So as not to bury the lede: ladies and gentlemen, for those who play tabletop role-playing games, my friend Brett and I have founded a new tabletop gaming company, Tossing Bones! We’ve just released our first product, a toolkit of drop-in adventures and lore called “Leveled Lairs - Aboleth” compatible with Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowdark. If you sign up on our mailing list, we’ll give you a free 1st level adventure: Acid Over Thornbay, also compatible with Dungeons & Dragons and Shadowdark. For those in the know and curious, I mean we’ll send you two different versions: one for D&D 5/5.5e, and one for Shadowdark. (You can also find us on Drive Thru RPG)

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons (for those in the know, the Holmes Basic Set) around 1981, and instantly fell in love. Role-playing games are more than momentary entertainment, they become hobbies, inviting players to create their own characters, adventures, rules, even their own games. I kept playing, moving the first edition of Advanced Dungeon & Dragons, until the mid-1990s. At that point, all my gaming friends (such as Brett) had moved away, I was busy with music and work and dating, so I took a break from D&D.

That break lasted through half a dozen jobs, a number of albums, and a failed marriage, until the woman I subsequently married told me she also played D&D, and introduced me to a couple of the groups she played with. That was 2018, and they were on the 5th edition of the game. And I fell in love all over again.

Everyone who knows me knows that when my hyperfocus latches onto something, I can’t simply be a passive consumer. When I fell in love with music, I had to play guitar and write songs. And it’s the same with role-playing games. I think I tried my hand at writing my own role-playing game in the 1990s, called “Phantastic Adventures” (the “ph” makes you know that it was sophisticated and cool…actually, it was terrible. It was me simply adding Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay rules to AD&D). But when I took my break, I left that behind, too.

But Brett, to his credit, never did. He kept playing D&D through all the editions. He kept designing boardgames (and released the successful Holotype via his company Brexwerx). All along, he kept encouraging me to get back into gaming, to pick up my game design hat (noting that an entire 3rd party ecosystem had developed around creating and selling RPG material), to re-ignite that fire. And when I got back into it, like a good friend, he was there, playing in my campaign, suggesting we start working on products together. And so here we are, with Tossing Bones. We started it a while ago—creating these suppliments and adventures takes a long time when you have full-time responsibilities—but we took our time, playtested it thoroughly, commissioned really excellent artists, and have something on the market that we’re really proud of.

So if you like RPGs, please check out Tossing Bones, join our mailing list, and come along for the ride!