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

  • Are There Any Black People In Japan?

    Recently, I read a couple of articles that made me think. One was an open letter to Japanese people from a black man, listing a lot of “microaggressions” that black people suffer here, and posted on another blog. Another was the article “The Cultural Theory of Race: Yet Another Look at Du Bois’s “The Conservation…

  • The Importance of Options

    Oh dear, it’s been a couple of months since I updated this blog. I have continued working on the game, but I’ve also had to start editing the final book for Ars Magica, so I haven’t had quite as much time to work on Kannagara. The problem I’ve been working on recently is the problem…

  • “Diversity” and American Dominance in RPGs

    The US dominance of both the pen-and-paper RPG industry and the diversity debate is a real problem, one that, I think, is actively hindering attempts to address the problems created by a lack of diversity. Let’s take an example I’m intimately familiar with: Japan. (For people who don’t know, I’ve lived here for 12 years,…

  • Racism in Japan

    Actually, the content of this post would be more accurately described as “reflections on the results of a survey of experiences of discrimination on grounds of foreign nationality in the municipality of Kawasaki”, but that isn’t snappy enough for a blog title, and quite a lot of what I say will be directly relevant to…

  • Progress!

    In the last week, I seem to have crossed a critical point with Kannagara. I now have a 6500 word draft of all the core mechanics, and I think they are both simple enough to be usable, and complex enough to support the sort of game I want to write. I don’t yet have anything…

  • Ars Magica and Kannagara

    Today, Atlas Games publicly announced my retirement as Ars Magica Line Editor. It doesn’t take effect until the end of this year, and it’s been planned for about three years, but the public announcement is an important step. What does this have to do with Kannagara? Well, the reason I am retiring from Ars Magica…

  • Results of the Kawasaki Survey of Foreign Residents

    The results of the questionnaire-based survey of foreign residents of Kawasaki were published yesterday. Most of the results are, of course, published in Japanese, but there is an English summary. (I had nothing to do with the English part of the English summary. I feel the need to make that clear.) I’ve been working on…

  • Not Even Resting

    Kannagara is not dead. It’s not even resting. It’s just all been happening behind the scenes. I know I haven’t posted anything to this blog for a long time, but I have been working on the game, along the lines I outlined previously. This has proved difficult. It took me a while to identify the…

  • Actually Formally Applying to Naturalise

    Today, I formally applied to naturalise in Japan. I went to the Legal Affairs Office in Kawasaki, and Yuriko met me there (we were both going from work). I arrived a bit early, but my case worker soon came to speak to me. First, she took all my application documents off me, and took them…

  • Second Naturalisation Interview

    Today, I had my second interview about naturalising in Japan at the Legal Affairs Office. I thought I was going to get to submit at least some documents today, but that was a misunderstanding. As I mentioned before, I ordered all the documents I needed from the UK, and that was fairly straightforward in the…