26 June 2025 Men, Reading, and the New York Times Article that Pissed Me Off

 This shit right here

    I read. A lot. I read constantly, and have since I was a little kid. Reading is the main activity of my life, and while how I read has changed (thanks, technology), that I read, and will continue to read, is not a question for me. Reading is like breathing for me at this point; it's just what I do. I can't imagine my life without it, and I wouldn't want to.

    People read less now than they have in decades, or so the research tells us. Fewer adults read books for pleasure nowadays (although those who do read, read a lot!) Men, in particular, read less, and that's especially true for fiction, and even more true for modern fiction of the type the author of this article is championing. I'm not sure how you describe the kinds of books that women--his ideal readers--read. Adult contemporary fiction? Romantasy? Literary fiction? Oprah's Book Club fiction? Something like that, or somethings like that. Definitely not the kind of stuff that I read. 

    What grinds my gears about this article is the feeling that I am being hectored for not being a soy-boy when I read, and that if I could just weep a bit more when I read about the fictionalized lives of BIPOC  2SLGBTQIA+? people, the world would be a better place indeed because I would recognize how riddled I am with toxic masculinity, a colonial mindset, a cis-normative world view, and late-stage capitalism. Fucking straight guys! All we do is stream porn, Netflix, Joe Rogan, and World of Warcraft. What a bunch of assholes.

        Note that the author flippantly dismissed Watchmen, a graphic novel included in Time Magazine's 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century, and which has been made into a feature film, two animated films,  and a series on HBO. Yes, yes, but it's not literature. It's more of that 'speculative fiction' gruel: horror, science fiction, fantasy. Stephen King and his penny dreadfuls (thanks Howard Bloom)! Genre fiction, like westerns, thrillers, mystery...posh. If one is not reading from the NYT's Best Sellers list, well...really, why read at all? 

    What a fucking pretentious, condescending douche-bag. This guy reminds of a poodle: sure, you see it for what it is on the outside, but deep inside its DNA, there is a wolf, howling to be let out. This dude needs to do some push-ups, eat a steak, and read some Conan.  Asshole. Men don't read the kinds of books he values because we aren't the target audience. Those books are not for us. We don't read for therapy, or to be made aware of all of our shortcomings. 

    We read, as C.S. Lewis said in the movie Shadowlands, so that we know we are not alone. 

Pajama Boy 

20 June 2025 "We'll Imagine It For You Wholesale!"

     As I wrote about last month, the act of pure, imaginative creation isn't something I do (or have ever done, really). I have always taken the bones of what others have done and added my own meat to them, which is fine--a lot of people game that way--but sitting down and actually making something new and unique was a novel experience for me. I liked it. It was challenging for sure...but it was good.

    I mention this again as I have now started my summer vacation from school, and I am looking at a lot of free time that I need to fill. I am a creature of habit to my core, so I'll do the same things over and over again ("peace is the tranquility of order," as St. Augustine said). What I want to build into my daily routines is some creativity...and that's hard for me. Here is why: there is just so much stuff. So. Much. Endless books and pdfs and websites and podcasts and message boards and Facebook groups and Discord channels and Youtube shows and podcasts. I can, literally, spend all day every day swimming in the infinite seas of TTRPG content and never reach the end. And that doesn't include the limitless depths of my Kindle, or the internet in general. The title of this post is a reference to the Phillip K. Dick short story of the same name (trading 'imagine' for 'remember'; it is the basis of the old sci-fi movie Total Recall). [Note: the movie is 36 years old, and I am now old and dying  and how did this happen?]

    Also--and as far as problems go, this is a good problem to have--I am at the point in my life where I can pretty much buy whatever I want to, whenever I want to. I try very, very hard to keep my buying of stuff to a dull roar, but if I see something I want, I just get it. There is an element of collecting (vs. actually using) that I need to be ever mindful of as I move through the TTRPG space. I often tell my friends that I have dragon sickness when it comes to game stuff. We...wants it. We...loves it. We...needs it, my precious...

