Thursday, June 15, 2017

Ecology of the Gaming Blog

I'm a little late to the game.

Hi.

So, I've been interested in the OSR for awhile now--in particular, hexcrawls, disease severity tables, unbalanced random encounters, and other forgotten treasures from olden times. Although I've had the pleasure of DMing for groups both online and in real life pretty consistently over the years, I've never managed to find the time to actually sit down and DO the things that percolate in the back of my mind as I run my players through D&D 3.5 Elder Scrolls homebrews, massive Forgotten Realms mega-modules, 2nd Edition Birthright campaigns, and 1e classic dungeons. An ever growing stack of ideas, campaign notes, obscure game store finds, unexplored dungeon complexes, and unused setting details that I can't bear to part with looms over me, full of something like wasted potential. I want to build something from these resources--something permanent and lasting. A place to hold my many places.

Like Burgess Meredith in the classic Twilight Zone episode, I have decided to emerge from the vault and demand that there be time enough at last!

And so there has been! For nearly a month now, I've been engaged in world-building, looting a hundred long-dead campaigns (and even more published material) to assemble the bones of my own little world. I've been obsessing over minutiae and wrestling with rules, and I've found it all to be pretty great. Over the course of it, my search for other folks' solutions to the problems I sought to address brought me to the amazing and thriving community of old school gaming blogs. I found myself wanting to share this thing that I'm working on, and to make the solutions that I'm creating available to others who are even later to the game than I am. So here we are.

I suppose we'll see what comes of this. To whatever degree I have anything to teach, I expect it will be through the illustration of a process built from the work of hundreds of others. My plan is to walk through the choices I've made so far, discuss the forks in the road where I made those choices, and eventually come out the other end with a ready-to-play world (and hopefully a few friends made along the way).

Here's hoping I don't step on my proverbial glasses.

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