13 October 2025 The Runes: Design Journal (1)

     I am working on a module--I don't know what else to call it--for Castles and Crusades. It is set in the After Winter Dark campaign setting, but it is more specifically an area detailed in Marbeline Coast expansion. To summarize: there is a citadel on a small island controlled by a faction called the White Wizards. An enemy wizard--a part of a dark order called the Paths of Umbra--is trying to infiltrate the citadel from below in order to steal magical knowledge and search for a powerful, forgotten McGuffin. Part two of this adventure will be more of a sandbox set on a nearby, larger island that continues the story. As I am writing the content, I am also creating a bit of a Dungeon Master/Castle Keeper/Game Master primer for a new player that explains certain terms and ideas for someone who may be unfamiliar with them. 

    I keep telling myself two things: first, this is just a rough draft, and will probably undergo significant revisions when there are other sets of eyes on it, and second, I have never really done this before, so struggle is to be expected. I am finding it hard to do! Having a story in my head and translating it to playable content is freaking difficult. There is so much to do, and I am constantly concerned that I am overwriting it (i.e. putting in too much detail), or that it makes no sense, or that it is organized incorrectly. I think it's the organization that's proven to be the hardest part. For example, do I put NPC/monster stats in text, or do I put them in an appendix at the end? And how much do I try to keep this story generic vs. Aihrde-specific? Pros and cons to both things. The endless details are relentless. Where exactly is the hidden passage, and how will the PCs find it? What if they don't pick up any of the breadcrumb trails...then what? How should the tone be? It's quite a learning experience for me, and very humbling.

    So far I've probably written 20+ pages of material, and all of it without maps to help guide me, which is a whole other complication. Calgon, take me away!

October 2nd, 2025: Notes on the Passing Scene

 Not too much going on, game-wise, so a few observations on what's what:

-I am slowly working on a module for Castles&Crusades, tentatively titled The Runes (so imaginative). It is set in the After Winter Dark campaign, and it takes place on the Isle of Arwonal. An evil wizard (the Paths of Umbra) is attempting to reconnect two mirror runes in hopes of bringing a raiding force through the forgotten paths below the isle's magical library in order to kill, steal, and cause chaos. I'm pecking away at it a little each day. It's slow going, but I am making progress. 

-Last winter, in the depths of boredom and despair, I bought all of the core rules for Old School Essentials. Beautiful game; based on the old B/X ruleset from the late 70s, early 80s. It sat on my shelf, untouched, so I said to myself, "I'll never use these" then sold them to Noble Knight Game for store credit (significantly less than I bought them for). Been thinking about those books, and that system lately. Started poking around online. Looking at stuff. Wanted them back. Needed them back. My precious. Re-bought them. I am dumb, but I think I'm going to mess around with them and learn to play solo, which a way of playing that's more technical than running a normal game with other people. Stay tuned! My takeaway here is that I am spending a lot of money on things that I don't really want, or selling things that I do really want to get more money to buy things that I don't really want. So either keep the things I buy, or stop selling the things I buy. Or, learn to sell on Ebay so I can break off of Noble Knight's teat. Something. (Addendum: Great video explainer about this game and its origins).

--Thinking I might try to go solo on this game and see how it runs. Last may I did some table generation using the old AD&D DM's guide and had a lot of fun, so we'll see how this feels. 

-It's been hard to keep the Sunday game going. Just...stuff gets in the way. We've played maybe 50% of the time since the beginning of summer. I am very much enjoying the game, as are my players, but we've had difficulty making it work due to schedules. Tuesday night game (now Mondays) is solid. Ed is running DCC right now, then LotR up next with Dan.

-I just finished reading a book, West Marches Campaign Playstyle Guide Book (which is part of what got me all OSE-adjacent), and I am still trying to figure out what that would look like with my group. Here is what's confuzzling me: you begin and end in a 'town' (the safe space). Each individual session is like a one-shot: you start, your travel, your adventure, you return. We play for two hours at a time, so what if they aren't done with what they are doing in that time period? And: how do I, in the game, make them leave where they are to return to their safe place? That feels super arbitrary. Or, so I just set the expectation at the beginning of the game that what they are doing in game time is being run by what we are doing in real-time? I think it would feel technical, which is a very different style of play. I'm not sure how it would go.

20 September 2025 C&C Live Play: Witches and Frogs

20 September 2025

    We had a live game today at my house with my brother, my nephew, his girlfriend, and our friend. It was a lot of fun. We played about four hours (maybe a tad less) and I was reminded, again, how much I prefer playing in person vs. online. We continued our C&C campaign--Barrowgate--and did a kind of side-quest where one of the story's loose ends was...well, hacked off. Witches! Bullywugs! Giant toads! A blindheim! Good fun had by all.

    I have slowly been pecking away at the Aihrde module I'm working on, but I find it mentally hard to switch between worlds. I'm designing in both Aihrd and Greyhawk (Blackmoor), neither of which is super familiar to me (I ran in the Forgotten Realms for decades), so it's a bit of code-switching for sure. My brother says we should just switch to Aihrde through magic, and I think I'm going to do that, with maybe a trip through the Demiplane of Dread along the way.

