Over on reddit, I’ve created r/Twoshirts and r/TheTaleofTwoshirts. This evening, I put up my first couple posts. I’m copying them here, but I also encourage everyone here to subscribe over there, and vice-versa. This is the first one, from r/Twoshirts.
In some ways, I blame Felicia Day, because it all started with The Guild. If you haven’t watched it, go watch it. Amazingly funny, inspired, and witty.
Watching The Guild led to watching Critical Role, because Felicia started Geek & Sundry, and gave Critical Role its original home.
Watching Critical Role reminded me that I used to play RPGs, all the way back to AD&D in the late 1970s, before I was even 10 years old. During middle school, every weekend, my gang of friends and I would sleep over at someone’s house. We’d play games like D&D, Champions, Paranoia, Toon, Battletech, Robotech, Call of Cthulhu, Twilight: 2000, and Bureau 13: Stalking the Night Fantastic (which inspired us to create our own parody RPG, titled Stalking the Stats Unrealistic). We rotated GMs and players – if someone had an idea, they ran a campaign for a weekend, or maybe a month. We came up with dozens of campaigns and worlds and stories and running jokes. And sometimes we just ran around shooting each other with nerf guns. It was awesome.
Decades later, I was watching Critical Role, and I realized that I had two kids that were about the same age as I was when I started playing D&D. I thought, what the heck, let’s give it a go and see if they like it, yeah? The wife was game to try, as well. I drew a map of a new continent on some graph paper. I picked a country, and then a city, baked some history, stir-fried some secret societies, and because all D&D campaigns start in a tavern, a caravan, or jail, I picked a tavern. I named it the Ivory Pound (with a proprietor named Rowlf, and go watch the Muppets to get that joke), and we were off.
My eldest still plays D&D with their friends in college. We lasted about a half-dozen sessions before my youngest made it clear he wasn’t interested in playing anymore.
A few years later, the creative itch was back, and I had this half-started campaign smoldering on a shelf in the library. I was working at Amazon, and I asked the wife if it’d be ok if I ran a D&D campaign one night a week, and she thought it was a great idea. I checked the Amazon wikis, signed up on an email list, and then sent an email asking if anyone was interested in joining a new campaign that I wanted to run. I was expecting 4 or 5 responses – hopefully enough to make a group.
I got just shy of 30 replies.
So… um… I guess a meeting? Where we figure out who wants to be in which campaign?
24 people showed up, and after sifting through what everyone wanted out of a campaign, we split into 4 or 5 groups, and six players joined mine.
We met weekly, after work, in one of the conference rooms. We played from 5:30 until 11pm… ish. We created minis in Hero Forge, and used wet erase mats for maps.
A year and a half later we were still going, and then COVID hit. We moved the game online. One player moved to the east coast; another to Michigan. But we kept playing, and 4 years later, we finished campaign 1, and started campaign 2.
I joined a friend’s game, as a player. Anyone who plays RPGs knows that you’re often thinking about new characters. So one day, I was fooling around with the idea of a goblin genie warlock, and wrote a backstory.
It’s weird when you read a little one-page story and realize that there’s a lot more “there” there. This little goblin boy wanted to tell me more, so I took him out of the character rotation, and started writing a book instead.
It’s also weird when you’re on a sabbatical, and you’re planning on finishing that book you started 10 years ago, but never finished, and this other little green guy waves his hand and beckons you in an entirely different direction.
I wrote 33,000 words in 8 days. At the end of those 8 days, I had a finished manuscript for a novella.
Some of Twoshirts’s backstory, and some of his world, is based on stuff I’d already written in campaign 1. Akri is a city from there, on the continent I sketched for my kids way back when.
But I knew Twoshirts was very distinct and different from D&D. I didn’t want monster-of-the-week. I wanted to focus on character and story. It was its own world, and thankfully, the fact that I’d done a fully-homebrew campaign was going to help with any copyright issues. So, similar to Critical Role, I went back and changed everything: new pantheon of gods, new rules for magic, and a new race, called the saurians.
I wanted to create a book, and a world, that was distinct, unique, humorous, and deep. I wanted to ask interesting questions. And I wanted to write a book that my kids might’ve wanted to read, when they started playing D&D. Or people that loved How to Train Your Dragon, or The Lord of the Rings, or anything on the Discworld or Xanth.
Twoshirts is – intentionally – NOT the kind of hero to save the world, and so the genre defaulted to cozy fantasy. But I wanted challenging problems in a complex world, so it needed to be small-e epic, rather than big-E Epic.
In other words, epic to Twoshirts. Not epic to everyone else.
Book 1 is pretty much done, and I’m querying agents and publishers. It’s at 47k words at the moment, and I’m trying to decide if I want to keep it as a novella – which nobody seems to want to publish – or expand it another 13k words to get it to the magic 60k threshold to call it a full novel.
Book 2 also has a full and finished manuscript. It’s currently at 55k words, which suggests that yeah, maybe I need to bulk up book 1 and flesh out book 2 a bit more.
For now, I’m trying to find people that are interested in the story. I’m going to talk about random stuff like D&D and movies and tropes over on r/Twoshirts, and specifically about the book series on r/TheTaleofTwoshirts. If you have any questions, ideas, or suggestions, feel free to reply here. I’m happy to answer & chat. My plan is to post once a week in each subreddit, and here on my website.
Thanks for reading, thanks for joining, and I hope one day you’ll get to read the books that I love to write.
