About

I started browsing OSR blogs off-and-on a few years ago, and I’ve always been impressed with the quality of the content and game mechanics that the blogosphere has produced. Later, G+ became the primary outlet for these kinds of ideas and I shifted to going there first to see what people were up to. There was some discussion about where that community would go when it was announced that Google’s social media platform was going to close and, while a number of other social media platforms were suggested, I found myself a fan of the idea that it was time to focus on the blogs again. Even with all of the great discussion on social media, most of the best content was still being posted to the blogs anyway. It made sense to me to give them some love. It also seemed like a good time for me to attempt to join in and put some of my own ideas, or my response to others’, out there.

I don’t know that my contributions will be of the same caliber as those presented by the bloggers I admire so much, but I think it’s important that new blogs emerge and new voices join the discussion to continue the mission to find new and creative material for our hobby.

Who am I?

My name is Travis Heldibridle. In the past I’ve gone by “Hildy” and “Aristotle,” and I can be found on some social media platforms today as “Hildissent.” I started playing tabletop games around 1990 when I was a teenager, and gaming has been a huge part of my life ever since. Gaming inspired me to read books and explore history. Gaming caused me to buy my first computer, which eventually delivered me to a career in information technology. I even met the woman I’ve shared my life with since 1998 on IRC, which I had first started using in order to talk about games. So, for me, role-playing games have been both an escape from reality and a catalyst for change in my real life.

What’s the point?

While I enjoy the social aspects of gaming, fiddling with game mechanics—looking for neat new ways to do things—has always been enjoyable for me. I’m a fan of house-rules, though they aren’t all created equal and they can almost always benefit from critical review by a third party. These DIY-RPG blogs are perfect for that so I intend to use this space to work on a set of rules that will likely fall somewhere between house-rules and a custom-built game. I do hope some of you take the time to chime in and let me know what I’m getting right and what I need to rethink as well.

I’m also a huge fan of worldbuilding. Making your own campaign setting—a whole world designed to tell the kinds of stories you want to tell—is the ultimate form of daydreaming. While I understand that very few people actually want to read lengthy amateur fiction, I’m going to be developing one or more worlds here on the blog. The hope is that, even if the content isn’t compelling to you, the discussion about techniques and systems that can be used to design a world might be of some interest to some people.