The Lone Toad - Ribbiting Adventures Issue 1
Interview with Castle Grief - OSR-style Author and artist of Tarvannion, Kal-Arath and more!
Welcome to Ribbiting Adventures Issue 1! Ribbiting Adventures is The Lone Toad’s mid-monthly newsletter that will dive deeper into solo RPGs with creator interviews, in-depth dives into solo RPG games and mechanics, and a look at Solo RPGs of the past.
In this first Issue of Ribbiting Adventures, I am interviewing Castle Grief, a solo and traditional RPG creator, artist, and newsletter author. You may have seen Castle Grief’s recent solo RPG, Tarvannion and several other solo and trad RPGs produced with a distinct OSR vibe.
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Interview with Castle Grief
Welcome Castle Grief to the Lone Toad. I'm excited to have you here and I'm sure the readers will be interested to hear your thoughts about RPG development, Solo RPGs, and sharing your works with the world.
You just released Tarvannion, a system-agnostic toolkit for old-school fantasy RPGs. The cool thing about Tarvannion is you created it all analog with ink and paper. Can you tell us why you went with that medium?
Thanks for having me!
I have strong feelings about analog - from vinyls and cassettes to preferring physical books over PDFs… All my own play whether solo or in group is done this way.
To me, there’s just something special about the tangibility of holding something in your hands, a quality to it that makes me feel connected and engaged in a way that digital never doesn’t.
Although I can certainly appreciate the convenience of digital, I also like to do creative work with my hands. I draw on paper, not an iPad, I write out my gazetteers and player handouts longhand - since my younger years doing punk rock zines and show flyers, this is just the way that has always appealed to me.
Tarvannion was a labor of love in this old style - I used a manual typewriter, a photocopier, scissors, pens, glue and so on and assembled on my floor like I used to do as a kid. It was a really pleasurable experience.
I am very hopeful that in the near future I’ll be able to start offering printed, physical versions of my projects.
The world you developed for Tarvannion is evocative, men are weak and divided, elves who were once saviours, now seek to rule, and goblin-kind are constant threats but also honourable. What inspired you to create this interlinked world and culture?
A mix of re-reading Tolkien and realizing how grim and gritty much of it really is, and wanting to play a long form solo campaign in a world like that, one I could sort of build on and discover as I played.
I had recently been reading an article about Wales when it was under Roman occupation, and the effect it had when the Romans left - the technology dropped, the financial system reverted to trade, tribes went back to war and so on.
Considering how it must’ve felt for the early peoples of the area to come under the influence of this advanced culture from so far away it must have felt alien, and then to have them abruptly leave intrigued me. Following this with imagining the elves’ own world to have become decadent and corrupt in the time between the Dawn Age and now, their world beginning to die or being overwhelmed with apocalyptic conflict with some other beings and needing an “escape” possibly driving them to come back to these frontier worlds they’d seeded much like the Bene Gesserit in Dune or something.
A lot of ideas come to me when I play solo - I just finished the first major arc of my adventuring there in Tarvannion with my character Aîwar, a young man who had a very rough start to becoming a hero, but a very fun story to play and learn about him and the world.
We were all treated to the development of Tarvannion through posts in your newsletter (Check it out here). And I was also pleased to see the game itself was inspired by your personal Solo RPG campaign. How does solo play help your creative process?
Although I have a pretty regular game with friends in person, there’s something about the quiet pleasure of solo play that feeds my creative side.
I prefer a clean setup with a good drink, and I use Moleskine hardcover sketchbooks to document my process, sketching out events, places, and so on as they happen, and occasionally taking “worldbuilding” breaks or scratching down new ideas for house rules as I need them. Right now I’ve decided I want to keep playing this game but let the world’s factions develop through the dice, so I’m working on a streamlined d6 mini system for a “faction turn” at the beginning of each session.
Solo is great especially for us “forever DMs” because it allows us to actually get the opportunity to roll the bones and remember the thrill of gaining experience and levels, the white knuckle of combat gone bad, the sometimes very real feeling of loss when a favourite character dies…
Reminding ourselves of these experiences makes us better at running and creating games for other people, too.
Solo is great!
Your games, Tarvannion, Kal-Arath, and Grim Keep, have a pen drawing style that is a throwback to the real old-school RPG days. What about this art style do you like drawing so much?
I’m in my early forties and was introduced to the game when I was a kid, so the “old school” style of art is what I’ve always gravitated toward from playing at a time when it wasn’t old school, it was the only school in town. Haha!
I decided a few years back to get more serious about my drawing practice. I don’t consider myself to be a great artist by any stretch of the road, but I enjoy it immensely and I think that’s a good enough reason to do just about anything!
