Marking some posts private

After some reflection, I have decided to mark some posts private and thereby make them unavailable. In the interests of transparency, I want to document the reasons why. Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash First, I have removed access to my list of free D&D 5e adventures. The traffic to that one post overwhelms everything …

I only know one way to love things.

I only know one way to love things: throw myself into completely, maybe even obsessively. That has an obvious dark side to it: at some point, I often tire of the thing and cast it aside, at least temporarily, once I've finished devouring it intellectually. I crave that sense of newness, of exploration. (Earlier in life, I feared …

Scarlet Caverns

Because I wanted to keep trying solo dungeon runs separately from some urban adventure, I rolled up a character specifically for delving and finding gold. In the Red Tide setting, the stereotypical dwarven lust for gold is explained by their "religion" or at least their metaphysical views about using it in the afterlife to attack a goddess …

Exploring the Ruins of the Undercity

Great success playing with my kids tonight! They'd lost most of their old character sheets, but no problem - we rolled up new ones pretty quickly. My favorite part of old-school gaming is how little time character generation takes. I let them roll 3d6 6 times and assign each as they wished, mostly using Swords …

Rooted in make-believe

When I was a kid, seeing a movie meant more than just a couple of hours of entertainment. It meant hours or maybe days of material for playing "make-believe" or "pretend". After The Goonies or Return of the Jedi or anything else I liked, the ideas and characters and settings and themes would inform my …

Solo RPG Play using Scarlet Heroes

I finally spent some time playing Scarlet Heroes, the old-school D&D-alike from Sine Nomine Publishing and Kevin Crawford. Unusual for these sorts of games, Scarlet Heroes focuses on very small parties (one or two characters) and even provides support for solo play where the GM is also the player. The system supports existing D&D material with one or two …