28 February 2026 Lent and Drinking from the TTRPG Firehose

 

    I have a buying problem. I buy too much TTRPG stuff. I see things, I get Dragon Sickness, and then I purchase them. Sometimes I'll sell them just so I can buy more stuff. There is something to be said about being a collector for sure: I love these books, and--at least in the past--they tend to become more valuable over time, but truthfully, I am often just buying stuff to buy it. There is so much TTRPG product out there, and it is so incredibly compelling to me, that I feel like I am trying to drink from a fire hose. In January, I realized I spent close to $600 on game stuff! A bunch of books from Troll Lords, a bunch of online stuff for Foundry/Forge, and an entire expensive set of books for Dolmenwood. It's not like I don't have the money, but when I added it all up, I was given pause. Felt wasteful. So for Lent, I decided to not buy anything at all re: gaming and books. Sounds like such a simple thing to do, and it is, but...it's hard. I have noticed the tempation already, multiple times in just one week. I crave...I covet...I desire...I needs it...I wants it..the Precious...

    We have been playing Lord of the Rings, which is fun. I have wanted to get my C&C Greyhawk game going again, but things at home are often times unstable due to issues with my younger daughter, so I can't really focus or commit to game mastering. I've been feeling a bit off lately, too, so that's made things spicy. I have been dicking around with different adventure ideas that I have, trying to lock in and figure out what I want to work on next. Generally speaking, all is well right now, so I'll save my money and use my imagination for free for the next several weeks.

20 Feb. 2026 "Curses to the dragon! Curses to Smaug!": AI, Foundry, DCC, and C&C

     It's been a while since I wrote. I fucked around with Foundry for a few weeks and ended up not loving it. There is a lot you can do with it for sure, and there are many more games available on that platform than there are on Roll20 (at least, the ones that we play). But I got entirely sick of fiddling around with settings every time I touched the thing. So as me brudder pointed out, you can set things up exactly the way you want them (true), and you get better at it the more that you do it (also true). I'm sure I'll go back to it at some point, when we are playing OSE or something, but for now, I think I'll stick with Roll20 for the games I am running/would like to run. 

    But even Roll20 is getting a bit fancy, which brings me to my thoughts about AI. Just screwing about, I was able to make a short .gif of an AI generated video that captured what was in my imagination with near perfection. It looks awesome, and I was able to add it to Roll20. Really cool for atmosphere. So instead of me trying to describe what is in my imagination, I outsourced it to Grok, which scoured the internet for other people's work then regurgitated it for me. 

    I admit, I found it a bit depressing, but AI is now everywhere, all the time. It is unavoidable. How much I want it to be a part of my life is something I think about a great deal. For me, the core satisfactions I get from this hobby are social (it is something I do with my friends) and imaginative (it is my creative outlet). While AI and VTTs are helpful tools--and to be honest, we wouldn't be playing at all without a VTT (or would we? More on that in a moment)-- I have this uneasy feeling that AI is going to consume everything if we let it. If you are interested (whoever you are, reading this unremarkable blog) you can see my deeper thoughts on the subject here: Against the Machine

    Tolkien hated the Machine, too, so I will stand with the dwarves of Erebor and pledge myself to resistance in this most important part of my life. Make no peace with evil. Curses to Smaug! 

    So, anhwhoo, I have been reading and writing some DCC content. Thus far, I've completed three DCC adventures and I'm kicking around an idea for a fourth. We've been playing The Lord of the Rings (the Free League 5e variant) with Dan in the DMs chair, and we've all been enjoying it a lot. Last night we tried Basic Role Playing on Foundry--Dennis running the show-- and had a good time with it. It was just a short science fiction scenario based on the old TV show Space: Above and Beyond, and it was a lot of fun. I am hoping to re-engage with my C&C Barrowgate game in the very near future. That is a good campaign that we all like.

8 January 2026 Foundry and Old School Essentials (and Foundry)

     After a long period of hectoring gentle suggestion by my brother, I finally purchased the Foundry VTT system, as well as the Forge...implementation, I guess. Then, naturally, I had to buy the DCC ruleset, a huge campaign, and a module. All in all it set me back about $200, but that very same day I received my first "We're Sorry We Made You Deaf" check from the Department of Defense for $180. The universe provides. 

    Foundry, so far, seems like it has a lot of options, but I am going to have to fuck around with it a great deal to learn how to use it. It's a little disappointing to have to leave Roll20 behind after six years, but it doesn't have great implementations of the games we are playing and Dennis swears that it's better, so we shall see. From what little I've messed with, DCC is certainly way better on Foundry/Forge. 

