Summer 2025 Newsletter

New website, same old newsletter! Before I delve into the past, present, and future at length, I'd like to give a shout-out to the awesome folks who play in my campaigns. Beyond showing up to tell fantastic stories every week, this year, we've had so many players write beautiful (or hilarious) pieces of original fiction, short stories, character journals, and manifestos that make our games feel so much more lived-in. It's one of my favorite things, and I am always grateful that I get to run games for so many diverse, brilliant, creative, and thoughtful human beings.

I also want to thank the folks who play in my original Star Wars TTRPG campaign. They've voluntarily been my guinea pigs for the last few years, as I've developed an original system to play out epic stories in a galaxy far, far away. The image above features an app being developed by Faye, one of our players, that is essentially D&D Beyond for our original system. It hosts easily-searchable rules, has a lightning-fast character creator that handles leveling up, integrates with Roll20 for dice rolls, and makes combat management super smooth. Once it's finished, I'd love to bring that level of support to our groups' other original and custom systems.

Since this is my first newsletter on my new website, I thought it would be timely to reflect on what has been an incredible creative journey over the past years before looking into the future. For those who have followed me for a long time, much of this might be familiar.

Looking Back to How We Got Here

For a decade now, I've been incredibly fortunate to have the support of folks on my Patreon. Without them, I honestly can't imagine what my life would look like right now.

Before that, I spent a long time scraping by as a working actor (sometimes bartender), dreaming about how I could do the things I loved most. I'd written fiction and designed games in my free time—creations that I was very proud of, like my online game Atonement. I learned a lot about online communities (sometimes the hard way) and how to collaborate with other extremely gifted creative people. However, as I grew older, time proved to be rarer and more elusive than it had been. I realized that I couldn't keep doing what I had been and still survive week to week.

And then, unexpectedly, thanks to word of mouth from Atonement, I received my first offer to design an online computer game and be paid for my work in 2013. It wasn't much money, but thanks to that project, I had a little bit of savings for the first time in my life. I wanted to use it to invest in creating something of my own. That led to creating my Patreon as a means to promote and support writing fantasy and horror webcomics and graphic novels, which had been a lifelong dream of mine. I wrote a lot over the next couple of years, supplementing my theater work with comics.

In 2017, word of mouth led to another chance opportunity. My webcomic I, Necromancer was picked up by a tabletop RPG company that created actual plays and podcasts. TTRPGs had always been my greatest hobby passion, but I had never even heard of live-streaming. And so, for a few years, I entered the world of actual plays, sometimes for work and sometimes for fun. I began to receive writing gigs for adventure and campaign books, and I shifted my focus from acting and comics to TTRPGs, which, surprisingly, proved to be a far healthier industry than what I was used to.

But, as much as I enjoy performing for an audience, there was a lot of noise in actual play games that I felt like got in the way of me running the best kind of game I could and just telling a good, long-form story with folks I knew were always excited to be there. I was also getting more and more TTRPG writing gigs on the side, and I became eager again to create something that felt like it just belonged to me and the other folks at the table. So, I attempted to launch my first private online game, supported by my Patreon, in 2019.

That first campaign (Dark Sun!) went really well, taught me a lot, ran for years, and made me feel like I'd finally figured out what it was I was meant to be doing. I met a ton of new folks over the next few years. Six years later, I'm still writing games and stories for other companies, but the heart and soul of what I do now is creating entirely original TTRPG campaigns for incredible people whose support allows me to do what I love most.

Atonement to now has been a 16-year journey, almost all of which I've spent with my amazing and supportive partner. A great deal of my life changed over that time. I got married, met so many incredible people from all over the world, moved across the country several times, wrote and published around 30 comics and TTRPG books, and found a level of happiness that I honestly didn't know I'd been missing.

Grappling With D&D and the OSR

Most of the long, ongoing TTRPG campaigns I've been running over the past few years are reaching the end of their stories. When this year started, I did some soul-searching. I asked myself if I still had enough truly good ideas to create new games that would feel fresh for my players and leave me feeling inspired. If I'd had any doubt, it didn't last long. If anything, I still have way too many ideas and far too little time to explore them all.

