March is over; April is here. That’s kind of a mixed thing. But I’ll get to that.

First, I want to wish all my brothers and susters in Christ a blessed Easter Sunday.

A Message for Those Struggling

Now, for the personal side of the update. Feel free to skip this and go down to the real meat below.

I have been in a period of very ugly recovery for the last two months. I am clawing myself out of a protracted depression, as many of you know, and I am now facing the very real fact that I have allowed my life to rot and crumble over the last two years as a result of that. Hence, I’m in a very difficult period of rebuilding. I am, however, doing well. Much better than I have been in a long time. I thank all of you for your encouragement, kindness, and patience, and again, for all the messages you continue to send about how you value the impact I’ve had on you in Game Mastering and in life.

I would also like to remind every one of you that everyone suffers and all suffering is a challenge. I was recently talking to a very loyal supporter who is going through a very difficult time in his own life right now and felt ashamed of the fact that some very basic things that most people take for granted had become impossibly difficult for him. Well, I got it. I told him so. Because I’ve been there more than once in this season of my life.

We rarely talk about our struggles. That’s for so many reasons. I know everyone has their favorite, pat reason why people hide their struggles, but there isn’t any one reason, and the reasons don’t matter. The point is, when we hide our struggles, then everyone else who is also struggling thinks they’re alone, and so they struggle alone and in shame and in silence. That makes the struggles insurmountable.

You are not alone in your struggles and, no matter what the cause, your pain is real and your challenges are real. There is no shame in struggling. There is no shame in being challenged. This is what life is, more often than not. Life is struggle. You’re not doing it wrong. But all struggles do pass. We go through seasons. Some are wonderful; some are terrible.

If you or someone you love is struggling, talk about it. Open your mouth and tell someone, “Hey, I’m not okay.” You can even tell me. If someone you love is clearly facing a struggle, open your mouth and say, “I can see you’re not okay. That’s okay. Do you want to talk about it? Do you want to not talk about it and instead just do buffalo wings and Mario Kart?”

And if you are desperately alone and there is no one to talk to, call your local crisis line, or, in the United States, call 988. I can tell you from experience you don’t have to be considering something drastic and terrible. You can just be hurting. I finally gave up my pride one night and called them tearfully just to say, “I’m not considering doing anything drastic, but I’m scared and I’m hurting and I’m so alone and it’s too much for me.”

Alternatively, as crazy as this might sound to some of you, walk into a church. Any church. Find the pastor or the presiding minister or whoever and say, “I’m alone and I’m in pain and I don’t know what to do.” That’s what I did. I walked into a pastor’s office two years ago and said, “I’m alone, I’m in pain, and I don’t know what to do, but I’m an atheist and I’ve done things that would make you hate me and I don’t want to hear it.” Not quite like that. I wasn’t a dick. It didn’t matter. I was welcomed like a brother, I was hugged, my hand was held, and someone spent a year of weekly meetings just talking to me. Not proselytizing or ministering or converting, just helping me carry my struggle.

There’s an organization called Stephen Ministries. It’s one-on-one compassionate caregiving. Not therapy, not conversion, just kind support for someone going through a really hard time, whoever they are, and whatever that hard time is. That support meant so much to me that I’ve now completed a very comprehensive forty-hour training course to be a caregiver myself. So I can share that same love with others.

But that’s not an option for everyone and I get it.

The bigger point here is we all suffer. We all struggle. We all think our struggles are too small or that we should be stronger or that we shouldn’t burden others with our problems. So we don’t talk about them. So we hide, alone, in the dark, and let our struggles fester. That makes them powerful. As someone said to me recently, “Alone, in the dark, the devil can whisper whatever the hell he wants to you.”

So take that one courageous step. Open your mouth. You never know who you might empower by being honest about your pain. You never know whose life you might save. You never know who might desperately want to to talk about their pain if you only give them an invitation. The world is a shitty place sometimes and we’re all stuck in it together. So let’s be together.

Thank you for everything.

-Scott “The Angry GM” Rehm

Your Support Matters More than Ever

I hate to do this shit, so I’ll keep it brief.

The financial support of my generous supporters is what keeps me working. It matters. It matters a lot. Even a pledge of $1 per article for the four articles I publish every month means a lot. I understand some of you have been forced to pull back your support because of your own struggles. I will never blame you for that. I will only say, “Thanks for everything you gave and good luck and let me know you’re doing okay.” I just had that conversation with a long-time supporter who lost his job. “Thank you for all your support. Take care of yourself. Don’t be a stranger. Keep reading. Keep visiting the community.” I also understand some of you have pulled back your support because of broken promises, inconsistent work, and slipped quality over the last two years as I let everything go to shit. I know some of you higher-tier supporters aren’t getting the value I promised. I’m sorry. I understand. I don’t blame you. I hope if you give me a chance to prove things are turning around, I can win back your trust.

But if you’ve been reading my work and think it’s worth anything to keep around, please consider supporting me on Patreon or SubscribeStar or making a one-time pledge of support via PayPal or Square. And if you need to see me deliver more before you’re ready to make that plunge, I get it. I really do.

That’s it. Plug over. I hate plugging. Let’s talk about news and content.

The Content Schedule

March was the most successful month I’ve had in the past eighteen. I’ve managed to get very slightly ahead on the weekly content creation thing. I managed to publish an article a week instead of rushing out a bunch of filler content at the end of the month. I had to move a few things to make it happen, but that success is something I can build on.

