• Books, Games, and Stories … OH MY!

    Backrooms: Abyss Level
    The Abyss is a level of the Backrooms.

    I can’t remember all the books, games, and stories I’ve published. I can tell you about my favorites and current projects.

    Tsume Puzzles for Japanese Chess: Introduction to Shogi Mating Riddles holds title as my favorite published book. It’s been well over a decade since I wrote it, but it still holds a 4.5 star average review from purchasers. I’m glad, because it might have been the hardest of all the books, games, and stories I wrote. I even wrote a computer program to check all the puzzles in the book for errors. I’m not sure I’ll ever have the energy to do a book of that complexity, again.

    Backrooms dot Net is my biggest current project. I’m creating a universe based loosely off urban legends of the Backrooms. I’m not the first to explore this domain. Tons of videos, books, and TV shows explore this topic. So, I can’t claim to be the source of all truth for the Backrooms. However, I think I can provide a fun interpretation of the Backrooms legend, eventually leading to stories and games based off the Backrooms urban legend.

    Role-playing games have my interest again after several years away. My son-in-law DM’ed a fantastic campaign of Curse of Strahd that I happened to participate in over a year and a half, and that reminded me of how much I enjoyed my 1980’s BECMI days. Expect to find me over at StartPlaying GM’ing either BECMI D&D or Pathfinder 2e Remaster. I’ll try to remember to post something here when I have open sessions.

  • BECMI D&D

    BECMI D&D took center stage in the TSR universe with the publication of the red Basic box set in 1983. The Basic Dungeons and Dragons box set was followed up by the Expert, Companion, Masters, and Immortals box sets. Thus the name BECMI D&D. However, it took decades before people started referring to that series of box sets as BECMI. Those of us that played it at the time simply referred to it as D&D, as opposed to the unnecessarily complex AD&D.

    TSR ended its support of BECMI D&D in or around 1994-1995, with the end of its support for Mystara (the BECMI realm) in 1995. During that time, many rulebooks, adventures (modules), and supplements were published. Also, three magazines (Dragon, Polyhedron, and Dungeon) occasionally featured articles or adventures for BECMI D&D under the name of “D&D”.

    Adventures and articles for AD&D could also be adapted for D&D. It took some guess work to do the conversions. Most of us players and dungeon masters of D&D would not take on the effort to convert AD&D to D&D.

    Most players of BECMI D&D adopted the adventures and supplements from the older BX D&D and even older original D&D. We mostly considered BX D&D to be the same game as our favored D&D, just slightly outdated. So many Basic and Expert D&D modules and supplements from 1981 and before were adopted by BECMI D&D enthusiasts. Commonly, you’d see BX rulebooks at the same table as BECMI rulebooks during sessions. No one thought that was strange.