About

Welcome to Geek Related, a small corner of the Web dedicated to role-playing goodness.  I’m a long time gamer and wanted to create a place to let people share some of the stuff I work on – original work, game reviews, session summaries, and more.  So enjoy!

About the Geek

I’m a thirtysomething dad and IT professional living in the Austin, TX area.  I started gaming way back in the day, 1982, with the TSR space opera game Star Frontiers (now freely available from starfrontiers.com).  It was a sweet game, and I started buying issues of Dragon Magazine that had support for it in a special “Ares” section.  Finally the mystery of the other 90% of the magazine (what the heck are “Hit Dice”?) got me to step into the D&D Basic and Expert sets (Mentzer ed.) and thereafter first edition AD&D.

For me, gaming died down in college – the electrical engineering program at Rice University didn’t leave much extracurricular time, and when I graduated I moved to Memphis, TN where I didn’t know any gamers.  I got back into gaming by way of Magic: The Gathering – as it got big, like-minded people tended to gather together around it, and after a year (and about a grand spent on cards) we all decided “screw this, we should be roleplaying!”

I got on a steady diet of RPGs around that time; along with gamer roommates and friends I went to GenCon and the excellent but defunct TennCon regularly.  My horizons expanded to the rest of the role-playing game genres – I avidly played Call of Cthulhu (the GenCon Cthulhu Masters Tournaments are always a wonderful experience), Feng Shui, AD&D (second edition by this time), and pretty much anything else I could.

During this time I co-founded the FORGE, a Memphis gaming club, and was one of the three original Regional Triads for the Yeomanry when Living Greyhawk launched in conjunction with D&D 3e.  I also served as publications director of The Way, The Truth, & The Dice, a Christian gamers’ e-zine.   But better than all that were the two gaming groups I was in while I was in Memphis; a bunch of great people and great gamers.

More recently, I moved back to Texas, and fatherhood has cut into my gaming time.  I’ve found a fun gaming group, though I can only participate in a couple of their campagins at a time (there seems to be an endless number of them underway at any point).  You can keep up with our wacky doings in the Session Summaries section.  I’ve developed a fondness for indie games, although sadly it’s more reading them than playing them.  And I’ve also gotten into World of Warcraft – though I’ve always been a PC gamer, I was always more of a FPS guy; this is my very first MMORPG!  In my mind it’s just a substitute for “real” (tabletop) gaming, however.

So that’s a bit about me. If you want more, my “My RPG DNA” series has a lot more about my gaming experiences.

My RPG DNA, Part 1: The Texas Years – Self-starting with Star Frontiers in junior high and moving on to D&D/AD&D.

My RPG DNA, Part 2: The Early Memphis Years – Returning to gaming via Magic: The Gathering and then escaping the D&D Ghetto!

My RPG DNA, Part 3: The Late Memphis Years – Running an epic immersive campaign, founding the FORGE, the launch of 3e and being a Living Greyhawk Triad.

I hope you enjoy what you find here!

If you want to cyberstalk me, I’m also “mxyzplk” on RPG.net, ENworld, wizards.com, paizo.com, and whatever other fine gaming forums are out there.  You can reach me via email at geek.related@gmail.com.

Note: d20 pic used in my logo is by Kurai.