    So last night I was just poking around the wilds of the net, looking at stuff, and it occured to me that I was engaging in what I always do: searching for things that other people made as a way to exercise my imagination. I should buy this book! I should get this game! I should subscribe to this...whatever. I, literally, have every single issue (in PDF) of Dungeon Magazine, Dragon Magazine, Kobold Quarterly, and The Crusader. That's like five years of content I have not even scratched the surface of, yet I'm still hunting around for more stuff. 

    Why, I ask you? Why? 

    I have been thinking that maybe I'll put some constraints on myself this summer and try to force myself to think differently. Only use what I already have, for example. Stick with the old stuff (DMG, MM, PHB, the C&C core books). I had so much fun just creating a randomly generated hex map. Why don't I do more of that? Setting up a pointcrawl on some map I find online. Throw in some factions, a couple of pre-generated 'random' encounters...why not? As Thoreau said, I don't want to die with my music still in me, and to be completely honest, I may come to the realization that I am not terribly creative to begin with. If so, so be it. But maybe I need to spend a bit more time in my own imagination instead of enjoying and building off of the imaginations of others. 

    Live without discipline, die without honor! No more buying. Mostly. For now. 

12 June 2025 Underdark Hex Crawl

 12 June 2025 Underdark Hexcrawl

    This is complicated. Since re-discovering Gygax's wilderness hex crawl generator in the DMG from back in the 70s, I've been thinking hard about a few core things related to my gaming activities. First, I realized that I am letting companies and people imagine things for me. I have almost always used modules and campaigns, and while I've personalized them (mixing, matching, changing, adding, subtracting), it is rare that I've actually created something unique. The hex crawl rules have piqued my interest  as far as doing more on my own instead of obsessively buying and collecting. Second, I've been thinking about how to take these hex crawl rules--used for wilderness generation--and apply them to an underdark hex crawl. It has proven to be an extremely complicated endeavor. 

    The under dark is three dimensional, so there is the issue of incline and decline. There are different types of passages (going off of the original underdark module, Descent Into the Depths of the Earth). And there are levels of the underdark (upper, middle, and lower). That's a lot of moving parts. Even if I were to just abstract the three dimensionality of an underdark map, I am left with a large number of variables that have to be accounted for in the creation of any generator. 

For what it's worth, here is my first stab at it.

Passage types: primary (wide and relatively flat), secondary (narrower, less ease of travel, descending), and tertiary (narrow, steep, hazardous). 

Areas: rubble, running water, stagnant water, sinkholes, crevasses, fungal forests, large/medium/small cavern(s), lairs, ruins, stalactite/stalagmite forests, cave in, lemon squeeze/choke points, settlement (with various sizes). 

If each hex is a passage type, how do I determine how many other passages entries there are in each hex, and of what type? And how do you move from one passage type to another? I can picture a 3-D map in my head pretty easily, but I am working in two dimensions on a piece of graph paper. [Solution: table for each hex determining how many, and what kind, of passages exist in the hex. But what about direction?]

So let's say we are working in a primary passage hex square that represents one mile. When the characters move to the next hex (and how many options will there be? They are underground and surrounded by solid rock!) how to I determine...

Thought: each hex has an option for each kind of tunnel, and player decisions determine what kind of passage they will enter when they leave the hex. They will create the next hex by choosing the passage type. I'd need a table for each kind of passage. Can you go from primary to tertiary without secondary? Probably not, right? So primary only leads to secondary, and secondary allows for both primary or tertiary as options. Tertiary only allows for the choice of secondary. 

Similarly, a primary passage is upperdark, a secondary passage is middle dark, and a tertiary passage is lowerdark. Distance would have be abstracted (i.e. 'this passage descends quickly)

Question: If you went from a primary to a secondary, then back to a primary...is it the same tunnel? How would that look on a map? 

Question: d10, d12, d20? 

So each hex is a one mile passage with one kind of feature and multiple (maybe) other passages. 

