About this blog

In the past years, I have very much become a reader of role-playing games, as opposed to an actual player. I usually GM a one-shot once a month at the open gaming night at our bookshop, using systems like DungeonWorld, some BRP-Variant or a heavily house-ruled FantasyAGE. I also have two ongoing games that tend to meet every other month, if we're lucky. At the moment, one of these is with the gloriously immersive RuneQuest: Roleplaying in Glorantha, and the other with that bizarre beauty called Dungeon Crawl Classics.

Swanosaurus is my blog for writing about RPGs mostly from a readers perspective, or maybe from the perspective of the theoretical player. Keep that in mind and feel free to correct me whenever I am mislead by this perspective.

My interest in RPGs is widespread, and I tend to try out new systems a lot. In the last few years, I ran longer campaigns with Pelgrane Press's Ashen Stars und Monte Cook Games Numenera. I'm a fan of the system design of Cubicle 7s The One Ring, kind of want to like Green Ronin's Fantasy AGE (but never quite manage to make it shine at my gaming table), had some good experiences with Played by the Apocalypse and am always game for indie one-shots like Fiasco, Durance or The Quiet Year. Also, all things related to Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing still have a place in my heart.

The one thing I never quite managed to wrap my head around is any D&D-based rules set. That's a pity, because I love OSR stuff like Wormskin and Patrick Stuart's work, and also DCC; I am just unable to wrap my head around the basics of D&D (or, as I feel, it's lack of recognizable basics ...). But that would probably be a topic for a blog post ...

Oh yeah, Swanosaurus also lies in waiting as an advertising platform for the moment when I finally get around to prepare about a dozen fantasy one-shots for publication; really, with most of them, I just need to decide which system to go with, find a native speaker to proofread and do some layout magics (which I don't have the necessary skills for). How hard can it be?

By the way, I'm not a native speaker, so be prepared not only for weird content, but also for occasional weird English.