This is the End

I'm an American illustrator, in my late 20s at time of writing (you can check out my work at www.tkillustration.com). I've also been playing and thinking about D&D ever since my older brother ran AD&D 2e's The Eye of the Wyvern for me when I was about seven. The introductory dungeon is perfectly linear, has three rooms, and is a terrible mess of bad layout and information design, but I made him run it for me twice with my super special centaur character (nearly defeated by a low wall and a misreading of some boxed descriptive text) and then a third time where I used a full party of all the illustrated pre-generated characters included in the back. The Eye of the Wyvern is a pretty bad introductory product on both the player and DM-facing sides, but the premise of the game itself was exciting. Soon I was making terrible adventures of my own for my brother and his friends to play in.

A few years later a friend's dad started running Keep on the Borderlands and later Against the Giants for a group of my friends after Boy Scout meetings. By middle school, impatient to play 3rd edition, we had mostly taken over running games for each other, with me DMing more often than not. We adopted Pathfinder when the beta rules came out, increasingly asking the ruleset to do stranger and stranger things, and then we all went off to college and mostly stopped playing as it become harder to find time where we could all be in the same place to put a game together. Fortunately around that time I discovered Grognardia and through there the weird subculture of D&D blogs. Eventually I ended up illustrating parts of Gavin Norman's B/X Essentials.

Now, eight years later, I'm starting my own blog. The iron I'm striking could not be colder, the ship of the OSR blog-o-sphere having long since sailed, but I already spend a lot of my time thinking and writing about games, so I might as well put that stuff out where people can see it.

If nothing else it'll save me from hollering into my friends' direct messages at odd hours because I've had some game design idea or other.