Paladin Forge

I first discovered Dungeons & Dragons around 1982, when I was six years old and pulled my brother’s Erol Otus-covered Basic Set from his room. I would stare at the dungeon maps, draw maps of my own, and imagine the adventures waiting inside them. I’ve been doing some version of that ever since.

Years later, I attended the University of Oklahoma and witnessed one of the great turnarounds in college football firsthand. I arrived during the John Blake years, when Saturdays in Norman could be rough, and stayed long enough to watch Bob Stoops restore Oklahoma to the top of college football with an undefeated season and the 2000 national championship. Sooners have a name for those moments when the improbable becomes possible: Sooner Magic. I got to experience it, from the hard years all the way to the mountaintop.

Magic is real.

Some of my best memories from those years, though, happened long after the stadium lights went out. At least a couple nights a week, for years, we would pile into somebody’s dorm or apartment. We’d fire up WCW vs. nWo on the Nintendo 64, order Pizza Shuttle and wings, and eventually break out the books and dice for another marathon session of AD&D Second Edition. We played deep into the night, arguing over rules, laughing, and living through adventures that became memories of their own. By the championship year, we had a house down from the Subway, and that became our regular gaming spot.

I later earned both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Creative Writing, with my graduate studies focused on screenwriting and writing for film and television. That training sharpened my understanding of character, dialogue, pacing, and structure, but in a lot of ways it brought me back to what I had already loved for most of my life: telling stories and creating worlds for other people to step into.

Today, I spend my days raising five children of my own among the beautiful forests of Arkansas and working as the writer and designer behind Paladin Forge, creating tabletop role-playing games, adventures, settings, and fiction. I still spend plenty of time behind the screen, running games for my children and their friends, as well as old friends I grew up with and, these days, sometimes even their younger siblings. The table has changed over the years, but the reason for gathering around it hasn’t.

More than forty years after I first opened that Basic Set, the idea behind the Forge really isn’t all that different. Draw the map, imagine what lies beyond it, gather some friends, and go have an adventure.

Vitam magicam gratamque habeo.

C. S. Lewis