🔍 About me

👁️‍🗨️ 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.

🖥️ 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 :)

🎲 My history with RPGs

📅 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.

♟️ 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.

🧛 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.

👨‍🦲 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.