Alan Bahr

It's no secret superheroic ttrpgs are among my favorite (if not my absolute favorite genre). Honestly, the only thing that stops me from making only superheroic ttrpgs is the requirement to make a living (they don't generally sell as well as dungeon fantasy rpgs, science fiction rpgs, or cthulhu/horror ttrpgs). But I think a lot about superheroic ttrpgs and how the conventions of superhero rpgs don't or do mesh with comic book games. There's no real point to this blog post other than me musing o...

I’m not a Halloween guy and the commonly proscribed religious holidays that bracket it aren’t mine, but the end of October is a deeply spiritual time for me. The encroaching descent into long nights, the surrounding beauty of dying nature, and the enforced slowing of life as necessitated by oncoming cold, cause the end of autumn and the onset of winter to resonate for me. It touches the part of my heart and mind that form my spiritual core, bringing me a quiet peace that I can’t live without. ...

In Praise of Run out the Guns! In 1998, Iron Crown Enterprises (ICE) published a boxed set called Run out the Guns! RotG! It was a condensed version of the current edition of Rolemaster (3rd edition I believe), set in a historical milieu of the Golden Age of Piracy. As today is Talk Like a Pirate Day, it felt apropos to post this. In regards to RotG!, I've longed for a copy of my own since I managed to play it at an all-night RPG event (sometime in 2008/2009 when I lived in Utah), and I had ...

I released Riches & Ruins (the first four books) today and as befits my latest releases, I seem to have something stupidly pretentious to say. RPGs are an interesting art form, as we’re just permanently exiting the first-generation innovators and designers (Stafford, Arneson, Gygax, Miller, Perrin, et al), the second generation is near the end (this would be the late 80s/90s), and the third generation (late-90s to the late d20 boom era) is still active, but the largest voices tend to be ...

The SPDC: Employee Handbook I wrote this small micro-RPG to practice a few mechanical ideas I wanted to strip apart and rework. It was also an exercise in communication with layout (so it's not perfect and is a bit wonky). But you might enjoy it. Here you go. The layout got warped at some point. I might fix it one day. I might not. It's free and all that. It appears the embed does not work. Here's a dropbox while I sort out the embed issue. https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/6dr1mkmsjm4t3oavayx2t...

Wine Dark Nights I am now old enough and far enough removed from my origin in gaming that I can reimagine and reinvent it as an homage. It's an interesting place when you grow up enough that you feel the need to turn your nostalgia into creation. Art always influences us, but as we get older, I think the drive to revisit, rework, and reinterpret what we enjoyed, consumed, and were surrounded by, continues to exist and we find ourselves in a place where we can. Anyways, Wine Dark Nights is comi...

“Nothing that we despise in other men is inherently absent from ourselves. We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or don't do, and more in light of what they suffer.” ― Dietrich Bonhoeffer For those who know me personally, yes, I am aware of the antithetical nature of my opening a blog post with a quote from a famous Protestant martyr. Nevertheless, one of the most essential paradoxes I've learned to embrace in my life is that truth carries a foundational constant as...

Starting this new (but old) blog (new-ish blog, new location, soon to be old location), I hope to find myself writing more and spending less time on "self-branding". I'm trying to figure out who I am still (even as I approach 40 and over a decade in the tabletop roleplaying game industry). I'm stripping away the internet from my life as much as I can (I'll never be able to be rid of it and frankly I won't want to be, but I'd like to be more my own man). Below is a restatement of what I wrote i...