Rough draft

24 May 2025 Thinking about sci-fi

     In all my years of playing and running TTRPGs, I have never run a science fiction game. I have played Star Trek (mostly in the 80s, but just again recently), and we played a brief Gamma World game in high school. We also played a short-lived MCC game which ended in a spectacular nuclear explosion. I used to have Star Frontiers, and I remember goofing around with ship battles, but that was at least 40 years ago. So no sci-fi game for Miguel, which is strange because I fucking love science fiction. So. Much. I don't read it as much as I used to, but it still takes up a lot of room in my imagination. Golden Age, Silver Age, New Wave, military, space opera, all the things. Movies, books, comic books, tv shows. Love them all. 

    I've been kicking around the idea of a science fiction campaign for awhile, but I haven't seriously sat down and started to plot one out. That's not 100% accurate: about 15 or 16 months ago, I began to kind of sort of build one out, but I abandoned it pretty quickly...and now I don't actually remember why. So there are several paths I'm thinking about.

Path One: Traveller. This is the original OG science fiction game, and I have never played it. There are numerous iterations and versions, and me being a greedy, dragon-sick game whore, I would happily buy everything I can get my greedy little paws on. It's a huge ecosystem, and those who play it speak highly of it. It is also supported on Foundry VTT, which I am reluctantly considering since there are way more games available than there are on Roll20. Do I really need another game? Of course not. Will that stop me? Not for one second.

Path Two: Stars/Cities Without Number. I don't know too much about this system, but it's available on Foundry, and people really seem to like it. I think it was inspired by Traveller, but it's more of a d20 system (vs. Traveller's d6 system) so it would be more familiar to my group and I. My buddy Z is pecking away at a SWON game currently, so it's probably better if I stay out of his lane, but I do have the core book, and it looks good.

Path Three: Starcrawl/Purple Planet/Evolved/Mutant Crawl Classics. Goodman Games and its third party publishers make all kinds of crazy shit, and I admit that there is a certain appeal in a gonzo game using campy-ass science fiction as the inspiration. Battle for the Planet of the Apes. Heavy Metal the Movie. Battle Beyond the Stars...such fun insanity is available to put the wind beneath my wings. There isn't really any VTT support for these systems (maybe Mutant Crawl) but DCC is not hard to run at all. 

Part of what I need to consider is who would play in a game like this. If it's my normal five players, the wacko-bird game would be a blast. If it's a smaller number--Z, Cheese, Dennis--it could be a more sober game. I'll have to keep thinking about it, but this is all percolating in my brain as I stare down 10 weeks of summer vacation coming up in less than a month.

Addendum: just as I was thinking about this, I imagined using Star Crawl to run the Star Trek Mirrorverse and have them go to the Purple Planet. That's how my brain works. 

18 May 2025 Kickin' It Wicked Old School

    I follow a guy on Youtube whose channel goes by the name The Joy of Wargaming. I don't remember how I found him; probably when I was following--with both fascination and horror--the BROSR phenomena a year or so ago. One of his video series is about playing 2nd edition AD&D solo, and how to generate hex maps for exploration...and down the rabbit hole I went. 

    Like many others in this hobby, I have become interested in the older expressions of how these games were played, which is ironic since I used to actually play the old ways because I am, essentially, old. I remember being frustrated by AD&D's combat when I was young (say, back in the early 90s); it felt like chopping down a tree: hit, miss, miss, hit, miss, hit, hit, so I started to futz around with different systems and write my own game called 'Mike's Quest,' which was a combination of Chaosium's BRP--the only other system I knew-- and D&D. I never finished it; I do remember making spell cards, creating a combat system (by 'creating' I mean stealing the parts I liked best from BRP and AD&D), and writing a long hand version of the new rules (which I still have in a notebook downstairs). But then life happened: I graduated from college, joined the military, got married, and started playing 3rd edition in the late 90s and early aughts. We played as much as we could for a time, all of us balancing wives and children and jobs and geography, but it wasn't until 2019 that we picked it up again with any regularity. The fifth edition was all the rage, the online components of TTRPGs were (and are) astonishing, and we were off to the races. My struggles, experiences, and criticisms of this new (well, not so new anymore) edition of D&D are well documented. Summary: well-designed system, works great, I don't like the game.