 

23 August 2025 Summer's End and Memories

 23 August 2025 Summer's End and Memories 

    Where did it all begin? When was the first time I knew I was interested in fantasy? If I really think about it, I'd have to say it began with my grandmother, Eleanor Irons-Reilly. Ma, as we called her, worked at a department store called Gilchrists. Her manager was a fan of The Hobbit, and got her to read the book in the late 60s or early 70s. In 1974, my grandparents bought a small cottage in Marshfield, Massachusetts, a place that has become the most important location in my life (but that's another story...), and my younger brother and I spent many, many days there with our grandparents. I distinctly remember Ma telling us about Bilbo and the trolls, and how the troll said Bilbo would barely be a mouthful. Later, when playing on the lawn, which seemed enormous to small boys who grew up in the city, we put our hoods over our heads and scrabbled over a rock, pretending we were dwarves fighting trolls in the fog that had rolled in from the ocean. 

    Two years later, the Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit was shown on network TV, and my brother and I begged to stay up late (9PM!) and watch it.    I was eight years old, knew some of the story from my grandmother, and had my mind just fucking blown. It was amazing, and those two things--Ma's stories and the old cartoon--set me on the path I continue to walk today. We had a record player, and a record of The Hobbit (along with a picture book) so I basically memorized it by listening over and over and over again. I'm not sure when I read Tolkien's actual book: it must have been in the sixth grade or there abouts, but that year--in the spring of 1981--a friend asked me, "Have you ever heard of Dungeons&Dragons?" And here we are, 44 years later. I'll write more about my early D&D experiences later.

    "Summer's date hath all too short a lease..." as the Bard writes, so I find myself staring down the dark  barrel of back to school time. It is what it is: this is year 26 for me, with just two or three left after this one. I have had a lovely summer: a lot of reading, many trips to the beach, a great deal of exercise, and countless hours sitting on my screened in porch, listening to podcasts, drinking coffee, and pondering TTRPGs. I am a fortunate fellow.

19 August 2025 Wicked Place Games

     Welp, my little brother has a TTRPG bee in his bonnet, and wants to get more serious--maybe more oriented, is a better world--toward actually creating and selling game materials. We are both approaching retirement age in our respective careers; I'll be done (God willing) in less than four years, and he's not far off of that, so what we've long talked about and thought about is starting to come to life. 

    Way back in the day, when D&D 3.0 was alive, we came up with the idea of Fionna Games, and wanted to publish some Celtic-themed materials, but someone beat us to the punch, life got in the way for all of u (wives, kids houses, careers, etc.) and it just never happened. Dennis (my little brother) is a very organized person; 20+ years of service in the United States Army does that to a person, and I know he's had this on his mind for decades now. He's really good at logistics and organization; at creating a plan and executing it. At researching things, then making best-information-available decisions. 

    I'm good at making shit up.

    So we've decided to take the next few years to create lots and lots of content, in the hopes that in the not too distant future, we can actually turn some of our lifelong hobby into a retirement gig. I am not concerned about making money at all: this is more about filling my time doing something I love with the people I love, so it's a nice plan and completely doable. 

    When we were children living in Somerville, MA back in the 70s, we used to call this staircase 'the Wicked Place' because, in our little kid perspectives, this wall was like the battlements of a castle, looking out over a mighty realm, especially as the sun was setting. Imagine Mufasa holding up baby Simba as they gazed over the Pride Lands in wonder and awe. That's what this view as like for us as kids, and in our New England parlance, "wicked" means good, or amazing, or incredible. Wicked Place Games goes back just about as far as my memories do. Seems like a good place to start. 

18 July 2025 When We Were Wizards Podcast

 When We Were Wizards Podcast

    14 hours of podcasts covering the creation of D&D, the rise of TSR, the fall of Gary Gygax, and a whole lot of other stuff. I admit that I felt a true sense of sadness as I listened to this long story. What started out as a bunch of amateur enthusiasts creating games in their basements turned into  a multi million dollar company that those same enthusiasts had no idea how to run. The love the money, the Good Book tells is, is the root of all evil, and much of what happened can be attributed to greed, ego, and hubris.  Having read Game Wizards and Slaying the Dragon: The Secret History of Dungeons&Dragons, I have a good sense of how this whole thing went down. 

    Another great resource in understanding these early days of TTRPGs is Secrets of Blackmoor, a documentary that interviews many of the original players and creators, and that has gone a long way toward casting some light on Arneson's often overlooked contributions to the game. Gygax reminds me a bit of Stan Lee: he became the face, and the most well-known person, of the D&D brand, but the reality is much more complicated. It always is. 

28 June 2025: Classic Traveller

     I have been thinking about a science fiction game for some time now, and I finally pulled the trigger and got Deluxe Traveller. I have never played Traveller before, although I may have owned some of the original books way back in the day (digest sized paperbacks). I remember seeing them many times in game shops and bookstores back in the early and mid 80s, but I was very wedded to D&D then, and had other games--Gamma World, Call of Cthulhu, Chill, Star Frontiers--so I never got into it. I do remember people absolutely loving this game, though. For some reason, deep in my neurons, there is a connection with MIT, but I can't recall the details. 

    So I splurged $135 in store credit at Noble Knight and got the 1983 box set. I am pretty excited about it! I like old games much more than newer games, and I waffled back and forth for a few months before deciding to go wicked old school (at least for now). There is an enormous Traveller ecosystem out there on the internet; I am already reading a bit about the community, and looking forward to engaging. In my heart of hearts, science fiction is my most favorite thing ever (fantasy and horror are close!). I have been sucked into some excellent military science fiction this summer, and I'm reading a big, heavy book called The Space Opera Renaissance (and I mean literally heavy: this thing could kill a small child). Sci-fi on the brain, I guess. There are worse places to be...

    I don't know what I'm going to do with this game, if anything, but I am hoping to imagine up some stuff and get a bit of -building done (world, sector, sub-sector, local cluster, empire...whatever!). Should be fun.