Coffee, Code, and Chronicles

The River Stir in Spring. The color of manure, swollen from rain and runoff, an odor of rotten vegetation, and thick with heavy debris floating on it or just beneath the brown-green water. Jost convinced his young friend, Janderke, to go fishing. Janderke owned a small row boat and often took it out on the River Stir for a small fee. Many locals in Tauer on the river would hand over a few pennies for time fishing. Janderke stood a half head taller than his elder Jost. Besides fishing, the both of them had something in common: formerly rich, and dead, relatives. But Jost had made his living fishing for more years than he cared to count and a small inheritance just made what accounted for his small vices more accessible. The day was cloudy and the dark clouds to the east suggested a lot of rain upstream. Thunder could be distantly heard. Janderke rowed the boat out to “ trunks," a collection of just above the surface rotting tree trunks downstream of the docks of Tauer. The “trunks...

I am currently editing the prologue for a new adventure serial here on the blog. This piece serves as a prelude to my upcoming guest post for the AtoZ Challenge in September. While that guest post is already drafted, I realized it would benefit from a practical demonstration of a creative process driven by the friction of randomness using Tabletop RPG (TTRPG) mechanics. While this method is not new, I hope to introduce it to writers looking to leverage externalized prompts to resolve story outcomes. Set in the grim “Old World" of Warhammer, the prologue introduces Jost Oberholtzer, a fatherly fisherman, and Janderke “Jan" Steuben, a young boatman. Jan owns a small rowboat on the River Stir, frequently taking Jost to well-known watering holes near Tauer, their small village on the border of Talabecland and Stirland. When severe weather forces them on a week-long journey nearly 100 miles from home, Jost must guide and mentor Jan as the young man is thrust into the cutthroat, da...

The Escapist, in 2018, created Read an RPG Book in Public week . The event details follow: Read An RPG Book in Public Week is an event that happens three times a year, during the weeks surrounding March 4, July 27, and October 1 (starting on the Sunday on or before, and ending on the Saturday on or after). During these weeks, roleplaying enthusiasts are encouraged to take their favorite RPG rulebooks out with them and read them in public - on the bus, in the coffee shop, at lunch, at the park, or anywhere (as long as it isn't disruptive to work, school, church, or any other functions). I try to honor this event every year, so I thought: I know ICS, I can tell a machine to create an ICS calendar file for sharing. I asked Claude, specifically. It adds the calendar for the next 20 years, or 2046. Felt about right. God willing, I'll still be playing or running Warhammer with or for my grandchildren. Why these three weeks? March 4 was designated as GM's Day in 2008, and was coi...

I'm honored to be picked as an A to Z Blogging Challenge Winner for 2026. As a decade-plus participant, I've won a couple of awards, but this recognition is equally as special. The first award I won was in 2011 from The Altdorf Correspondent .  The TAC  was the Warhammer blog of Magnus Seter, I won the 2011 Best of Fans award for my A to Z participation on my old blog, Another Caffeinated Day (archived, but not live). I often would say in many online profiles after that recognition, “I may introduce myself as ‘Award Winning Blogger and Gamemaster...'."  With this, I may again add it to my bio. For 2016, I started my journey with one goal and quickly pivoted to working from different source material. This was mostly to maintain a “work-life-blogging" balance. It was a struggle a few times as I did not pre-write or schedule posts. Many of my entries would be after 8 p.m. Some may have noticed. It was just much easier to dip into the well of active play rather than ...

Zharr-Naggrund, “City of Fire and Desolation," is the heart of the Chaos Dwarves Empire on the Plain of Zharr in the western Dark Lands beyond the Black Mountains. Scholars state that no chronicle of Zharr-Naggrund is reliable as the Chaos Dwarves are ruthless slavers and all outsiders would die in the furnaces and forges of the Chaos Dwarves. Only servants of the Ruinous Powers and the warriors of the chaos gods themselves would be given audience in the city and permitted to leave. Any accounts of the city are from slaves left for dead on battle fields, unreliable statements by chaos sorcerers tortured by witch hunters, from the heretical books and accounts of the same in their dealings with the Chaos Dwarves, or from last testments of often mad and blasphemous members of chaos cults seeking weapons and spells for the Chaos Dwarves. Atop the ziggurat of Zharr-Naggrund is the great Temple of Hashut, the bull headed “Father of Darkness", worshipped by all Chaos Dwarves and sou...

The Ynyr is not a singular thing, but possibly a dark honorarium given to the fodder of Chaos hordes from the Chaos wastes and frozen mountains of Norsca. The Ynyr are often mentioned in "heroic poems" spoken, and sometimes found in scholarly texts written about such oral histories. In all theso poems, the faceless Ynyr march first into battle, on the shieldwalls or in waves of sword, club, and pike wielding men, screaming oaths to their dark gods. Each seeks to find favor though the bravery of such charges and the death delivered for the gods and the mortal generals at the head of the hordes. To live with no kills is dishonorable, Ynyr will cast themselves on their swords or the sword of their leader to reclaim honor.