    So OSR I am. Come at me, bruh! As T.S. Eliot said, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started, and know the place for the first time." Yesterday I spent several hours using an almost 50 year old book--The Dungeon Master's Guide-- to generate a random hex map, which I then colored in with Crayola colored pencils. I used the random encounter tables to populate the hexes, then the Dread Thinganomicon for some additional ideas. That's it. Two books, some dice (albeit some online dice), some pencils and a blank hex paper. I spent hours doing this, and I was astonished at how my imagination just kicked into high-gear. The story, or the setting, or the potentialites, whatever you want to call it, emerged from these simple tools, and now I have a mini-world that I am excited to continue to work on. "New does not mean best..." --Slipknot

    I realized yesterday that I have been making my job as a DM and an adventure designer harder, not easier, by buying and reading so much stuff. And there is a lot of stuff: world books, source books, campaign settings, mini adventures, design books, modules, websites, podcasts, Youtube...the amount of material is a frigging raging river, and I have dived into it and swam, trying to keep my head above water, for almost six years. None of this is bad or wrong: I love this hobby, and there is so much new and shiny stuff to buy! (I am also at the point where I have the financial resources to buy, literally, whatever I want to, whenever I want to, ad infinitum). But in so doing--in the buying and the reading and the using--I have strangled my own imagination. One of the things Jeffro Johnson--a lead figure in the BROSR movement--said that has really stuck with me is this: you only need three books to play this game for the rest of your life: the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Master's Guide, and the Monster Manual. That's literally it. 

    Now, to be clear, I like modern mechanics like ascending armor class, advantage and disadvantage, luck points, critical hit and miss tables, etc. Those innovations make the game play better for sure, and I'll continue to use them at my table. But so much of the other stuff is just a distraction from the simplicity of the system (say, the Siege Engine in Castles&Crusades) and my imagination. So for my next trick, I am going to reduce the number of resources I have at hand; strip it down to core books and a few other things I like a lot (The Lazy DM's Companion, The Tome of Adventure Design) and see where it takes me. 

    What's old is new, my friends. Embrace the Old Gods! 

5 May 2025 Game Update

 Greetings people who read this blog (i.e. me)! It's been a few months, so here is an update on all the game goodness taking place in my sad and pathetic exciting life:

-I am on session nine of a Castles&Crusades campaign with three players (Dennis, Dan, Ed). They are level two. I have set it in Blackmoor (northern Greyhawk) and sandboxed the whole thing. When I was home on leave for three months, I had a lot of time to work on my games, so I created a bunch of encounters, NPCs, a few factions, and keyed a bunch of encounters. So far, so good. The system works well. Unlike 5e, it feels dangerous, and the game is evolving as we play it. Me like. C&C doesn't have a ton of support on Roll20, but I am resisting moving over to Foundry simply because I don't want to have to learn an entirely new VTT (more on that below). 

-We did play a short Star Trek campaign with Dennis as GM on Foundry. We used a 2d20 system, which was new to all of us. It was based on dice pools; the more d20s you rolled, the higher the likelihood of your success. It was fun. A little crunchier than I like, but we had a good time playing. Unfortunately, about 2/3rds of our players treated it like D&D instead of Trek, so it went a bit off the rails. I think Dennis was a little frustrated. Star Trek is pretty niche, and if you aren't into it, the game doesn't work as well as it could.

-We are currently playing DCC with Ed in the GM's chair. It's a funnel, and it is quite funny. Running 20+ 0-levels on a VTT is no joke, but Ed is rolling with it (and believe me: we have significantly less than 20 guys left right now!) DCC is a fun, crazy game. We laugh a lot, which is great. I don't know that I'd use this system long-term (although I did run a Sword&Sorcery game for about six months), but it's always a good time. 

-Dan is preparing to return us to the world of Middle Earth using the modified Free League 5e rules. There are limited races, very limited classes, and virtually no magic available to players so it feels quite different than normal 5e. The action economy is still the same (reaction, action, bonus action); the skills are basically the same, and the whole thing works well with all of the superhero shit sanded off. Dan is great at running Tolkien's world, and we are all looking forward to playing again. The stakes got pretty high at the end of our last campaign in Moria, so I am curious to see where it leads us going forward.

