Just a few months before COVID shut down all gaming conventions all over the world, I regained control of Rogue Cthulhu, the gaming club I co-founded over 20 years ago. In those few months between Thanksgiving 2019 and when the world shut down in March 2020, I was hard at work trying to prepare for the next Rogue Cthulhu show at the Origins Gaming Convention. One of my areas of focus was to re-establish the prize table and point system that had been dismantled while I was away from the helm.  This is one of the prizes that I was working on at that time. Unfortunately, I don't have a ..read more

 So, 2020 happened. That was a thing. As I'm sure it was for all of us, it was a particularly hard year for me. At the end of March, just before COVID-19 took over all of our lives, my mother passed away unexpectedly. There is some confusion about how exactly she passed, and I'm not convinced that COVID did not play a part, but testing was not being done at that time. She went into the hospital to get treated for rhabdomyolysis. She had been complaining of muscle pain and weakness in her legs for weeks and my daughter, who is a pharmacy student, discovered that she was taking two differen ..read more

Hey everybody. I'm YouTube Famous now! Lol. All joking aside, I am very grateful to beloved YouTube woodworking content creator, Matt Cremona, for featuring one of my projects on his channel. About six months or so ago, I sent him some pictures of my Tarot Box project. At the end of his weekly shop update videos, he features several viewer projects. As he has over 250 thousand subscribers, you can guess that the queue for the viewer projects is pretty long. The segment with my photos starts around 10:50 into the video, but I recommend you watch the whole thing, especially if you are into wo ..read more

The Ars Goetia is the first section of a 17th century grimoire known as the Lesser Key of Solomon. It is basically the yellow pages of conjuration. Personally, I stay away from conjuring or summoning of any kind. It's just not my bag. But for those who do, the 72 demons described in the goetia will take care of most of your needs. I have a large collection of craft store pre-made boxes of various types and sized, and recently I decided to start purging that collection in favor of making my own better quality boxes out of nicer wood. Among those craft boxes, I found this one which looked to b ..read more

Last year, I posted about my penchant for acquiring free wood to use in my wood work and turning projects. Because, I'm a cheap bastard, and free wood is the best wood. Well, a friend of mine (yes, I have two of them) brought me some free wood that he got from his work. He is a truck driver, and he goes through a large quantity of dunnage/cribbing in his job. He says he burns a lot of it for fire wood, and asked me if I wanted some. I've gotten caches of cribbing before, and it is usually old oak 4x4's. They look pretty nasty at first glance, and they do usually have a lot of cracks in them ..read more

         It has been more than two years since I have made something- like, actually made something, not just modified or laser etched it, but actually crafted it with my hands from scratch. The Rogue Cthulhu dice boxes were probably the last thing I really made.          Not gonna lie, things have been rough. Rogue Cthulhu has been retired. My gaming days have come to an end. Book of Shadows, my store, has been shut down. The building was badly vandalized and it did not make economic sense to make the repairs needed to stay ..read more

I recently returned to the leadership position of my old gaming club, Rogue Cthulhu and due to changes in policy during the four years I was away, our once vaunted prize table now has to be rebuilt from scratch. So, first I made a list of reasonably simple and inexpensive craft items I could make to begin rebuilding our stock of prizes. We often get gifts of larger prizes, like RPG books, as prize support from publishers connected to the games we run, so what we mostly need is smaller prizes that work with our point chip system. The first such project that I thought of was a line of laser en ..read more

I have made about five batches of planchettes since I first posted about them. This post is about batch #3, i.e. version 1.6. I'll try to keep it brief, because I just finished batch #4, i.e. version 2.0.  Version 1.6 was just like version 1.5, except they had laser engravings on the top surface. It was a medium sized batch of about 17 units. All were made from hardwood, though some were made from planks that I planed down to thickness, and some were made from thin (1/8") stock I usually use in my laser. The laser stock ones were too thin to put a glass oculus into, so only the ones I pl ..read more

I've been itching to make some more boxes. I really liked the way my pencil top boxes with ebony splines came out. With the exception of the lids. Those were hard to fit properly. They ended up being a little too sloppy for my liking. So, I decided to try a different style of lid. I also wanted to use some of the thin hardwood boards that I bought for my laser, because, well, they didn't need planed to thickness and because I had a large collection of them that was getting a bit out of hand. However, the thin boards were not thick enough to cut a rabbet or a dado into, so the top and bottom w ..read more

At my shop, we sell a line of pre-made spell candles that are 1.5" in diameter. These candles are hand made (not by me) and the bases are not perfectly flat. The odd diameter and the imperfect bottom make finding a holder for them a little challenging. To combat that problem, I have custom made some quick wooden block style holders designed especially for these candles. The cat's name is Luna ;) The holder is just a square block of solid walnut with rounded over edges and two holes drilled in it. I made the prototype batch of six holders in about an hour (not counting finish drying ..read more