Write What You Know

Famous words, those.  Of course, I've also seen "Never write what you know, write what you love."  And there's some truth in that.  Because my one commercial product to date was certainly a labor of love, and it seems to have struck a chord with quite a few folks.

But the thing is, I don't have a lot to write about at the moment on a strictly gaming front, and one of my long-time dream projects was to write about something with which I'm pretty well acquainted: weapons and armour of the medieval and renaissance periods.  Specifically, to write a gamers' guide to the topic.

The thing is, over the years, my plans for such a project have changed considerably.  There was a time when such a guide would be dedicated to The Truth(tm), or at least The Truth(tm) as I understood it.  It would likely consist of lengthy rants about geek and gamer misconceptions about sharp pointy things.  To be honest, such a book doesn't sound like much fun to write, much less read.  Also, I'm just not that big on realism when it comes to gaming anymore.  As long as the results aren't absurdly unrealistic, I can usually sit back, suspend my disbelief, and enjoy myself.

Finally, I hesitate because the best gamer resource on the topic to date was published some years ago.  Granted, it's for The Riddle of Steel, a game system that makes the realism crowd drool and everyone else's eyes glaze over, and there's a lot of rules-specific stuff in there, but the weapons section is entirely top notch, just for the historical data and illustrations.

But, said resource is out of print, and TRoS is an unlikely candidate for revival.  And there's a lot I feel I can impart in terms of general knowledge and things that can add to the "versimilitude" of a game without adding complexity, as well as provide some ideas you might want to consider when creating or playing in a "gritty" or "realistic" game.

So, I think I'll take a stab at it (so to speak).  It probably won't be something I do with every post, but I think it may be my focus for the near future.