But also, the look of concern on your face Patrick when you looked at the yoon suin art. Please forgive me! Though I admit I did laugh a little bit because I was expecting it. And you are not the only one to express concern or even dislike of my MS paint art.

David is mostly right about why I am doing a lot of my art in MS Paint and other old digital formats like PETScii. I enjoy working within the constraints those programs enforce, and there might be some nostalgia there as well. But there is also an element of burnout involved. A few years ago, just before the end of g+ really, the whole process of drawing on paper started to make me almost physically sick. I don't know why. Depression, anxiety, doubt, all played a part, and maybe something wasn't clicking creativity wise. But for quite a while the act of putting pen or pencil to paper was enough to make me vomit. Now I am doing more analogue drawing again, but it's usually within the constraint of designing rubber stamps."

Monday, 16 August 2021

More Interviews! More! MORE! MORE!

LEARN!

The secrets of BROKEN FIRE REGIME

with Her Christmas Knight!

My own Dark and Mysterious History

with David 'Yoon-Suin' McGrogan!

The secrets of PHILOSOPHY and THOUGHT

with MAX CANTOR

(creator of Maximum Recursion Depth

coming out soon)

25 DAYS LEFT ON THE DEMON-BONE SARCOPHAGUS KICKSTARTER!!!

Saturday, 4 April 2020

I Spek - All my Audio Interviews and Podcasts

My voice - surprisingly nasal. Here is a page of links, like a library of all the podcasts and recordings where I have been interviewed by, or talked with, someone else.

Zock Bock Radio - this was a long one about BFR but it covered a wide range.

Noisms from Monsters and Manuals - mainly about my personal history

Her Christmas Knight! - so handsome! Mainly about Broken Fire Regime

The Smart Party Interview - pre Silent Titans

Udda ting with Henrik Möller - mainly about VotE

Loco Ludus - general gaming culture

The Magniloquent Moth with Salinday, Part 1

The Magniloquent Moth with Salinday, Part 2 - another pretty wide ranging talk.

The Worm Ouroboros I talk with Tom Fitzgerald of 'Middenmurk' about the book, 'The Work Ouroboros'

The Great Crystal Debate w Kiel Chenier. Crystals, good or bad? = BAD

Podecasts

A series of conversations I had with Scrap

Podecast One

Podecast Two - Monsters

Podecast Three - Beauty

Podecast Six - Bees!

Podecast Five - Relateable Content!

Podecast Six - The Wonderful Kererū

Thursday, 13 September 2018

Smart Party Interview with Me

Click the image or here.

If you have questions you can ask here, on G+ or Facebook.

I am sorry about not updating more actual meaningful content.

Will try to have something by the end of this week.

Saturday, 18 August 2018

None Of You Care Enough About Textiles

As is becoming traditional for interviews, the more interesting and original the content, the fewer the views. I suppose that makes this your chance to be amongst the ELITE! One of the FEW.

I am an imperfect interviewer but I found all of this utterly fascinating. I interview Mun Kao and Zedeck Siew about their zine/ongoing artpunk D&D project A Thousand Thousand Islands and the conversation goes all over the place from Malaysian views of D&D, the politics of textiles, negative space in design, art-text collaboration and much more.

Zedeck on Tumblr
http://zedecksiew.tumblr.com/

Zedeck on G+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+ZedeckSiew

Mun Kao on G+
https://plus.google.com/u/0/+MunKao

Mun Kao's Patreon, shame him into making more art and writing down the reading list he used to research South East Asian cultures for ATTI.
https://www.patreon.com/athousandthousandislands

Politiko - the card game, and app, about Malaysian politics;
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.centaur.politiko&hl=en_GB
https://www.loyarbarang.com/shop/misc/politiko2/
https://vulcanpost.com/638933/politiko-malaysia-mobile-app/

That Scandi game Trudvang Mun Kao mentioned as an inspiration.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1256540796/trudvang-chronicles

Thursday, 12 July 2018

I Interview Ben L of Mazirians Garden

I found this one really interesting.

The game with Sebastian - the Dreamlands and I story https://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/... D&D, Escapism and our Hobby https://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/... Ben on the City http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2... http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2... Bens Old School Manifesto http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2... Playing Online http://maziriansgarden.blogspot.com/2...

Some of Bens after-interview comments from the original Hangouts thread;

Hey, I realized after the interview was over that you were asking me for recommendations for current OSR artists that maybe people didn't know. I talked about Tumblr instead.

Here's some stuff I'm currently digging:
Definitely Dirk Detweiler Leichty whom you mentioned, he's just amazing.

Also Jonathan Newell's illustrations of his mad city are very cool.

Thomas Novasel was also doing neat city stuff not too long ago, in the kind of John Blanche mode. A lot of crazy towers.

