Travis Miller's Blog About Sword & Sorcery Fiction and Classic Fantasy Adventure Gaming
It used to be next to impossible to make a reasonable living as an artist in any medium. It's still not easy. It was never easy. It will never be easy. Today, making a living as an artist or entertainer is hard in ways that are different from the way it was hard in the …
Continue reading On the 21st Century Opportunities To Make a Living as an Artist
We use the term "writer's block" to describe our inability to deal with the emotions we feel when we face a blank page or a problem with the work that doesn't have an obvious solution. Often writers are blocked and have no idea why. They simply can't come up with an idea. We sit at …
Continue reading On Writer’s Block: Part 2: What I Do About Writer’s Block
I went to a seminar given by a cozy mystery writer in Cleveland a few years back. She starts writing her books by writing the dialogue scenes as they come to her. They are totally out of order when she writes them. When the shape of the book starts to make sense to her, she …
Continue reading One Way to Use Dungeon Room Ideas that Don’t Fit
A few weeks ago I wrote about "a game master's statement" based on some of the artist's statements I had seen at art gallery shows and museum exhibitions. To give an example of what this can look like, I wrote one for a sandbox campaign I'm working on. This is just one way I could …
Continue reading An Example Draft of A Game Master’s Statement
Ray Bradbury was the sort of writer and storyteller I appreciate the most. Many great storytellers are not particularly great writers. Many great writers are not particularly great storytellers. Writing is the skill of communication through the written word. One can be good at writing and lousy at storytelling. Most of what gets printed in …
Continue reading Book Recommendation: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
I don't like elves, dwarves, and halflings in Dungeons & Dragons. We all know the way they look and feel in D&D was lifted out of Lord of the Rings. The inclusion of elves, dwarves, hobbits, orcs, ents, and balrogs (don't get me started on balrogs) into Dungeons & Dragons was a design mistake in …
Continue reading Tolkien’s Elves, Dwarves, and Hobbits Don’t Belong in Dungeons & Dragons
How much backstory and history do I make for my sandbox campaigns?
Grumpy Wizard 
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