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Testament Part Two: Heiuper
Ever work on a thing for so long you lose sight of what it is? What it was? That is how I feel about Testament. I’ve spent year illustrating and writing and rewriting and designing and carving and printing and sewing. I lost sight of what I was trying to do in the flow of…
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Foreword
At least once a day I stop and think to myself, “I have some talented friends.” It can be a joke on social media, a piece of artwork I see, a snippet of writing, or just a stray thought that triggers that phrase. I find myself lucky in that regard, having surrounded myself with people…
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Making a Page for Testament
When I set out to make Testament, all 288 hand painted, block printed, and hand written pages, I didn’t have much of a plan. I knew I wanted to write a book. I knew I wanted to make it an artifact. I knew I was going to hand make every single page. And I knew I…
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Post GenCon Report
This past weekend I returned to GenCon for the first time in 10 years or more. For the uninitiated, it is the grand festival of table top gaming, much like San Diego Comicon is for comics. Unlike SDCC, it still holds tight to its roots and is chock full of people playing games at all hours of…
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Yggdrasil MGZ Halloween Preview
In the mythology of Yggdrasil, necromancy is one of the worst crimes that can be committed. This class in conjunction with the Grey Guardian illustrate this. It will come with a host of Necromancy wyrds, a new Necromancer skill, and a new magic item, the Bound Bracelet. It has been a lot of fun to write up.…
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Yggdrasil MGZ Halloween Issue
I have a fondness for Halloween and Halloween themed issues of magazines. It is only natural that for my own, Yggdrasil MGZ, that the third quarterly issue would follow suit. I already had the seeds in place with the second half of the comic I was finishing for it – it’s a ghost story – so…
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Halloween Issues
A lot of my game design and writing these days is a reflection of my fondness for the weird publishing moment of the 90s. Though entirely unsustainable as a business model, you have this rush of high quality print products hit the market seemingly all at once. Bookstores were awash with magazines covering every subject…
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Who Doesn’t Love a Good Monster?
One of my favorite things when I was a teenager was the loose leaf pages of the AD&D 2E monster manuals. I loved how the best entries treated the monsters they covered with the seriousness of an 18th century naturalist, positing theories on how a goblin exists inside its corner of a wider ecosystem. And as these…
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Tribal Discovery and Adoption
Gaming is a conservative medium. The dominant vehicles of play, like D&D, are centered on the conservation of the past, and has foster a culture adverse to the exploration of new ideas. Even people deeply progressive in their politics are deeply conservative when it comes to gaming. Why is that?