1-3 May 2026 Adventure Idea: The Red Queen

     I need to looks this up, but as I recall, in Aihrde, the Red God Ornduhl put gems and jewels in the earth that can corrupt those who find them. Ornduhl is the greed of the All Father personified, and it was under his influence that the first goblins were made from dwarves who fell under his sway. 

As is told, Ornduhl mined all the deep places of the world and set there precious metals and gems of his own design. These he buried in the rock so that none might find them, for they were his most precious creations. But more, he imbued the precious metals with his own desires, casting enchantments upon them, so that any who handled them ran the risk of being cursed with the desire to possess it ever after. These precious gems, gold and silver veins, and other metals lay hidden from all for many ages (Codex of Aihrde, pg. 199). 

    I am trying to find any information about a region of the map of the world of Aihrde called Damenfaur. So far, I can't find a thing. But I'm trying to place something far enough away from the core areas (the lands of Ursal) so I can world build without stepping on anyone's toes. 

    My thought: there is a large farm in an agricultural area (sort of Anglo-Saxon vibe). On one of these farms is a little girl named Margen. Margen is the daughter of a thrall who died giving birth to her. Margen has known nothing but cruelty, want, and indifference her entire ten years of life. She is barely fed, treated slightly better than the dogs, and is either tormented for sport or completely ignored. She is, literally, no one, has no one, and is cared for by no one. Her life is horrible.

    One day Margen, after being soundly cuffed for spilling a pail of goat milk, runs off into a stony field to cry tears no one will ever see or care about. While she is standing there, miserable and alone, a new emotion begins to arise in her young mind: hatred. Hatred for those who hurt her, hatred for those who ignore, and hatred for everyone she has ever met. As she stands there, turning red with rage and black with hate...she notices an unusual glint in the frozen ground beneath her holed shoes: the glint of a gem! Falling quickly to her knees, she begins to claw at the hard dirt until she uncovers something utterly beautiful: a many faceted, richly red gemstone the size of her fist. Where this treasure came from she does not know, but to Margen, this is the most important moment of her sad life because this gem begins to speak to her. 

    The gem warms Margens heart, and for the first time in her life, she feels love. She begins to sob even harder as the gem fills her mind with visions of ample food, warm clothes, a soft sleep pallet by the fire, and the smiling faces of people who understand her, care for her, and wish to hear her thoughts and desires. All this, the gem whispers, all this for you, Margen, but first... 

    Margen can feel the gems power burning around her, then in her. The gem fuses to her right hand and begins to emit an hellish, pulsing light. Margen returns to the farmhouse, then enters into the main room where the large family and their servants are eating their dinner. There are bright flashes of blood red light, screams of pain and horror, then silence. Moments later, Margen emerges. Her tattered frock has changed to a long crimson cape that she wraps around her thin body. Her eyes, too, glow with the red fires of Orndul while behind her, those who tormented her or ignored her lay dead...for a moment. With a flick of her gem-fused hand, those whom Margen slew raise again to serve her. 

   Six months later, in [someplace] rumors have began telling of a great evil that has been born in [someplace]. A creature calling itself the Red Queen has been destroying thorpes, villages, and towns with armies of the ravening dead. Worse still, these armies are now moving toward [someplace]...

    Fun, right? So what's the adventure? The party can be hired as spies by a local ruler to go and learn what is really going on. They could be part of a militia that encounters the forces of the Red Queen and get stranded in lands she has conquered. They could simply be curious, or be sent on an errand by a patron. Whatever it takes to get them into the area where Margen and her forces are becoming more powerful. So...a point crawl? 

    In any event, I'm kicking this idea around. 

3 May 2026

    Thinking this through a bit. This isn't an adventure, it's a campaign, or a very long scenario with overland travel, point-crawl encounters, random encounters, and some kind of exploration/crawl at the end. One of the problems I have re: designing is my canvas is always too big! This would be like 30 pages were I to write it all down. Maybe I will, just for fun, but I have found that I don't really enjoy writing adventures that other people will read. I like making them for my players, but it's a bit tedious to do for (possible) public consumption. 

