RPGs, Movies, Comics, y'know: nerd stuff!
September 7, 2026
The campaign I am calling “Paper Chasers” has the PCs as ‘retrieval experts,’ who are hunting down ancient texts and artifacts for the archmage Silence Frost. The players requested an episodic game with minimal overarching plot and a dash of Read more…
August 29, 2026
The first step of the family D&D 5E campaign started with a terrified village and a missing child, leading to their first “dungeon” and the first glimpse of the threat that would be the focus of the campaign. Homebrew is Read more…
August 22, 2026
The second D&D game I’m going to be running is for three friends—including the best man from my wedding and his wife—who have been my core virtual gaming group since the pandemic. It started as a way to introduce RPGs—a Read more…
August 18, 2026
Homebrew is going to encompass posts relating to my own gaming rather than gaming products—which will be posted over on the SEP website. So, let me tell you about the game I’m running for family. Along with my playtest for Read more…
January 16, 2025
That title is going to fall flat for those not interested in Asian security issues. It amuses me and that’s all that matters. I’ve already waded into the ‘system matters’ discussion, and made my assertion that complex or robust rule Read more…
January 10, 2025
This holiday break, two of the movies I watched were Akira Kurosawa’s The Bad Sleep Well from 1960 and The Founder from John Lee Hancock. Both of these movies tell stories of ambition in the corporate world—for The Bad Sleep Read more…
January 2, 2025
. . . to go forward. I’m working on a robust or complex TTRPG system right now—more complex than my usual ‘story-forward’ games but not to the level of D&D or GURPS—and I thought I faced an intractable problem. I Read more…
December 20, 2024
I’ve already written of my love for Cyberpunk 2077, then I did a one-page adventure seed inspired by it, so what am I doing now? Well, Cyberpunk 2077 is a computer game, but it is an RPG. Part of its Read more…
December 5, 2024
Right now I have a couple of playtests happening as I work on a robust role-playing game system—a game that is complex, with many pre-defined components that is more about player choice than player creativity when it comes to character Read more…
November 21, 2024
When writing a fantasy RPG setting, I think we all borrow to some degree. There is borrowing from other creative works, and then there is borrowing from history. When borrowing from history, we are also often borrowing from other cultures. Read more…