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Hello world! I’m Mike, a mid 30s web software dev and an avid fan of TTRPGs, film and music as well as ergonomic keyboards (the coolest of all Carpal Tunnel related hobbies). I’m finally getting a blog together in an effort to get my internal thoughts about these topics out to the wider world with an actual URL attached to them. I want to use this as a way to share things I’ve discovered that work for me with TTRPGs across my nearly 20 years interacting with them.
At time of writing my current campaign I’m running is a very combat-light, exploration heavy Vaults of Vaarn campaign with an emphasis on cosmic wonder and investigation.
My history with TTRPGs dates back to the early 00s where my dad introduced me to the idea of them by way of stories of playing D&D in college. From there I borrowed what books I could from my local library and fell in love with 3rd edition and its strongly idiosyncratic art direction. From that point there were a few other games that entered my awareness but eventually I thought I was “too cool” for them and move onto other hobbies. Years later, we’re all stuck at home in the midst of a pandemic and reddit suggests a community for me, r/whitehack. Out of curiosity I click and find out that there’s a whole world of folks making RPGs that aren’t D&D, they aren’t even a second or third tier publisher, just some folks self publishing their little games. Since then other hobbies took a bit of a backseat as I fell fully into the rabbithole of indie/OSR/NSR/whatever other acronym games and have been happy ever since.
In the pipeline I’ve been working on various things for running a campaign using Matt Finch’s glorious Swords and Wizardry for a very Cthulhu Mythos inspired fantasy setting. I’ve actually been loving the levels of intricacy that go into OD&D and how it manages to straddle complex and simple in a very interesting way. Is 1d20+modifiers to beat a number a good united mechanic? Sure! That said there is something that currently has me hypnotized with X-in-6 skill checks.
I’m also working on a small collection of NPCs for Vaults of Vaarn that I hope to publish in PDF form for that dedicated and wonderful community.
The hope with this blog is that I will publish something every week or so if fo no other reason than to get something out of my mind and onto digital paper.
