When you are on a tight deadline for, The Blackmoor Gazetteer.  And also -  When you are heavily ADHD and you should be working on one book, but you can’t feel inspired or motivated. Then suddenly you get an idea and are ready to work on it, only your idea is for another book entirely! I’ve been working on my new RPG book, The Terror of Spiral Keep, with the goal of making a setting module that teaches referee’s how to infuse their own game with a feeling of exploring the unknown and psychologically disturbing elements of horror. One main premise I have been trying to get across ..read more

Well, it’s a been a while. Was just peering at some spurious content about the need for Chainmail to understand original D&D, along with comments about a letter Arneson wrote to WOTC being another reason that it would be impossible for Arneson to be the inventor of RPGs. Old arguments I've been debating for years and it is all so tiresome. I had to go delete my online arguing and let people think what they want - I have more important things to do right now like writing this blog post! Here is what I think: No, all this reverse engineering on historical fact is just wrong. Almost no o ..read more

I hope this blog post finds all of you well. While I normally like to write a complete article which has a lot of heavy research with supporting images  I am doing something different today. I will simply describe what we found without explaining too much about what it is. It's up to you to figure it all out this time. I will also do something odd and try to be brief in my descriptions. At Arnecon, Ken Fletcher approached me with a folder full of documents pertaining to his work when he was at Adventure Games. Ken felt it important to pass on these artifacts to someone who would help ..read more

Arnecon! We’re less than three weeks out from Arnecon game convention. It is going to be a very unique event. Since it is the first one, we’ve planned it as an intimate event without the huge crowds like other conventions. Of course, one can never predict what an event will be like until it happens. What we do foresee is a rare chance for those who attend to spend time with many of the original gamers who helped create our hobby. Wesely will run Braunsteins. Ross will run a game of Strategos. Phil Grant will have Dawn Patrol games. Megarry will bring Dave Arneson’s game table to the convent ..read more

Much as I love RPGs, and especially the old ones, with few exceptions the rules for magic and spell casting leave a lot to be desired. If you are not familiar with Original D&D, you can take a look at the original Basic D&D by Holmes here: www.americanroads.us/DandD/DnD_Basic_Rules_Holmes.pdf Gonna go out on a limb and claim that SJGames, The Fantasy Trip: Wizard may be the only well functioning magic system I've ever played. It derives ideas from Tunnels and Trolls, which is much more interesting when it comes to magic spells than D&D, except the spell names are a bit goofy in ..read more

Since the numerous HASBRO/WOTC debacles of late, a great deal of you are starting to move away from D&D 5e. Some are choosing heavily ruled games such as Pathfinder and others have begun a long journey into the older play style which goes all the way back to when Dave Arneson began running his Blackmoor campaign in 1971. ​To all of you D&D 5e players - Welcome to the wider community of RPG gamers! For me, it is wonderful to see a new exploration of older games. The simpler game systems that are not heavily mechanized to the point that referees have little space to individualize hav ..read more

Finally back from Gary Con. I managed to get sick on the return drive. It made the trip into a hallucinatory journey for me. But I am now fully recovered. Today is the house game group day. YAY, I can look forward to playing tonight. Thankfully, Bob Whelton will be running something so I can take a break. I’m not burned out, yet, I put a lot into doing the annual Gary Con games I run for people. ​ I do not run a massive schedule of games. An aerial war game session over Blackmoor, a movie screening, a large naval battle, and the annual descent into a Blackmoor dungeon with Tonisborg. E ..read more

The Lost Dungeons of Tonisborg is published which is wonderful, yet, there seems to be some confusion regarding the purpose of the book. Dan and I had assumed most users of the book would understand the underlying premise being this: Although the book is about the old dungeon maps, the only way to understand the maps is via a tutorial on play methods and a set of rules specifically designed for the play style for the time the maps come from. Very simply, if the maps had been published as the section on history along with the maps, and without any of the other sections, the maps would have ..read more

I found this on the web and have no idea what it is from ​Sample Chapter from, The Essential Blackmoor by Griffith Mon Morgan III Copyright 2023 Time and Sand - how and why to streamline your game As a referee you have to contend with the desire players have for more powerful weapons and spells, and even more so, for rules systems that give them abilities that border on magical super power. In order to operate the Blackmoor World setting I always will advocate for games with simpler mechanics and faster abstract combat because it allows for more exploration in a smaller amount of game tim ..read more

I’m no genius game referee. I am just a regular gamer like you who works to keep their game fresh for their players. In order to do this I try to expand on what is in the rules of my game. I do it in order to create more lore about what the people places and creatures that can be found in my world are like. I assume all referees do this with their game. Often it is within the little details that one can expand their setting. Just take something seemingly ordinary and give it a little bit of a twist and you’ve added some flavor to your world setting that can be discovered by players.  H ..read more