Jennifer M. Baldwin

Return to DCC RPG

April 23, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I’m playing a solo Dolmenwood game right now, my kids and I are playing some adventures using Hero Kids, and I might be joining an open table for Shadowdark in the very near future, but I’ve also been cooking up another solo adventure/campaign using the Emirates of Ylaruam gazetteer from TSR, and I was thinking of using Cairn for my system, and yet now, I’m getting the itch to return to my first OSR love: Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG.

I’ve played several games using DCC, and I’ve loved each and every one, but I find that players don’t always love it as much as I do. Maybe I’m not a very good Judge, maybe the players have wanted a more typical 5e experience, I don’t know. But I’ve moved away from DCC RPG partly because there are so many new games I’m interested in (Dolmenwood!!), and partly because I’ve found it hard to get a regular game going.

But if I love it so much, and I’m planning a solo campaign, why not use DCC for my solo campaign? It’s an obvious choice!

One thing I’m interested in is using DCC for a homebrew. Although Goodman Games makes excellent adventure modules, I’m more and more curious to see how DCC works when using the core rules but adventuring in my own world (“my own” is a stretch… I am using the Ylaruam stuff from TSR… but I’m not using any pre-made modules; I’m making a sandbox and letting my PCs go wherever, no set story).

One of the things I love most about DCC RPG’s core rulebook is the way it encourages the judge and players to develop their own world: make your own patrons and deities and monsters and magic items and everything else in between. If dice rolls lead to wild results, play out those results and see what happens. A spell goes awry and transports the party to another dimension? Cool! Go explore that dimension. A PC dies and his friends want him back? Cool! Travel to the underworld and rescue him. The warrior wants to learn a new fighting style? Cool! Seek out the legendary sword master of the far-off mountains and convince him to train you.

The Goodman Games modules are fun, but one of the things that drew me to DCC RPG is the way it inspired my own adventuring and world-building ideas. I like the modules for one-shots, or even as locations/encounters within a hex crawl, and I might use a few as I solo-play, but I’m really in the mood for creating my own map of adventures, my own locations, my own quests. I’ve never really used DCC for that kind of play yet, and I want to try.

I’m inspired on some level by Bob the Worldbuilder’s excellent Skrym resource. By using the Ylaruam gazetteer and the Skrym random tables (as well as the tables in the DCC core book), I feel confident I can make a robust solo campaign.

In some ways, I wonder if Goodman Games’s success with its modules has hampered or undersold DCC’s ability to work as a homebrew game. The game itself has so many interesting quirks and tables that create stories simply by the effects of a spell roll or treasure table roll or patron roll. The modules are wonderfully weird and well-designed, offering the perfect DCC “flavor,” but as a system, I think the DCC core book gets overshadowed by this robust line of adventures. I’m genuinely curious to see how well the system holds up in a sandbox campaign that is not based on any DCC RPG modules or settings.

Thoughts on The Motern Method

March 15, 2025 / / 2 Comments

I liked it. Well-worth reading and owning.

However, if anyone has spent any time at all reading Heinlein’s Rules or exploring corners of the internet where these Rules are being lived out, a lot of the concepts in The Motern Method will sound familiar.

Which doesn’t mean it’s not worth reading. IT IS.

But it wasn’t particularly revolutionary for me. Parts of it reminded me of Make Art, Make Money: Lessons from Jim Henson on Fueling Your Creative Career. Parts of it reminded me of Ray Bradbury’s long-standing advice on quantity over quality in one’s art-making. And parts of it reminded me of Heinlein’s Rules.

One thing it also reminded me of is my previous desire to be an independent filmmaker. If The Motern Method was anything for me, it was a reminder that I once wanted to make movies and felt like I didn’t have the resources, and that maybe I need to let go of such thinking and try to make a movie no matter the lack of money or equipment.

I’m not saying I’m going to start making independent films. But… maybe?

The other thing I like about the book is that it collects a lot of advice into one place. Sure, there are Heinlein’s Rules and the books and authors I referenced above, but when I need a quick pep talk, The Motern Method is right there, with all the stuff.

For instance, I got a rejection the other day from a short story market. And yeah, yeah, rejections are part of the deal, right? I’ve had many rejections before, so you’d think I’d brush it off and no big thing.

