Starting the Blog
The year 2020 will probably still linger in our memories long after I write this post. For the world it was a historic stress test on our governments, institutions, and our collective sanity. For me, it was a year of soul searching. I made several important decisions about my life: namely, to focus on writing and tabletop roleplaying games. I started out the year believing that I’d be able to make it work as a professional GM. After all, during my unsuccessful job hunt, I started and ran several enjoyable games, made a number of connections, and generally took advantage (for the first time) of living in the epically nerdy San Diego. What I didn’t foresee was the lockdown that’s now kept me inside and away from the gaming table for almost a year now.
We had to move to virtual tabletops. Whereas I was comfortable face-to-face, comfortable enough to believe that people would put down their hard earned money to sit at a table with me, running online was a whole different monster. The games were okay, but they were exhausting and I didn’t really enjoy running them. I created a patreon to support my discord server, to pay for this website, to cover my subscriptions, and to lesser extent, support myself as I struggled through the year.
Eventually I found a new way to pursue what I love that didn’t involve nausea and dizziness (so called ‘Zoom Fatigue’ or so we’ve come to call it). I decided to take on an ambitious project, turning a set of notes for a dungeon I had into proper campaign module. Over 100 fully illustrated pages of encounters, locations, plot, and puzzles: all grouped together in the Temple of the Gargoyles! In retrospect, this desire I had to emerge onto the tabletop scene with a ‘bang’ was a product of naivety. Producing a print book is a huge amount of work. The warning signs were there. How could I expect to publish a book if I couldn’t even print a zine and send it to my Patreon subscribers as was promised?
The Temple sits mostly complete thanks to the efforts of Steven DeWaele, the illustrator, and the two editors I recruited to help me, Sage Porter and Vinh Nguyen. However, the key stage of turning it from a mostly complete document into a published book has yet to be done. I am now looking for mentors, people who have walked this path before I stepped onto it, with the hope that I don’t make any more mistakes in bringing it to the bookshelves.
While I do that, I am trying to fulfill the expectations of myself that I laid out last year: regular zines, regular homebrewed content, commentary, and, of course, the story of how it all gets done. The start of this blog coincides with revamping of my patreon.com page, new strategies for marketing, and a new energy for keeping the community of people who have done so much to keep me devoted to this work through Discord and my online games.
I hope 2021 ends up going as well as we hope (it’s a low bar, to be honest), but regardless of what happens I will do my damnedest to make sure that my experience this coming year will be productive and a foundation for everything that comes after. I know that this post won’t get any views for months, but maybe some day, you’ll be reading this years down the line, perhaps curious as to how this successful or at least intriguing blog started.