Strange Ways is the Deal if the Day on DTRPG

 Strange Ways: Six Classes and Alternate Magical Systems for Any OSR Adventure Game is my Copper Bestseller set of alternative magic systems and classes that use them for OSR games. I'm very proud of my creation!

Year 3 (and a bit) in Review

 There years! I have been writing and creating through Welcome to the Deathtrap for over three years now, and I am very proud of what I have created.

And I am going to start this review by saying how much I appreciate my readers. You have kept me excited to sit down and write every single day.

Let's Build an RPG (pt. 4)

 Creating a good RPG is a long, ongoing process. What I managed to make when I started Dragonette was playable within 20 minutes. Making it presentable to the world has taken considerably longer.

Still Polishing

What I put out last week was perfectly playable. In fact, I've gotten some good reviews and a lot of great feedback from people on it. But, it is far from something I'm satisfied with. Since it's initial release I've created an alphabetical index and a table of contents.

The Relationship Between Rule Complexity & Rule Opacity

"This pitiless reptile had killed his poor companions"
Virginia Frances Sterrett (1900-1931)

 Since I've started to try to reorganize Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for my Ruins & Redcaps project, it has been really interesting taking note of what Gygax chose to share with players in the PHB, and what got moved to the DMG.

In fact, one of my big complaints when I made the shift from Mentzer Basic to AD&D in 1987 was that some things I was used to seeing in the player's book, like attack matrices and saving throws were nowhere to be found. 

It was equally aggravating a year and a half later when I finally got the AD&D2e DMG to complete my set and discovered that it didn't have saving throws, either. They had been put back in the PHB. At eight years old, running my first campaigns that moved above third level, I found myself doing extrapolations of mathematical algorithms in order to figure out what the saving throws ought to be at higher levels.

(Yes, I was one of those, kids.)

There was definitely some complicated and clashing ideas between different TSR designers about exactly how transparent Dungeons & Dragons ought to be.

Cloning AD&D to Avoid Zero Days

 

I have been having a rough month! Both of my sons developed croup a while back, and no sooner did my oldest recover from that, but he and my wife each brought another virus home. So, I've been intending with croup, the flu, and a Norovirus all at the same time. Amazingly, in spite of all the bedclothes I've changed, baths I've given, and laundry I've done, I have managed to avoid getting infected with any of it myself.

With a lot of long nights spent sitting vigil over my family, my creative energy has been next to zero. I have had neither the creativity to continue working on The Depths of the Eternal Ocean, or to continue editing and refining the presentation of Deathtrap Lite. Valkyrie remains a slow movie side project intended to catch my thoughts while working on Eternal Ocean.

Needless to say, I haven't really wanted to lose my writing time. In fact, I have been aggressively grabbing time for myself whenever I can. So, I started yet another project. A much less demanding one. This one is for dipping into when I have the time, and probably won't be ready for a very long time. 

The project is intended to be a faithful reproduction of AD&D's rules.