Casting Shadows

Arrayed in the pull-down menus at the top of the page is a collection of commentary and comments about roleplaying games and techniques for both players and adjudicators. The focus is strictly on face-to-face and play-by-post ‘tabletop’ gaming. I have been active in these forms of interactive imagining some think of as storytelling since 1983, and from time to time I have something to say about their workings. I hope those that read what is contained herein will have something to say as well.

Let me know if my posts contribute in any way to your games. If you like, you can also find Casting Shadows on BlueSky, TwiXtter, YouTube, and Facebook. Casting Shadows is also a podcast.

Projects Old and New, Active or Archived:

1. Saturday Seeds – These were weekly starter ideas or central questions for various game systems. They were posted once a week… guess which day. Some were just the seed, others sprouted a little into Infectious Plots. An offshoot of this evolved into Serial Settings which were weekly posts devoted to an ongoing setting development project. These posts were made every Monday.  You can find them all in sub-menus of the Infectious Plots pull-down at the top of the page. Saturday Seeds went on hiatus after 200 seeds were posted. Serial Settings went on hiatus after two complete settings were created for the Ubiquity Roleplaying System specifically but were presented here in a system-neutral fashion:
   1. The Windlet Isles – An island portal to a lost world in 1938
   2. Samhang – A Korean village in 1936 during the long Japanese Occupation
2. Commentary – These are posts with my thoughts on how to prepare for and run games. You can find them in pretty much each category, but primarily in the Blog sub-menu in the About menu, and in the Casting the Shadows menu at the top of the page. The current one will have its title smeared across the top of the page in large script and have a picture. It will be relatively hard to miss. An additional vector for commentary are the YouTube video entries which will touch on more conversational or discussion-based aspects of these topics.
3. Live Reports – These were continuing transcripts of the games I was running in either PBeM or Chat-based media before video conferencing improved sufficiently for live play. For example, the site hosts transcripts from a Trinity Series (WW), a long-running Palladium Fantasy Campaign, a Mechwarrior: A Time of War Campaign, SLA Industries, Aces & Eights, Mythras, and more. You can find them in the Live Game Reports menu at the top of the page…obviously. Playlists of heavily-annotated campaign recordings replaced this and these can be found on the YouTube channel.
4. Technical Questions – These are of two types and appear on an unscheduled basis. The first type has entries that pose questions for game masters, asking them to think about and share how they would deal with a specific situation in a game they were running. The second type poses questions for players, asking them to share how they would react to a given situation. You can find them in the Technical Questions menu at the top of the page. Each type has its own sub-menu.
5. #RPGaDAY– Each year, in August, I partner up with David F. Chapman to run a month-long social media event focused on sharing positive experiences and ideas about RPGs. Search anywhere that uses hashtags for posts from all over the world about how awesome our hobby is. Use the hashtag #RPGaDAY plus the year (eg: #RPGaDAY2025) to narrow down a range of responses. Each year, David and I prepare a list of 31 prompts for the event and these influence, the form and content which characterizes each year’s offerings. 2024 marked the 10th year of this initiative.
6. Framing Future Discussion – Ultimately, this page is about reinforcing an attitude for preserving what this hobby encompasses, growing in understanding of our varied cultures of play, learning to see what it is that we do when we play and how that influences everything we experience about our play, and speaking about it with as little bias as possible in order to find that place where we can begin to establish our own critical understanding of this hobby – not with borrowed words and ideas, but with our own.

Casting Shadows was a founding member of the Axis of Ogres with The Rhetorical Gamer and KORPG. What did that mean? Read our blogs and find out.

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