Evlyn M is well known but does wonderful things utterly in her own style.

Probably the one person who people don't know, because he's not on G+ and may or may not speak English, is Huargo whom you can find on Facebook under "Huargo Illustrador". He did absolutely amazing illustrations for the Japanese version of Tunnels & Trolls.

These are all Huargo

AND...

THE FUCKING ENNIES ARE HAPPENING

I like Hot Springs Island, Rey & Kiel are good people, I listen to Jason Hobb's podcast and Fear of a Black Dragon. If you read or played or listened to anything on here and you liked it then vote for it.

Tuesday, 3 July 2018

I interview Bryce Lynch

I promise I will get back to writing stuff on here, just gotta paint this Space Marine assault squad first.

This is the Unbalanced Dice page http://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pu... Who are they? We don't yet know. Shams Grog n' Blog http://shamsgrog.blogspot.com/ referred to in the video. If anyone can find the mapping post that Bryce is talking about then let me know and I will put it in here. The original Bryce Interview http://falsemachine.blogspot.com/2016... (I can never interview anyone but Bryce.)

Tuesday, 26 June 2018

I interview Melan (Gabor Lux)

Saturday, 2 September 2017

HSI - The Guide & an Interview with Jacob Hurst

The thing you can mention to people, and thing which I in fact did mention to people at Gen Con while I was shilling it, the 'unique feature' about Hot Springs Island is that it has its own guide book.

That is; it has a guide book, written in the 'voice' of the campaign, as if it were an object that the PC's themselves found or came into contact with, and one you can hand directly to the players in the same way.

I was going to talk more about this but Jacobs answers to my questions were more interesting than anything I was going to write anyway so here you go....

THE DENSITY & FULLNESS OF THE GUIDE

Patrick - "There is a LOT more info in the Guide than the Dark - deliberate or maybe design oversight? If they are not familiar with the setting then I can imagine the DM saying "Hold on, pass me that guide...""

Jacob Hurst - "Kind of a design oversight I guess. The Dark was going to have a set page count of 192 for always because it was apparently a good page count for paper math with 8.5x11 pages. I don't know if this is actually true, but I'd seen a number of 192 page sketch books that were that size so I believed it.

Then I ran out of room.

If it's info I consider to be important it's in the dark.

Part of it too was to give the players the monster manual, and see what happens.

At gen con Zak broke open my awareness of myself when he was selling my books to people saying approximately "no one does this (the field guide)! Ever have a player who says oh that's an ochre jelly and it's weak against blah blah at the table, well this may or be true."

And I realized then, that that was me. I was that person who consumed the monster manual and knew all the weaknesses and then when playing I was "ruining" the game with my "out of game knowledge". And I would always get so mad, because who gives a fuck if everyone knows Trolls are weak against fire?

And after Zak said that stuff it made me think more, and I think that the problem is that the rpg business system is inherently broken.

Lets look at a multi-player video game. Everyone who plays buys a copy of the game. If there are 10 people playing a map, then 10 copies of the game have been sold.

With table top rpgs, if 6 people are playing, only 1 person is allowed to buy the game, because if the players buy and read the module or setting or whatever then they know all the secrets and "spoil" it (for themselves and potentially everyone else).

The field guide attempts to give everyone the fun info, but NOT the spoilers.

I still don't think that knowing Trolls are weak against fire can ruin a game, but I can now understand how that knowledge can enable players to pass through content at a rate much faster than a DM expects. So when they only prepped to the troll encounter and that was supposed to be the "final battle of the night" and you breezed through it in 5 minutes, it takes the wind out of their sails. And it's not really anyone's fault but the adventure creators who didn't give the DM tools to roll with variable "content consumption" speeds.

Now I may have

..........................

Now I may have totally failed at that, but that was the intended goal.

Regarding the DM asking to see the book, they might. They absolutely might. But they may also just smile and say "sure, go ahead and do that."

The parts of the field guide that aren't true aren't exactly defined, and the DM gets to decide.

For example, I didn't want any undead on the islands. In the FG under the shadows it says "These creatures are not undead and cannot be turned by pleas to the devine." for me, that's true. But when Donnie runs, he treats them as undead, and well... That's OK. Far as I'm concerned that's intended. "

PLAYERS USING THE GUIDE BOOK

Patrick - "Also, tell me more about the reactions of new players to the Guide Book, what did they do?"

Jacob Hurst - "Now, about the Field Guide. We played and tested the island a lot with people we know. We had done it a little with people we don't know, but we hadn't really had the "full field guide experience" 'till Gen Con, and it worked amazingly well. I'm even going to go so far as to say unexpectedly well.

When Donnie ran the games, the Field Guide would be found, as a treasure item, on a corpse. And then he'd slide the book onto the table. It's some beautiful theatrics really.