 

16 April 2026 Greyhawking (1)

    I had a printed copy made of the 1983 Greyhawk Box Set, which we have an original of, but I wanted one to mark up and carry around. The actual box and its books are now 43 years old, so it's better not to handle them too much (although, in reality...what are we ever going do do with it?) So I have nice bound copy that I am reading through and writing in, reestablishing my connection with this venerable setting. I have also been listening to The Greycast, a podcast about Greyhawk. 

    I don't think I've read through this material since I was an early teenager. I distinctly remember sitting on the porch in Marshfield going through this book with the huge map spread out in front of me, and being a bit numbed by how much of what was being described was related to troops and military powers. Knowing what I know now--that D&D arose initially from miniature wargaming, and that Gygax was a wargamer--I understand why it is like this. War is a feature, not a bug, in this world. Similarly, since this world is so old (relatively speaking), there are far fewer muppets races to be, and to interact with, in Greyhawk. Definite classic feel.

I have a huge map of Greyhawk on the wall in front of me, so I've been locating each place on the map as I read, which has been harder than it sounds! There are a lot of kingdoms, baronies, prelacies, theocracies, brotherhoods, counties, marches, lands, and holds! I'm not onto the "Geographical Marvels, Regions, & Prominent Features" part of the book, which will be fun.

    Thus far, a few places are jumping out at me as far as potential campaign settings:

- The Bone March (overrun by humanoids; humans enslaved)

-Highfolk and Highfolk Valley (elven realm, reminds me of Raymond Feist for some reason)

-The Horned Society (deviltry and humanoids!)

-Irongate and the Iron League (an organization created to oppose Ivid in the Great Kingdom)

-The Scarlet Brotherhood (humancentric nation what hates all demihumans and humanoids)

-The Spindrift Isles (Bone Hill, lands becoming Fey again; elves dominate)

-Country, Principality, and Dutch of Ulek (demihuman nations)

-Valley of the Mage

-The Wild Coast

    My current campaign started in Perrenland, then moved north to Blackmoor. The only reason I did that is I didn't want to learn all of Greyhawk, and wanted someplace smaller and more self-contained to play in. 

12 April 2026 Castles&Crusades and Greyhawk

 12 April 2026

    Not too much going on, gamewise. We are playing Lord of the Rings 5e, which we are all enjoying. Dan is certainly a master of Middle Earth! I am desperately trying to get my Greyhawk/Blackmoor game up and running again, but it's been hard since people--including me--have to keep cancelling. It pisses Ed off to no end, and I don't blame him. He's a social guy, and when he plans to play, then doesn't, he gets cranky. Of all of the players in our group of six, Ed is definitely the most consistent. 

    I am going to sell some stuff to Noble Knight if they offer me a fair price. I am getting rid of things I don't want or need, and I am not buying anything new, even though there are some tasty Kickstarters out there from the Troll Lords. If I am patient, I can get the stuff for 50% off once its in circulation. One thing I learned during Lent: do not impulse buy. But: it is hard. My precioussssss...

    I also told my brother that I am not too into his grand idea of turning this into a business. I love, love, love these games, and I love playing them, but creating content isn't something I really enjoy. I take stuff from all over, chop it up, slap it back together, add my own ideas, then run it. That's what I've always done; that's the joy for me. I love being a game master. Writing modules? Not so much. 

    So I'm kicking around the idea of just running in Greyhawk going forward, and using Castles&Crusades as the ruleset. I do still really like DCC, but it's a bit silly for me, even though it's super fun to play. It's a true beer-and-pretzels game, and all we do is laugh! But I like to run a bit more serious of a game, so C&C in Greyhawk will be my jam. This week. God knows I've changed my mind before. I have been listening to a podcast interviewing a guy who has been running the same campaign for 46 fucking years! Amazing. 

    This guy, Lord Gosumba, has had God knows how many players and does something I find interesting: he sets up a region that evolves in response to what his players do, but also evolves on its own without their influence or input. So I thought a bit about this as I was walking this PM. Identify a region, set up an onion (low level danger, connected to medium level danger, connected to high level danger), advance the timeline, and when when group is done, start the next group in the same place. Ed has done something similar with his DCC game and I like it. I'm thinking this through, but it's an intriguing idea. 

26 Mar 2026 On Not Being A Writer

     I have come to the realization that I don't like writing adventures. I'm not sure why this should be a surprise: in 45 years, I don't think I've ever actually written a full adventure. What I do do is take what other people have written and make it my own. I suppose this is good information to have and my little brother is trying to start up some kind of a gaming company, and would like me to be a part of it. I fear he may be disappointed. 

