Jim Ward (right) gaming with Gary Gygax (left) on Gygax’s front porch. Image from Goodman Games. In the last years of TSR (the company that owned D&D before Wizards of the Coast), every year on April 4th Jim Ward (VP of Creative Services) would tell a story about the day he got fired from TSR on…
Last week, Jim Ward passed away at the age of 72. If you don’t know who he is, spell his name backwards. D-R-A-W-M-I-J As in Drawmij’s instant summons. Jim was a player in Gary Gygax’s game group, and he suggested the concept for that spell, and Gygax wrote it and named it after Jim.[1] Jim…
I’ll be at GameHole Con this week in Madison, WI! I’m a special guest, which means I’m running several games and doing a few other things associated with the convention, and I have some MCG events as well. Here’s my schedule as I know it so far (and note that all three of the ••• bulleted…
Info on my Patreon, full of crunchy RPG goodness!
This blog post is for people who like MCG’s Arcana of the Ancients stuff for 5E, and want more. :) Back in 2021, MCG released a Numenera supplement called Vertices, a book of ruins for PCs to explore. Although Vertices is written for the Numenera game, if you have any of the books from the Arcana…
Thoughts on the Cypher System Starter Set from the perspective of having written the award-winning Pathfinder Beginner Box
My friend and colleague Kim Mohan passed away today at age 73. I met him when I joined TSR. He was one of the TSR people whose names I recognized[1], so getting to talk to him in person was a cool thing. When Wizards of the Coast bought TSR, he and I were part of…
Back when I still used Facebook, I used to argue politics on the internet. A lot. A lot a lot. Like, Id be late to a social event because I “needed” to reply to someones wonky political take on something. Or Id stay up late for the same reason. Or Id have trouble falling asleep…
I’m gonna start a Patreon, probably in December 2022. Partly because I want people to be able to find me if Twitter stops working, and partly to incentivize myself to post more articles (I do post them here on this WordPress blog now and then, but I’m the sort of person who gets a lot…
(Trivia & Anecdotes is a series of blog posts about weird and sometimes funny behind-the-scenes facts about various books I worked on, in chronological order of when they were published. If you see a number in brackets like this [1], it’s referring to a footnote at the bottom of this post.) Welcome to part two…
(Trivia & Anecdotes is a series of blog posts about weird and sometimes funny behind-the-scenes facts about various books I worked on, in chronological order of when they were published. If you see a number in brackets like this [1], it’s referring to a footnote at the bottom of this post.) This is the first…
If you wanna see me in person at Gen Con 2022, here’s my schedule. And I’m bringing dice from home and giving away, one per person who asks, until I run out. :) (At the bottom of this post I’ve included a modified map of the exhibit hall showing the location of the MCG booth…
(The owlbear in the D&D movie trailer prompted me to finally write this article, which I’ve been meaning to do for over a year now!) Back in 2012, there was a discussion on the Paizo boards that led to talking about shapechanging spells, specifically ones that let you turn into an animal, and what those…
This is a story about the very first 3rd edition D&D Forgotten Realms adventure, Into the Dragon’s Lair, and wow it’s a doozy. It’s the year 2000. Wizards of the Coast is about to release the 3rd edition of D&D. We’d had a lot of positive excitement about this edition, helped by some great Gen…
In 1999, I was the first person outside of the 3e design team who got to write monsters for the new 3e Monster Manual. At the time, the 3e design team was Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, and Skip Williams; Jonathan was the lead on the PH, Monte was the lead on the DMG, and Skip…
Back in 2014, I ran a Kickstarter for the Five Moons RPG, which I intended as a simpler take on the 3e/PF rules and focusing more on the “sweet spot” of adventuring (levels 1 to 12 in 3e/PF terms, before the math really starts to break down for high-level characters), flavored with some of my…
My previous T&A article was about Cloak & Dagger, my very last 2e design project, so it makes sense that my next book, the Living Greyhawk Gazetteer, was my first 3e design project. The plan for 3e D&D was that the core D&D books would “nominally” be set in the World of Greyhawk (WOG), meaning…
Right around the time that Paizo employees decided to form a union, WIRED journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio (hereafter abbreviated as “CDA”) contacted me to ask about my experiences working in the tabletop RPG (TTRPG) industry and whether I had witnessed or experience any harassment at various companies. She used my responses and those of other people…
At this year’s GameHole Con I ran several sessions of a one-shot Ptolus adventure[1] using the Cypher System. I brought pregenerated characters so we could get right into the gaming. Two different groups had a player ask, “some of these say ‘Dwarf’ or ‘Elf,’ does that mean the other characters are human?” Specifically, three of…
[This was originally a rant on my old website, written back in 2001, I’m just migrating it here. Originally this was called “RPGs Are Too Expensive,” because that’s what people were saying, and my rants were arguing against it. I don’t have more recent data on printing costs, designer costs, and so on, so this…
Sean K Reynolds 