Skip to main content

Welcome

Welcome!

The time has come for me to start posting blogposts. I may be late to the game but I think the whole "a wizard arrives precisely when he means to" thing applies here. So first, a bit about me:

A software developer by trade, I've been playing table top RPGs for nearly 10 years. Not many to some but more than many. I started with D&D fourth edition then quickly regressed through third, second, and then to advanced with OSRIC, B/X with LOTFP, and now back to the future with fifth edition D&D. I've stumbled my way to competency as a dungeon master and in doing so I've honed a love for writing rules, map making, worldbuilding, and heavy weird fantasy. Aside from TRPGs I nerd out about all sorts of niche things and my collection of hobbies are vast. Hopefully I'll be able to explore some of those here.

This blog, as I intend to keep it, will be a place to share my DMing tips and OSR creations. Keep an eye out for Homerules and the fruits of running custom settings. One of which – The Black City – is a sprawling anarchist city crawl in a weird, dark fantasy victorian-ish London. I look forward to sharing more of that as I am very happy with how developed it has become.

I am also excited to begin sharing early details about a "Space Cowboys" game I've been plucking away at for some time now. It's an RPG inspired by Star Wars, Firefly, and Cowboy-Bebop among others. After many revisions the rules are coalescing into something tight, fast, and hack-able.

Wodan Gaming, the name of this blog, is a play on "Wodan", the old Germanic pagan god who's norse equivalent is more immediately recognizable (as Odin), and my name, Dan. implying this blog will impress you through the imperative "Woah!".

Thank you for stopping by.

Update 2022: I've renamed this blog from Wodan Gaming to Surface Level Games. Read more about that here: Enter the Robotic Topologist

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

2 Years of Drier Deserts, Hotter Suns

Two years ago today I released the first public version of Drier Deserts, Hotter Suns. Immediately after that, the COVID-19 pandemic hit Vancouver, where I was living at the time. As I had been working on the project on and off for about eight years at that point (making 2022 now year ten!), it was awful timing. It really killed my motivation to work on games. A bit of playtesting has happened, but not nearly as much as I had hoped. You see, I came to learn very early on during those days that I absolutely hated running games online. As a referee, I am very active . I love to stand up, walk around the table, make big gestures etc. That really doesn't work online. It was also hard gauging people's reactions to the new awesome rules I had just written. These might sound like excuses but there's no denying the fact that I was having a whole lot less fun playing RPGs and making them. It really hurt the project and my playtesting efforts. It's not all bad though! The playtes

Starship in a bottle episode

In sci-fi games, it's pretty easy to forget that the player's ship is their literal home. I'm always a fan of it being their "home base", but that can often be overshadowed by it's utility as a people mover. To make it feel more lived in and homely, I'm experimenting with the bottle episode . Essentially, trying to set an entire session aboard the ship.   The easiest way to accomplish this to set the session during the time it takes to travel between two locations. This works great for a lot of reasons. You can easily lead into it from the session before (ending that session just as you are departing), and it can lead into the next session easily (the session ends when you arrive at your destination). Like a filler episode, it nicely slows down the pace of the game and gives a sense of scale on a temporal level. The other benefit is that if the session doesn't go well, you can fast forward to the destination. Alternatively, they can be set onboard the

Enter the Robotic Topologist

Announcement time! I'm rebranding. Shocking, I know. I had originally wanted to just release everything I made under my own name, but I've realized that that's not the best idea. For starters, I have a pretty generic name. More relevant is the fact that any collaboration just shouldn't be released under my name. I want to share things I think are cool, and don't want to imply that someone else's creative work is totally mine, especially as I reach out to artists and get help on things like layout and promotion. With that said, welcome to Surface Level , the Robotic Topologist Blog. Previously Wodan Gaming by Daniel Harris. Robotic Topologist is my new name to put on any and all gaming content I'm going to release. I think it's a pretty good name, especially the topologist part. I'm fascinated by the study of topology and like the implication of table-top-ology. The robot part is there since I'll mostly be focusing on sci-fi stuff, but robots