Neither Reverence nor Contempt

In another century, I studied photography. My advanced photography and senior seminar classes were taught by Professor Sean Wilkinson, now retired. As someone who stumbled sideways into visual art, I initially didn’t have much of a cognitive framework or vocabulary for thinking about it and discussing it, and my

A Wizard Creates a Mountain; the Mountain Creates a Rain Shadow

One of the most enlightening things I’ve read on the topic of tabletop roleplaying games is an essay by Wolfgang Baur in The Kobold Guide to Worldbuilding, “How Real Is Your World? History and Fantasy as a Spectrum of Design Options.” It was this essay that clarified for me

Dwarven Feast, Fine Dwarven Feast

Now that I’m done with my (cough) “speedrun” revising The Monsters Know What They’re Doing for 2025, I’m undertaking the long-overdue task of straightening up my desk, which includes dealing with an outrageous number of unfiled papers. Some of these papers, though, are too good not to

It’s Been a Minute

I ended up going radio silent for longer than I intended to, but I think my reason is a pretty good one: I’ve just finished my first draft of a revision of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing for the 2025 Monster Manual. I began what I initially

Clearing the Air

Last week, organizers announced on social media that Big Bad Con (an annual game convention held in Burlingame, Calif., in the fall) and Big Bad Online (a TTRPG-related panel discussion series streamed on Twitch in the spring) would not be held in 2025. They left unanswered the question of whether

Thoughts on an Antifascist RPG, Part 2

(Read part 1 here.) In the early 1980s, a college-age programmer named Richard Garriott—who’d written and sold his first computer game, Akalabeth, as a teenager—had established a successful series of roleplaying games for the Apple II computer, but as he looked back on Ultima I: The First

Thoughts on an Antifascist RPG, Part 1

This “death curse” you speak of … you say it prevents people from being brought back from the dead. Who gets brought back from the dead? People with connections. Influence. Money. If a man is loved by his neighbors, respected in his community, but poor, and he has an accident, does

All in One, Part 3

(Read part 1 here. Read part 2 here.) So the Hero System was a bust. What about some of the other genreless roleplaying game systems that social media readers suggested to me? Genesys is a universalization of the Star Wars Roleplaying Game published by Fantasy Flight Games in 2012 (not

All in One, Part 2

(Read part 1 here.) After the Cypher System and Savage Worlds, the universal roleplaying game systems suggested most often to me are Fate Core and Cortex Prime. I’m glossing past Cortex Prime because I’m not sure whether to think of it as an RPG per se or as

All in One, Part 1

I drifted away from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in 1989, just before TSR released D&D’s second edition. I was lured away by Shadowrun, FASA’s “punk elves” science fiction–fantasy mashup. Part of the appeal lay in certain aspects of D&D that I was starting

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, Part 2

(Read part 1 here.) In my post “Fitting Through the Door,” I posited that porting a player character from one system to another requires being able to answer “yes” to three questions: * Does the character’s “one main thing” make sense within this system and setting? * Does the system faithfully

An Elderly Lady Is Up to No Good, Part 1

It’s an opinion so widely shared that the degree of consensus practically elevates it to the status of fact: Curse of Strahd is the best campaign-length adventure for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons published by Wizards of the Coast. And out of all the games I’ve run since