But I was bummed. In a funk.

And that rejection was followed by another rejection (different story, different market). So again, you’d think, “But that’s great! You’ve got two stories out for submission and even with the rejections, all you need to do is send them out to two more magazines and keep going!”

And that’s exactly the right advice, but my brain doesn’t always operate on logic. My brain sometimes spirals into depths of self-doubt and loathing that are like the black pits of Tartarus, just roiling under the surface waiting to bubble up.

I know rejections are part of the gig, and I know all I need to do is send the stories out again. But knowing and believing are two different things.

Enter The Motern Method.

I remembered that Farley had a few chapters on rejections and getting your work out into the world (again, very Heinlein-esque), so I flipped to those pages and started reading.

It was basically a pep talk, and it worked. My brain stopped its death-spiral, and I felt renewed. Getting my work out into the world is what matters. Getting your work out into the world is what matters. Can’t let rejections stop that. Gotta keep going.

Sure, I could have gone online and googled Heinlein’s Rules again, or tracked down similar publishing advice, but having Farley’s book right at hand, its minimalist, indie-punk black and white cover reminding me that artists can work outside the mainstream system, made it easier to read what I needed to read.

I love the book’s aesthetic. No author is mentioned anywhere but on the spine. No introduction, no table of contents. The book just starts, each section indicated by bold-font titles, and then it ends, with Farley narrating his creative journey, explaining how the Motern Method was developed and how it helped him write the book.

Some sections are ones I quibble with a bit. “Read the comments. Read the reviews”? Maybe for others, but for me, this is DEATH. Both good comments and bad, good reviews and bad, tend to hurt my Creative Voice. It doesn’t mean I’m not an idiot who sometimes reads the reviews, but I always hate myself afterward.

Farley’s larger point — that reading the reviews will toughen you up, show you that taste is relative and not to worry if people don’t “get” your work — isn’t a bad one, but I know for my own ego, reviews can get inside like brain worms and infect my process.

But overall, the book is a rallying cry, a manifesto.

And it is very punk. Which I dig.

I’ll be keeping The Motern Method on my writing desk. When I’m stuck, when I’m down, when I need a kick in the pants, it will be my go-to.

News Fast

March 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments

I wasn’t going to do a news fast because I thought it was important to pay attention to all the crazy stuff happening since January (since November, really). I thought consuming news was crucial to keep abreast of STUFF. Stuff that’s important. Stuff that’s going to hurt people (is hurting people). Stuff that’s going to be pretty forking bad, so I needed to know all the stuff. Or most of the stuff. Or, heck, just some of the stuff.

But I’ve decided there’s no way to dip my toe into the sludge of stuff without getting sucked in. A little bit of news, even just a check of the headlines or whatever, is enough to send me off into the vast, ugly maw of all the hellscape stuff that’s happening right now, and I just–

I can’t.

A little bit of news suddenly becomes a lot of news becomes too much news. So I’m cutting myself off from the news.

Near-total fasting. Occasionally a crumb from a newsletter (that isn’t normally political) will wedge itself between my teeth, but other than those stray, unintentional crumbs, I’m going off the news.

In fact, I unsubscribed to a bunch of newsletters just so I could shut out the world.

I blocked the New York Times and Reddit on all my devices.

I marked “Not interested” on every slightly newsy/political video that pops up on Youtube.

The only radio that passes my ears is the local classical/jazz station or a music show on WDET.

Total. News. Fast.

I don’t know how long this will last, but I can report on how it’s been for the past two weeks.

Reader, it has been glorious. Maybe not for the world, but for my sanity. For my writing and creativity. For my mental and physical and spiritual health. For nearly everything.

It has not been easy, or at least, it wasn’t easy the first week. Fasting from the news meant a total reorientation of how I spend my days and my time. Cutting out the news without filling my time with something better is a recipe for lapses and failures. As such, I’ve been listening to more audiobooks and RPG-related podcasts. I’ve spent spare moments reading my kindle or a library book.