-I have been kicking around different systems, seeing what I like and what I don't like. C&C is a good sweet spot between 'not too hot' and 'not too cold' regarding crunch. It is pretty flexible; you can add or subtract certain things (critical hits, for example, have a wide variety of possible mechanics) and the siege engine is both elegant and simple. Very good game. I do find the monster stat blocks to be overly complex (not near what they are in 5e!) but so far we are having fun, and will continue to do so. As I said above, my victims players are only level 2, and they are adjusting to a more OSR-style of play (like retreating when they are too injured or getting their asses handed to them). 

-I am currently looking at Old School Essentials and Shadowdark, two recent systems with the later being the sexy new beast on the block, while the former takes the old B/E/X game and updates for modern play. I like them both a lot, and they are supported on Foundry (OSE is on Quest Portal as well). The longer I play these games, the more rules systems I read, the more I want simplicity, and both of these games are much more simple than C&C or 5E (or BRP, really). I have found that setting up on a VTT is a tedious, and it often gets pedantic with tactical combat. I may move toward more narrative games in the future, but I'm not sure all of my crew will like them.

So that's me, State of the Nerd in May 2025. As I tell my wife, think how much money I'd be spending if I was playing golf! 

13 February 2025 Played C&C Live and Campaign Prep

     Last Saturday I played a face to face game of Castles&Crusades with Dennis, Dan, Ed, Mark E. and Noah E. It was really nice to sit around a table and play; it's something we rarely get to do, and I miss it! Face to face is all of our prefered way to game, but life, time, logistics, jobs, family, etc. make it hard to do. 

    I prepped a very short introductory module called Shadows of a Green Sky, which is simple to run. It took us about three hours to go through the whole thing, but I could have made it longer with an additional encounter or two. I gave everyone 4th level pre-mades (I think Ed brought his own guy), and the system ran very smoothly. The Siege-Engine functioned well to adjudicate challenges (crossing a river, trying to sneak around, slipping on some grease, etc.) The combat was great: I think we all enjoyed rolling a d10 for initiative at the end of every turn (but next time I'd use a 12 or a 20 to make ties less likely). We played theatre of the mind, and for the most part it went well. A few small hiccups: I described something one way but the boys imagined it another way, for example. I said something off the cuff that was out of synch with something else I had said, which caused a bit of confusion. Ed wanted to do something out of pocket, and I wasn't sure how to adjudicate it, which led to a ten minute argument (#Ed). Other than those small things, though, it went great and we all had fun. 

    As I said previously, I am not doing rollable tokens and things like that anymore. I am doing theater of the mind from now on, which is easy face to face, but might feel different on a VTT. There is only one way to find out! In addition, we as a group are going to have to make some decisions about what we want to see mechanically once we start playing: how do we want to do critical rolls, for example? Do we want to do push-rolls? How do we want magic to work--Vancian, 'spell points', slots, etc.? The good thing about C&C is how malleable it all is: it's easy to add things, subtract things, modify things, whatever. On that note, I have found The Castle Keeper's Guide to be an incredibly useful resource to help me think through this game. I need to spend more time with it, and with the other core books as well. When we were kids, we could spend hours just flipping through old issues of Dragon Magazine, or reading through the old rule books. It's a little bit harder to do that as an adult, although I really do have some extra time on my hands currently. 

    I have continued to build out a Tier-One gaming environment, with about ten encounters populated, a base of operations with a bunch of NPCs, and a few 'random' encounters, as well as a long rumor table and a table of 'strange things' to represent the odd effects of the Fey/Shadowdark intruding into the area. In addition, I have a C&C module--A Mortality of Green--pretty much ready to go, AND I am working my way through Tomb of the Iron God to add a dungeon component. And four different factions. So, yeah: ready! 

    I really do want this to feel more sandboxie than it normally does.  I want the world to feel stretchy and elastic so it (and I) bend and move in the direction the players want to go. There really isn't an overarching story, although I have added some lore to make it seem like there is an actual history in this region. So far, I feel pretty good about the direction this has all gone in. Now I just need my players to ruin it for me!