I work in pencil often, and also usually with a fountain pen, and for cleaner work, I enjoy using a dip pen with India ink. (I use a brause 361 nib for any interested parties)
I can look at black-and-white fantasy art all day. I love color too, but it’s outside my comfort zone right now!! I’m working on it.
Now let's take a step back, how did you get into RPGs? Was it an older sibling or friends from school? And what was your first-ever RPG?
A friend had gotten the AD&D 2nd Edition core books for Christmas. He wasn’t really a book reader and gave it to me.
This would’ve been around 1992 or so.
I’ll never forget looking through those books, from the Jeff Easley cover art to the DiTerlizzi watercolors in the Monstrous Manual…I was hooked immediately and started running games, although it took me another year to really fully learn the ruleset.
So many good memories!
Another pal gifted me a Cyberpunk 2020 box set and we played a lot of that, too.
I got out of the hobby for many years and then got back into it a few years ago when I was given White Box: Fantastic Medieval Adventure Games and Mörk Borg as gifts from a friend.
They kicked my creativity back into gear and I’ve been running regular games and solo play since in a variety of systems.
As you know The Lone Toad is a solo-focused newsletter, so what about Solo RPG drew you in and got you creating?
There’s a real beauty in the raw freedom of solo play - being both creator and explorer, in a closed loop that feeds itself.
I see a lot of people asking questions all the time about how to solo - for me, I lean into the dice doing all the heavy lifting. Because I’ve got a lot of experience DMing, and because I like curating specific flavors and feel for my own games, I spend a ton of time on tables and refining that aspect of play, and using the heck out of the oracle.
Not fudging rolls creates so many cool and unexpected aspects of solo gaming, questions that I expect to go one way go another and sometimes create whole story arcs.
My current solo campaign was thrown almost entirely off the rails by a single unlucky roll on a Shadowdark carousing table, and wound up lending itself to creating what was for me a super rewarding character development arc.
There’s also a lot to be said for playing alone: I love the friends at my table but it can be stressful, chaotic, and a lot of work sometimes even keeping some semblance of orderly conduct at the table!
Solo play for me, all analog with a sketchbook, dice, a pen, and some good tables is such a peaceful creative meditation - I usually play for between 40 minutes to an hour solo, and try to end my sessions on a cliffhanger to keep the thread.
How big are RPGs in your personal life? Do you have friends and family who are on this journey with you or is this a lone project?
I have friends who I play with a few times a month, but I play solo probably a few times a week when time permits.
The creative process is pretty solitary, and I like it that way. I have a healthy social life but enjoy spending a lot of time alone on creative projects when I’m not working.
Recently, I’ve started working with a friend on some joint RPG projects - he is a full-time guitar player in a touring heavy metal band but is doing some of the digital aspects of layout, coloring and so on that are outside of my abilities, and it’s been nice to have someone to work with.
The readers would love to know about future plans for Castle Grief. Any new releases or future games you can talk about?
I am hoping to finish a few projects soon:
With the friend I mentioned, we just finished a round of playtesting an adventure we worked on called Into the Crystal Castle of the Speedlich. We ran it with ODND. A very heavy metal, over-the-top adventure about thugs, drugs, and scumbags of all types. We had a blast running it and want to put it out as a module.
An add-on for Tarvannion, which will be faction rules and info, some dungeons and ruins to explore, and maybe a few other things.
I’d also like to finish a follow-up to Kal Arath I’m working on - a sort of dice drop randomly generated mega dungeon called the Valley of the Black Ziggurat. It also has some new rules and stuff for my system that Kal Arath runs on.
I’m also working on a sort of Nordic-themed hexcrawl sandbox that I’ve been messing with for years. So yeah - lots of projects and not enough time to finish them!!
Finally, if people want to follow your work (and why wouldn't they), where can they do that?
I’m on itch.io as Castle Grief, and also Substack.
I had an X/Twitter account but I find standard social media to be a little negative or exhausting so I don’t use it much.
However I do use Discord and Reddit to keep up with creators I like and to look for inspiration, but Substack is the best place to keep up with me!
Thank you Castle Grief and I'm looking forward to seeing what you create next!
Thank you for having me!!
Wow! What an inspirational and interesting interview. Be sure to subscribe to Castle Greif’s newsletter. There is so much good stuff there.
Thank you everyone for reading this excellent interview with Castle Grief. You can expect more of this in the future so if you haven’t subscribed to the Lone Toad, make sure you do it now!
The April Edition of the Lone Toad will have something huge in it, so be sure to subscribe so you get it directly to your inbox or Substack app.
Check out my Spring Sale on Itch.io. All my paid games are 40% off for a couple more days!
Want to hear some of my ranting between sessions? I’ve been talking about the world-changing impact of D&D on substack notes which you can check out here!
This was super inspirational in a way. Like, all by HAND?! Whew. Loved the interview!
Thanks so much for this!!! Loving the newsletter.