The player's viscerally know that it's important, because well I mean... here it is, on the fucking table in front of them right now. And it looks pretty nice. But in the game world it was on a corpse so you know... there's danger associated with it.

Because it's physically limited only one person can really be looking at it at a time, unless two or more human beings get physically close to one another. So the person with the book tends to become the "caller" at the table, or the "right hand man" of the caller at the table. Or the book gets passed around (again, physical interaction).

So when you have a table of total strangers, who are strangers to each other (like at Gen Con), it's fucking magic. Because it breaks the ice. They now have a reason to interact with each other both in game and out of game, and it's a semi-structured interaction because of the limitations of book being shared (both in and out of game).

"Wizard what IS that thing?!?!"

The main thing they all did with the information in the book itself was to identify and weaponize stuff. Which I mean... is the whole point!

One group had been sent to find the elusive Kujibird. They saw sleeping ivy in the book, and then decided to look for that plant, so they could then use it to catch the bird if they found it.

Basically we gave them a "goal" on the island, and then they'd use the information in the Field Guide to effectively plan their adventure.

One group was dropped off at the elven ruins with the mission of recovering elven artifacts, but they knew the ruined city was fucking dangerous, so they decided to not go to it, and go elsewhere. Because they knew there were other locations out there where they could accomplish their mission, even if they didn't exactly know where they were. So they fumbled around and found the Lapis Observatory instead of dying in the ruins of Hot Springs City.

Frequently too, the person holding the book would end up reading pieces of entries out loud to the group.

It really did work better than I'd hoped it would.

THE PLANTS

Patrick - "Who did the plants? They are quire botanically sophisticated, in a way rare to see in a D&D products and the en-culturation or the specificity of their processing and use is often quite complex as well..."

Jacob Hurst - Regarding the plants: Everything with Hot Springs Island began collaboratively. Having a whole section devoted to plants was my idea though, and I did the heavy lifting for them. When the 4 of us brainstormed up plants, my guidelines were "all of the plants need to do something. Even if that something is relatively mundane (e.g., 'they're fucking delicious')."

And from there we spitballed up the majority of their core attributes.

We also did some backwards, such as the peppers. And now I'm going to go on a contextual tangent.

One of my personal core ideas for Swordfish Islands was that I wanted a person to be able to play a birdwatcher. Or a "exploration oriented scientist from the Age of Discovery". Which obviously doesn't translate well into your standard fantasy faire. But I used to play Ultima Online (a lot) (Great Lakes shard), and in UO, when you opened a person's character window, there was a small scroll off to one side where you could write your character backstory. I made so many jokes with my friends that they were all the same: "My parents were killed when I was young and so I was raised an orphan on the hard streets of Britain/Trinsic/Moonglow/major city. I did what I had to do to survive and now I want revenge. Death to orcs! blah blah blah."

I've also tried to run numerous games of D&D where the players are super adamant about coming up with "elaborate" character backstories that can then be "woven into" the game. And then... they give me two pages of backstory that's basically the same shit I saw in UO (i.e., boring and nothing to work with). But if your game is totally combat oriented (4e) then can you blame them for gravitating in that direction?

So my whole thing was: Swordfish Islands needs to be a place where you can have a hell of a good time and never have any combat, but it's still an RPG, and deadly and full of treasure and problems. And the real problem needs to be, not finding treasure and interesting things, but making it off the island with them in one piece. A problem of "abundance".

And this is the place from which the plants really came from. I was super obsessed with the idea of making a random bird generator so you could, for example, be a wizard who's life dream was to catch a glimpse of this elusive bird rumored to have been seen on the islands. But doing the generator the way I wanted was going to be stupidly hard, and ultimately pretty boring. So I went with plants.

I love plants. We always had gardens growing up (flowers at my house and vegetables at my grandparents). I was an Eagle Scout in Boy Scouts and for my Eagle Project I "wildscaped" an area in a local park (planted native plants that local animals like). And Poison Ivy is my favorite Batman villain.

Also, around the time we started on all this, I was really into the idea that when the Spanish conquered the "New World" and started bringing back all this gold and silver, they basically destroyed their (and everyone elses) economy due to inflation.

So I combined these and said: Let's come up with plants that do something, and some should have the potential to totally, and utterly fuck up your game world (like Jelly Moss).

But to get back to the backwards peppers, we came up with Blindfire vine first. A plant monster that eats you and turns your body into delicious fruit, but because I'm from Texas it was like... let's do spicy peppers! Spicy peppers are so much better than fruit 'cause you can eat them, AND weaponize them (thank you capsaicin!). And my grandpa always competed in chili cookoffs... hey guys, what if on the main island there's an annual(?) chili cookoff, and so they send adventurers to the island to collect the best tasting and hottest peppers? Ok well we should have some other peppers that aren't on a monster plant, but maybe they're only found on the island with active volcanoes 'cause you know... lava/heat/peppers?

