Hi.  I’m Michael and this is my blog about tabletop RPGs.

I’m a twenty-something British London-based roleplayer, with about five years in the hobby depending on how you measure the boundaries.  I like to play when I can, but usually I prefer to GM.  I’m blessed with a wide circle of geeky gamer friends, many of whom I met at university, and at any given time I’m in three or four (or more) regular campaigns with them.  Most of us aren’t students any more though – jobs and life stuff cut into our gaming time, and increasingly we struggle to get together as much as we’d like.  We all know how that goes.

Our hobby is diversifying at an accelerating rate, with distinctions between “indie/story games” and “the mainstream stuff” becoming increasingly anachronistic.  I’ve been sitting on the fence between both fields for a long time, and look forward to the day the line sinks into the earth so I can jump off without hurting myself.  Which is to say my roleplaying tastes are wide-ranging: I like Savage Worlds, Gumshoe, some iterations of Cortex Plus, The One Ring, Warhammer 40K, games that are Powered by the Apocalypse and Paranoia.  Recently I’ve been playing a lot of Fate Core.  I firmly believe that the quality of games being produced right now is better than it’s ever been, and can’t wait to see what the future holds.

I was recently fortunate enough to be accepted into the beta playtest for Evil Hat’s upcoming Fate release “War of Ashes”.  It’s an RPG adaptation of Zombiesmith’s miniatures wargame, a “grimsical” fantasy story of oddball muppety Vikings embarking on epic quests when not trying to mind their own business.  It looks to be a very fun (and funny) game and I’m delighted to be testing it out.  One of the conditions of joining the playtest was a “Disclosure Agreement”, a pledge to try and promote awareness of the game by discussing it with gamers on blogs and social media.  Following in the footsteps of the great Rick Neal, whose RPG blog was similarly willed into being on the back of the “Disclosure Agreement” for Evil Hat’s Dresden Files release six years ago, I figured this was as good a time as any to see if this whole “internet” idea is one with any legs.

To begin with, I suspect I’ll be mostly talking about the War of Ashes beta – what I’m liking, what I’m not, hopefully providing a balanced review.  After that, I hope to expand the content of this blog to talk about roleplaying more generally: game reviews, discussion pieces, new rules and maybe some actual play accounts.  I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Right, that’s more than long enough for an intro: hopefully I’ll have some actual content to put up tomorrow.