D&D Things I've Been Vibing With Lately

Despite a distinct lack of gaming in 2024, I've still been absorbing a lot of D&D-related material.  Books, blogs, podcasts, videos on Youtube... there's a lot of good stuff out there that I can recommend.  I'm sure I'll forget some things, but below is a list of the D&D-related material that's been firing my synapses lately.

The Collected Works of Jon Peterson

• The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons 1970-1977
• Playing at the World Vol. 1
• The Game Wizards

The first two of these I purchased as soon as they were released, and devoured almost immediately.  I discovered The Game Wizards on Spotify, available to anyone who has Spotify Premium.  All three of these are great.  The Making of OD&D is a good overview and collection of documents related to D&D's early days, including the rulebooks and supplements, and of course the draft version of the game was fascinating reading for someone as interested in the progression of the rules as I am.  Playing at the World gives an excellent look at the wargaming scene that gave birth to D&D, and I learned a lot about how that transition came about.  I'm very much looking forward to Volume 2, which will dig more into the rules elements of D&D and their influences and origins.  The Game Wizards was more focused on the creation of D&D by Gygax and Arneson, their ensuing legal battles, and the financial growth and collapse of TSR up through 1985.  It's all interesting stuff, although it can get bogged down a bit in the numbers and figures and incessant talk about stock options.  I'm not sure I'd have appreciated it as much without the context given by the following podcast, which was not by Peterson but makes a great companion to his works:

• When We Were Wizards

This oral history of TSR I found captivating.  Most of it is sourced from actual quotes by ex-TSR staff and other involved parties, or actors quoting their words exactly.  The actor who portrays Gary Gygax did a great job in particular.  Tense boardroom meetings, politics, drama, Gary's wild Hollywood excesses... This podcast has it all, and is highly recommended to anyone with an interest in the history of the hobby.

Blogs

• The Tao of D&D

I've been a fan of Alexis Smolensk's D&D writing for years, and I've always admired his dedication to improving the game and his give-no-fucks attitude towards the game's creators and current custodians.  He's always consistently produced enlightening material, but this year his 39-part RPG 201 series has been a particular highlight.  Reading the whole thing will require a subscription to his Patreon, but it's the sort of high-quality, thoughtful material that will benefit any DM who reads it.  Definitely worth shelling out 3 bucks for - hell, as an Aussie I had to shell out 5 bucks!  Still worth it.

• BXBlackrazor

JB has been blogging for a long time now, and I always pay attention when he has a new post or a rant.  I've found his evangelizing for AD&D in the last few years to be particularly eye-opening, but more than that his blog has been my gateway to a number of other inspiring parts of the D&D online scene: Anthony Huso's blog, the Fantasy Adventure Gaming movement, and the German AD&D scene.  Those last two I'll talk about later (but definitely check out Huso's AD&D blog posts if you haven't yet).

Podcasts

• The Classic Adventure Gaming Podcast

There aren't many episodes of this show (and there hasn't been a new one in quite some time) but what there is is very good.  Each episode covers an aspect of old-school D&D play and features in-depth discussion from a roundtable of folks who know what they're talking about.  The Fantasy Adventure Gaming scene (or Classic Adventure Gaming for those who desire a less objectionable acronym) is heavily focused on a style of play that emphasises the game as a game, and prioritises effective play over theatrics and story-gaming.  This is the playstyle I've come to favour, and there's a lot to learn from this podcast.

• Zock Bock Radio

On a related note, this podcast comes out of the German AD&D scene.  Most of the episodes are in German, but when they have non-German guests they're in English, and those episodes are highly entertaining.  Settembrini and his regulars have an intelligent, refreshing and entertaining take on AD&D that aligns pretty closely with the CAG scene I mentioned above.  In particular I recommend episode 38, in which Settembrini and Prince of Nothing debate the relative merits of AD&D vs. BX.

Also, they have the catchiest theme song and it will get stuck in your head.

Youtube

• Wandering DMs

I've been following this show since its inception in 2018, and I'm always surprised that they're not bigger than they are.  Hosts Dan and Paul have very different approaches to the game, but they always approach their topics with enthusiasm and it's hard not to come away from each show energised about D&D.  I tend to prefer what I call the "Dan" episodes, which are the ones where they do a deep-dive into particular aspects of the rules, but they also have great interviews and occasional looks into the current 5e scene and more social aspects of the hobby.  Just a great show all around with two very engaging hosts who obviously love each other's company and would no doubt be doing what they do even without an audience.  The best way to start my Monday morning every week.

• Daddy Rolled a 1

I've been enjoying this show in the last year or so.  It does deep dives into the history and rules of D&D and other parts of the hobby, and the host delivers it with an unscripted, conversational style that I really like.  It's a great companion-piece to the Jon Peterson books I mentioned above.

• Arbiter of Worlds

Alexander Macris, the creator of Adventurer, Conqueror, King, tackles all sorts of high-level aspects of D&D and RPGs in this series.  There's a level of  rigorous, intellectual thought that's gone into these videos that can't be found in too many other places online, where the majority of the pundits out there are recycling the same DMing advice that's been circulating for years or decades.  It does get a little too systematised in places for my tastes, but this series is full of concrete DMing guidance that's of a calibre head and shoulders above the norm.  I definitely want to do a rewatch of these so I can properly grok the concepts he's talking about (and I definitely need to check out ACKS for its wargaming and domain play aspects).