I’ll admit, there are times when I really don’t feel “ready” to commit the mental energy needed to listen to an audiobook, or I resist the “slowness” of reading a book. There’s no clicking of links. No jumping from outrage to outrage. It’s been revelatory that I’m so resistant to sustained reading. I never thought I would be someone who would resist reading a book.

But that’s what happened (and still happens) once I started the news fast. The prospect of picking up a book to fill that time (time once-filled by Reddit and NYTimes articles and such) has become a daunting prospect. I realize now how “light calorie” the news was for me. Easy to digest. Not nutritious, but if I ate enough, eventually filling. A sick, greasy filling, but enough so that I would be satiated.

Reading or listening to an audiobook instead has meant a bit of struggle at the beginning. I resist. But then, it’s either listen to a book or read one or simply sit with my thoughts, and I realize that all three of those is preferable to the news, so I sometimes do sit with my thoughts, or jot down ideas in my pocket notebook. And sometimes I open the kindle just to peruse and suddenly find myself pulled into a story or essay. Or I’ll open that audiobook of Ray Bradbury stories that I’ve been neglecting and before I know it I’m crying or cheering or overwhelmed with awe, and it was all worth it, that initial struggle, that bit of resistance: I’ve pushed through it to the somewhat “harder” pleasure of reading a book and found the reward to be much greater than any I’ve ever had with reading the news.

I’m not sure the news fast can be sustained indefinitely. I may, with time, start listening to the radio again, just to keep up. But I might continue to block the news websites and be much more selective about the podcasts I listen to. I’ve gotten better at filling my spare time with reading (and not news); I don’t want to lose my new-found ability to engage with the deeper, harder pleasures of books. The spare moments don’t have to be filled with news and outrage. They can be filled with reading. Or thinking.

Or with nothing at all but quiet.

American Fantasy in a Box of Rain

February 28, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Ross Douthat had an op-ed a few months ago where he posited that America needed its own quintessentially American fantasy novel/series, and while I immediately objected to the headline’s premise that we’ve never had one (ever heard of Oz, my dude? Or the John the Balladeer stories?), I understood that Douthat was arguing for a “Great American Fantasy,” a Lord of the Rings for our purple mountains’ majesty.

He also acknowledges the Oz books and others, and yes, he does say we can have a great American fantasy that is for children or that does something outside of epic fantasy.

In his opinion, no “American fantasy” has achieved greatness yet, and that’s what he’s challenging authors to do. “Make American Fantasy Great” (but not “again,” because, well).

Okay, cool, fine, whatever.

I’ll admit that I have a fantasy novel idea (that I first developed back in my early college days) that seeks to blend my love for psychedelic 1960s music with my love for fantasy, but I don’t know if it would meet Douthat’s idea of “great.” Too quirky, perhaps. Too niche.

In many ways, the Between Earth and Sky trilogy by Rebecca Roanhorse is what I would call an “American Epic Fantasy,” but I’m not sure it counts for Douthat’s vision, and I don’t think he’d call it “great.” For Douthat’s “American Fantasy,” America = United States, whereas Roanhorse is definitely America = non-European, indigenous America. She’s decidedly pre-Colombian.

My idea is of the “magic school,” magic-in-the-real-world variety. Think A Separate Peace set at a music school with magic and dragons and it’s the 1960s.

For me, psychedelic rock & roll has a lot of fantasy connections. It’s why hippies and college students were all saying “Frodo Lives” in the 1960s, making The Lord of the Rings into a huge American bestseller. We all know Led Zeppelin was putting Tolkien references into their lyrics. And the weirdness of an LSD trip can definitely feel like traveling into another world, a magical world (so I have heard).

In particular, the Grateful Dead’s music and Robert Hunter’s lyrics have always been a source of inspiration for my imagination and for my fantasy writing too. If there’s an “American Fantasy” soundtrack, I think it might be the Dead who plays most prominently on it. This is partly because of the free-form style of their music, the occasional weirdness. But it’s also because of Hunter’s lyrics, which blend Americana with mystical imagery; a very grounded, homespun sensibility with a dream-like lyricism:

“Walk into splintered sunlight

Inch your way through dead dreams

to another land

Maybe you’re tired and broken

Your tongue is twisted

with words half spoken

and thoughts unclear”

…

“Just a box of rain

wind and water

believe it if you need it

if you don’t just pass it on

Sun and shower, wind and rain

in and out the window

like a moth before the flame”

(“Box of Rain,” words by Robert Hunter)

“Box of Rain,” “Ripple,” “Dark Star,” “St. Stephen,” “Terrapin Station,” “Franklin’s Tower”: These are only a few of the Dead’s songs that carry me away to an Otherworld, to fantasy.

