Or, The Game & Narrative-related Thoughts of a Middle Aged White Guy

I’ve been bothered by the prospect of running a newsletter about gaming - tabletop RPGs and the occasional boardgame and maybe some online versions of same, like, none of your bookie-and-casino nonsense - for a few months now. I like newsletters; they’re an easy and direct way for me to write, and I can think about the audience in my head - which is not the real audience, but might be some reflection of it - as I get things down on the screen, and have some illusion that I’m thinking of the right people. This isn’t true of blogs, at least in my head, where I’m writing to an unknown audience, and anyone at all could stumble over it and be trying to read it without it being written for them. Or something. I don’t now, I just like writing newsletters better. But since I already have two newsletters (Gentle Decline and Commonplace), adding a third one seemed like a pretty mad thing to do. Ain’t, as the lady in the meme says, nobody got time for that. So I tried to write a blog post on site that I’ve had for… 16 years, it turns out, and it was crap. It was clunky and condescending sounding and unpleasant, and I disliked it as I wrote it, let alone since. When I hit the publish button on the first actual issue of this thing, I’m going to go back and replace the blog post with a link to that instead.

Anyway, yes, this. Apparently I figure I have enough to say to at least start this off, and since I’m not looking for any support on it like the other newsletters, I don’t expect to feel bad if it vanishes into the ether of not-enough-time and stops after one or two issues. Much like the old blog, it’ll still be here for me to come back to.

So I should talk a little about what I think this newsletter will be about. I say think because gods know I could ramble at an Olympic level for Ireland, and I don’t really know beyond “stuff about gaming”. But I know myself well enough that it’ll come back to thoughts about narrative in gaming, literary-style references in games, meta-stuff about gaming, people who write and sometimes people who play games, marveling at the new cool status of D&D, Critical Role, and bits and pieces of my own campaigns and campaign worlds. I will try not to let it devolve into let-me-tell-you-about-my-character, although that will happen sometimes.

So yeah. Onward!

Drew.

In the meantime, tell your friends!