This blog appears primarily for the reason that it provides space for me to offer up thoughts on a great variety of topics pertinent to RPGs. I’m an old school gamer and find many fora on games and game design to be an ill fit, as most of the participants embrace completely different playstyles and philosophies. Any post on those fora can appear in a post here after I’ve been able to work out my thoughts.

The next reason is that it gives me a place to post and explore bits of my design projects where I can get some feedback from interested readers. I don’t see much utility from posting for feedback where most forum users aren’t old school peeps–the feedback gained is likely rooted in much different sensibilities and unlikely to be of much use.

And lastly, this blog is celebrates me regaining the ability to produce materials. My mental health has been spotty for ages–depression–and now that the mental fog isn’t ever present, I’m able to design and create and write, again. It’s such a nice feeling!

[Addendum:] It’s been some twenty months since I started this project, and now I think I’ve a much better grasp of how I want to use it. I’ve three active design projects underway — a bespoke system, an AD&D hack, and a pulpish system — and I want to discuss how a concept will be used in each of those — a compare and contrast exercise involving each concept. I suspect that approach will prove more useful to both me and any readers.

I also want to offer more directly usable material than I’ve done thus far. I know many readers peruse blogs looking for material they can drop into use at their tables, so I look to help them along in that effort and offer up usable goodies that don’t require much work. In other words, I’ll work to offer more than just an examination of concepts, I’ll try to offer usable example material.

I’m adding a bit more structure to the blog, too, in the way of organizing posts into ongoing series covering one subject. Say, a series on building adventures, a series on subsystems (travel, exploration, establishing domains, etc.), a series about GMing techniques…each with standardized hashtags to help search them out. Instead of just idle musings on topics that cross my screen/mind, I want to offer more directly useful writings that are easy to find.

I know it’ll take a while to revisit all of my extant posts and get them revised in accordance with the plan. I’ll try to get all that done on a relatively quick schedule. Some posts will get revised, some merged with another on the same topic, some will disappear, and there will be new posts appearing. As of now, all of the other posts have been removed in anticipation of new posts appearing.

Let’s hope I can maintain motivation to get it all done quickly.