d66 Classless Kobolds: Blog 1.0

Hey.

I've blogged, say, twice over a decade ago through Wordpress. The first instance was a repository for poetry I wrote previously in college, and nothing more. So perhaps it doesn't count. The second was a few posts about homebrewing on a shared blog with friends. It was hot garbage, really. Regardless, I never saw myself as a blogger, and I am quite late to the RPG/thoughts-on-games blogosphere, but, welp.

My reasons coming here now are three-fold, and related by context, if not directly by content. Firstly, I want to take part in the Secret Santicorn exchange on the OSR Discord, and that's more easily handled via blog post than other media. Secondly, I've had ideas in my head for penning my own small rules-light adventure game, which is probably beyond trope at this point and eye-rolling to many, but deal with it. Thirdly, I am a very disorganized and aloof person--I have plenty of big dreams and objectives, but total bankruptcy when it comes to handling the minutia and logistics necessary to make said dreams and objectives become a reality. My mind is a steel-trap for inane trivia, but as soon as I decide that any of that trivia is, in fact, worthwhile to my pursuits in some manner, it quickly sails out of mind for other climes, seemingly lost forever.

Growing up I was surrounded by board games. Everyone in my family played something. We still do (I have a creaking shelf chock-full of modern board games in my living room). Additionally, my older brother had stacks of Battletech, Shadowrun, and Star Wars RPGs at his disposal, but being twelve years my senior, I never participated in any roleplaying in the house, and he mostly took it elsewhere, anyway. It wasn't until 2015 that I ever played a pen-and-paper RPG, and that was D&D 5e. I played quite a bit online since then, having no local group of my own. For years I've since run various one-shots and campaigns using that big rules system, and even helped co-author a published adventure based on Aliens, if said film was translated using mindflayers. Buy it, if you want. Or don't.

However, in the last five years I've played and run a great number of other games, from simple story games like Cheat Your Own Adventure and Atop A Lonely Tower, to PbtA fare like Monster of the Week and Apocalypse World, and then, oh, and then a vast array of delicious OSR games and modules... that's where, after years of other content, I really fell in love with RPGs: Sandbox adventure and unhinged agency; creativity and cunning over numbers and mechanical hall passes; no metaplot or guardrails or must-happens; bizarre ruins and wasted post-apocalyptic far futures and snake people making fell bargains... Yeah, that's the stuff. That's the stuff right there. As a result, it's really since I've fallen for old school games that I've begun to fill my head with design ideas and ways to better run the stuff I enjoy. That's much of what this blog will end up being about, I think.

I don't pretend to assume that anything I contribute here will be earth-shattering or revolutionary. It may actually come across as panned or derivative, or something not worth anyone's time. Regardless, it's at least worth my time to remove by digital suction the wild thoughts in my mind and trap them in one place for posterity and ease of access, so here we are.

Things I admire:

- Immovable rods
- Jars of grease
- People named Chet
- d66 tables
- d66 tables in 6x6 format (thanks, Maze Rats!)
- Kobolds
- Gnolls
- The Mighty Boosh
- Seltzer water

Some might say that not all of those things are related to RPGs. I'd argue otherwise. Anyhoo.