Hi there

I expect this blog to consist of:

• my general thoughts on gaming (sometimes informed by my background as a social scientist)
• reviews of gaming materials
• thinking aloud as I write my first module, “Treasure of the Satrap’s Army.” More on that in the next post.

My basic perspective is pretty typical for OSR: I prefer rules light and sword and sorcery.

My gaming background is that I’ve been gaming off and on since I got the Mentzer red box. I graduated to AD&D 1e and 2e and also various Palladium games, but my interest trailed off when I realized I was a collector of closet drama rather than a player and I never got into 3e. Also, the dungeon punk art style seemed like a huge let down compared to the TSR greats like Larry Elmore and Clyde Caldwell. I got back into it 4 or 5 years ago when some friends invited me to play in a 5e campaign. Since then my group has played a few Gumshoe games and I’ve GM’d in both 5e and Gumshoe.

I’m still in a 5e campaign, but I’ve soured a bit on the game. The 5e core books are masterful game design, but the published campaigns, the player culture, and the later splatbooks really grate on me. I think actual play podcasts staffed by improv actors have done as much to warp people’s sense of TTRPGs as porn has done to warp people’s sexuality. However I hope to spend more time talking about how I like a game where the player characters are all human mercenaries (and any sapient non-human NPCs are profoundly strange and generally bad news) rather than complaining about games where half a dozen tiefling bards work at Starbucks and the main XP mechanic is for reporting anti-orc racism to the wizard college bias response team.

This blog is my explorations and musings on the kind of Appendix N inspired OSR gaming I increasingly prefer and hope to write for.