And so cachuga peppers on Hot Springs Island were born. A sandbox hook that can be weaponized by creative individuals.

Jelly Moss was a "hey guys, what about a slime mold? Those look fucking cool. Wanna draw something like this Gabe? Fuck yeah! Ok... what does it do? Well they're slimy obviously, slime is sticky... so glue? Good good, but bigger? What if the glue is so good it works as well as nails. Oh that's fantastic. Especially for a fantasy type world where nails are having to be hammered out individually by hand. Dude.. that could totally fuck up an economy 'cause it'd put all these blacksmiths out of work. And their guild would be pissed and paying people to stop that from happening, but the carpenter's guild would probably love it and be paying on the other side. Hahaha yes... ship it!"

------------------------
~~-----~~

Regarding "Botanically sophisticated", well, I cheated. Once we knew what all the plants were, and we knew what they did, I got a bunch of sciency books, and looked for the ways in which plants were described that seemed in line with the plants we had,. I sorted all my plants by type (bush, tree, grass, etc) and then flipped and read and was like "ooooo, vaguely pyramidal, that's a cool fucking phrase". Yoink!

This brings us to another aside. Photography is a bane to doing things this way. If you pick up a field guide now a days on plants or animals, what you typically find is a beautiful glossy picture of the plant or animal and its name. There's no written description, or if there is it's either the most basic shit. All the space devoted to writing now is devoted to what the thing does or how it lives because photography "solved" the what does it look like problem.

So if you want to do this, you have to find books about plants and animals from the time before cheap photography/color printing. If you're really lucky you can find some books from the 1950s-1970s where they publishers were still providing the detailed written physical descriptions AND nice images. But these are rare.

Also, the internet is pure fucking garbage for doing this. And it's all really interesting to me. Like... it's the most amazing time to raise a kid ever right now and yet lacking. My mother got my son a subscription to a kids nature magazine. There was a "find these animals on this page, in the big picture on that page." One of the animals was an eastern meadowlark. So I immediately pulled up a video of an eastern meadowlark singing so my kid could hear it. This is amazing. The number 1 question my kid asks when I'm on my phone is "What are you finding for me?" which is wonderful. And yet, at the same time... we're poorer in a way because I can find this meadowlark song, but I'm not really equipped to process and recommunicate it. How do I describe the song? I don't know. But I can send you a link so you can experience it yourself.

This all sort of ties into that "what the fuck does an elephant look like?" thing that Scrap(?) was sharing the other day with drawings of elephants over time by people who'd never actually seen an elephant.

And all this, imo, is really important when it comes to writing fantasy stuff because no one has seen these creatures or plants or places that don't exist. And as we become more and more reliant upon pictures and recordings and whatnot, I think that it may become harder and harder for people to describe their worlds because they've never had to do it.

[gets down off soap box] Thanks for listening to that.

As usual - SHOP IS HERE.

Sunday, 29 May 2016

An Interview with Bryce Lynch

On his site tenfootpole.org Bryce Lynch has read and reviewed probably more D&D adventures than any other human being, which, I imagined would give him a unique prespective on adventure design and D&D generally so I asked him a bunch of questions.

1. WHY are you doing this?

Because I am a fool/for myself.

I've been roleplaying since 78 but in the 90's I moved from D&D to other games, eventually ending up in the narrative/story game space. A pivotal moment happened at Origins, in a Fiasco game, which slotted in to some views that came from running Lacuna. This killed my narrative/story interest, abruptly, and got me back to D&D-ish things.

Looking about I discovered all of these forums and all of these cool things people were talking about and recommending. This was right before GenCon, so I made a huge purchase at GenCon; like $2000 in adventures. Getting home from GenCon was like Christmas! As I started to go through it the highest Highs become the lowest lows ... I was crushed with disappointment. Almost all of it sucked.

Then I had a thought: if my expectations were crushed then other folks probably were also ... and a brief perusal showed that there was almost NO negative reviews of ANYTHING. In RPGlandia everything is TEH BESTEZT! I bought a site and started jotting down notes, mostly for me, to refine what I was looking for, and hopefully other folks would find a more realistic view also, when they went looking for opinions.

You mention games of Lacuna and Fiasco that alienated you from Storygames. I found a reference to that here in your Rise of Tiamat review and a little here in your Death Love Doom Review. have you spoken about it in more depth anywhere else? Would you like to do so here?

