I’m excited to share that my tabletop gaming books are now available on Amazon!

About My Work

I specialize in creating old-school gaming materials that celebrate and preserve the history of tabletop roleplaying and miniature wargaming. My work focuses on authentic recreations and clones of early gaming systems from the 1970s.

My published titles include:

• Dragons Beyond - A faithful clone of the 1973 draft rules for Original D&D
• Men in Metal - A clone of the original Wargames Research Group (WRG) v1 & v2 medieval miniatures rules
• Midwest Fantasy Wargame: The Primeval RPG - A recreation of the Twin Cities gaming style from 1972
• Trouble Aboard Station Brown - A Braunstein-style science fiction game with three factions: Earthlings, Martians, and Uranians (name your own price on itch.io)
• The Mage’s Companion and other supplements for old-school gaming

Find My Books on Amazon

You can browse all my published works on my Amazon Author Page.

Continuing the Dundermoose /Jeffro Johnson Challenge

NOTE TO GRADER / READER

This is continuing the Dunder Moose and Jeffro Johnson megadungeon creation challenge. I’ve decided to put in an entry for level 2. Although I started this before getting feedback, I did want to just do one off the top of my head. The initial dungeon was drafted in 2 hours with time to draw a map. I did draw the map within an hour. However, converting my chicken scratch into something intelligible to other DMs took a bit longer. I could have run this after 3 hours prep from my scribblings, but the text below probably took another 90 minutes to polish up. The dungeon is heavily inspired by TSR classic module B1: In Search of the Unknown and does make a head nod to Kenzer’s B1 parody (find the embroidered ‘M’). I ran a mash up of both of these for my OSE campaign way back in the day. Anyway, I think you should be able to run this gonzo dungeon with one read through. Enjoy.

Step-by-step recreation of how I did it

Problem Statement

Gary Gygax left us plenty of procedures, but he never - to my recollection - walked through exactly how he created his iconic dungeon adventures: B2 - The Keep on the Borderlands, the Giant + Underdark series (G1-G2-G3-D1-D2), S1 - Tomb of Horrors, S4 - The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth, T1 - The Village of Hamlet.

Likewise, although Tom Moldvay gave us a simple procedure in the back of his edition of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, he did not let us in on how he created (or co-created) several classic adventures: X1 - Isle of Dread, X2 - Castle Amber, B4 - The Lost City, A2 - Secret of the Slaver’s Stockade.

Alternate title: The Dangling Jewels

Oh - you wanted a map with that? That’s gonna wait until tomorrow (Saturday night). Section 4 is the level 2 portion of the dungeon. I would consider it outside the scope of the Dunder Moose / Jeffro Johnson challenge.

NOTE TO DM

This adventure is designed for four to six 1st level adventurers and compatible with 1st edition AD&D. The call to adventure should be given to the player whose character has the most 1) experience, 2) an alignment that is more or less Neutral, 3) or the least gold (after equipping and provisioning).

With Jeffro Johnson, the bombast is real. But so is the legacy. Let’s unpack it.

If Jeffro Johnson died today his detractors would celebrate. But really, if he died today (and I certainly hope he does not), then he will have left behind a gaming legacy that is hard to undo. I’ve spent the morning looking at many of his past blog posts. There was a frenzy of activity that began in 2021 and seemed to culminate in 2024.