Old Men Running The World

Category: blathering

  • An Imagined Atlas Of Imaginary Atlases

    Jim’s note: the New York Times last week ran an article on one of the very greatest contributors to TTRPG history, fantasy atlas-maker Karen Wynn Fonstad. You can take a look at it here. This kicked me in the mind with an overpowering Proustian rush and I returned to my copies of her atlases of Pern, Middle Earth, and the Forgotten Realms. Then I remembered I had already written about fantasy atlases on the TEETH RPG newsletter. And THEN I realised I could post it up here. And you can read that, below.

    I own a surprising number of atlases. Some are straightforward atlases. You know the sort: large-format hardback books containing maps of the world. Others, like The Times Atlas Of World History, which I somehow own multiple editions of, are also grand acts of generalised erudition: formidable slabs of publishing achievement that have been iterated over decades of republishing to explain something with maps. In this case, the general history of the human race.

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  • Welcome

    Firstly, Happy New Year.

    Secondly, welcome to Old Men Running The World.

    Over the years we have each amassed a bunch of RPG writing which has no decent home online, and should have one. We’ve become aware that we both basically talk RPG stuff each and every day, and we think doing some of that talking in public may be worthwhile. We’re also aware that we both have Hypergraphic Tendencies, and a safe platformn for that overwhelming impulse also seems like a good idea. We have things we’d like to say, and so a place to say it seems reasonable. This is that place.

    (When editing DIE RPG, and cutting another huge and sprawling essay that really was extraneous, Grant Howitt liked to say: “Kieron – you have a blog.” Well, no, he didn’t have a blog, not a real one. But now he does. So you can and should blame Grant.)

    We’ve got a huge backlog of stuff to post, but we didn’t want to overwhelm the site at launch, so picked a handful of articles to give a taste of our flavours and obsessions. But this will grow and change. We probably will write something about a game other than Trophy Gold eventually, for example. Jim has a whole lot of interviews he’s done with interesting figures in RPG. Kieron really does have a bunch of old DIE RPG stuff to do, too. And there are some new thoughts we want to pull together into an essay shape for publishing here.

    Some of our stuff for this place will probably appear via our respective newsletters first. Or it might not. But it is the relative ephemerality of the newsletter that has, in part, inspired this place. So it will appear here eventually, and make this place a home and an archive.

    In short, we’re here, we’re thinking in public, because we think thinking in public is both fun and occasionally useful.

    Thanks for popping in.

    Kieron & Jim.

    [image credit]

  • The Most Romantic Thing (On The RPG-mediated search for Experiential Validation)

    A version of this essay was originally published in the TEETH RPG Newsletter.

    A former girlfriend once asked me what I thought the most romantic thing was. Blindly missing the prompt to say something cute, I mused that the most romantic thing would be to die leaving a vast unpublished catalogue of complex and near-indecipherable work for your heirs to discover, so that you became both an enigma to those who knew you and an out-of-time legend whose eccentricities echoed down the ages, like Diderot. She looked at me in a way that suggested that she did not think this was the most romantic thing, which perhaps goes some small way to explaining how that whole situation did not persist. But the important thing is that while I am not casting myself as Diderot exactly, I am likely to leave behind a vast catalogue of near-indecipherable work if anyone remembers to look through the leftover chaos of folders, notebooks and documents once I croak my last. 

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