About
About Alex
I discovered DND in my early teens. Back then, my summers were spent writing Final Fantasy X fan fics on some online forums, or playing any and every RPG I could get my hands on. I was fortunate to grow up with masterpieces like Chrono Trigger, Ogre Battle, FF Tactics, Legend of Dragoon, Baldur's Gate and eventually Diablo and World of Warcraft. After receiving the 3rd edition Starter kit for Christmas, I bought and read the Player's handbook, Monster manual and DM guide cover-to-cover, but could never find anyone cool enough to give it a shot at my (very) rural high school.
I eventually shelved the books, though not before playing solo for a solid year. They would taunt me for the next decade and a half, until the 5th edition "DND renaissance" brought forth enough interest among my friends to finally quench the thirst. The pandemic amplified that momentum, and I soon found myself consuming enough DND content to make up for lost time. Sneaking session prep into my work day, juggling as many campaigns as I could possibly gather players for, pledging to every Patreon battle map creator and Kickstarter project I came by, and writing countless adventures that I might never have the opportunity to run.
The latter was really what gave birth to the RPGWanderer idea. To have more stories than players to tell them to is ubiquitous among passionate DMs. I needed a reason to write worlds and means to share them. It couldn't be adventure modules or settings books - there were already too many of those, and too many great ones. My Grim Hollow, Explorer's Guide to Wildemount, Dark Matter and Cyberpunk Red books all gathering dust, for lack of opportunity rather than value. It had to be some sort of game, rooted in story-telling, that would be as loyal to the tabletop experience as possible. A different way to engage with DND, equal parts fresh and familiar. What keeps me going is to imagine that every time you launch Tides of Murkport, I'm DMing for you a little bit, in a way.
When I'm not writing, I feverishly collect whatever RPGs the market puts out, and rarely finish them. Recently that's been Tactics Ogre: Reborn and GOW Ragnarok. I also enjoy reading (favorite author Robin Hobb) and walking my dog Gucci around the lake.
About Aaron
I’m a software developer turned project manager turned CTO turned software developer.
My history with DND goes back 27 years to high school playing DND 2e and systems of my own making. I know what THAC0 is, and have optimized for it, unironically.
While I haven’t played much classical DND recently, except for Tides, I have a storied history of playing RPGs that dwells heavily in the worlds of Fallout (1|2), Diablo (1|2), Quest for Glory (HQ for reeealz), Bard’s Tale, Betrayal at Krondor, Ultima, Eye of the Beholder and other similarly ancient games.
I love gaming but my passion lies with software development, and I’ve been luckily living that dream for decades. I’ve worked with Atari Basic, GW Basic, Assembly, Pascal, Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, C, Smalltalk, C++, Perl, Java, Lua, PHP, Python, JavaScript and whatever other language you want me to really, because a man has to make a living.
It’s my job to make sure that the site and the game stays running and works properly. That is to say that if and when things happen that shouldn’t I’m the guy you should yell at. (We have a Discord server for that!)
My manifesto is that TNG is the best Star Trek, Ironman is awesome, Quest for Glory 1 & 2 are the best fantasy RPGs ever, and reconciling class inequity in society has to happen, or it will happen to us.
Working on RPGW is a dream come true and I’m incredibly excited to have the opportunity to help bring the Tides of Murkport to life for you.