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Hrolf, a Raider Hero
Raiders of the Serpent Sea, like its predecessor Odyssey of the Dragonlords, features quotes from remarkable NPCs in the campaign and player books. I figured I’d sneak in an extra post this week to delve a bit more into one of these NPCs whose quotes you will see in the preview player’s book coming soon. Hrolf belongs to the Hallharn raiding clan but his exploits have been such that he is well respected by most of the other raiders. He is good natured, a capable warrior, and a natural leader. Over his long career sailing the Serpent Sea he has collected numerous stories so a journey across land and water…
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Why Norse Mythology? Why Vikings?
A few kind folks who have expressed excitement for my new project, Raiders of the Serpent Sea have also been curious as to why I have chosen these particular thematic elements for this campaign book. I think my introduction, which will appear in the forthcoming player’s guide, is probably the best explanation. The stories of Vikings have always lived large in our imaginations and there are as many flavors of these stories as there are storytellers. We imagine that these seafaring raiders lived as large in their world as they do in our stories; that they were boastful in the face of danger and took tremendous risks to secure their…
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Further Into the Serpent Sea…
Last week I was finally able to provide the title for my upcoming project. Going forward, I’ll now start explaining the world a bit more and what to expect from the Raiders of the Serpent Sea game master and player guides. Here’s a first look at the current back cover blurb for the player’s guide: Glory is Yours For The Taking Centuries ago, upon a vast, beautiful, and wondrous world, a horde of shape changing fiends known as the Yoten warred with the heroic Vanir. Betrayed by their own, the heroes failed and fell, one by one. Only upon the very edge of destruction did the survivors unleash ancient magic…
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Announcement: Raiders of the Serpent Sea
In an earlier post I explained that I am making a campaign book with Arcanum Worlds. Well… now is the time for the proper announcement! Raiders of the Serpent Sea is a Norse-themed campaign book for 5e and will be published by the fine folks over at Modiphius Entertainment. They have released a full update to their site about it if you want to learn more! A significant portion of the campaign book is complete, including some beautiful pieces of artwork from many of the same artists that worked on Odyssey of the Dragonlords. I intend to launch a Kickstarter (soon!) to help add more artwork, to pay for the…
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Making Games
For as long as I remember I have been making games. It started with writing stories during elementary school and evolved into creating fantasy maps of mundane locations. This was well before I started to play Dungeons & Dragons — I had lots of fun navigating the magical spaces of my imagination and trying to communicate them to my friends and family. But when I discovered other kids playing D&D, I finally found a foundation upon which I could structure my imagination. And at this point I should add that for the first little bit I didn’t even have the D&D books. I just saw what the other kids were…
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Glory is Yours For The Taking
It will probably not come as a shock to any of you who know me well that I am a huge fan of roleplaying games and got my start in this whole “interactive narrative” business back in my preteens playing Dungeons & Dragons. I ran numerous campaigns throughout high school and more sporadically into college and my time with BioWare, playing everything up to and including 3rd edition. And though I missed 4th Edition I’ve been playing 5th Edition for a few years. I have set my adventures in a variety of official campaign worlds and even designed several of my own worlds over the years. I have always enjoyed…
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Dungeons & Dragons Campaign: Odyssey of the Dragonlords
Back in 2020 I proudly showed off my copies of Odyssey of the Dragonlords, a successful 5E D&D RPG Kickstarter by James Ohlen and Jesse Sky. At the time I mentioned I had started a campaign with my kids and some of their friends. Well the campaign is still going strong! We just completed the 39th session, with the heroes now level 13 and the Oath of Peace about to come to an end (you’ll have to read the campaign book to understand what that is about). Though I had previously played fifth-edition with my kids using the awesome starter set, the kids wanted new characters after that and so…
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Good Tidings!
I hope all is well for those of you still stumbling onto this blog. (Well, I mean I hope everyone out there is doing well, not just those who come here to read my words….) So… I do have an announcement to make. But not today… not quite yet. Stars are still being aligned, courses charted, that sort of thing. But soon. I do have a few things to chat about today though… After a very long departure window, I have left my position as senior technical lead at NAIT (a polytechnic in Edmonton). It was a wonderful experience that allowed me to learn many new things. Our team at…
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The Lazy Designer: The Next Game
So… years ago… I republished my first Lazy Designer book via my newsletter. It was well received and my frank advice on working in the video game industry connected with many readers. So I started to serialize its sequel via the newsletter as well. Then I got divorced and I forgot about the newsletter entirely. A few years later and I am now resurfacing several postponed projects! I feel bad for neglecting the newsletter… so I’m going to start over with posting the “Next Game”. The first post will drop in the next few days and after that I will try to get into a regular cadence with those updates…
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Falling back…
I promise this will be a short post. Quick. To the point. The past few months have been exciting. My guiding star has been a desire to return to spending my time doing things I really love doing. Some of that is writing, but a lot of it is actually Dungeons & Dragons. Both the playing of it, but also the preparation and the design work required to run multiple campaigns. I have really, really, enjoyed this return to the things I loved doing many years ago. So I promise, in a month or two or three, I’ll have more to talk about how I am pivoting my life to…
