Ask Me Anything: cowleyc

1. What's the source of your avatar?
2. Which OSR and non-OSR are your favorites? Least favorite game you've tried?
3. How does it feel to be younger than me? I assumed all OSR-loving people were old curmudgeons and now my worldview is shattered.

1: The avatar is of a Bogatyr, a Slavic hero from folklore. Finding profile pictures is always hard, and I happen to like pictures of bogatyr, so...

2: My favorite OSR has got to be Swords and Wizardry, with Shadowdark taking a close second. They're both clean, easy, and leave a lot of room for making rules up, which is my sweet spot. My favorite non-OSR has to be either Dragonbane or Coriolis. The latter is a blast, and so packed full of flavor! I had a hard time using darkness points on the spot, but they're still probably in my top five favorite rules ever.

As for my least favorite game, that would have to be either Pathfinder 1e or 2e. They go off the deep end into number-crunching that I despise, and the canon setting is, in my opinion, a kitchen-sink of a map designed by a child who wanted to put vampires next to barbarians next to robots. There is almost nothing in those systems that I enjoy.

3: I always assumed we were born on the same day, minute, and roughly the same second! This is news to me!

But more seriously, there are a few camps in the OSR. One is very much the grognard who remembers the good old days, and another is those who have found the old games (especially the versions that have been cleaned up) and fallen in love with the style. Technically, having started with AD&D 2e, I fall under the first... but I relate more with the second group. I stepped away and explored the TTRPG world before coming back to my roots. And then planting better roots without THAC0.

1. What puts S&W ahead of others like Shadowdark? Or BSH or EZD6?
2. Have you tried Coriolis 2e? I played a 2-session adventure this month and I did not enjoy it. The focus on delving and managing supply just made it feel like a dungeon delving game with a sci-fi skin.

Favourite cheese?

Best hiking shoe?

Do you take your dog with you hiking? How are you enjoying the Appendix N books? What differences do you notice compared to more contemporary books?

Why have you started learning Norwegian? Have you ever been to Scandinavia or are you planning a visit?

1: Swords and Wizardry feels like the most compatible game for me. I know OSE is the OSR golden child, but S&W is next in line for compatibility. I can run darn near any module I want and not have to even think about converting anything. Shadowdark runs smooth, but even those super quick conversions (DCs, Spells, XP, etc) take me out of the game for a moment. BSH is fun, but takes a lot more conversion; I'm happy to be running it on PbP where I can take the time. And I've never played EZD6 or ICRPG.

2: I saw it come out, I saw it stripped away the mythology and focused on space-crawl, and I looked away. It stepped away front the aspects I liked. It might make for a fun hack with Alien.

Goat cheese, hands down. I ate too much brie on one internship years ago, so that's off. White cheddar on a slice of apple pie is nice, too. But goat cheese. On anything.

The best hiking shoe is the one that fits you best. I have a weird toe-shape, so I need shoes with a wide toe box. I don't care what brand, just be comfy.

If you're getting Merrells, be sure to replace the insoles or suffer the blisters.

1: I do take her hiking! She loves to run around but not lose sight, and she loves ferns.


2: I'm loving them! I love how ridiculous they are, how they very much don't take themselves seriously. They create such imaginative landscapes and have strange, alien names. There's so little internal logic or consistency, but everything still seems to flow.

I don't know why I started! Maybe I read saga or two and decided to learn. But now I'm trying to plan a ski vacation to Norway, and maybe bribe my wife to move there with street waffles. Never been there, but excited to go!

This is a really cute dog picture. :3 Give her pets from me!

What was your most memorable kayaking experience?
Was there ever a situation when your non-RPG professional or hobby knowledge was very useful for roleplaying?
What would you call your favorite book if you had to pick one?

