What If We Kissed calls itself the “same genre of thing as Dungeons & Dragons,” and I understand the mistake.
As I said before, for better or worse D&D is the entry point for most anyone who is curious about RPGs. Unless they have a friend who is both well versed in RPGs and believes D&D is an imperfect introduction to the medium, a newcomer is first going to take a look at D&D.
The Macabre Tale of Edmund Moulde About Edmund Moulde was born from a flash game. At least, that’s the first spark I remember. It was a silly little thing, where you played a young Addams-family-like scientist creating Frankenstein monsters to fight other scientists, and I only played it for a bit before shrugging and moving on with my browsing.
The idea of a Gothic child, who — Dr. Jekyll like — set about doing science in an old castle clicked in my brain.
Here is a collection of all my short stories:
The Ring I once wrote out a quick review of Twilight. Having never read the book, I was going entirely off of other people’s opinions and descriptions, so it was an ultimately pointless masterbation, more a method of organizing my own thoughts around a single question: was sparkly vampires a good idea?
I have always been drawn towards theme over action, so in a misguided attempt to detail what would have been a “better choice,” I started playing around with modifications to familiar fantastical beasts.
John Gardner’s Grendel is a remarkable book. Adapted into the beautifully appalling children’s cartoon (yes, that’s real), Grendel is at once a retelling of the epic poem of Beowulf and an exploration of multiple philosophical concepts, including Existentialism, Nihilism, and Absurdism.
After reading the Epic of Gilgamesh, I found myself enamored with several philosophical questions, not the least of which was why did this purportedly heroic figure of Gilgamesh start life as a tyrant?
About Hilda is a great TV Show/Graphic novel by Luke Pearson. In it, the titular main character is accompanied by Alphur the elf. As an elf, Alphur is a red-tape enthusiast, devoted to ensuring protocols are followed, contracts are adhered to, and every T and I are crossed and dotted. Hilda can’t even see the elves until she has signed all the paperwork allowing her to do so.
From this, a simple idea: Magic is in words.
About I love RPGs, and have played them for most of my life. Relatively recently, I found myself in possession of far more indie RPGs than I could reasonably play, and so my odd little brain demanded I categorize them. I started and quickly quit the project as I found more and more matrices on which to measure these games, and slowly found myself philosophizing about RPGs in aggregate.
The end result was the following tretise with the following theses: much like anime, we should really classify RPGs as a medium rather than a genre; All RPGs are personalized hacks rather than codified systems; and the conflict between an improvised story and a codified ruleset makes RPGs something both more and less than either games or stories.
Welcome one and all, to my collection of all my books, short stories, posts, musings, and other little oddscrawls that crawled across my brain. This website may change format semi-regularly as I experiment with format and schedule; I appreciate your patience as this repository evolves.
Currently, I am involved in uploading the following projects:
RPG Errata I found some more interesting things to say about RPGs! An addendum to my original Treatise, with some more games and a rambling thoughts.
