh). Tom, always playing whatever character he is as conniving and scheming, using a combination of intrigue and threat, made a self sufficient street rat type with great marksman skills (Eenkho). The group quickly met up with Lucky who has given them many assignments and a host of other "guest" players who are friends that take up interest or are around for a session.