Tetsujin no Llama

omeone made the mistake of asking me to expand on some things I'd said about writing historical rpg material, so you all must suffer for it. I write a lot of historical rpg stuff as well as entirely fictional setting material. So why make historically themed games rather than just making stuff up? Well, because it's an effective way of achieving the purpose of writing settings and adventures in general. The purpose of settings and adventures, I would aver, is to give players things to do in a convincing context. Convincing context doesn't necessarily mean realism. Players have different levels of understanding of what's "realistic" in different situations and are more or less sensitive to how closely those situations adhere to reality. For example, I'm a history and culture guy. Put me in SF campaigns (which happens with some regularity) and the specifics of how reaction drives, orbital mechanics, and subatomic physics work entirely escape me. I don't,

I love dice.  It's a common affliction of gamers, but it's a particular thing for me. They're interestingly shaped, emblematic of my hobby, and modern ones are tiny works of art which appeal to even people like my non-gaming lovely and talented spouse (who has gotten me a great many of these over the years, because she knows what I like). I was recently asked about my dice collection, which has been accumulating for rather more years than I like to think, so here's a more or less historically guided tour. Back in The Olden Days (tm) of the first tabletop roleplaying games, polyhedral dice weren't easily available, nor were they initially sold as gaming accessories. They were originally sold as scientific equipment, used by people like statisticians and mathematical researchers who needed to generate random numbers (there's a fascinating paper here on the history of dice as randomizers in scientific work; the dice we use owe a lot to the reconstruction of post-w