I thought it was on FortressAT, in my Origins Con Session Reports. Looks like it didn't make moderation and I eventually posted it on RPGGEEK in my Geek of the Week Q&A. I stuck it at the end. Boy, reading those old session reports brings back some fond memories. "The Queen can't just take our land, It's the Magna Carta baby!" ,"We're sorry for your loss. Please accept this complimentary British Petroleum Slurpee as a token of our regret."

(It's reproduced in full below the cut.)

"I bought a site and started jotting down notes" - you wouldn't, by chance, happen to still have those would you? What did they say?

Alas, no. Very brief though. "This sucks" and "I hate this hook" and "steal this." You can see some hints of this in the August 2011 reviews, some of my first, where I'm still figuring things out. I think I cherry-picked Thing in the Valley because I liked it. You can see me struggling in The Prison of Meneptah (which also has a Melan reply.) I recall asking someone on the Dragonsfoot forum, which was reviewing it, about it. I don't recall the response but I do recall it was less than satisfying. After I posted that one (or another one around that time period) someone said something like "Nice review. At first I thought you were one of those guys who liked everything." A little validation seems to vastly shorten the time it takes to refine an idea. For better or ill. :)

2. How the fuck have you kept this up without going mad?

The same as everyone else: Hookers & blow.

The only really bad part is Dungeon Magazine. I find everything else interesting, either because there's something to steal/get inspired by or as an example of what not to do ... a validation of my beliefs. I like to look/imagine, especially at the amateur products, at what the vision was and how the writing fell short. This makes most reviews pretty easy

Dungeon Magazine, though ... wow. The worst part is when I buy a series or a lot of product by one author. When the first one is terrible then I know I have to slog through the rest and that can do a lot to kill enthusiasm. Dungeon Magazine was like that for a LONG stretch ... knowing that I had to slog through eighty pages of crap with nothing to look forward to. I try to avoid mass buys these days, where all of the product is from the same author or the same company. In short: variety keeps things fresh, even if it's bad variety.

3. Has it become strangely addictive?

Hmmmm, I'd use the word 'routine.' Monday morning is a review, Tuesday morning is a review, and Wednesday morning is Dungeon Magazine. There's some applicable rule about how long it takes for something to become habit, I think?

4. What do you know that no-one else knows?

There is a difference between "I had fun" and "A good product." Having fun has more to do with your DM than anything else. The product is more about supporting the DM in helping you all have fun.

a. Have you perceived any deep, long-term patterns proceeding over years or decades that other people might not have noticed?

I doubt there's anything new to learn. I think the most interesting time was the move away from house-rules, like Arduin and Arms Law and T&T, and the codification of official rules that started in 1e. That shift, 35? years ago, is just now being corrected in any serious way.

5. Why are most adventures so bad?

a. Why do people want the wrong things?

I'm not sure that's a good question. No one wants the wrong thing. I would say that it's easy to go with the flow. Adventurer's League, show up on Wednesday night and play. WOTC pushes an adventure to the DM every week, almost no prep. And if you try and run something NOT Adventurers League, or D&D, or the most current version of D&D, then you face additional hurdles. I'm not sure that 'Apathy' is the right word, but a lot (a majority?) of folks are happy enough. I'm guessing that just enough of their sessions have just enough fun to keep them strung along, as they chase the high. It takes effort to seek out something different. It takes effort to get out of your comfort zone. When I'm at my best I want every thing in every day to always be awesome, and everything else isn't worth my time.

b. Is there simply no evolutionary pressure on them to make them better?

Correct.

c. WHY is there no pressure over time for tight writing, usability or clear layout? Is it to do with the audience, the way adventures are used, the hobby part of the hobby?

I'm going to write an answer for all three.

The problem has many parts. The good news is that a lot of research has been done on the issue, in the general consumer sciences field. The bad news is that the solutions are not prescriptive.

The hobby part of the hobby is one aspect. There's a very low barrier to entry, which is both a blessing and a curse, for both PDF and print. The glut of product makes choices hard for the consumer. There's a lot of research on how consumers react in these situations. We see things like mimicking the old trade dress and nice covers that try and combat these, but that's just marketing; putting a nice cover on a crappy product helps the publisher and harms the consumer. Harlan Ellison, I think, has some diatribe in which he touches on the impact of amateurs producing material. While not directly relevant, it is interesting to see how it impacts other fields of writing also.

Some publishers need a revenue stream. They mouths to feed and bills to pay. A product needs to come out every month and the deadline is the deadline, damn the quality.

Similarly, the pay-per-word crap sucks ass, and not in a good way. Encouraging bloat and weak editors combine to create unusable product. I'd love to see the big publishers crack down and/or cooperate in this area. Offer a set fee, set expectations, require hard deadlines with lots of time for revisions ... and offer a brand that means quality. But they don't really have to, people keep buying their schlock, so they don't. There's your lack of evolutionary pressure: they make money no matter what kind of crap they put out.

