I was sitting in the Old Tom pub in Oxford with Mark Smith having a pint before we headed off to a game. (It was a bit more spit and sawdust in those days, not like the picture above.) This would have been in early 1979; "Roxanne" was playing on the jukebox, if you want all the details. Mark said to me, "Have you ever thought of setting up a business running roleplaying games?"
"Wouldn't really be on," I reckoned. "It's just a thing you do as a bunch of friends. It's not a career."
Mark shook his head. As usual he was way ahead of me. "In the future, I'm telling you, being a professional GM could be an actual job."
Little did we know that in a few years' time we'd both be making a living from fantasy gaming via our gamebooks and RPGs.
I don't know if there's much of a living to be had from GMing even today, but Mark was right to predict the emergence of professional GMs, and the internet has made it massively easier to find and join the right game for you -- like this Blood Sword D&D campaign. I'm still holding out hope that the English edition of Blood Sword 5e will be published soon, but there's been no news for some time so online games like this may be the nearest we'll get for a while yet. Better make the most of them.
(More about the Blood Sword series here.)
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