    I am hoping to restart my Barrowgate campaign, on hold since late October due to issues taking place at home. I was just going to move on to something else, but Dennis, Ed, and Dan said they wanted to continue that particular game, which was flattering to hear, so we will! I'm going to use this as an opportunity to learn Foundry/Forge, and to try out something new: Old School Essentials. I have this game on my shelf, and my understanding is that's it's a cleaned up version of the old B/X rules with a good helping of AD&D DNA inserted into it. The irony of going from AD&D in the 90s to all these different systems--3e, 5e, DCC, Dragonbane, BRP, Castles&Crusades--then landing right back where I started is not lost on me. It is a very simply game compared to modern rule sets, so I am curious if we will find the action economy too plain (that's a complaint that I had about AD&D way back when) when compared to more dynamic systems. I am forever looking for the Goldilocks system: not too hot, not too cold. C&C came very close, as did Dragonbane. I love DCC, too, but it's hard to take it seriously, which is fine: it's a frigging ball to play. All we do is laugh!

    So we shall see how all of this goes. It's nice to have a hobby, to have the resources to pursue the hobby, and others to enjoy the hobby with. 

(4 day later): I have dipped my toes into Foundry. There are a lot of little setting points that have big impacts (i.e. setting about vision on the token prototype, the token on the board, and the scene). Lots of little dohickies and gewgaws to learn. While I appreciate that Foundry has way more games available, I am not finding it easier, or better, than Roll20. I just need to do more reps. 

22 December 2025 Random TTRPG Musings

 22 December 2025

    Yesterday was the first official day of winter. It is cold and dark. I have nothing to add about that.

    I had been working on a Castles&Crusades adventure, but I never felt that good about it (even as it was coming along fine). I find the system to be a tiny bit vanilla, to be honest, and the market is teeny-tiny if we ever wanted to actually sell things. Then, I started working on something for BRP, a system I really like, but found it a tad too crunchy for my taste re: writing. Playing, sure, but writing? Then, I took what I was writing for BRP, switched it over to DCC, and let my imagination loose. The system is incredibly easy to work with (you can see the comparison of a BRP stat block vs. a DCC stat block below, both for the same creature, a ghoul), and it brings out the absolute crazy in me. As a life-long fan of Sword&Sorcery, Appendix N books, and Weird Tales, DCC scratches a deep itch in my brain for just my plain fucking gonozo imagination. Space-horror! Sci Fi-fantasy! Mix is all up in a pot and see what comes out! So fun!

31 December 2025 Populating Hexes

    Been doing a little bit of world building/hex population over the last week or so. I've been working on a DCC scenario called "Old Gnaw: the Ravages of the Corpse God," and I needed a point of reference, so I threw together a map using the '9 Villages' method I learned from Keep on Crawling. Basically, you throw nine dice on a piece of paper, circle where they land, and use those points as villages/settlements on your map. That's what I did, and the results suggested a long river to me (since most of the dice were kind of on in row along the top half of the paper). Thus, Korg's Valley was born. Once I had the river placed, I filled in other features--mountains, woods, a swamp, some hills. The names are as bog-standard, barebones as you can imagine, and that's okay. As Carl Sagan wrote, "Before you bake an apple pie, you must first create the universe." I am not going all J.R.R. Tolkien here: this is good enough for me right now. I started writing a small bit of background, too. Nothing crazy, but the geography suggested a story to me, so I am fleshing that out a big, too. I like having a map to look at, even if it looks like it was done by a 6 year old.  

Next, we have a bit of (very rough) hex generation using Shadowdark. I did a bunch of rolling and populating, and ended up with a river that leads to an ocean with a jungle and a bit of desert, too. Two areas of caves--one safe, with a tribe of barbarians, the other unsafe with a hermit. A town on the river is risky, and is run by a malevolent sorcerer named Skalvin. Mind begins to churn. Story begins to emerge.

Finally, I used the good old Dungeon Master's Guide from 1979 to generate some hexes. I came up with a desert that lead to a plain, then a marshy area with a pond, the ruins of a city (!), followed by another marshy area with a pond. The tale begins to emerge from the concepts that are completely randomized. 

The point here is to show that randomization can lead to good, creative ideas. This is a way people could play (and did, back in the old days): procedural D&D. The world, and the story, emerge from the dice. I could see doing this at a table just to see how it goes, and to see what happens. It would be an incredibly slow game (I could actually play this by myself if I wanted to), but it would be...interesting. 

 

7 December 2025 Science Fiction

 7 December 2025: Science Fiction

    I love science fiction. Love it. I didn't read too much of it as a kid. I read Dune in high school (I think I read it twice) but I can't remember any others. Ray Bradbury, which is really more fantasy than sci-fi. H.G. Wells, maybe Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert Heinlein. Other than that, not much. For whatever reason, in 1991 when I was a senior in college, I decided I wanted to get into some science fiction, but I wasn't sure where to start. I was a big Dan Simmons fan at the time--horror being my main jam in those days--so I picked up his (then) new novel Hyperion and had my mind thoroughly, utterly, completely blown. Hyperion remains one of my favorite books of all time, not just because I found the story and the concepts incredible, but because of the experience I had while reading it: sublime. Transcendent. Consciousness expanding. It was remarkable.

