I'm Richard — the mostly-human entity behind this channel. (Some people say I'm a robot. Be boop.)

It starts, like most good stories, with a bribe. I was 9 years old when my uncle Tony told me he'd buy me a book if I helped him with some chores around the house. That weekend I bought my very first game book: the Player's Handbook, 1st edition.

Here's what I hadn't told Uncle Tony: I didn't actually need the rulebook. By that point I'd already been drawing monsters in notebooks, inventing rules off the top of my head, and organizing the neighborhood kids into whatever weird He-Man-adjacent game my 7-year-old self had dreamed up that week. I was LARPing before it was even a term. I was GMing before I ever owned a DMG. The Player's Handbook just put a name on what I'd already been doing.

From there it turned into a lifelong project: find every game I can, play it, and figure out what makes it work. Not just what's fun — but why it's fun. What design decision creates the magic moment. I'll play anything. I have played anything.

Ten years ago I started Grey Wizard Gaming because I wanted to launch a Kickstarter and knew I needed to build an audience first. The Kickstarter never happened. But somewhere along the way I made friends across the globe, built something real out of this corner of the internet, and kept designing games — I just never launched them. Yet. They're in the tomes. They're coming.

Follow along as I explore the games I love and the stories that spawned them — and eventually, the things I've been quietly building in the dark.