• Joy of Wargaming: How to Win at RPGs

Ah, the BroSR...  They are an amusing bunch of trolls at times, but I like a lot of their ideas.  Running games by the book, using 1-to-1 time for tracking campaign downtime, exploring Braunstein play in relation to RPG campaigns, handing control of important NPCs or factions to other players to increase the game's unpredictability...  For me, this Youtube series is the best distillation in one place of everything these guys have been doing, and it's mostly free of their self-congratulatory and self-aggrandizing tone that I find funny but many others find intolerable.  There are a lot of great ideas in this series for anyone who wants to run a grand campaign in the old-school style.

17 Years

I was looking back at some of the earliest entries on my blog recently, and it's somewhat sobering to realise that I started this just over 17 years ago.  Not that I've posted with any sort of regularity or consistency, especially in the last couple of years... but 17 years is a long time to stick with anything.  I guess it puts me in some rarefied company as far as longevity goes, and being part of the earliest days of D&D blogging.  It was still edition 3.5 back then, just barely.  I'd just gotten married that year, a marriage that ended in 2021.  My son was born a year later, and he's rapidly approaching adulthood.  I was just starting work at the library where I'm still happily employed.  That job's been about the only stable thing in my life over that period, and given that I wrote a significant number of my early posts while I was on the clock, I might still be lucky to have it.  I was excited about the imminent arrival of D&D's 4th edition... that certainly changed, and quickly.  So yeah, a long time, and a lot of changes, and I'm feeling reflective about it.  Please indulge me while I ruminate about my place in the D&D blog-o-sphere.

If I'm being real here, I don't have much of one.  My readership, I assume, has always been low in comparison to the BXBlackrazors and Taos and Grognardias of the world.  Nothing I've written has ever really blown up, or caught the attention of the D&D community.  (Well, I did get in a fight with Rob Kuntz one time... but we patched it up pretty quickly.) I've had no particular insights to convey, or grand theories to espouse, or manifestos to advance.  I haven't created anything.  No adventures, no rules supplements.  Not even a thinly-veiled retroclone reskinning of an old version of D&D, and everyone who's anyone has peddled one of those!  Nah, I've just been plugging away, tinkering with ideas here and there but not following through.  Making plans, but not enacting them.

Oh, what grand plans I had.  Remember the Ultimate Sandbox?  What a dickhead I was, but when you're young you think you have all the time in the world to tackle every foolishly enormous project you can think of.  And that was a big one: creating a massive multiversal campaign setting incorporating everything ever published relating to D&D.  Of course it was never going to eventuate.  It would take a dedicated lifetime just to do that with the material that existed in 2007, and of course there was always new material on the way.  And something that unwieldy was never going to something I could practically run.  I still love the idea, and I'm still planning something similar... but a campaign on a smaller, more manageable scale.  Something I might actually be able to get started in this lifetime.

Most of my blogging here involved a chronological reading and exploration of D&D's earliest publications, and I think that's probably been my most valuable contribution.  I started it a time when the larger D&D sphere was rediscovering OD&D as a whole, and while I think there were many others who covered the material with more insight, I don't think many covered it as comprehensively.  Reading my blog in order would give a decently in-depth overview of how the rules developed from Chainmail through to the Player's Handbook, with some sidebars for Judge's Guild, the Games Workshop scene, and others.  It's something I think I'd tackle more knowledgeably now, but I also don't think there'd be as much value in it these days.  The territory has been explored long ago, and I'm happy enough if I've been a small part of doing that.

The thing is, my contribution has been small.  Like I said, no insights, no creations... and I think that's a side-effect of my biggest failing.  Which is, no gaming.  Well, very little gaming.  During the course of this blog, I believe I've DMed ten games.  For something that I always list off as one of my primary hobbies, that's not enough.  For something I love, it's not enough.  Oh, I've certainly been immersed in D&D research and note-taking during that time, almost constantly.  Blogs, podcasts, books, rules... I've sunk hours and hours into it.  But I've barely played.  And if there's one thing that all of the insightful and productive D&D luminaries on the internet have in common, it's that they play.  A lot.  It makes sense, doesn't it?  To contribute meaningfully to the game, you have to know the game, and to know the game you have to play it.  And while I think I know it quite well on a historical and theoretical level, I'm very out of practice on the practical level.  There are reasons for that, some of them valid.  But I've always said, you can always make time for the things you genuinely love.

And over the last 17 years, one thing hasn't changed: I still love Dungeons & Dragons.  I love learning about it, I love discussing it, I love prepping for it, and I love playing it.  That love has been out of balance, though.  I've spent a lot of time on the first three, and not enough on the last one. That's going to be my D&D resolution for next year: play more.  Knuckle down, do the bare minimum prep required to get a campaign up and running, and play as much as possible... and blog about it.  And who knows, maybe I'll be back here in 17 years, and I'll be proud of the contributions I've made, and the blog posts I've written, and happy with the amount of gaming I've done.  Things can change, after all.