It’s funny. The genesis of my gigantic TTRPG collection (almost certainly 500+ distinct books) was an old newsletter I used to write. I won’t link to it. It’s super defunct.
But I thought, a hundred years ago, that there was a place in the world for someone to dig through these old games and find the best of their old ideas. Dust them off. Set them out on the table and see if anyone liked them.
Which is of course a brilliant idea that people smarter than me have been doing for more than 20 years now. Oh well!
And for better or worse, my life took a different turn and that’s not what ended up happening. But over time, as the collection has grown, I continue to think that I might really enjoy making a TTRPG of my own.
Knowing full well there’s basically no money in it. Certainly less than I make doing redacted for redacted. Call it a passion project. A sickness. A warped twisting of a dark mind filled to the brim with moths and soup.
But long before it would ever make sense to sit down and do that thing, I would need to find my community. A thought that, somehow, never occurred to me to try to do. Until like a couple weeks ago.
And so it begins...
I was, until about two weeks ago, following a grand total of maybe four TTRPG-related blogs. Come to think of it I’m not even sure when that started.
Tonight, I fixed that. My project for the evening has been to trace the hidden veins of the TTRPG thought space, find all the blogs I wasn’t reading, and add them to my reader.
My process was simple. Starting at the blog that’s been reliably the most interesting I would spiral out, following link after link, adding whatever caught my attention. Whether it was a single post to Readwise, or the entire feed.
Dear reader, I now have 113 unread articles in my feed. It was none on Monday. Oh the hubris of one week ago me thinking I might not have anything to read on my next flight.
I should probably be surprised, or ashamed, or surpshramed at how little I’d engaged with the TTRPG community. There’s no excuse for it. For something I claim to care so much about, I had invested so little. Except for the literal investment. In money. Of buying 500+ TTRPG books.
But as they say, it’s really the friends we made along the way.
... And I had made none.
It’s always difficult to introspect the self, and figure out why past-me did or didn’t do anything. I hardly know what now-me is doing and future-me is a radioactive orb of soup and malice.
But I think the main reason I was living on an island was a secret fear that I might... I dunno. Read something and then be influenced by it? It’s ridiculous on the face of it. That’s literally the reason I bought all the RPG books.
You see if I don’t know what all the cool kids with their hip new Motherships and Triangle Agencies are doing, then how could I ever be guilty of copying them? I couldn’t. Infallible logic. Your move Aliens.
This is of course insane.
If there’s one thing I’ve learned about plagiarism, it’s that the first step is to plagiarize something. I’m not the kind of person who would copy someone else’s work and then try to pass it off as my own. (Well. Okay. I did do that once, in first grade. I “borrowed” someone else’s addition worksheet, because I hated math, erased their name, and put my own. Yes this is a true story. But I promise I don’t do that anymore.)
Two people can independently have the same idea, or be inspired by the same thing, and maybe end up in the same neighborhood as each other, and that’s okay. Some people might try to claim one copied the other and those people are Wrong and should be put in Time Jail where they will be sat on by the Universe for all of Eternity or until they Feel Bad.
Basically, this is not a thing I should be worrying about. If someone wants to make the legal claim I plagiarized them, then it’s time for lawyers to have a Polite Conversation about it. Until then, I’m not spending my time worrying what some rando on the internet thinks about the provenance of the art I’m trying to make.
Okay so then what?
Arguably, I should post more of my ideas on the internet. Part of that is because it’d be proof I had them first, but that’s a silly reason to do anything. Don’t spend your life fighting the argument against some future internet nerd with a Bad Opinion. Mainly because ideas are worthless and you should give them away for free anyway.
Execution is the part that matters.
Our society puts so-called “Idea Men” up on a pillar because it’s tactically useful to have a class of person who thinks their Next Big Idea is finally going to make them rich, while ignoring all the social and structural reasons it won’t. Ideas don’t make people rich. Working 16 hour days and a small $2million loan from your parents make people rich. The idea was secondary.
The problem isn’t that I don’t want to do that. It’s that writing a TTRPG, or a setting for a TTRPG, is about the fifth thing down my project list. No. Really.
- That wizard community thing I keep hinting at.
- A SaaS app for exactly ten people that I cherish.
- This thing I’m calling the ORB which I am envisioning would sort of be like a digital museum exhibit for all of my classic TTRPGs and their ephemera.
- A SaaS app that might actually have a paying audience.
- Project Ashenreach. The codename for my TTRPG setting.
See? Fifth.
If you’re curious, I’m tracking 30 distinct projects in my project management system. A perfectly normal and well-adjusted number of projects for an adult human to have.
Until then I’m following 23 distinct TTRPG-related blogs. I’m sure that number will thin over time. But it’s the start of actually trying to be present and aware. Of weaving myself into the fabric of a community that is ostensibly important to me.
Someday, probably not soon, I’ll try to reach out to some of them and say hello. Make friends. With the other people crazy enough to do what I too also want to do. Someday.