XP earned

Here you may find my portfolio of game writing and editing credits, updated as needed:

My first design credit (and, indeed, my first writing sale) was as a backer contributor to Kobold Press’s highly-acclaimed Tome of Beasts, for the Rift Swine. I’m inordinately proud of this awful, hideous thing.

Emboldened by having an entry in a high-profile D&D monster book, I wrote Adversaries & Allies in the early days of the DMs Guild to fill some gaps in the NPC entries in the Monster Manual. It’s broken just about every rule of conventional wisdom about pay-what-you-want titles, going platinum in its first year and continuing to make a couple of sales about every week. I certainly didn’t expect it was going to have this kind of long tail; there’s lots of design in there I’d do differently now. One of these days I hope to put out an updated version.

My first major adventure contribution was for Travis Legge’s tiefling-centered Waterdeep mini-campaign Yearning to Breathe Free, for which I wrote the sidequest chapter “The Tethera Tan Yan” about a nasty cult dedicated to Demogorgon. Travis called it one of the best cults he’s ever seen in an RPG supplement. I’m just glad I didn’t completely mess up writing about the Shou.

Also working with Travis Legge, I wrote The Treasure of Magister Yama as a chapter in the Vengeance of the Shunned campaign for Slarecian Vault, Onyx Path’s community-content program for the Scarred Lands setting. It’s a backwoods cosmic-horror jaunt I gleefully stole in part from M.R. James, except with more alien magitech and pig monsters. (Pig monsters are, I’m afraid, one of my Brancusian kinks.)

I contributed two entries to Oliver Darkshire’s Mistkickers: Ravenloft Sidekicks, the Scholar and the Abomination, the latter of which Oliver was gracious enough to give more than its fair share of page count.

Later, I expanded the Abomination entry from Mistkickers to its own product, The Compleat Abomination, giving it a full 20-level sidekick progression and a host of new options. It’s a very niche work, but I stand by it doing exactly what it set out to do.

The Treasures of Var the Drowned is a one-shot adventure set in the tragically overlooked Shining Lands of the Forgotten Realms. It’s a deliberate exercise in subverting the default tomb-raiding plot of lots of D&D adventures – here, the characters are tasked with protecting and returning relics, and the robbers are the bad guys.

I was part of the editing team on the (multiple ENNIE-nominated!) Uncaged: Goddesses anthology, where I provided both developmental and copyediting for a handful of the adventures and playtesting on a couple of others. I’m inordinately proud of what this group created here and of the acclaim it’s garnered.