My Substack is live!

A "brief" introduction.

Hey everyone,

So after a long time deliberating, I’ve made a Substack. I find often the motivation to start something in earnest can be the hard part. For years I have toyed with the idea of having a blog, but hopefully the “why now” should be clear.

My background is I’ve been a ttrpg/D&D nerd for over 10 years now and its been my creative outlet. It all started when my friends were interested in ttrpg’s having told me about the adventures they got up to in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. When I returned from uni, their game had ended, and fatally like many, I had looked at D&D 5e and thought “why not” and took a shot at running the game.

I was instantly hooked as far as running the game, taking early influence from Matt Colville’s running the game series. My game was set in my own setting now called the Reckoned Marshes. My big influences are stuff like Conan, Warhammer Fantasy, Warhammer 40k (around 4th edition is what I grew up with), and of course Lord of the Rings, and later, Game of Thrones and The Black Company.

My players were keen for a non-standard fantasy start, and elected to start in the desert. 3 years later on a fortnightly game, getting to around level 5, the game came to an end due to real life commitments. In that time, I had changed jobs, and got a bunch of my colleagues interested, this rapidly turned into my second campaign titled: Kingdom of the Broken Crown. Another fortnightly game set in the Reckoned Marshes, this time starting out in a more “classic” medieval western European setting, still in 5e.

Sometimes I was running for 9 players in a single game, where the challenge became having a big enough table, its a problem I’m grateful to have had. The game ran for circa 7 years and spanned from level 1 through 20, ending in a epic battle against an archlich in a competition to ascend to godhood.

What I found, as many of you will resonate with instantly. Is 5e as a system starts to break down around 5-10th level and gets more challenging to run the further you go past this point. Its been discussed at length, but the character options, more HP, more dice, more actions and bigger numbers, while still having the same player working it out all contribute to slowing down each players turn, and as a result, the game. Admittedly, my infatuation of every shiny new 3rd party publisher book didn’t help. But more importantly, my inspirations were always a far grimmer fantasy than what 5e simulates - you’re not worried about torches or rations when you have darkvision and goodberry!

The two things that were key to what happened next were: my friend introduced me to Twitch, and I discovered LordGosumba there. Watching some old school (1e/2e with 40 years of house rules) had me totally enamored, and triggered a fake nostalgia in me for old school content. The second was one of my players, Stride, giving me feedback that its tough to run a good dungeon crawl, causing me to search for how to run one, which made me discover Questing Beast on YouTube, and ultimately meant I had a copy of Old School Essentials on my shelf.

This started my love of the OSR, and the less is more approach to rules, I used to think the legalese of 5e was simple! My 5e game was stripped back, you could still join and understand it if you’d played 5e before, but subtle things that emphasized the “rulings over rules” helped streamline high level play into something manageable, and skill checks were often replaced with role-playing out the challenge, leading to a more interesting game. For many, I’m sure this sounds all so familiar.

The latter half of this campaign was influenced by the OSR in a big way. With the campaign now wrapped up, we’re now on my 3rd campaign, same setting but generations in the future, and using Old School Essentials. Sporting a much more open world, west marches style game. With far less 5 page backstories, and more “good luck surviving your first dungeon” Darwinian character discovery. There are some tweaks with the times, my players prefer a little more survivability out the gate, but nothing too sacrilegious. With swords in hand, my players set off from the starting town of Chultis, and looked to make their fortune. I’ll hope to chronicle this more going forward.

Over this time I had always been enamored with the idea of publishing adventures, and I’d thought about blogging short fiction before, but never settled on a good platform to get started so it remained a pipe dream. But now having engaged with more on forums as I’ve gotten more involved with publishing - Castle Grief was a big influence here. I decided to start a substack. mostly to chronicle my musings on the game and share what I’m working on. With my posts my hope is I will chronicle my journey of always looking to be a better GM, and in the process hopefully help you pick up a thing or two as well, or at the very least, something you might find interesting.

Until next time!

- The Nazrat