Introduction
Who am I?
No one of consequence, really. As far as this blog is concerned, I'm an old tabletop RPG gamer and designer named Brian Bình. I've written for several commercial game systems and settings under various noms de plume since the late 20th century. I took a break from writing and gaming for a while to work and travel the world. About 7 years ago, I was trapped in northern Michigan by heavy snow and had a sudden inspiration to dig out some old notes. I wrote "The Curse of the House of Rookwood" in a Google Doc on my phone during the snowy winter nights over the course of a few months based on Mike Addison's original idea of the cursed Ravenstone family.
Mike had started Nerdy Pup Games so we published it through Nerdy Pup and Kickstarted a print run. It turned out to be kind of a surprise international hit. Actual play podcasts, Twitch streams, and YouTube channels started showing off their own Rookwood campaigns. I still haven't caught up on the ones I know about. There's even one in Polish I've been trying to translate!
I spent part of my cut from the Kickstarter campaign on a bunch of other KS campaigns that were going on. One of these was for the dark fantasy Trophy RPG, which I thought looked really awesome. As part of their campaign, they had a contest to write an incursion as Trophy adventures are called. Being stuck in a tiny apartment in Hawai`i during the COVID-19 outbreak with nothing else to do, I decided to give it a shot. I wrote "Sea of Dust" which received glowing reviews and a nice cash prize. At that point, I thought "Huh. Maybe I should just keep going."
I wrote a bunch of other games and supplements and put them on my itch.io storefront and people liked them. I don't have the temperament for the kind of promotion and marketing needed for commercial success ("Witches & War Rigs" did pay my rent the month of its initial release, but that only happened once), but I like making my small batch artisanal nerderies for the fun of creation. Which brings me to this blog.
I have played several dozen different kinds of RPGs with different systems over the years. Counting by the number of hours at the table, I've probably spent more time playing various "World of Darkness" games by White Wolf, but D&D is the game that had the biggest impact on me. That's the one that started it all for me when I first spotted a Monster Manual in a Waldenbooks store back when Waldenbooks still existed. I played and ran with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons 1st and 2nd edition and Dungeons & Dragons 3.0E and 3.5E. I had a love/hate relationship with D&D the whole time, then I was out of gaming for a decade.
A couple years ago, I heard good things about Old School Essentials by Necrotic Gnome and decided to give "D&D" another shot. I realized that a lot of the things I hated about D&D were actually AD&Disms that didn't exist in B/X D&D. I got a copy of the Rules Cyclopedia and saw it had a lot of cruft too, but I decided to just ignore that stuff. I used to be a miserable bastard, but I decided long ago that liking things is more fun than not liking things. I've been a lot happier since that realization, so now I just love the parts of D&D that I love and ignore the parts I hate.
What's "Moon Shadows"?
Moon Shadows is the name I've recently given to the campaign setting that I've run games in for decades, both original adventures and modified modules that were made for other settings. It mostly existed in my head, but it also sprawls across several notebooks, index cards, Post-It notes, and loose scraps of paper, not to mention numerous notes scribbled in the margins of rulebooks. After updating my copy of Affinity Publisher to the latest version and considering which of my works-in-progress should be finished next, I decided to organize and compile my notes to turn Moon Shadows into something comprehensible and useable by other people. It's going to take a long time to finish everything, so I'm going to release it bit by bit as I finish things, but I'm not a fast layout artist. This blog is a place for me to "think out loud" and talk about the setting as I work on compiling and presenting it. I hope other interested gamers will follow along, but if I'm just shouting into the void here, that's fine too. The important thing is that I get this all out of my head.
If you like nerdy rambling about magic, planar cosmology, custom classes/races, and stuff like that, stay tuned for any useful or inspirational bits you can use for your own campaigns.