Also, seeing GIS was a fun jumpscare, I was studying in the field back when I had no idea of what I want to do. XD Still remember how to use a theodolite, even. Any interesting stories about your job? :D

1: I have done so, and she was appreciative. She's a stinking cute puppy. :)

2: My most memorable experience is canoeing, actually! I had just finished a work trip at Harlequin Lake, near Yakutat, AK, and had to return across the lake to pick up some gear we left behind. Harlequin Lake is a glacial lagoon, so it's filled with icebergs. Super dangerous to boat around, but beautiful beyond belief. My friend and I spent a lot of time with our paddles in our boats, just floating and watching.

3: I like to think my outdoors experience has always been useful in my games! As someone who has crossed glaciers, climbed mountains, and been uncomfortably close to many large animals, I try to bring a sense of realism to my games! I try to paint a picture from my own memories!

4: Oof, favorite book is a hard one for me. Either "We, the Drowned" by Carsten Jensen; or "Arctic Dreams" by Barry Lopez. The former is a novel about a danish fishing town from pre WWI to post WW2, and weaves tall tales into a narrative that covers many families and has so much continuity. The latter is a beautiful piece of writing about a man who circumnavigates the Arctic, discussing how traditional beliefs, scientific facts, and his own experiences might be connected.

5: GIS is a super fun job! I've been able to point out my own maps in places that I've gone hiking. One of my more interesting projects was creating a model (a series of tools, or programmed steps) that would consider slope, water, soil type, and many, many other factors, in order to determine likely indigenous archaeological sites.

I remember you saying that trying to get paid gigs to run OSR is hard because of low demand, compared to all the D&D queues out there. Would love to hear more about your OSR endeavours, what was popular, what wasn't, how crowded, how dismal, etc

Oh, good question! For those of you who don't know (and why should you?), I took a year off from GP and my home games to try hand at Paid Gaming. It .. did not go well. Much of the experience is a long story, but I focused on running Shadowdark to try reaching a more broad audience. I was able to attract players for some short series and one longer campaign, but it was frequently like pulling teeth.

It just so happens that I joined during a GM boom. Everyone had seen the success of COVID GMs and wanted in on the action. So now all the tried and true advice was worthless because you weren't competing against a couple dozen GMs, you were competing against hundreds and growing. And people weren't lining up for OSR.

I mentioned multiple camps in the OSR earlier. It applies here, too! The older camp (the grognard, if you will) don't pay because Gary Gygax never paid for a game. The younger camp (the NSR players) don't pay because the community is based around free hacks and supplements. The only clientele I found were folks coming from 5e who were interested in another type of game, and we're already paying players.

Eventually I gave up, once my partner had a serious talk with me about how anxious I had become. And going back to GP and my local game store has been the best decision.

1) Favorite beer style, assuming that you partake.
2) Favorite music genre.

1: Being from the Pacific Northwest, I grew up drinking IPAs. But the last few years have been all about Lagers, Pilsners, and Kolschs! I've been finding the third option to be topping my list whenever I find them!

2: I listen to Bluegrass, and a few overlapping genres like some country and some folk/indie. A lot of my playlist (that's right, singular tense) is songs about death, dying, murder, etc.

Hey GM! Enjoying our game of Dragonbane so far. Hope we can keep it going. On the topic, do you play with game props on the table (like the standees and maps from the Dragonbane set)?

At the table, I usually go without props! I like a more theater-of-the-mind approach to situations. That being said, I love the Dragonbane standees and would love to run a small live game sometime using them.

As a player, I always buy a miniature to represent my character. It gives me something visual to focus on to help stay in character.

What part of your job looks easy to other people but it actually difficult to do?

What would you rather find in your attic: 1000 roaches or 1 human?

1: I think people underestimate how difficult color coordination can be in visual media! Especially when you're putting so much visual data either right next to or on top of each other. So much of my job is spent playing around with color and shapes, after the rest of the data has been found and put on the map. Maps are art! And we are not artists!

2: Considering I'm in the process of a move, and the new house doesn't have anything more than a tiny crawlspace, I'd much rather find roaches. They don't bother me too much! But a stinky human stinking up the place and blocking airflow? Rude!!!

1. Favourite moment from a game on GP?
2. From an in-person game?
3. What's a game you'd like to play but haven't yet had the chance to?
4. What are some key differences you've learned about running/playing in games via PbP versus in-person?

