Saturday, June 30, 2012

What is a Name?

Welcome to The Spell of Seven. My little corner of the internet devoted primarily to tabletop roleplaying games. HiroTsukasa is the handle you would be most likely to see associated with me on any forums so calling me Hiro is fine; Dustin works as well. Amid the fervor of excitement for Goodman Games' new Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG, I have been inspired to follow suit of the many interesting blogs going up covering the game. Eventually, the question has to come up: what's with the title of your blog? I figured there could be no better first post than to answer that very question in advance.

An excellent thread on the Goodman Games forum brought The Spell of Seven to my attention. It is actually the second in a series of Sword & Sorcery anthologies edited by L. Sprague de Camp. While a fan of the genre, it has never been something that I delved into extensively and, despite having access to the book, I never paid much attention to Gygax's Appendix N until the advent of Dungeon Crawl Classics. What really struck me about The Spell of Seven is just how wide of a range its stories cover and how broad the Sword & Sorcery genre really can be. For example, before the interest was sparked by DCC I would not have personally considered any of Dunsany's tales to fall under the Sword & Sorcery label. Naturally, appearing in anthologies like this and being among the authors listed in Appendix N proves otherwise. Having looked into reading more of the Appendix N authors and their stories, I can see the reasoning now.

To me The Spell of Seven is really this eclectic mix of stories across the Sword & Sorcery genre as a whole, which is really awesome in my opinion; and that's not even starting to talk about how awesome both pieces of cover art are. In part, that is what I hope this blog to be. It's a my own little space on the net to talk about tabletop rpg's and I personally have quite the eclectic mix of interests within the hobby. So much of the hobby, particularly with D&D, is stuffed with Edition Wars and other negativity. That's something I have never been able to understand. There are games I dislike and those I prefer over others, but I try to see the value in any game; first and foremost that means having a good time. I am just as comfortable sitting down for a game of 4e and then sliding the battle-map aside to play some Labyrinth Lord.

So moving ahead, welcome to what I hope becomes my own Spell of Seven. Dungeon Crawl Classics is now without a doubt my top interest when it comes to tabletop rpg's, but I plan to talk about all the games I am running/playing or have an interest in. I'll post session write-ups, review some stuff and maybe just muse about the hobby a little now and again. My time to read for personal pleasure is at a premium these days thanks to graduate school, but if the chance arises I might also discuss works from Appendix N that I have the luck to check out; sufficiently relevant given its importance to DCC. I have a lot of backlogged content I was tossing together weeks ago when this was still just a vague idea, so there might be a flood of posts over the next week before things slow down into a more normal pace.

Still new to this whole blogging thing so if you have any advice on how to improve the look of things or requests for future posts comment away!