Welcome to "The Dwarf Died Again," a blog about old-school D&D (among other things).

Howdy! I'm Matt. I enjoy playing, talking about, and pondering tabletop RPGs - mainly old-school D&D and Savage Worlds these days, though I enjoy a lot of different games.

A few weeks ago I realized that between all the various places I discuss RPG theory and design (mostly Reddit and Discord these days), I probably string enough thoughts together and write more than enough words to fill a blog post every few weeks. I know I'm getting to the whole "start a blog about old-school D&D" thing a decade or so late by some estimations, but hey - the game I'm currently running turns 40 years old in a few weeks, so who's to say we won't still be playing it decades hence? I may not have been a participant in the halcyon days of Google+, but at least for the foreseeable future I hope to add Blogger to the list of places I talk to people about RPGs in my spare time (at least until our mighty tech overlords - may their code always be kind and merciful - shut that down too).

A few years ago when I was transitioning from "guy who grew up on 2e AD&D via the Baldur's Gate games but never played in person, then bought the 5e Starter Set in college but never touched it" to "guy who's starting a D&D group and trying to learn how to GM after getting into The Adventure Zone", how-to-GM blogs like The Angry GM and Sly Flourish were absolutely invaluable. As I started broadening my horizons beyond D&D 5e and learning about the history of the game, I found blogs such as DMDavid and B/X Blackrazor to be great and interesting reading. And as I spent way too much time thinking about the intricacies of design, the nature of the game, and (especially) how to tweak the game to my liking, I'd turn to Bastionland, Ten Foot Polemic, Coins and Scrolls, LLBlumire, Necropraxis, Methods & Madness, Zadmar, and many, many others for ideas.

RPG blogs are great, is what I'm saying. The RPG blogosphere (do people still use that word?) is a vibrant network of folks sharing ideas, musings, and stories. Said network has magnified my own enjoyment of this hobby by at least a factor of 2. It's for that reason the first thing I did when setting up this blog was populate my blogroll over there to the right. Seeing an interesting post title on a sidebar while perusing a favorite blog, clicking on it, and discovering an entirely new perspective is a unique joy of consuming content in this medium.

I'd love it if even a few of my musings in this space help someone run their game better, learn something, or just spend an enjoyable lunch break reading about something interesting before getting back to work. I can't say at this point how often I'll post; I imagine it'll probably vary quite a bit as my workload (both at work proper and of the more family-oriented variety) does. I have roughly 10 titles  sitting in my "posts" box at the moment just waiting for elaboration, so I've no shortage of ideas at least.

In any case, that's it for now! Thanks for reading, and I hope you get something useful from the thoughts and musings to come!

But what about the name?

Oh, that? From my first campaign running 5e's "Lost Mines of Phandelver" to my current campaign running "Stonehell" in B/X, the bulk of player character deaths have been Dwarfs*. Don't ask me why, they're generally the most survivable characters by the numbers, it just... happens.

* Dwarfs or Dwarves? I think it depends on how much you like Warhammer. Feel free to weigh in though: https://www.strawpoll.me/42338698