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Showing posts from January, 2024

The Roots of Original D&D - What Was the Castle & Crusade Society and who was Tony Bath?

 "ONCE UPON A TIME, long, long ago there was a little group known as the Castle & Crusade Society." This is the very first sentence in the Foreword of the first Dungeons & Dragons book "Men & Magic", published in 1974. The foreword goes on to inform us that it was the Castle & Crusade Society's fantasy rules, which "brought about much of the current interest in fantasy wargaming." The Roots of Original Dungeons & Dragons What Was the Castle & Crusade Society? The Castle & Crusade society was a group of medieval miniature wargamers formed by Gary Gygax and Rob Kuntz in 1970. Gary and one of the society's members Jeff Peren designed a set of medieval wargaming rules known as the "Lake Geneva Tactical Studies Association Medieval Miniature Rules", which were originally published in C&C's very own fanzine known as "The Domesday Book". These rules were later revised, expanded and published as "

The Future of Tales of Mystara

The Future of Tales of Mystara  If you've followed my Tales of Mystara podcast from the beginning then you'll remember how it was at its inception. The whole thing came about during the famous Covid 19 Lockdown! I was house sitting for my aunty who was away when the lockdown struck so I ended up staying there for a very long time! It was quite obvious at some point the creative juices would begin to flow as there was little else to occupy my time during that period. I decided originally to start a series of video tutorials all about how to play D&D solo. These videos were just made on a phone camera with an editing app. This is literally all I had. Making these videos got me thinking about a project I'd started a few years before where I attempted to make a solo actual play using audio and music and trying to do silly character voices. I'd abandoned this idea after quickly realising it took a great deal of time! Then I heard Tale of the Manticore and immediately I j

My Intentions for 2024

My Intentions for 2024 This blog has been somewhat a ghost town for a while now. I guess I've been occupied mostly with my YouTube channel. At one time this blog and the videos were married in the sense the content overlapped, but as time has gone by I've mostly had to toss out anything I can to stay on track to avoid only having time for creating content enough for a handful of uploads a year. It's not that I am trying to maximise my output for the sake of it. It's nothing like that, really. I just want to keep up with the pace that I enjoy the hobby at on a personal level. As I largely neglected this blog I'd like to address it. But I'm trying to avoid duplicating anything. I want this blog to stand on its own two feet as something completely separate from my YouTube videos or podcasting. I actually don't have a clue right now what approach to take, so I thought I'd just share my internal dialogue with you for a while and see what comes of it. So, I su