Of a Certain Age

I turned 36 last week. I’ve never been one of those who shy from their birthdays. I’d rather keep having them than not. Still, it got me thinking about the adventure gaming industry. When I look around at my peers, it seems that most of the “young” designers are people in their mid to late thirties, right around my age. …

Gen Con Ho!

I’m in the throes of preparing for Gen Con this week. The show, the greatest adventure gaming convention on the planet, runs from August 19–22 in Indianapolis. I miss having it in Milwaukee, but last year Indy proved itself to be a fine venue, and you couldn’t ask for a better group of people to run the show than Peter …

Hungry Little Monsters

Sean K. Reynolds is just over a week away from releasing the latest of his charity jam projects. (Anyone remember Swords into Plowshares?) Hungry Little Monsters is due out August 15 as a PDF. It’s a monster book with contributions from all over the adventure gaming industry. I wrote up a creature known as the doubler, a cannibalistic doppelganger. You …

Comic-Con Report

I’m still recovering from my lightning-fast trip to San Diego for Comic-Con International. The show was amazing. Somewhere between 80,000 to 100,000 people showed up, filled the entire convention center, and taxed the air conditioning to its limits. Every morning, it was chilly in the exhibit hall, but by mid-afternoon the scores of thousands of warm bodies made the whole …

Site Update

I updated the Current Projects and Upcoming Appearances pages. The latter includes my schedule for seminars and signings at Gen Con.

A Ghost of a Story

Very early Monday morning, I turned in my first draft of my adventure for White Wolf‘s Ghost Stories, an anthology of adventures for the new World of Darkness core rules due out this August. Developer Ken Cliffe got his notes back to me the same day, so I’m now working on the second draft, which I hope to complete tomorrow. …

Comic-Con Coming Up

I finally bought my plane ticket for Comic-Con International. I arrive in San Diego Friday afternoon and leave Sunday night, so it’s bound to be an action-packed trip. I only have two official duties at the show. From the programming material sent to me, they are: Fantastic Fiction for All Ages: The Young Adult Market: Looking for ideas for summer …

World Gets Darker

Ken Cliffe at White Wolf asked me to write an adventure for Ghost Stories, an anthology of short adventures for the upcoming World of Darkness roleplaying game, the core rulebook for their reboot of their original games, Vampire, Werewolf, Mage, and so on. I jumped all over it. Justin Achilli played mule for Ken and handed me a CD with …

OATF Moving Along

The Origins Awards Task Force has sucked up much of my past week. Many people have lots of great ideas for the Origins Awards, and sorting through them is a Herculean task. Plus, there are some political landmines strewn about the place in the wake of the election of a nearly all-new GAMA board of directors at Origins last month, …

Origins Award Task Force

Any minute now, there should be an official press release about this, but I’m going to jump the gun and start talking about it here. The new board of GAMA, the Game Manufacturers Association, has hired me to lead a task force charged with improving the function of the Origins Awards. These are the adventure gaming industry’s premier set of …