I think we tend to associate British bands like Zeppelin, or heavy metal and prog rock in general with fantasy — which makes sense. These genres and bands are often heavily influenced by fantasy literature. And fantasy literature has, to Douthat’s point, been generally associated with European culture for a lot of its history (though this has changed more recently).

But the Dead are also a band with a fantasy vibe, it’s just that their vibe isn’t always drawing FROM fantasy literature but instead from a different corpus that includes American history and folklore as well as classical literature, the Bible, the folk, blues, and country traditions, and, of course, the Ken Kesey Merry Prankster LSD stuff from their early years. The Dead are American Fantasy to me because of the way they bridge so many different influences, while also bringing their own original visions to bear on these source materials. It’s old and new, traditional and experimental. Earthy bluegrass and psychedelic flights of fancy.

One need only look at the album artwork and overall aesthetic of the band’s merchandise and promotional art: animated skeletons and dancing bears and all kinds of fantastical and sumptuous pastoral imagery. Crows and cats and harlequins. Banjo-playing turtles and skulls and starry skies.

(To be fair, lots of promo art from the psychedelic sixties and seventies fits this bill. But the Dead have kept it going beyond that particular period, making this aesthetic an integral part of their oeuvre.)

In some ways, the “Great American Fantasy Novel” isn’t even a novel at all. It’s the body of work done by the Grateful Dead. Maybe this isn’t what Douthat is looking for — this isn’t a Moby Dick but for “fantasy” — but as the man once said, “Believe it if you need it. If you don’t just pass it on.”

I believe it.

A New Spirit

February 25, 2025 / / 0 Comments

It feels like spring here in Michigan. For two days, at least, we’ve had a thaw: snow melting into great running rivulets along the sides of roads, puddles everywhere, blue sky and birdsong. I’ve also started a new notebook, having finished my previous one this past weekend.

Upon starting a new notebook (spiral-bound, flimsy cardboard cover, the kind you can get at any CVS or Kroger), I like to enliven it with a “guardian spirit” on the first page (hat tip: Austin Kleon for the “guardian spirit” concept).

For this new notebook — as February ends and spring begins (eventually) — I want someone who embodies the kind of disposition I’m hoping to cultivate this season. Ice is cracking, snow is melting.

I’ve decided on C.S. Lewis, but not merely because of the obvious allusion to his most famous children’s book about the end of winter.

My children and I just recently finished the audiobook of The Silver Chair (topnotch performance by Jeremy Northam, by the way).

I often can’t decide which Narnia book is my favorite — it’s a three-way tie between Chair, Dawn Treader, and Magician’s Nephew — but since The Silver Chair is freshest in my memory, it’s my favorite for now. It’s the perfect “knightly quest” narrative. Jill and Eustace are sent on a great mission to rescue the king’s son, they have signs and directions to follow that they often bungle, but nevertheless, they continue to seek the fulfillment of the charge placed before them, and in the course of their journey, they face giants, and strange magic, and monsters, and wondrous creatures. Also, there are talking owls. I am a sucker for talking owls.

And Puddleglum. Puddleglum and Reepicheep. Best Narnians by a country mile. Northam’s voice for Puddleglum is perfection.

I also finished John Hendrix’s fantastic graphic novel about Lewis and Tolkien called The Mythmakers (another Kleon recommendation and also utterly topnotch).

At some point in the future I’d like to write a bit more about The Mythmakers because it was completely wonderful, but for now I’ll say that the portrait Hendrix paints of both men made me fall in love with their lives and their journey all over again.

(I say “all over again” because I was already a huge Lewis and Tolkien nerd, but Hendrix’s comic has reinvigorated and reoriented that passion… I’m even thinking of choosing new books for my British Lit class next year due to the ideas Hendrix’s graphic novel ignited.)

