It’s Been a Minute

I ended up going radio silent for longer than I intended to, but I think my reason is a pretty good one: I’ve just finished my first draft of a revision of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing for the 2025 Monster Manual.

I began what I initially called my “speedrun” in February. My goal was to have it written by Memorial Day. That didn’t quite happen. I stopped calling it a “speedrun” when, one by one, all three members of our family got sick (two of us with norovirus), a mischance that extended into the Oobit’s spring break. That was followed by my getting sandbagged for a week with COVID-19, even though viral levels in the Chicago area were the lowest they’d been in years, for crying out loud. Still and all, five and a half months to complete a job I’d intended to do in four—which everyone told me was an overly ambitious goal anyway—isn’t too bad as overruns go.

Now I have to get the 2025 revision of The Monsters Know under contract. I’m hoping that it will be available by Gen Con 2026, but I can’t promise anything, because nothing’s been promised to me. The good news, though, is that I have representation now: Brady McReynolds of JABberwocky Literary Agency, a Dungeons & Dragons player himself, who’s about to launch a full-court press on my behalf. Fingers crossed, I’ll have more news to report soon.

In the meantime, I intend to resume posting to The Monsters Know What They’re Doing (the blog) next week, after I’ve taken a few days to decompress. And I have assorted thoughts to share, some of which are below, some of which will wait for another day.

2025–26 Appearance Schedule

Making Enemies: Monster Design Inspiration for Tabletop Roleplaying Games hits shelves Oct. 7, and you can preorder it here. But that doesn’t get you a signed copy, does it? Or a chance to battle one of my 20 new beasties in person!

Oct. 16–19, I’ll be at Gamehole Con in Madison, Wis., and I’m running four events: one D&D game, one Pathfinder, one Shadowdark and one Cypher System. Place these events on your wish list for your best chances of getting into one of them. I’ll also be talking monster design with Charles Gannon, Kenneth Hite, Alan Patrick and Bryan CP Steele and RPG-related book publishing with Ben Riggs.

Nov. 21–23, I’ll be at PAX Unplugged in Philadelphia. That’s about all I can tell you so far; I’ll update you if and when I have any events on the schedule.

Feb. 5–8, 2026, I’ll have a signing table at Capricon 46, a science fiction/fantasy convention in Chicago. It’s a smaller event, and a not-for-profit one, so every new attendee gives it a boost.

I’m hoping to add at least one more convention to the schedule in March, so watch this space.

Never Enough

I look around at other TTRPG creators my age, and I wonder how they do it. Then I remember: Not everyone goes and has a kid when they’re 49. At that age, you’re supposed to be sending them off to college, or at least helping them with their algebra homework and driving them to and from dance recitals, chess tournaments and ballgames, and taking advantage of the fact that they mostly don’t want to be seen with you. They’re not going to require your undivided attention for the next seven years.

In an industry that’s been dominated for so long by grognards, most of the creative energy, it seems to me, is coming from younger millennials. Because of course it is: They don’t have kids to take care of (many, by choice, never will), their metabolisms haven’t slowed down yet, and they’ve come of age in an era in which personal hustle is supposed to make up for the fact that your three jobs put together still aren’t enough to afford you a minimum standard of living. What better demographic to pay 10 cents per word, when 10 cents per word in 2018 dollars (when the push to establish this rate of pay as a minimum standard began) is equivalent to 13 cents per word now?

And you know what? They’re producing mind-blowing work. Not just in games, as freelancers or independent designers, but also in game-adjacent media, including podcasts and actual-play streams. And I actually grieve, from time to time, how much of that work I’m never going to get to enjoy. Not because it’s inaccessible to me, not because I don’t have the money to spend on it (in fact, I’ve made a point of sharing the fruits of my success with others where I can—although I’ve had to cut back since mid-2022, when inflation cut my weekly hardcover sales in half), but because I just don’t have the time. And even if I did, my friends don’t have the time, either.

I’m fortunate, now that the Oobit is in school (well, day camp, since it’s summertime), to have roughly six to seven hours a day (minus a break for lunch) when I can work without interruption. When she was in half-day preschool, it was more like two to three hours. In theory, my spouse and I, who share an office at home, traded off who got to work the remaining half-day while the other looked after our child, but in practice, that half-day was dismally unproductive, because the Oobit could never make do with the attention of just one of us. Those were the conditions under which I wrote How to Defend Your Lair, which is why it took 13 months to complete.

We don’t have weekends. On Saturdays and Sundays, the Oobit has no school (or camp), which means we don’t get to work or relax. For relaxation, we have evenings. Most nights of the week, we have just about enough energy left to play video games. On Wednesdays, we play D&D with the group I’ve been DMing for since 2015. I certainly can’t complain about that; how many people get to say they belong to a group that’s played more or less continuously for 10 years? And yet it’s hard to deny that the energy level has dropped off quite a bit since we began playing by Discord and Owlbear Rodeo, owing first to the pandemic and then to players’ moving out of state, compared with when we all got together at a player’s house after work, most of us carpooling to get there. Everyone’s wiped now.

I look at my game shelf, and it’s chock-full of genius. The Black Ballad. Beyond Corny Groń. A whole bunch of Eberron material. Alas for the Awful Sea. Blades in the Dark. Brindlewood Bay. Court of Blades (that one, at least, I did get to play for a while, until the campaign faltered because of fatigued players’ inability to keep track of intrigue plots). Deathmatch Island, which I want to play so badly. Flabbergasted! Haunted West. Kids on Bikes. The Last Caravan. Orbital Blues. Ten Candles. Triangle Agency, which I want to play almost as badly as Deathmatch Island. Wanderhome. I’m just now getting around to playing Reach of the Roach God with my best friend and an old mutual friend from high school I reconnected with recently, which is the coolest thing I’ve gotten to experience in a long time.

And I feel guilty, knowing that what’s on my shelf barely scratches the surface of what’s out there, knowing that my awareness of the TTRPG scene is distant and overwhelmingly vibes-based, knowing that I’m not able to give back even a fraction as much as I’ve received.

I have so many social media mutuals to whom I want to say: I would follow everything you’re doing, consume everything you’re producing, learn from you, sing your praises, if only I had the time. But it all has to take a back seat to work, family, and recovering enough to be able to do justice to work and family the next day.

There’s no profound lesson here, no neat conclusion, no ribbon I can tie on it. It’s just something I’ve been wanting to get off my chest for a while.

In The Monsters Know What They’re Doing, the essential tactics guide for Dungeon Masters, and its sequel, MOAR! Monsters Know What They’re Doing, I reverse-engineered hundreds of fifth edition D&D monsters to help DMs prepare battle plans for combat encounters before their game sessions. Now, in Making Enemies: Monster Design Inspiration for Tabletop Roleplaying Games, I explore everything that goes into creating monsters from the ground up: size, number, and level of challenge; monster habitats; monster motivations; monsters as metaphors; monsters and magic; the monstrous anatomy possessed by real-world organisms; and how to customize monsters for your own tabletop roleplaying game adventuring party to confront. No longer limited to one game system, Making Enemies shows you how to build out your creations not just for D&D 5E but also for Pathfinder 2E, Shadowdark, the Cypher System, and Call of Cthulhu 7E. Including interviews with some of the most brilliant names in RPG and creature design, Making Enemies will give you the tools to surprise and delight your players—and terrify their characters—again and again.

Preorder today from your favorite independent bookseller, or click one of these links:

Spy & Owl Bookshop (hi it me) | Barnes & Noble | Indigo | Kobo | Apple Books