I've been gaming for twenty-seven years now, and I can still remember opening the Big Red Box. I was a poor kid, and it wasn't the sort of thing we could afford. My mom had a job cleaning condos on South Padre Island, though, and after the Spring Break rush, she found the Big Red Box left in a drawer in one of the condos by some college kids. It had a dragon and a dude-with-sword on the cover, so my mom figured I'd be interested in it, whatever it was. :)
Boy, she had no idea.
I was fascinated by everything in that box: the booklets, the dice, character sheets. I read everything in it in exacting detail, and started to figure out what actually playing this game would be like. Then, I found the maps.
After that point, I was hooked. I didn't just want to play this game to create a character and fight monsters. I wanted to be the one with graph paper, who made those cool maps, by God. The first five years of playing D&D, I was the one who DMed it, and I loved the world-building.
Today, I work in the gaming industry, as a freelance writer and game designer. My love of the written word has blossomed into professional work, but I've never abandoned by love of maps. I don't have the artistic eye or training to make maps and the like professionally, but I still make them for my home games to this day. Only instead of a ruler, sharp pencil and pad of graph paper, I tend to use Photoshop. But the craft is the same for me, and I really love working on it.
So that's the purpose of this blog, really. It's a place to post the maps I work on, and might even host some of my thoughts on gaming-related stuff.
Many thanks to the incredible Terry Pratchett, whose quote in the title banner of this blog provided the name for this page, because it's so, so true.
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