    After that, sci-fi was on the menu. I read some of the classics--Foundation, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, maybe a few others and enjoyed them all, but I was still more into fantasy and horror. I met the science fiction author Samuel Delaney, whose writing I find unreadable, but who was a kind man, and generous with his advice about what to read as a newbie to the genre. I discovered William Gibson and Neuromancer, and sort of fell in love with Molly Millions. 

    It wasn't until 1996, when I was living on Diego Garcia while in the Navy that I truly hit my sci-fi stride. We had a small but mighty library on the island, and for some strange reason, there was an incredible selection of science fiction books available. I'll never know how the books got there, and kept being replenished, but the choices were remarkable, and I read them voraciously. I'm talking a novel a day voraciously. I did the deepest of deep-dives and read science fiction until my eyes bled. I discovered John Wyndam and read his major works (The Midwich Cuckoos, Day of the Triffids, The Chrysalids, The Kraken Wakes), for example. There was a series called Science Fiction Masterworks, and I read a bunch of those. David Brin, Greg Bear, Ben Bova, Brian Aldiss, Jerry Pournelle, Philip K. Dick. David Weber introduced me to military science fiction, which lead me to Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Hadelman's The Forever War. I read Ursala LeGuin's gentle science fiction (The Dispossessed, The Left Hand of Darkness), C.S. Lewis's theologically infused Space Trilogy, and Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. John Scalzi! Jack Campbell! Becky Chambers! Octavia Butler! The many, many, many anthologies put together by Gardner Dozois. I read science fiction like a starving man entering into an all-you-can-eat buffet. It was, and is, awesome. 

    But what I've never done is run a science fiction TTRPG. We dabbled a little in Gamma World back in high school, and played a good amount of FASA Star Trek (and more recently, the Modiphius version). I had Star Frontiers, and maybe even Traveller, but I never played either. So all of this is a long way of saying, I am thinking pretty hard about running a science fiction game. I'm a little burnt out on fantasy, and I'm never running Call of Cthulhu again (love the game. Sick of playing it). Me brudder and I recently considered Troll Lord Games' Amazing Adventures, but found it a bit too pulpy for our tastes, I just bought the entire M-Space collection from from Frostbyte Games, which is for BRP, so we'll see how that goes. Once I finish my rough-draft of The Runes, I'm heading out into the vasty deeps of space.

5 December 2025 Amazing Adventures vs. Basic Role Playing

 5 December 2025 AA vs. BRP

    Last night my brother and I had a conversation with our good friend Dan, who we have been role playing with since way back at the beginning, in 1984 when we were all in high school. We were making a video so that we can learn how to make Youtube content for our (eventual, hopefully) gaming company Wicked Place Game. It was a lot of fun to traipse down memory lane and remember the great adventures of yesteryear, and the halcyon days of spending a Saturday afternoon flipping through old Dragon Magazines, or reading the AD&D Players Handbook for the umpteenth time.  Wonderful memories.

    We had a lively discussion about gaming systems, picking apart the things that we like and dislike about many of them, and generally nerding out about TTRPGs. As Dennis and I think about creating content for our nascent gaming company, there has been some disagreement between us about what exactly we should be working on. Little brother is firmly in the Castles&Crusades camp, and with good reason: the game system is well-designed, we've played it and like it, the company is great, and they give us a 50% discount when we buy things! All solid reasons. I have been a bit hesitant, though, because in my observation, the footprint of the game is much smaller than other systems we like, so it's a very small pool to swim in should we go in that direction. Other games (not including 5e, which none of us are interested in) like Dragonbane, Shadowdark, and (we think...) BRP have larger audiences, more eyeballs, more dollars, etc. It is notoriously hard to find information about games sales, so much of what we are talking about is supposition based on anecdotes (like how many game-related materials are available on Drivethru RPG, or how frequently games are discussed on websites like ENWorld, or how many members there are on a Discord channel). It's hard to know where the energy is outside of 5e and big guns like Daggerheart and Draw Steel. 

    No game is perfect. For example, I prefer unleveled games (BRP) but I don't love skill systems (therefore AA). Both systems are supported on Foundry, but neither on Roll20. BRP is probably much bigger than AA re: a community of players, but both are tiny compared to something like Shadowdark, which itself is fractional when compared to D&D. Both of these systems are old (C&C is 20 years, BRP is 50!) so game mechanics have modernized and changed a great deal since then. I have tremendous affection for BRP, but I do love the Troll Lords. It's hard to know what to do, but at this point, all of this is a passion project: we are doing what we like in hopes of one day (maybe...) monetizing it somehow.

    I have become bogged down in writing my C&C module. It's been a bit of a slog lately. It might be that I'm a little burnt out on fantasy in general, which is mainly what my group plays. I don't want to run Call of Cthulhu again; I love that game but I am done with it (I've written about this elsewhere). So...what, then? A horror game that's not CoC? Some kind of multiversal sci-fi game? I'm not sure. I might need to switch it up a bit.