1. There was once a short-lived Ranger Hellrider named Varrak "Finehair" in one of Adam's games. He was a skirmisher, a thinker amongst the other knights. Well, the party had found themselves in Hell (Avernus) and needed to get past a guard tower. To go around would to be spotted; to go in would be death. So, Varrak proposed a different solution. Use the various hell-rides they had acquired. They used a warmachine as a ramp for their few bikes and jumped to the top of the tower in order to surprise attack from above! Granted, it resulted in a TPK, but it was EPIC!

2. That's a much harder question! I'll go with the time my group in a Dresden FATE game was exploring Alaska to track down missing magical kids, and they ended up in a cave filled with punk ghouls along the coast of Anchorage.... and getting to describe the "Eat the Rich" poster slapped up on one wall. Or in that same game when the party's witch managed to tap into the heart of a volcano by interrupting a ritual. I took her into the next room and described how she felt the power, the vastness, the intensity of the volcano inside her mortal shell. It was intense!

3. I'd love to play one of the super-crunchy systems like Hackmaster or Rolemaster. I've run a short PbP game of Against the Darkmaster, and learned a lot about using aides to help things along. But man would I like to really dive in some day! I find this ironic in myself, as I keep moving towards lighter and lighter systems.

4. You know, I don't know that I see too many differences between playing live vs PbP! Lots of "Same Same but Different." As a live player, I like to posture myself and speak in accents (not well, mind you); this translates to more descriptions in PbP since you can't see me hunching over my keyboard with one eye shut. In both formats, driving the momentum is crucial; in a live game, this might be in the way I talk and urge the party along, while in PbP having a discord to keep poking players seems to help. In the end, my loosey-goosey totally inconsistent manner of GMing seems to work well in both formats.

Okay, skiing questions, though I myself have only skied Western US (Utah) twice, so likely your favorite mountain is one I’ve never been to.

• What was (or maybe still is) your favorite mountain and why?
• What was the most insane thing you’ve ever done on skis?
• Did you marry a skier, and if not, did you convert your spouse to a skier?

1. I grew up snowboarding Mt. Hood and currently ski around Mt. Adams, but going out to Banff maybe ten years ago was amazing. I don't remember the name of the mountain, but we had to take a carriage up for about half an hour... only to board down a massively open slope with so few people around. "Top of the World," I think it was called!

2. I only started skiing this last season, so I don't have too many stories. Even on a snowboard, I'm more of a chill flow-er. But last year, day one on skis, I had just finished my lesson for the day and my partner wanted to see what I had learned. We took an easy trail that we had done in the past, but didn't realize it was closed due to early conditions. She took me down sheets of ice and rocks, with not even walking as an option.

3. I married a skier, and she was the one who convinced me to convert! I found I love skiing even more than boarding! And I was able to progress much faster.

Let's talk strange encounters while on a hike, or around a campfire...
Any interesting sightings ?
Any rumours of cryptids or ghosts - any legends you heard from locals?

When I was a kid, I was at a boy scout camp and heard a commotion outside my tent. Peeked out to see a glowing green humanoid run past, too fast for me to pick out any details! Turns out it was another kid who broke a glow stick...


Or the time my dad woke up my friend and myself while camping in Alaska in August to say there were lights dancing in the sky! Turns out it was an little aurora show out of season.

I did see wolves stalking a coworker on a work trip once out to a remote beach in SE Alaska. He had gone in search of those glass balls, the Japanese fishing floats. Tons of wolves out, all hungry due to the weird season we'd been having. We could see him in our binoculars, but couldn't reach him via radio. Eventually he crossed a stream that the wolf wasn't interested in.

Plenty of bears, including a baby bear that was crashing around behind me while on a trail toilet.

Nothing too weird! And not many rumors that I've heard. I know they're out there, but I like my hiking for the grounded reality of it.

Amazing stuff. The glowing green kid is priceless! (it feels straight out of Scooby Doo!)

And he would have gotten away with it, too, if not for those meddling kids!