RPG Art Commissions Open!

I am hungry and don’t know how I’ll pay rent this month or next, so who wants character/monster portraits in black and white ink?

Here's a small portfolio showing a range of stuff I've done in a few different styles (see also my IG here). Following that are the details you'll need to know for working with me.

Model United Nations: the Most Popular FKR Game

We don't actually have the numbers of how popular Model UN (MUN) is but we can reasonably guess there's as many as 180,000 people who participate in it just in the United States alone. It's played all around the world by students ranging from middle school up through university and has been around for many decades. And even if it turns out I'm totally wrong and the number of people playing Jim Parkin's ultra-lite Star Wars game actually outnumbers the people playing Model UN ten to one, the point is that Model UN has a Parks & Rec episode.

And yet I bet you don't know much about it. I bet you didn't know that it's an FKR game. And yes, it really is. Not in like a "you know, if you really think about it, it kinda fits the definition!" way or something cheeky like that. It's very straightforwardly an FKR game, and if more was known about its history (it's a bit murky tbh) then I strongly suspect we could probably trace its lineage back to the original Prussian kriegspiel games.

I have not written much about my experience with FKR games before. I've mentioned them here or there, and at least once have pissed off some of its fans. But I have actually spent many years using the FKR philosophy of play! Just not in the form I think that most people would imagine.

I've written about Model UN before so if you've read that post, you can skip this. But I decided to write all of this again for 2 reasons: 1) I think it needs another pass and I've written it better this time, and 2) I think it deserves a post of its own, independent of the context in which I wrote about it in that series. And I promise that if, after this article, it is clear that no one in the RPG community gives a shit about this then I'll shut up about it forever.

But if Model United Nations is one of those things you've always been vaguely aware of from pop culture or the club fair at your high school but you never really gave it much thought, then let me tell you all about it and how cool it is.

A rough outline of this post (with each of these containing some sub-sections):

1. What is Model United Nations?
2. The "mechanics" of how it works
3. What to take away from this for TTRPG stuff
4. Some fun stories where I gush indulgently

Happy Birthday Knight at the Opera: A Blog Retrospective

I started this blog two years ago. At that point, many people were already saying that the OSR / DIY D&D blogosphere was dying out, but they were probably being unnecessarily bleak. Still though, I was throwing my hat into a competitive ring with a small, small audience. Attention is hard to grab, so if you aren't a Grognardia or a Jeff Rients or maybe a Patrick Stuart then your chances of catching people's eye is pretty small.

Considering all that, this blog has done much better than I ever anticipated. It's not huge or anything but waking up to see your post has gotten 1000+ views overnight is pretty damn cool. That's 1000+ people who chose to read my nonsense in their cubicle on a Monday morning over a cup of coffee instead of doing something productive. That feels pretty good.

So for this blog's 2 year anniversary (as well as a celebration of my favorite holiday, Labor Day), I wanted to reflect and share wisdom. This post will have 3 parts: 1) How to Start a Blog, 2) Things I've Learned About Successful Blogging, and 3) a Celebration of This Blog's Greatest Posts and Products.

I Want to Talk About The Green Knight

I don't do this very often but this post isn't about RPGs or gaming. It's just some thoughts on fantasy fiction in general, although it does occasionally reference RPGs because that's who I am and I know my audience.

I'll warn you when I'm about to get into spoilers. First I need to set the scene.

This post is a series of short essays. First, what I love about medieval European culture. Second, what I love about Arthurian mythology. Third, what I love about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Lastly, I'll talk about the movie. Warning: about half the sentences in this post begin with, "I like" or "I love," but I hope I'm still able to drive at something deeper than you might expect. 

Elves Part 1: Reconstructing a Fantasy Archetype

Picture by Yuliya Litvinova

I've now written three articles about some of the main races in my homebrew setting without ever having intentionally set out to make a series like that. One day I just wanted to compile a bunch of my weird notes on dwarves in one place and share them. Then with gnomes. Then with halflings. And even when it had occurred to me that I have a series on my hands, I still think I was never intending to write a post on elves, because...

Well, because elves don't need a lore post.

Like, gnomes and halflings both need work done if you want them to be interesting. Even sticking to the vanilla versions is still lesser than what you get with off-the-shelf elves. Dwarves have lots of lore but it's infamous for being cliché, so revisiting it and doing something fresh justifies itself. But elves? Elves get nothing but attention. They often have too much lore. Wasting more ink on them is an injustice and disservice to the other fantasy races. To other fantasy ideas. Elves are the most thoroughly fleshed-out and experimented with idea in nearly all fantasy fiction. Just look at the TV Tropes article. How the fuck do you get this much mileage out of one idea? How does D&D manage to always, inevitably have a million elven sub races in each edition even as they avoid that mistake with other races?

The thing is, we could try to have the conversation of "what is the elf, at its core?" Analyzing fantasy ideas often means reducing them to their most vital components, the thing that makes an elf an elf no matter what else you change. And when people have that conversation, they usually arrive at something like, "fancy, graceful humans with pointy ears and whatever other traits we culturally idealize (beauty, longevity, skill, knowledge, pale skin, starlight eyes, etc.)." If that doesn't do it for you, here's a way to avoid a debate: not everyone exactly agrees on what an elf is, but most people agree that David Bowie seemed to be more elf than human, which I would say is a solid rule of thumb to operate on.

But there is inevitably a conversation after that one. Because while most elves check off most items in that definition, they all have more going on. Even the original Norse elves or Tolkien's elves. So the next question is, "having now understood what elves fundamentally are, how do you expand on that to make them your own?" This is where the interesting conversations take place. Where you get cool and novel elves from.

Me? I want to have the next conversation. And I specifically want to ask, "what should we take away from Tolkien and early D&D's answers to the previous question? What did we take for granted as classic elf tropes that really do have some potency?" Hence, reconstructing the classic elf. Not exactly as it was before, but at least giving those classic tropes another look. Kiel Chenier has really creative and cool homebrew elves that are a perfect example of not the kind of thing I'm talking about today. No one would question that Warcraft's Night Elves are a fucking rad take on elves, as with the Elder Scrolls's bizarre elves and metal Dark Sun elves and so on. But none of those are classic elves, and most fantasy creators don't really consider just going with classic elves. But as long as we're trying our own hand at writing our own elves, I want to take a moment to explore this direction.

Violence as Magic

Disclaimer: although this is an RPG blog, I might occasionally write on something off-topic. It will probably always be RPG-adjacent, though. In this case, I’m writing about a concept in fantasy storytelling of all kinds.

Semantics

Firstly, I want to get on the same page about how we use an important word: MAGIC. I think we’ve gotten into a habit of treating it as synonymous with “fantasy.” Like, “fantastic” = “magical,” e.g. something like a unicorn that we could call a “fantastic creature” could also be called a “magical creature.” This isn’t a wrong way to use the word, but it’s distinguishable from another way that I feel used to be more common. An older definition that was more limited and yet nuanced.

Fantasy is anything impossible in reality but possible through the imagination. So all magic is fantastic. BUT...

Magic itself is an activity. It’s something that people learn and do. Magic is performed. Not all fantasy is magic. A floating continent in the sky isn’t magic. Unless it’s floating because someone cast a spell to make it do that.