I just saw something from Finch, and he's right: When you buy something, rate it. 5 stars. 1 Star. Whatever. Rate it everywhere you can. Education, alternatives, that's what will change habits. (I'm a hypocrite; I used to do this more.)

Do you have a link?

The wretched hive of scum & villainy: YDIS

(Bryce provided a link but I am not sending traffic to that river of shit.)

6. What is beauty of interest to you? (This doesn't make grammatical sense.)

Apneatic (I wouldn't google that...)

The wonder of a childlike imagination. Grottos sparkle and waterfalls have caves. Bookcases have secret doors and chandeliers drop. Fields of flowers with fairy dragons who always talk to you. Something out of folklore where animals talk and limbs fall out of chimneys and brave little tailors have belts. Is there a treasure in that knot in the tree? Fuck yes there is!

7. If you could go back in time and change one thing (in RPG history), what would it be?

I wish for three more wishes.

1: Tomb of Horrors would either not exist or would only exist as rumors. I understand what it was and it's purpose however it set a bad precedent. I think it encouraged both a linear design element and, more troubling, and adversarial bend to GM'ing. I suppose someone would have done it eventually, but that early publication influenced too much, I think.

2. Those FUCKING skeletons in B2 would not be wearing those FUCKING amulets! Again, I think this influenced design too much. It implies that the game world has a set of rules that the DM must play by. Skeletons turn as 1HD, forever more, unless they wear this bullshit amulet. This has led to monsters wearing rings of protection and so on, not because it's cool or enhancing things but simply for the mechanical effect. It's got an AC 1 point more/less BECAUSE FUCK YOU THAT'S WHY.

3. And this is really my core point of the above two: the 'official' supporting product would have been better. For better or worse, people have taken (and will continue to take) the official product as The Right Way to play the game. If you publish a linear "5 fights" adventure with your edition launch then a lot of people are never going to move beyond that. More care going in to the launch products, at a minimum, would have set things on a different course, I think, and we'd have better design overall. It's weird to see some great advice in the DMG's and then to see the launch product ignore it.

8. On whom would you bring down the sword of judgement if you could? (You don’t have to answer this one.)

WOTC.

I suspect I know the plan: keep D&D on life support and make money in licensing and internal Hasbro synergy. That's no excuse for the quality of the product they are putting out. There's an absurd amount of tribal knowledge, or at least should be, about how to do something good. Their official adventure content sucks donkey balls: hardbacks, Adventurer's League, and most of the previous 4e and 3e line. The feedback I've seen is mostly "You don't proofread! Orcs are supposed to have an AC of 12 but they have of 13 in the adventure! " That's lame, and it seems to be the feedback they pay the most attention to. The stat & rules nonsense is worthless, it's fucking D&D, it can be whatever. Their inability to produce content that is evocative and helpful is inexcusable. Laziness, because they know people will buy it anyway, especially if they slap Baur's name on it? Who knows. I can excuse the amateurs who, as a labor of love, create something and their vision doesn't match what they turn out. The product WOTC cranks out for the Worlds Most Popular Fantasy RPG should be better. Fuck their book layouts and fancy fonts. That shit should be the cream and not the core value for a $50 book.

9. Are there any personalities you would single out as having a noticeable effect on adventure design? Any important names that the audience might not have heard of?

The long line of shitty editors that Dungeon Magazine had? Robert Silvers they were not.

Matt Finch, You, Melan, Benoist, Bowman & Calithena. Zak for his relentless championing of the DIY/gig thing. Jason Sholtis. Stater. But that's really just a subset of people who right stuff I like and not Personalities who had a Notable Effect.

The early TSR folks established the course that we're still on today. Those small efforts early have influenced everything. The only thing that has made as large an impact is, I think, the OGL. Ryan Dancey, representative as the work of many on the OGL, has put us in the wonderfully optimistic spot we're in today. Without the OGL the landscape would be VERY different. I don't see another person who has had as large an impact since the very early days.

'Baur' is Wolfgang Baur, is that right? Do you want to add anything or contextualise that for anyone not familiar with that situation or person? (Like me)

During the launch of 5e WOTC released a boxed set. The first adventure they published after that was two linked hardback books, Hoard of the Dragon Queen and Rise of Tiamat. Both were done in some kind of work for hire with Wolfgang Baur and his Kobold Press company. Baur had a decent reputation after writing several decent Dungeon Magazine adventures, a stint as an editor for some things, and Kobold Press was decently respected. So WOTC outsourced their launch product so someone they had previously had a employer relationship with, and leveraged the fact that he was moderately popular ... and the end product, Hoard/Rise, sucked ass At least that's what I can piece together. The adventures WERE outsourced to Baur/Kobold, for sure.

