It’s late Sunday night, and the next morning’s Patreon drop just isn’t where I want it to be creatively. I’ve got to get up the next morning at 4:30 to get the drop done before heading to my day job before sunrise. That’s when the self-doubt creeps in the most–when I’m tired, vulnerable and alone…
The beautiful thing about tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs), which a lot of video-game players have difficulty realizing at first, is that the adventure you’re on doesn’t have preprogrammed coding.
Tabletop roleplaying games (TTRPGs) can serve as powerful tools for social-emotional learning (SEL). I made this bold claim in my last blog post. When the TTRPG is rules-lite and optimized for collaborative storytelling (like Ealdsmyth), the potential for SEL increases exponentially.
If you’ve ever watched a group of teens lower their guard—suddenly collaborating, reflecting, and finding unexpected courage—you already understand what I’m trying to build with my new Patreon.
I had a humbling experience this week when one of my students introduced me to yet another celebrity doppelganger that I resemble. By day, I’m a public high-school teacher, and one of my students confessed Friday that a picture of me has been viral among the students for at least a year, showing an uncanny…
I found out last night that a key figure from my past passed away in October. My Comic Book Guy–Al “Oggie” Medlock–was vital to my learning to function as an adult, and I don’t think he realized how life-changing that was for me. Emerging from darkness During my freshman year of college, I fell into…
(A shorter version of this story appears in the Jan. 9, 2025 edition of The Press-Sentinel. If you’re in or around Jesup, Georgia, you should definitely subscribe to that excellent newspaper! Sometime in 2015, I woke up from a vivid dream. Though I don’t recall most of it, I remember seeing Jimmy Carter’s face with…
I don’t have a single tattoo on my body, and yet I had an absolute blast writing my latest book, Under the Skin. It’s all about incorporating tattoos into your tabletop roleplaying gameplay. My obsession with imaginary tattoos started when playing Pathfinder 2nd Edition and leveling up my character so that he could “craft magical…
We often overlook gratitude in the consumerism-obsessed culture of our modern day. We get so caught up in the stuff we want to possess, we forget to acknowledge our fortune in the stuff we already possess–whether it’s tangible belongings, experiences, relationships or character qualities. It’s a shame, though, because scientific study after scientific study has…