Very Opinionated Gaming
Jim Ward (right) gaming with Gary Gygax (left) on Gygax’s front porch. Image from Goodman Games. In the last years of TSR (the company that owned D&D before Wizards of the Coast), every year on April 4th Jim Ward (VP of Creative Services) would tell a story about the day he got fired from TSR on…
Last week, Jim Ward passed away at the age of 72. If you don’t know who he is, spell his name backwards. D-R-A-W-M-I-J As in Drawmij’s instant summons. Jim was a player in Gary Gygax’s game group, and he suggested the concept for that spell, and Gygax wrote it and named it after Jim.[1] Jim…
I’ll be at GameHole Con this week in Madison, WI! I’m a special guest, which means I’m running several games and doing a few other things associated with the convention, and I have some MCG events as well. Here’s my schedule as I know it so far (and note that all three of the ••• bulleted…
Info on my Patreon, full of crunchy RPG goodness!
This blog post is for people who like MCG’s Arcana of the Ancients stuff for 5E, and want more. :) Back in 2021, MCG released a Numenera supplement called Vertices, a book of ruins for PCs to explore. Although Vertices is written for the Numenera game, if you have any of the books from the Arcana…
Thoughts on the Cypher System Starter Set from the perspective of having written the award-winning Pathfinder Beginner Box
My friend and colleague Kim Mohan passed away today at age 73. I met him when I joined TSR. He was one of the TSR people whose names I recognized[1], so getting to talk to him in person was a cool thing. When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, he and I were part of…
Back when I still used Facebook, I used to argue politics on the internet. A lot. A lot a lot. Like, Id be late to a social event because I “needed” to reply to someones wonky political take on something. Or Id stay up late for the same reason. Or Id have trouble falling asleep…
I’m gonna start a Patreon, probably in December 2022. Partly because I want people to be able to find me if Twitter stops working, and partly to incentivize myself to post more articles (I do post them here on this WordPress blog now and then, but I’m the sort of person who gets a lot…
(Trivia & Anecdotes is a series of blog posts about weird and sometimes funny behind-the-scenes facts about various books I worked on, in chronological order of when they were published. If you see a number in brackets like this [1], it’s referring to a footnote at the bottom of this post.) Welcome to part two…