I love D&D 5th edition, but I've run multiple years-long campaigns from 1st to 20th level. It requires a lot, and I needed a break. Some of that has to do with some objections I have to how Hasbro (the corporation that owns D&D) has handled the game, alongside its treatment of the design team, third-party creators, and the community in recent years.

But really, simply, over time, my tastes as a gamemaster shifted. I wanted faster, more cinematic, more dangerous action. I wanted rules that better supported roleplay and improvisation over a rules-as-written philosophy that slows down play and creates a lot of choice paralysis for some folks.

While I'm not compelled by the OSR (Old School Renaissance) design philosophy's often heavy emphasis on dungeon crawling, random encounters, and loot-centric motivation, I do enjoy those elements in moderation. More so, in the past couple of years, I've found a lot to love in how games like Cairn and ShadowDark get out of the story's way and give more agency to the players. (I strongly recommend both games, whether you're a gamemaster, player, collector, or TTRPG fan!)

A few years ago, I created an original TTRPG system from scratch to run two Star Wars campaigns, wanting something that felt a little different than the games already published. Only a little more recently, I hacked a faster, tenser, more lightweight version of Call of Cthulhu to run my latest Pretty Marsh Harbor campaign. For Pretty Marsh, I approached the design from almost the opposite point of view of Star Wars, with organic character progression and practically no rules for combat at all. I'm still running those campaigns, and they've both been phenomenal experiences.

In short, our Star Wars plays more like D&D with robust combat and character progression, while Pretty Marsh is even more rules-lite, improvised, and organic than most OSR games. After a lot of refining and reflection on what was working for me and what wasn't, I gained perspective on what kind of games I want to run—and confidence to create a system that supports long-term fantasy campaigns. I finally felt ready to tackle a new project that could replace my Dungeons & Dragons campaigns moving forward.

In the Year 2025

So, I took some time off from taking on writing projects on the side to develop my own version of the Ravenloft setting, featuring unique domains, my spin on classics, and an original storyline loosely tied to my players' past campaigns. Ravenloft combines my love of fantasy and gothic horror, and it's always been one of my favorite TTRPG sandboxes.

To support Ravenloft, I heavily modified ShadowDark to develop something closer to an NSR (New School Revolution) system emphasizing collaborative storytelling, narrative-driven play, and more expanded player character progression. I wrote a book's worth of lore and rules, added rules to support different campaign styles, created a ton of unique player options, and made it all freely accessible to players without requiring a third-party site like D&D Beyond.

This month, we launched our first Ravenloft campaign, set in my version of a future Sithicus, inspired by some of my favorite dark fantasy stories: DragonLance, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Witcher, and The Blacktongue Thief. It's been an absolute blast and, after two sessions, I'm already eager for all the future campaigns we'll play with this system once our current D&D campaigns reach their epic conclusions.

Looking Forward to the Next Year

So what comes next? While I am in talks to write more TTRPGs and video games, and have ideas for new self-published digital-first games, my focus remains on my community and the games we play. It's what I'm most passionate about, and I don't want that to change.

Most of my current long-running campaigns will conclude over the next year or so. Some of these campaigns have (or will) run for 130-150 sessions! My main goal is to collaborate with my players to tell the best story possible for each, and to craft endings that folks will hopefully remember fondly for many years to come.

I'm also excited to start new campaigns! One of the greatest joys I have is witnessing how players evolve and develop their own personal style of roleplaying over time, and I can't wait to see what new ideas they bring to the table in the future.

Another goal is to further develop this website. I created it to become a hub for everything I do, from running games to writing them. I'm engaging with social media much less now than I have in the past, and much more directly with the communities I'm part of. I want to use this space to write helpful articles for players and writers, share design ideas, and maybe offer more interactive experiences.

Finally, I'd like to expand on how I support my players. As we move away from D&D and play more original games, I aim to find better ways to provide resources that make playing our games as easy and enjoyable as possible.

Final Summer Thoughts

If you've supported me or collaborated with me over these past years (or even if you've just read the entirety of this long letter)—please know that I couldn't feel more thankful. I love what I do more than I can really say, and I hope folks can feel that in what I write or the games we play together.

I've gone on at length because, to me at least, right now feels like the end of one era and the start of the next one. I can draw a straight line through the last 16 years to where I am now, and I can see well into the future. It's all very special to me, and I don't think I've ever felt more focused or ready for what is to come.