About

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons in 1987 when I was 10 years old. I’ll never forget that exciting day. I checked out What is Dungeons and Dragons, by John Butterfield, from the public library. I poured over that book like it was the savior of my life. I didn’t have access to an actual rulebook until 4 years later. And I didn’t own my own copy of a rulebook until I was 16. I played this wonderful game for 4 years with nothing but that book for as long as I could check it out and my own imagination. I kept checking out What is Dungeons and Dragons for over a year and memorized most of the book. What a fantastic tool it was, but it did not have the actual rules so I had to make up a lot.

I got my friends together and Dmed a campaign. We would play every afternoon at the end or school as we waited for the bus. And then we gathered every weekend for all day sessions. For the first few months we only had the 6 sided dice from my monopoly game. We would roll 3 of those dice to simulate the D20. We did not even understand the probability difference of 3d6 vs a D20. Finally, my friend John got a set of polyhedral dice and we were off. 

Over the years I played with a couple of different basic box sets that belonged to friends. Finally when I was in high school at 16 years old I got my own copy of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons 2ed Player’s Handbook. I read that book cover to cover a hundred times in the next 3 years. We played so many adventures and campaigns together during those years. On the night of my senior prom, after dropping our dates back to their parents’ house we played an all night session at a friend’s house. We made a house rule rule that night, if you fall asleep, your character dies! Needless to say we had a lot of character deaths that night, but most of us stayed up all night into the next day playing this game we loved. 

As high school was coming to a close, we began experimenting with other games: Shadowrun, Star Wars, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Call of Cthulhu, and D100 Marvel Superheroes. In my college and early adult years I also played D&D 3.0, 3.5,and 4th edition. And of course in 2014 I got in on 5th edition. I have loved every edition for different reasons but I did think 5th edition brought in the best of everything I had been experiencing for over 25 years. If you had asked me at the beginning of 2020 I would have said I don’t need any other game but D&D 5th edition. 

In 2020, My gaming world was rocked when my DM, Jeremy Hudson, introduced me to Blades in the Dark which is the progenitor of the Forged in the Dark (FITD) system. I had never played a fiction first, narrative driven game before. We played a lot of Blades in the Dark over the next year and loved every minute. But I missed the fantasy genre. So I looked around and found there was a military fantasy version called Band of Blades which is phenomenal. We played a good bit of that, but I wanted my high fantasy, dungeon crawling, dragon slaying rpg. At the time, we didn’t find a version of FITD that did general fantasy so we decided to make our own. This is why we started designing For Guild & Glory. (FG&G)

Having just touched the first hardback copy of our first ever TTRPG game tonight (3/18/24) that Chris and I co-created, I'm filled with wonder and awe that after a year and half we've gotten to this point.  Together we created, wrote, designed, tested, played (along with many others) and ultimately laid out and published ourselves.  It's been a true labor of love and we are both excited that we have gotten to this point.

I remember my dad, playing Dungeon & Dragons with the youth group on the living room floor, having cut down a large appliance box and laying it flat and drawing a one-inch grid on it wondering as a kid what are they about to do... it wasn't until the pandemic that I even began to watch Critical Role and play D&D. For whatever reason, I was mainly involved in sports and my friend group all during middle/high school was just not into role playing games.  I do wish I had began to play earlier in life.  But, like I've heard many times growing up, you're never too old to begin! And so that's what I've done and after 19 years of officiating high school football, I'm on my fourth year of "officiating" RPGs and I love, love, love GMing!

So here we go, heading out on an wonderful adventure into unknown waters, ready... I think, to discover what's in store for Chris and I as we begin this exciting excursion at 53!