The new roleplaying paradigm
What's a guy in his mid-fifties living in a one-horse town to do?
I remember the joys of spending weekends at my friend Ronald’s when we were in the 7th and 8th grades. Ronald was my introduction to Dungeons & Dragons. Those were heady times, filled with magical things like character sheets and polyhedral dice and Thac0 and armor class.
“It’s a Death Knight. Can you even hit an Armor Class of negative three?”
Skip ahead a few years. I’m attending Western Kentucky University (1989-1994). Yeah, it took me five years to graduate. I changed majors a couple of times.
North Hall dormitory’s rec room, Thursday nights, saw four to six of us (I was almost always there) playing 2nd edition AD&D and — less often — Paranoia, Palladium, or Cthulhu.
The university’s swim team was housed on the first floor of that dorm in the same wing in which the rec room was situated. They’d pass by on their way to a kegger, look in on us nerds, and holler “Suck my d*ck!” To which my fellow nerd, Jason R., would reply, “Which one? The one in your mouth or the one in your ass?” It never came to blows, which is perhaps fortunate for the swim team. Two of us nerds were not shabby martial artists.
What I remember even more fondly than the details of our adventures was the comeraderie. This was in my early twenties. Now I’m approaching fifty-five. I have a really good job that allows me to work from home most of the time. But we live in a rather rural area and my wife and I aren’t social butterflies. Still, a man sometimes wishes he still had the sort of friendship from those days in the early 90s.
Throughout the first two decades of the new millenium, I’ve dungeon-mastered several campaigns on sites such as rpol.net, and myth-weavers.com. Some of them spanned multiple years. I ran games using Dominion Rules, AD&D 2e, and Hackmaster. Some were great fun, but on at least two occasions a munchkin munged the fun.
After my most recent lengthy online campaign in 2023, I resigned myself to the fact that (1) I didn’t have the energy for long-term maintenance of a gaming group, and (2) that solo-gaming would give me the opportunity to write and engage in world-building. And thus, I threw myself into consumption of all manner of titles: Four Against Darkness, Mythic GM Emulator 2.0, and blogs such as Grognardia and Paul Walker’s Substack. Paul Walker, I want you to know how much I enjoy your posts!
As I waded through various solo-roleplay materials, I moved father down the path of self-discovery that I had begun with my affair with Hackmaster: I came to realize that I now prefer less crunchiness in my roleplay mechanics diet. And in a few exploratory soloing experiments, I found that I lean into journaling. I learned that I loved the process of worldbuilding in conjunction with blogging. Here another term added to terminology, there another NPC added to my Cast of Characters. The North Hall nerd of the early 90s had survived after all.
During the 2025 Christmas holiday, I enjoyed an entire week off from work, and I laid the foundations for a 2026 solo-play that I am calling Endless Rime. It’s set in Earth’s Upper Paleolithic era, and it eschews heavy, complex RPG systems, instead tweaking chaosgrenade’s itch.io Awesome Dice Pool System.
I’ll write more about Endless Rime in my next post, and I hope that it will develop a readership. I’ll see you on my Hacking a Lite RPG post…
