Alexis Smolensk

My wish in writing this is to avoid being self-important while efficiently explaining my retrospectives, record, practices and work since 2008, as a dungeon master and designer of content specifically for dungeons and dragons. I'm writing this because my blog Tao of D&D has now reached a length where it has become impossible to "know me" by starting at the beginning and reading up to the present... simply because the blog now has more than 4,100 posts, representing opinions about D&D that likely reach into the realm of three or four million words; about the equivalent of forty-five 300 page plus Forgotten Realms novels.

Thus I hope to provide a map for new readers, casual readers and even long-time readers a map with which to know me. For this, I'd like to provide a chronological foundation first, from my beginnings as a player and a DM before the establishment of my blog, my ideals of worldbuilding reaching back into the 1980s and then the overall progress of my blog these last eighteen years. From there, the next step would be the construction of my present world and it's maps, complimented by a discussion of my 1,500+ wiki page, featuring houserules and worldbuilding; and finally, a discussion of written books and other projects to date. I would hope these things can be covered in large strokes, enabling a comprehension of my gaming philosophy, designs and intentions for the future.

Personal Background

Beginnings

I began playing D&D in 1979, at the same time that I entered high school, first participating in a very ordinary sort of D&D game run by Shane Kraft, based on the White Box Set. AD&D became available in my city just three months later, whereupon everyone I knew dropped the old books and ran toward the new system; I asked for and got copies of the Dungeon Masters Guide, the Players Handbook and the Monster Manual for Christmas of '79. Within a few months, I began running my first campaign, which was something of a disaster.

In those first few years before 1984, I ran my second game world, which worked a little better. I also began to play in campaigns run by others my own age, college students and adults, wherever I could get a game, because in those days it was fairly easy to play three or four times a week in different campaigns. I was introduced to Rolemaster, Empire of the Petal Throne, Tunnels and Trolls, Chivalry and Sorcery... and to other non-fantasy games like Top Secret, Traveller and Gamma World. D&D remained my preferred system. I played in a round robin with a number of other DMs, where we'd each run progressively on Fridays; but as other DMs lost interest or the will to design their games, I found myself running every Friday night by default. Within four years of my introduction to the game, virtually every other DM I'd ever known had stepped down, so that I found myself the only reliable dungeon master, with as many players as I could want. I was a rare commodity.

With the summer of 1984, two major changes took place in my gaming. The first of these was design, which I shall come to after; the other had to do with the growing community in Calgary between 1984 and 1986. One of my players was closely connected to a fellow by the name of Rob Gordon, who was the primary organiser of the city wide game con of those years; I was asked to participate as a DM, to run tournaments, which I willingly did. I should not say so, but I was told at the time by many that I was "the best DM they'd ever known." Given what I've learned since, and what I must have been able to do then, I put that down to a small field of participants (the cons pulled numbers in the low hundreds) and an easy bar to clear. Nonetheless, I grew dissatisfied with the cultural footprint of the game that I could see. Casual players, which counted as nearly everyone at such events, saw D&D as "wish fulfillment." This idealism drastically deviated from the games I wanted to run, so that I became unenamoured with the people and with the events themselves; thus I "quit" public life and turned my back on "community D&D" for the next twenty years.

The Dark Years

Between the winter of early 1984 until late 1993, I ran a single campaign with reliable consistent players, many of which I'd known since high school, until their lives took them to other parts of the world and into relationships, so that the game folded. Thereafter, for the next nine years, I did not run D&D at all. I was married in 1986 and had a daughter in 1988; in September of 1994, in the space of four weeks, my partner Michelle's multiple schlerosis declined from remission into a full-onset, so that she became a quadrapelegic. Thereafter it would be kind to describe my life as merely a raging sea; by 1997, the last consequences had come to pass and for a time, while I wrested myself out of depression and loss and anxiety, my daughter went to live with her grandparents.

Return to Gaming

In 2003, my daughter and my second partner Tamara prevailed upon me to run them in D&D; others who knew my daughter joined and I began a campaign that ran continuously from that time until 2015, then intermittently up until 2023. New tools emerged; I had been more or less working on a D&D game world since the mid-1990s. I'd obtained a Pentium-III in '96, which I worked into the grave, to be replaced afterwards by a series of computers and the use of the internet. Through my gaming in the 2000s, I slowly moved away from pencil-and-paper gaming, creating more and more content on publisher and excel, while printing booklets for my players to use to keep up with my house-rules. I stumbled across blogging in 2004, tried a personal-content blog in 2006 and then began "Tao of D&D" in 2008. Steadily but surely I dropped every analog game characteristic except physical dice, which I still prefer to animated generation.