Lewis, myths, stories, adventure, the creative process: all of it hits where I’m at right now. I’m not exactly an Oxford don, but as a high school English teacher, I have some affinity for professors like Lewis and Tolkien: teachers who also cared deeply about their work as writers. I’m much more Tolkien-esque in my procrastination and slow production, but I aspire to be more Lewis-ish. I admire prolific artists, and Lewis was decidedly prolific.

He also was a voracious reader and loved many books and genres. I’d like to think that I read a lot, but I also want inspiration to keep reading more (and more widely). I want to reclaim myself as a Reader, capital-R, and even more particularly as a BOOK reader. There are many wonderful blog posts, articles, essays, and sundry on the internet, but I want books. Books to read. Books to spend hours upon hours lost inside. I want to read books the way Bilbo wants to see mountains.

Tolkien was famously (infamously?) critical of Lewis’s habit of throwing everything-and-the-kitchen-sink into his Narnia stories, but I’m much more a Lewis than a Tolkien when it comes to my own storytelling and world-building. Lewis’s fantasy stories are very “Arthurian” in that sense. Everything is up for grabs. The mythos can contain multitudes.

(Anyone familiar with the breadth of Arthurian stories from the Middle Ages and beyond will know that there’s nothing the Arthurian mythos can’t contain, or practically nothing. Lewis, as a medievalist and lover of Arthuriana, was always much more comfortable weaving different traditions and legends together; whereas Tolkien, though also a medievalist, was less enamored of the King Arthur legends and less inclined to the hodgepodgey quality of those stories.)

I can already feel the pull of my library books, and already the desire to take solitary long walks through the countryside, and at last the desire for tea (or beer), good conversation, and the sharing of stories.

Experiments in Applying Butt to Chair

February 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments

Wrote about 740 words in an hour. Handwritten. (Sometimes I handwrite, sometimes I type. Switching back and forth helps jog my Creative Voice. I let it decide which to do at any given moment.)

Not my highest word count in an hour, but I did have a brief stretch in the story where I haggled over word choice and phrasing. I try to not get bogged down in such things, but there are times when I really have a way I want something to sound, and my first few attempts aren’t quite getting the rhythm. So, I try out a few different options: moving words around, switching out phrases, writing sentences, scratching them out, then writing new ones, etc.

I told myself I wasn’t moving from my chair for one hour, and lo and behold, it worked. I sat in my chair for one hour and wrote a decent chunk of words. Now I am writing this blog post, so more words abound.

Today was a day off from teaching, so this one-hour, uninterrupted writing time is a bit of an experiment. I usually rush to write a few hundred words in the morning before work, but this is the first time in several weeks where I’ve had a quiet afternoon (no children at home), and I’ve been able to write. I wanted to see if I had the focus and stamina to sit and write for an hour without interruption, and the answer is yes. I can do it. I can probably take a ten-minute walking break and do it again for another hour. I can foresee myself doing this for three or four hours in a day, if I had such chunks of time. I might even try it later this afternoon, when the kids are home from school, to see if I can do it with a little bit of noise and distraction hovering around.

I can see myself doing this day in and day out. A day spent writing.

I can’t say I’ve cracked “writer’s block” or anything (hahaha, far from it!), but I will say that I’ve gotten better and better at finding strategies and methods to be more focused and confident. A few years ago, sitting and writing for two or three hours sounded good in theory, but I had a terrible time actually doing it. I would jump on the internet for “just a minute” and end up there for hours. I would tell myself to go down to my computer and write, but then a million other things would suddenly become extremely urgent, and I’d do all those other things instead of the one thing I told myself I wanted to do.

A few years ago, I worried that I simply wasn’t cut out to write professionally because I didn’t have the discipline or work ethic to make it happen. When I did have hours upon hours of time on my hands, I squandered it.

Today, in this butt-in-chair experiment, I’ve seen that I AM capable of blocking time for writing, doing the writing, and getting the writing done. And wanting to do more writing. Keeping the chain going.

I definitely need to replicate this experiment many more times before I can confidently say my work ethic has improved, but today was a good start. Today showed me I can do it if I want to.

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