I was lucky enough to be invited to speak with an MA Worldbuilding with Creature Design class at Leeds Arts University earlier this month. Here’s a rough outline of what I spoke about. Thanks to Ben and all the students for making me feel welcome and for asking some thoughtful, interesting questions!
I’ve been sitting on this news since last year, but I’m happy to announce I’m one of the writers on Tome of Strange Beings, the new bestiary for Dark Souls: The Roleplaying game. More information will come soon from Steamforged Games, but for now I want to say how surreal it still feels.
18 months ago (or 100 years, time is all weird thanks to COVID), I released a book on Kickstarter for Zine Quest 3, Mysteries of the Mists. Zine Quest is a loose collection of TTRPG projects on Kickstarter, typically in a lightweight zine format (under 20 pages, staple-bound). Last year, with all the talk from Kickstarter about crypto and blockchain, some in the TTRPG industry started their own, KS-less initiative called Zine Month (or ZiMo).
This past weekend, I exhibited at a convention for the first time. Thought Bubble is a comic art festival held annually in Harrogate. I’ve been a regular attendee since 2015 but this was my first time on the other side of the table.
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be tabling for the first time at this year’s comic arts festival Thought Bubble! I’ll be at the Harrogate Convention Centre for both days, Saturday the 12th to Sunday the 13th 2022.
I was listening to the first episode of the Toa Tabletop podcast recently (the new iteration of the Mud & Blood podcast). Liam Stevens (the host) was discussing historical accuracy in tabletop games with professors Shawn Rowlands and Hamish Cameron and it got me thinking again about my design process for the setting of Runecairn, my Norse fantasy TTRPG.
There was a discussion on Twitter the other day about the OSR and what this term actually means from a conceptual and philosophical perspective, as there’s no one single definition. Even what the acronym stands for changes depending on who you ask, from old school renaissance to old school revival and others. I wanted to set out my reasons for calling Runecairn an OSR game and explain what I mean in doing so.
When designing Runecairn, I wanted a way to quickly populate monster stat blocks in a consistent format without a lot of manual work. I decided to see if I could use a Mail Merge in Word and Excel to get the result I was after.
Keep going!Keep going ×2!Give me more!Thank you, thank youFar too kind!Never gonna give me up?Never gonna let me down?Turn around and desert me!You're an addict!Son of a clapper!No wayGo back to work!This is getting out of handUnbelievablePREPOSTEROUSI N S A N I T YFEED ME A STRAY CAT