Melan - Melan of Melans Dungeon Mapping and Dragonsfoot? Any particular articles you would like to point out?

That's him. That mapping article appeals to the academic in me. He's written a decent of critical commentary, and his Formhault stuff is pretty good. He's written quite a bit for Fight On! He's one of the few non-native english speakers that publishes in english.

https://rpggeek.com/rpgdesigner/20611/gabor-lux

Benoist - Benoist Poire from http://odd74.proboards.com/ and this interview & here? Anything else you would recommend people looking into?

Yup. He's got a nice series on map making on K&K, and also.

http://www.knights-n-knaves.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=28&t=9533&start=30

Bowman & Calithena - From Fight On! magazine? Any recommendations?

Issue 2: the upper caves (my favorite ever!), issue 3 (crab-men!) and issue 5 (trogs) and issue 6, a monumental work.

Jason Sholtis - From http://roll1d12.blogspot.co.uk/ http://theystalktheunderworld.blogspot.co.uk/ and the Dungeon Dozen. I think my audience will be familiar with him.

Yup!

Stater - Is that this guy? I don;t know him well. Tell me more about him.

He does a lot. He turns out A LOT of content in the form of hex crawls. Each hex being an little adventure seed. I did a comparison of hex crawl styles in one of my reviews: http://tenfootpole.org/ironspike/?p=997

10. If you were putting together your prefect copy of Dragon magazine, what would you put in it?

My Dragon looks somewhat like Fight On!

*) I'd have a fluff piece each month, no more than three pages. A campaign world, concept, or something like that. High level, with almost nothing explained WHY. Mystery after mystery referenced once and never again.

*) I'd have a campaign arc outlined each month, enough to start someones imagination running. No more than a single page, and maybe half a page. Evil Iggy just won kissed the princess and is now the king. He's looking for the Throne of the Gods. Blah blah blah. Not a plot, an outline

*) Half a page each month on how to make a new monster or magic item. Brief, breezy, maybe using one of those random thing web pages to juice the imagination.

*) A con/public game calendar.

*) An Oglaf strip.

*) Something like the Dungeon Dozen.

*) A Dear Abby column on how to handle HARD things. My buddies wife keeps coming in during the game and asking him to take out the trash. My friend stinks. Mike always cancels, and so on. And the advice should always end with "Remember, sit down and talk to them like a real person. There's only drama if you get worked up."

*) I'd have a zonky cover, something completely different month to month. Anyone who's ever had a page at Deviant Art. No two ever by the same person and as much style diversity as possible.

*) A terse village, maybe one page, brief, with a focus on the people and how they relate to each other, that you can drop in. Or a business "rope walk" ,"salt works" or something like that. A touch of realism but LOTS of gameable content.

*) An adventure. That doesn't suck. No more than 6 pages. It will have some twist or something new to it. Not just goblins in a cave. They better be those goblins made of twigs and leaves and the cave better be a purple worm.

*) A well written industry news piece. Trends,etc.

*) New stuff to check out, or skip, with a liberal definition of 'stuff'.'

*) A DM/Player advice column, tips to run the game, handle traps, etc.

*) Outside your comfort zone. A furry RPG, narrative game, rolemaster overview, something DIFFERENT.

*) Most importantly, a page of DIY Rules. Exploding daggers, Shields will be sundered. Carousing.

Maybe 16-18 pages. $20. Village & adventure are located so they can removed and used.

11. Have you ever thought about making your own thing?

Only when my ego becomes over inflated.

I've done some one-page/one-sheet references under other names. I did a players handbook. I wrote a "fixed" chapter of Hoard of the Dragon Queen. My wife and I have talked about working on something jointly, again. We argued, no joke, for three hours over the first sentence in my Hoard rewrite, and thus have tabled that idea for now. I have a lot of hobbies and I would have to give something up in order to do this ... or come to terms with my self-loathing perfectionism. Neither is likely to happen any time soon.

From Q 11 'fixed' "chapter to Hoard of the Dragon Queen" is that the link I have above?

The Tiamat adventure line is a 2-parter. Rise, the link you have, is part 2. Part is at: here on the blog and here in a google drive.

12. Have you ever thought about condensing your wisdom or things you have learnt into rules, guidelines, a manifesto? A statement? (Or just a list of rules or guidelines.)

The Grand Moff Tarkin says you're never supposed to talk about what you plan to do, only what you've done. Jesus H Fucking Christ it's easy to procrastinate writing.

[ask patrick if I should open source this?]

Open Sourcing creative efforts is a complex issue which can work differently depending on personality and your ability/desire to deal with large numbers of people and processing and synthesising their ideas. I generally wouldn't, but then I am essentially a Morlock so maybe don't take my advice on when to work with others.

I would be keenly interested to see what you come up with though.

