My winter vacation is coming to a close tomorrow. I feel like I didn’t do half the things I wanted to, but I did accomplish a lot!
First and foremost: I’ve written a tabletop adventure (for OSE) under my business name, Bovidae Studios. It has been written, playtested, and the third draft has been sent to my editor for review (and removing my unnecessary verbiage – I am sure you noticed, but I am actually an extremely mediocre writer). I have a couple interior drawings to finish up, but otherwise, once I get that back and make some changes, I’ll let my spouse look it over and then send it for self-publishing via DriveThruRPG.
It’s very exciting! I put a lot of work into it! Is it good? Maybe. Who knows! It’s ~20 pages of actual content and it will cost $7.95 – it was going to be $10.00, but then someone else released something infinitely cooler, their magnum opus, for $7.95, so I decided maybe mine should be the same. There will also hopefully be a print edition (mostly I want to own it if I’m being honest) once that goes through DriveThru’s proofing process. I’m also starting work on my second adventure for release maybe in April! Both of these I will probably post to this blog when they are up, but probably won’t do any progress updates or anything (though I do post some updates aimlessly on the dice.camp Mastodon instance from time to time).
Otherwise, #Dungeon23 is a thing (thanks to Sean McCoy’s brain). It is supposed to be a year’s-long mega dungeon: one room a day, one floor per month, for a total of 365 rooms and 12 floors. As cool as this is… I don’t have the time for it. I have adventures to write, a day job that has nothing to do with tabletop, I’ve got art commissions on the side, I started working out three times per week, I’ve been doing vocal lessons and learning guitar on my own, and I’m supposed to be updating this blog… so I already fill up most of my free time!
That said, I still want to do it – so, as a compromise, I’m doing one room a week and will hopefully post my updates to this blog! The exact day of the week is uncertain – it will probably vary, but it should be interesting. I’m doing it on paper, but I’ll digitise along the way and toss it all together as a PDF at the end.
Lastly, I accidentally overwrote this blog’s WordPress theme and it messed up the navigation menu. I can’t be arsed to fix it right now, but maybe I’ll get around to it.
Okay, I couldn’t come up with a good title for this, so that’s what you get.
A bit of context; recently (late last November), a campaign I’d been in for the last three years finally broke down to communication issues. I left, mourned, and thought about what I was going to do next.
I’d never actually done the whole ‘Looking for Group’ thing before with internet strangers – my real-life Monday campaign had me initially invited to by a coworker, and the games I began running online, I initially pulled players from friends, close-knit club groups, and friends of those friends. I’ve played with ‘strangers’ online – but all those times it was finding them by accident through mutual communities like Discord. There was never a truly anonymous recruitment process. I’ve never really been through the whole ‘application & interviews’ ring as a player.
So I’ve been hitting up a few ads and throwing myself out there to mixed success – a couple interviews here, a few non-responses there, and I think I’ve found a couple personable potential spaces where something really nice and new will start. Perhaps I’ll even get to play Burning Wheel. But I’m not here to talk about those. I’m here to talk about this:
He re-worded this every other day or so.
First thing’s first: I like Old School Essentials. OSR games are my jam. But I have so many questions – first, how old is this guy? He must have shared a urinal with Gygax himself. The “This is real D&D” is a Schrodinger’s problem: is this guy an old elitist or is he just offering a very specific experience (one I’d love to have)? My spouse says I should play with people in my age bracket. He’s probably right. But this could be a unique opportunity! Against my better judgement, knowing I can leave at any time, and not wanting to make assumptions of a person I’d never met, I decided to message him. The internet is all anonymous, after all. I sent him a bit of a long-winded request, asking to chat, maybe he could give some more information? He says nothing and responds with a Discord invite:
T U E.
Sweat beads on my brow as I click join. I steel myself. This is the proverbial lion’s den. No session 0. No expectations. No vetting, no interviews. Why does he trust me? Who am I? Where am I? Time will tell.
I wait a while, expecting a greeting, but none came. Before introducing myself, I decide to scroll up and see what the chat is like. There’s only one channel – the default Discord’s ‘#general’ and all I see are confirmations of time, regretfully missing a session or two, a few ‘Happy Holidays’ over the last Winter, and weekly Zoom invitations.
So, this DM is bringing people into a Discord, inviting them to his hosted Foundry game, and then sending Zoom invitations for voice and video. Why Zoom? Discord and Foundry both have integrated video and voice calling. Who is this man, really?
I’ll soon find out. The very next day I’m set to join in the session with another new player. There is no information given other than the time. I show up slightly embarrassed on being a bit late (had a call to attend) and roll my character as per his instructions. It’s actually kind of incredible – he talks about how he doesn’t use the fancy Foundry system designed for and instead had made his own system entirely from scratch. I respect it. Things feel both smooth and rustic at the same time. We don’t introduce ourselves over voice (perhaps because of my ten-minute lateness) and we immediately start playing the game.
There was a chuckle when I rolled my stats. This Fighter won’t last long.
It was…. fantastic?
I won’t get too into the details of the session, it was very standard fare. You begin in a tavern. Puzzles. A crypt. Arguments on ten-foot poles. We put on a cursed ring. A wizard, a thief, a fighter. But that’s exactly why it was so fantastic; I truly felt transported back into 1980s-90s Dungeons & Dragons. Despite the technology running it for us over the internet, the lack of physical character sheets… everything about the game really felt like how I’d seen it and described it being played back in the day. I felt as though I was actually fulfilling a sense of nostalgia (though I had been far too young to have played back then). There was definitely a sort of magic to it. I wouldn’t compare it to any other game – I probably don’t recommend this to anyone looking for something that isn’t “D&D in the late 90s like how I played as a wee lad”. But the charm of it and the transparency of the DM in what we did (he was “adversarial”, but he was also a good teacher, walking us through traps) overall felt good. He was a great DM – and weirdly, one of the best voice actors I’ve ever heard in my life.
I’ve been envious of the old GMs and DMs. Folks with decades of experience under their belt – going through the systems over the years and watching the hobby evolving. They got to be there for the original tropes, they’re able to build off of that. I’m remarkably green to the whole thing despite my enthusiasm. Being there made me kind of feel like I was able to have some of that. While I’m still cautious (he’s old, I’m young and queer – we certainly didn’t give our pronouns) – I have a lot to learn from this guy.
Slice of Beef 