About a year ago, a new tabletop game store opened in my neighborhood. Walking in one day on a whim, I felt something I hadn’t felt since my visits to my local comic book shop in the ’90s. Everywhere I looked, there was something that seemed both incredibly fun and infinitely fascinating. I wanted to play every game and understand everything about them. I’d forgotten how magical that felt.
I'd never played D&D, but I’d been watching people playing role-playing games online, more for the personalities than the games themselves, so my girlfriend bought me Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana, a visual history of D&D. The illustrations from the early days of D&D hit me hard—not because they were good, but because they were rough.
The first drawing of a "Beholder" feels like it should be drawn on notebook paper right next to your high school algebra notes.
These days, the art in D&D books is by some of the most talented illustrators around. But back in the early days that wasn't quite true. Many of those early artists were... finding their feet. These were literal teenagers who were just trying to make things that their friends thought looked cool. Monsters that, over the next 50 years, would appear in movies, miniatures, video games, novels, books, t-shirts and more. The roughness of it made the whole thing seem approachable. D&D wasn’t this intricate, untouchable thing. It was just a bunch of folks making up dumb stuff. And I realized, hey... I love making up dumb stuff!
Much of the early D&D art was literally traced out of comics.
So I bought the Player’s Handbook, signed up for a “Learn to Play” session at the game store, and started obsessing. Books, blogs, YouTube, podcasts—you name it.
I can’t stop thinking about this stuff.
I want to learn what it means to be a good player, a good game master, a good adventure writer, storyteller, world builder, publisher, improviser, and designer.
Back in the day, people would say, “If you can’t stop thinking about something, start a blog about it.” So, here we are. This site is my attempt to capture everything that excites me about this hobby. I want to dive in, share what I learn, and explore this world and see where it takes me. These TTRPGs are social games, so let’s explore them socially, together, in public.
I don’t want to wait until I’m an expert in this stuff to start writing about it. I want to write about it in order to learn about it. I want to do it now. I want to get started. I want to go.
So I’m going to start. Let’s start. Let’s go.