    Here is a true story related to this issue. In the summer of 2003, I decided to finally write a novel. At that time, Wizards of the Coast was still publishing many, many fiction books set in their de facto campaign world, the Forgotten Realms. The things that had always held me back from my dream of becoming a writer were no longer an issue. I had a full-time job, I was happily married, I was no longer in school. My life had settled down into a very happy and comfortable place, and now--now at last!--I could do the thing I had dreamt of doing for most of my life: write. I had the summers off. I had a genre I loved. I had time, time at last, to be a writer.

    And...I fucking hated it. I wrote one chapter then stopped (it was a good chapter, I'll say that much). I would put off writing, write then delete, write a little, write a lot, disregard, avoid, and generally not do the thing that I had told myself I wanted to do for (at that point) twenty years. I felt guilty. I felt frustrated. I felt disappointed. I felt a bit angry. I felt sorry. Finally, by mid-August of that year, I gave myself permission to stop putting so much pressure on myself and just stop. When I did, I felt this enormous wash of relief come over me. I knew then, 23 years ago, that I was not a writer, that I wasn't going to become a writer, and that the gap between how I imagined it and how is actually was was unbridgeable. I don't think I've written a single piece of fiction longer than five or six pages since then. 

    So pecking away at module/adventure writing over the past six months or so has reminded me that I am, in fact, not a writer. I don't enjoy it, I'm not that good at it, and I feel the same kind of pressure that I did in the summer of 2003. I am stopping. I don't want to. And that's fine. 

    My wife is a writer. She writes full-time. She published books, goes to author signings, and makes mad money. The sheer amount of work that she does--most of it not related to actual writing, but rather to the running of her business--is exhausting to simply watch, let alone do. Living with a real-life working author has only underscored the reality that I am, in fact, not one. So be it. 

What does that mean going forward with the inchoate Wicked Place Games? Well, my super power--the thing I absolutely love to do-- is run games. I am a game master, and I am good at it (I think). Running games, creating stories, connecting things together, taking an idea and running with it, and using my imagination to cobble together disparate parts from all of the bats flying around in my belfry--books, stories, movies, songs, legends, lore, myths--is the part of the TTRPG space that gives me energy and gets my mind roaring. So Dennis and I will work out something; some way to make this a part of our lives as we approach retirement and begin the next phase of life. But writing is not going to be it, I think. I just isn't something that I enjoy. 

18 March 2026 On the Design Struggle Bus

     I admit: writing TTRPG stuff is hard. I don't love it. So far, I have written three scenarios--The Slime Lord, Old Gnaw, and the Spring Tower. They are fine. They need to be play tested and refined. I started to write a module for Castles&Crusades, The Runes, but I got in over my head really quickly. The reality is, I am not really enjoying the process. I love playing games, and running games. Writing them is less fun. I haven't been able to GM since October because things at home are challenging right now (and have been for almost two years). I just don't have the bandwidth.

    I wonder if I am casting my net too widely. I am thinking about working backwards, i.e. starting with an encounter or two, like as gourmet as I can make it, then building outward. I have been kicking around the idea of populating a small city and seeing how that feels (vs. a region with various encounter points--random, set, etc.) 

    I like Matt Colville. He is the main guy behind MCDM, a small gaming company that punches very much above its weight (it's only 12 full-time employees, but makes remarkable things). His Running the Game series on Youtube has been a delight over the past five or six years as he is a guy who thinks deeply and well about TTRPGs: how they work, how to think about them, and how to design them. He is an open book about game design, and as he (and his team) developed their own game, Draw Steel, he produced design journals on Patreon so that people could watch, almost in real-time, how their game was being built. Fascinating stuff. One of the things I've learned from him over the years is to question assumptions. Why do we use dungeons? What is a dungeon? Why do we use the six stats, generally speaking? How do we do monsters, and why? These kinds of inquiries get to the root of game design. 

    So I'm wondering if I am going to large at the outset. The reality is, I haven't ever done this before. I've played and run games for 45 years. I've never written actual material for someone else to play. I think I'm going to try narrowing my lens; making the aperture smaller, and see how that goes. Let's see how a five room dungeon goes. That's the most basic unit of ttrpg writing. 

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.