Blog

As the final processes for sales and production of the various formats for the Old Man of the Woods come to a close, I find myself more and more in the frozen northlands of Tears in the Snow, the next in our horror adventure line. With the ice and snow being as much of a challenge as the creatures and encounters, this adventure has been very challenging to write. Thankfully, most of the time, I don’t really feel like I’m doing creative writing so much as putting an already existing story to paper (or screen). Things happen in this adventure that I did not expect or plan for in its initial concept, which often means that other sections need to be completely rewritten. This is more so in Tears of the Snow than any of the other adventures, as its entire plan has completely altered from the initial seed and then outline stages. What was once a story about survival against the elements and creatures of the north has become a ticking time bomb of events that all build on each other and have a much tighter story weave than I ever planned for. At over halfway completed, this adventure

As of today, May 19, 2026, The Old Man of the Woods is available in PDF, Paperback, and Hardcover. Currently, Amazon sells the PDF and Paperback versions, while Drive Through RPG sells all three versions. We also sell the PDF on Etsy, which will begin carrying the Paperback versions in the near future.   Eventually, all three formats will be available on all of the above platforms.

In the beginning, there were dice, and they were good…Since then, I’ve added more technology than is healthy, and I find myself increasingly convinced that creative writing and adventure design are not the hard part of the business. Early formatting decisions to make game design easy came back to haunt me when I reviewed the printed copies and found that the font was microscopic. A small issue, but one that set back the paperback release by a week or so. Another hurdle is that almost all of the points of sale have totally different format requirements from each other and from one medium to another. What was ok for PDF makes print totally wash out, even basic page settings have to be changed.   Happily, I have also begun work on the shell of the new adventure, Tears in the Snow (TIS.. because I saw my acronym error too late), which is exciting and new. While I really enjoyed creating The Old Man of the Woods, it was at times suffocating; a lot needed to be learned. Now that the lessons of OMOTW were learned, moving forward with TIS is no longer an unknown country, but a visit to known

Work on The Old Man of the Woods paperback versions was completed yesterday, April 21, 2026. This marks a milestone in our company’s history (the first released product) and a system shock for me as a writer, as I will now have to inhabit the mind of yet another sinister alien being driven by its own reality and agenda. This is disconcerting, as I got used to being the Old Man and am (if it is possible) comfortable with him. I have been taken from a dark and misty forest realm to a frozen hell where the weather is just as dangerous as the beings that populate it. From a being of relentless effort but no humanity to a creature of passion and hunger for humanity (not as food…well not always). The mental gear switch is more than I thought it would be, but I’m looking forward to it. So then, onward to Tears in the Snow.

So, as a system-neutral adventure company, we will likely get a lot of adaptation questions and general inquiries. To provide the most assistance to our customers, we have added a FAQ section to the website. It includes a form to ask questions, and if relevant, we will post the information in that section to help others.

After much work, design, re-design, writing, converting, converting from conversions, and generally trying to bring a product to market single-handedly, The Old Man of the Woods has been successfully offered for sale on Drive Through RPG and Amazon. I am currently offering a hyperlinked PDF on both platforms, followed by physical copies in both softcover and hardback. I hope that my format and story for The Old Man are well received, and I am now looking forward to completing Tears in the Snow as the second of my system-agnostic horror RPG adventures.   Looking back two years, when The Old Man was just an idea for a short encounter, I was not aware of how many steps or challenges I would face to make this a reality. In those days, I thought creative writing was the hard part; what a joke. Little did I know that I would be building a website, learning to format documents in various programs, restructuring my entire business plan, and obsessing about tone and grammar. It has been a very enlightening and great experience, which I don’t think I would have started had I known where it would take me. Every game master wants to

I sit here, having spent the most horrifying moments of my life as a writer in the three preceding hours. I routinely do breakfast with unknown and unnamed horrors. I map the lives of madmen and the depraved. I even seek the dark places where the unquiet dead congregate to devour the living… But today was the worst; I taught myself to format PDFs.   On a serious note, writing adventures and designing games is the easy part of this business. Keeping compliant with various levels of government, tax reports, business reports, web hosting, buying software, finding business partners interested in bringing the projects to life, and providing logistical support takes up most of your time. This is a hard lesson for anyone who has ever stared gimlet-eyed at the screen and saw beyond it the adventure that was begging to be wed to the blank field.   I write this as an observation, and to say that it’s difficult, but not impossible, and certainly not discouraging. I see the final stages of development for The Old Man of the Woods unfolding, and I find it worth it.   So then, happy Friday the 13th, the Old Man is coming

2025 was an interesting year for Crimson River Games. We were founded after three years of work, deliberation, learning, and saving funds for fees and resources. We published the website and joined several social media platforms, which were met with mixed success and confusion. We were able to establish our presence in the crowdfunding community and learned what worked and did not for others that came before us. In all, it was an enlightening experience, but one thing is missing…a product.   This is where 2026 comes in: we will release the first two adventures in our system-agnostic line. The first to be released will be Old Man of the Woods, which is scheduled to launch on Kickstarter in February. The second, Tears in the Snow, is tentatively aimed for delivery through Kickstarter just before Halloween 2026, for seasonal play. Both adventures have been in development for over two years and will be fairly long affairs to ensure that we deliver value to our customers.   So then, I want to wish you all Happy Holidays, and I hope your New Year will be as productive as ours.   Now back to my desk for more writing and editing……  

How long should an adventure be?   Bilbo once asked, “Don’t adventures ever have an end?” This was likely his unfortunate response to playing the original Dungeons and Dragons game module, Temple of Elemental Evil (First Edition, AD&D, TSR Inc, 1985). Nothing against that grand and well-read and never-finished adventure, other than it is long…really long; totally devoid of much variation other than the a-z roster of things you will kill and rob. This is a classic example of what we now call “grinding” games. Grinding, or the act of playing to get stronger so that someday the game can be enjoyed, is usually a video game issue. In this case, it is so that you don’t have to enter another room with an illogical set of adversaries, who are totally unaware that you slaughtered their buddies in the last room.   So then, is it really about length, or is it about continuity of content and variation of encounters that determines what a good adventure looks like? I would opine that an adventure can be one page and still be too long, or one thousand and still not belong enough. Think about the one-page example, can’t be that bad,

Scripted vs Procedurally Generated Adventures   Ahhhh, the age-old debate.. a scripted but decision-limited adventure or a procedurally generated, fully sandbox but sometimes senseless adventure? Those purists from back in the day might harken back to the murder hobo days of their youth. Where it did not matter that the monsters in the next room made no sense (shark in a dungeon) and tended to ignore the death cries of the ones you murdered in this room. The days of wandering monster tables that made things feel more like playing the first Diablo or Doom, rather than the story of a character’s life.   This is offset by a view that everything should mean something, and the goal is to get to the end of the adventure and achieve something meaningful. A process where the party strives to make “the right choices” and where murderhobo-ing is both discouraged and counterproductive. A process where merely choosing whether to walk down a hallway might actually be out of your hands, and where you are along for the ride rather than driving the bus.   Which is better? Honestly, neither, and both.   That is to say that both have their place in