13. When reviewing, how do you think about potential preferences in taste, things that are unique to you vs others? Is this something you think about?

I have some strong reactions to certain things, among them: fairy tales, barrows, gonzo, tinker gnomes and magical ren-faire. I try to disclose this during a review if I think it's applicable. More importantly, I try to write a review in which my own preferences are not relevant to someone else finding the review useful. "I like this" is not a good review. "I like this because tinker gnomes fly hot air balloons with rappelling kinder special agents" tells you more. Even if I don't like something (or do) hopefully I explain why so the reader can make their own judgement based on their own preferences. This makes the review useful even to the scum^H^H^H^H folks who like kender, tinker gnomes, and magic technology.

"I liked it" is personal preference. "I liked it because the salmon sashimi was coated in about a pound of kosher salt, each." is actually useful. If you like that much salt, Yum! If you don't like that much salt then maybe that place is not for you. The important part is now BOTH sides can find the review useful.

14. Culture war bullshit. Gender, race, representation, the gender wars. These aren’t primary interests of mine but it’s possible that you have a deeply held feeling you have been holding on to, something you are anxious to say or an opinion you have been brewing for a while. Is there anything you want to say?

Bryce selected this image specially

My own intolerance is reserved for the cohort of angry old white men shaking their fists at the sky. The kids stay in their room too much. The kids don't know how to roleplay. The kids like grid combat. The kids have no attention span. The kids play with their phones at the table instead of listening to my six page monologue. Those sorts of generalizations upset me the most, maybe because I'm always on guard to ensure I don't fall in to them. I often wonder why ... again, so that I don't fall in to it. Fear of difference? Some nonsense definition of respect? Bitterness? Their genius & wisdom is not being recognized? I was delighted when you asked me to do this ... do I fall in to the same traps? And now I'm self-centered for bringing a discussion of cultural inequity back to me? Stupid unexamined life.

We live during a time when the world has never been more just and verdant. I have great confidence that the younger and coming generations will ensure that statement becomes even more true. The kids are alright.

Also: I like succubus boobies.

15. Likewise - edition wars. maybe you have a mic to drop or something.

Oh, I don't know, it's all personal preference. I prefer the more rules-light stuff in B/X or something like Black Hack. If you want to run Roberts Rules of Order edition then have fun.

My only gripe is the tendency for folks to not play anything but the most recent rules. I like playing with new people and having new experiences and it's hard to attract players in a store, con, or public game if you're not in the Most Current Edition trough. This makes me sad when I think about it so I'm not going to think about it anymore.

I loathe lawyering and the min-max/DPS mindset, which is probably why I like the rules-light stuff. The focus can then be on the game and what's going on rather than digging through the books trying to find something to give you a +.5% edge. [Shakes fist at sky!] A 90's GURPS foray, and then 3e, is where I first noticed it and then my experiences with GOD DAM I FUCKING HATE YOU RPGA, both in running games for them at GenCon and now playing with my kids & wife at Winter Fantasy, has perhaps biased me quite a bit. Fuck me, I can't seem to quit a game called "Dungeon & Dragons."

I did have that 4e book burning. The party was more anti-materialist and about "finding" the 5e boxed set in the ashes the next morning. IE: Performance art for the big 5e meetup the next weekend. I disliked 4e quite a bit more than the others (although I did like the way it emphasized special monster abilities) but not enough to go out of my way to erase it from existence. I wanted a big party to celebrate 5e and the giant meetup/party the next week and I thought that finding the 5e boxed set in the ashes would be a fun thing to do. And it was.

16. What do you think about 'the future of the hobby' whatever that means.

Wasn't it in one of those goofy sequels to Dune where humanity spread out in the galaxy, forever free from being annihilated? The environment has splintered in to a thousand sub-systems and will continue to do so. (although it could be argued that everyone house-ruled in the early days and so it has always been this way.) The large companies will hunt the lucre in media deals while keeping their systems on just enough life support to sign the licensing deals their shareholders crave ... maybe with guaranteed income subscription models in the middle-tier. I have great confidence that the gig/DIY culture will flourish, in the shadows, and continue to grow and continue to produce an increasing number of wonderful products.

I'm also looking quite forward to seeing more product from other countries, and in particular those without the Tolkein influence. We get glimpses of these things every now and again, with the work of Benoist and Melan are the immediate examples. I'm quite optimistic that the Internet will allow us to see more from the DIY fantasy crowd in other countries and I think that's quite exciting. There's this small group of people who travel & license foreign boardgames, I sometimes wonder if one could do the same for RPG's/adventures? Imagine an imprint that travelled exclusively in that content! That would indeed be wonderful!

Below the cut you can read, in almost real time, Bryces Dark Origin and the Tragic Accident that turned him against Story Games.