David Chart's Blog

David Chart’s Blog

Latest News

  • Ars Magica Crowdfundings

    My first professional publication for Ars Magica came out in 1993, in White Wolf Magazine. Things rather grew from there, and I spent over a decade as the Line Developer. When I retired from that position, I ended up taking a break for a few years, but now I’m back.

    First, I prepared the text for the upcoming Definitive Edition. The text is now done and is being laid out, and the crowdfunding launches in a few days.

    Second, part of the crowdfunding is the release of Ars Magica under an open license (CC BY-SA), and I have a Patreon at which I am writing for that license. The licensing has not happened yet, but I have permission from Atlas to do that. When you have been working with them on the line for years, you can do that.

    I am looking forward to writing for the game again!

News Archive

My Writing

Fiction

I have written some fiction.

Academic

I have published a few peer-reviewed academic works, on philosophy and Japanese history.

Roleplaying Games

I have written for roleplaying games.

Mimusubi

Mimusubi is my project for non-fiction writing about Shinto. It has its own website.

Recent Blog Posts

  • Rules for Creativity

    So far, this has all been preliminaries. From this post, I want to start working out how to make creativity part of a game. It makes sense to start with what I think is the hardest problem: rules for coming up with ideas. If I can solve this problem, the rest should be relatively easy.…

  • Dice Mechanics

    The core of a role-playing game’s mechanics is the decision mechanic, what you do to decide whether an attempted action succeeds or fails. It’s certainly not the whole of the mechanics, but it’s a very important part, as the rest of the mechanics have to be designed to work with it. That means that it’s…

  • The Purpose of Mechanics

    I wrote this post over the last week or so, and then a discussion of romance in role-playing games over at Gameplaywright moved on to this topic. Rather than repeat myself, I decided to put this post up a little early. All role-playing games have mechanics, and I don’t think that this is a matter…

  • Roleplaying Creativity

    I’ve been working as a freelancer in the role-playing industry for a little under twenty years now, but I have never designed a whole game. That’s about the only thing I haven’t done, and it’s an oversight I’d like to correct. I plan to talk about the design here on my blog, in the hope…

  • Welcome to Japan

    Yesterday, the three of us went to Shirahata Hachiman Daijin, our local shrine, to have a ceremony performed to mark my getting permanent resident status. I wanted to mark it in some way, because otherwise it would just be a matter of going and getting the sticker in my passport, and it really ought to…

  • Mayuki Miscellanea

    Recently, I’ve been deliberately spending more time with Mayuki, playing with her for at least an hour every day. For some reason, that seems to leave me less time to do other things, a situation I don’t really understand. Surely as a reward for being a good father, the very nature of reality should warp…

  • KODOMONOKUNI

    Today, the three of us went to KODOMONOKUNI. I’m not sure why they put the name in all caps, but that’s how it appears on their site. It’s a large activity park, primarily aimed at children (the name means “Children’s Country”), with an emphasis on a pseudo-natural environment, rather than on rides and such. It…

  • Still More Preliminary Discussions

    On Sunday, we had another meeting of the representative assembly. This week, the main task was to establish sub-committees, and decide on the general topics they would discuss. The first question was whether we would have any sub-committees at all. As the full committee has 26 members, I said that I thought it would be…

  • Permission for Permanent Residence

    Today, I went to the Kawasaki Immigration Office and picked up my Permission for Permanent Residence (that’s the official English title on the sticker in my passport). Unlike my previous visas, which were “signed” by the head of the Tokyo Immigration Office, this one is “signed” by the Minister of Justice. This is obviously a…

  • Shiobara Onsen

    Last weekend (from Sunday to Wednesday) I took a trip by myself, to Shiobara Onsen. The idea was to recharge, and it seems to have worked. Shiobara is in the mountains of Tochigi Prefecture, a little north of Tokyo. It takes about four hours on “normal” trains, but it’s not expensive, and you only have…