That said, I was a little ambitious and tried to do a few too many things in one month of recovery. So some things didn’t happen as quickly as I wanted. But everything is still in process and I’m still recovering and growing.

Starting this month, there will be a fresh Early Access Feature article for all supporters of every tier on Wednesdays sometime in the midmorning Eastern Time. There will also be a fresh General Access Feature on the front page on Tuesdays at around the same time. Basically, that will just be the Early Access Feature from two weeks prior.

Here’s what to expect for the Early Access Features.

• Wednesday, April 8: Stupid Narration Tricks: Tagging Your Players
• Wednesday, April 15: Let’s Build a Pretty Good Dungeon: Blocking Out a Map
• Wednesday, April 22: The Anatomy of a Trap
• Wednesday, April 29: Helping Your Players Haggle and Bribe

Things might change in that schedule.

I also have a backlog of bonus content items. I haven’t forgotten the wilderness tracker I promised a couple of weeks ago. It is in process. Once that’s done, I move on to the next one. Those will be a free gift to high tier supporters and available to everyone else for a few bucks. As soon as each is done, I’ll get them out. I’m hoping the pipeline will allow around two useful-at-the-table type things every month. I will also be republishing some old stuff that used to be in the Secret Stash before that got destroyed by a technical issue.

Do You Have a Question? Ask The Angry GM!

I do this occasional column, often as filler content when a major article isn’t finished, called Ask Angry. It’s based on those old newspaper advice columns, but it’s about pretend elf games, and instead of Ann Landers or your Agony Aunt, you get a sweary Internet asshole. Because I only do that shit infrequently, questions tend to sit for a long time and the people who sent them in can’t always use them.

Well, I have a plan. I can’t say too much just yet. It’s experimental, but if it works, it’ll let do Ask Angry more regularly without delaying or taking the place of other content. But I need a few nice, fresh questions. Specifically, I need some good, punchy, brief, evergreen-style questions. And questions without a deadline.

If you’ve got something you think might be useful for a revival of Ask the Angry GM in a better format, send it to ask.angry@angry.games. Please tell me how to refer to you.

Live Chats and Streams

Angry’s Mostly Monthly Live Chat will take place on the supporter Discord server on Monday, April 13 at 8:30 PM ET. The recording will be posted for all supporters of every tier.

In addition, I will be hosting my first ever Angry Deep Dive. I will be talking for two hours on camera with visual aids about mystery adventures and investigations. I will be hosting it on the Discord server and it will be available as a recording to all supporters of Angrican tier or better, which is basically everyone who’s support entitles them to Discord access whether they use it or not. I will also be careful to make sure it works without the visual aids, as much as I can, for folks who prefer to listen to the audio.

Angry’s Deep Dive: Building a Mystery will take place on Monday, April 20 at 8:30 PM ET with the recording to follow for Angrican-tier supporters.

Finally, I will be hosting a Slapchat for members of Club Slapdash on Monday, April 27, at 8:30 PM ET. I assume all y’all know what that’s about. Or maybe not… I’ll come back to that.

Crappy Casual Critical Gaming Streams

I have now settled into a regular groove of Sunday night video game streaming purely for fun on my YouTube channel. Every Sunday at 8:00 PM ET, for about two hours, I play a video game, host a stream, hangout with the chat peoples, and discuss the game, it’s design, how the design sucks, and how much I suck at the game in question. Yeah, it’s called Crappy, Casual, Critical Gaming for a reason.

Come hang out. Starting this Sunday, I will be choosing one game to stick with to completion. I haven’t decided yet what it will be, but it’ll be something. There’s a poll in the Discord server, but I’ll probably override the results.

Clup Slapdash: What The Hell

I realize I keep talking about Club Slapdash in secretive tones and restricting a lot of information to only certain people and that new people are always joining my community. So, let me very briefly explain Slapdash.

Slapdash is my currently in development fantasy adventure roleplaying game engine. The name is just a placeholder and it’s not actually an indicator of the level of quality I’m aiming for or anything like that. It’s a real game. At least, that’s what it’s turned into. When finished, it will be the roleplaying game that lets you build and run games the way I’ve been trying to teach you to build and run them.

The game is currently in a late alpha test stage and moving to the first community beta tests in the next few months. I can’t be specific about the timetable, because some of it depends on some final testing, but I do need people who aren’t me playing and running at least a short playtest adventure in the next few months.

Currently, everyone who is supporting me at the Frienemy Tier is a member of Club Slapdash. That entitles them to design updates, live chats, previews, and a spot in future playtesting as and when spots open, plus access to beta test materials when they start happening, and as things are ramping up, access to my design blog where I’ll start describing the specific mechanics. I already did a big, two hour design vlog about the unique core mechanic just last week.

Further, anyone who is support at the Frienemy Tier and is therefore supporting the development of the game will be entitled to the Slapdash Core PDF Thingy as and when it’s eventually available. You’ll be get a playable, runnable, complete RPG engine when it’s done. That’s in addition to any bonus content I throw out periodically for Frienemies.

This ain’t something that’s going to be done tomorrow. Currently, I have to do some proof of concept testing on the combat engine that was drastically modified a couple of months ago, and so I will be running a few short alpha “battle test” sessions in May for members of Club Slapdash. I’ll be putting out polls to see how many of those I can run. Then, sometime in the summer, I really want the first beta module with pregenerated characters and a three-to-five session adventure to go out. Closer to August, realistically, than June, but that’s the current timetable.

So for those who’ve been wondering about Club Slapdash, now you know.