ð About me
ðïļâðĻïļ Where else you can find me?
I have a Where to Find Me set up containing links to all my social media, Youtube, Twitch accounts, etc.
ðĨïļ The original blog
The original iteration of the Red Dice Diaries RPG Blog started out many years ago as a simple Google Blog called House of Black and was designed very simply to host write-ups for sessions of a Rogue Trader game that I was running for some friends at the time. That game sadly came to an abrupt end--as games often do--but it was about this time that I was contributing fairly regularly to a Facebook group called the RPG Brigade (once the Youtube RPG Bridgade, and it's still going today); a friendly fellow named Tim Harper Samwise7RPG online encouraged me to release some videos on Youtube with my thoughts on RPGs and so that's what I did.
Here we are umpteen years later, after a few different iterations of the blog, podcast and Youtube channel and I pretty much owe the genesis of my interest in publishing stuff online to one man - thanks Tim :)
ðē My history with RPGs
ð Early Beginnings
I was born in the UK in 1980 and was really into Fighting Fantasy books, Lone Wolf books and all the other choose-your-own-adventure style stuff. I remember reading a lot of these books and borrowing them from a local library, later my wife Hannah (who used to work at our local games shop Spirit Games) would buy me a copy of Fantasy Wargaming by Martin Hackett one of the first books I read on the subject in my library.
âïļ Wargame phase
Like a lot of teens I would later get into Warhammer Fantasy Battle as was, and miniature gaming. During that period myself and a few friends went to Games Workshop HQ and participated in a number of tournaments.
Later it would occur to me that I enjoyed coming up with weird army lists and the story behind them far more than I did the actual painting an army or playing the game (certainly more than the feel of the empty wallet after buying said miniatures); I was eventually able to persuade my friends to play the Hogshead re-print of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay since we all the knew the world anyway. We played gave that a few goes before my friends inevitably drifted back to wargaming and we pretty much lost touch when we went to university.
ð§ The Angsty Years
In the 90s I played a lot of World of Darkness and enjoyed the heavy angst of that, eventually getting invited to a Minds Eye Theatre (live-action) Sabbat game, making a lot of friends there and even briefly living with some of them. Eventually that enjoyment of LARP would lead to me attending Lorien Trust events with some friends (which I still do) and I would also go on to play D&D, back in the 3.5 days initially before eventually "discovering" the burgeoning OSR scene and really getting into that.
ðĻâðĶē Today
So that pretty much brings us up to date, I mostly run OSR-style games now and tend to run them online due to only living in a small town and preferring the wide-pool of players that online play gives me access to as a GM, I've written or contributed to a few RPG products, produce sporadic podcast episodes and youtube videos whenever I feel that I've got some to say.
I also co-host the occasionally produced podcast Purple Worm with my friends Pete Jones and Colin Green.