Happy new year to my fellow fans of all things epic! I certainly hope we all have a better year in 2021. It's been a quiet holiday for me, as can be expected with COVID lockdowns and whatnot. But I've managed to keep things epic with a rewatch of the Lord of the Rings movie trilogy. (I've always felt those movies are particularly Xmas holiday-themed.) I've also been running an online Burning Wheel campaign for the past couple months. One of the players, my good friend Tom, recently came up with a great idea which inspired me to write this blog post. I'll just go ahead and quote him below: "I want to make an epic continent-spanning campaign where the players are from a society that doesn't have the tech for maps and they have to navigate via peripli and itinerania — I guess these are basically just real world node maps." -- Tom  OK, so chances are you're having the same initial reaction as I did to this and are wondering what peripli and itineraria ...

Well, 2020 is nearly finished and it's been a doozy of a year, I think we can all agree. It hasn't actually been terribly bad for my family (knock on wood), just very busy. Working remotely with a kid home from daycare has meant much less time for writing and lots more time spent watching family movies and drinking. >.< In search of new entertainment, I recently introduced my four-year-old daughter to Dungeons & Dragons (kinda). Readers might recall that I actually started playing a simplified version of the Mouse Guard RPG with my kid when she was just two and a half. She still likes playing it with me sometimes (I should write another episode of Mousling Guard, come to think of it), but she doesn't want to play very often. And even when she does, it just turns into a LARP every single time, lol. A short attention span plus a love for roleplaying with dolls does not work well for rules crunchy systems, no matter how much you dumb it down. What I've learned, ...