HeyJaredBears and Barrows
Ground zero for the Digital Bohemian. Musings on tabletop games and fiction for the sensitive young man.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 8
- Latest publication
- Sep 19, 2026
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- Jul 6, 2026
Latest issues
Samurai D&D (opens the original)
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Oriental Adventures kickstarted my imagination, but it’s not perfect. In some ways, it is a half measure. Having spent more time with it I have come to believe that in order to realize “Samurai D&D” some fundamental changes have to be made to the chassis of the game. To parse out some of the unease I was feeling with the game I turned to genre fiction to begin to compile an “Appendix N”.I started with a selection of Kurosawa films including Sanjuro, Yojimbo, and Ran. More recently I read a signi
The Case for Roleplaying in the Far East (opens the original)
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I have discussed numerous times on this stack my personal view of the conduct and playstyle deficiencies of the general TTRPG demographic. Gary’s mistake was thinking that future audiences would know what Conan the barbarian was like and intuitively replicate that. Even then, he left us the wisdom of roleplaying grades so perhaps he knew even then.Recently I have been running some sessions of AD&D using OA in the sandbox campaign milieu published in OA1 - Blades of the Daimyo. It has been a fair
Investigating Yojimbo-Stein Part 2 (opens the original)
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I hope you’re caught up with the previous 2 articles regarding Oriental Adventures. This time we’re looking at laying down the actual game setting having thoroughly investigated most of the circumstantial factors in part 1. Much of the geography and other factors of the milieu will be downstream from the primary clans of import and their ancestral bonuses so that makes a logical starting point. The ClansIn the previous article I elected to base the milieu around 5 notable clans. After reviewing
Investigating Yojimbo-Stein Part 1 (opens the original)
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In the previous article I went over my initial impressions of Oriental Adventures and how it might work for sandbox campaigning. In this follow up article I will chronicle my process using ACKS to fill in some of the gaps for me and shore up what’s presented in OA into a playable campaign suitable for drama and intrigue in the far east.DemographicsEstimating the RealmAnyone familiar with the ACKS Judges Journal knows that it provides some great guide lines and methodologies for laying out the ge
Gygax and the Far East (opens the original)
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Recently I’ve been exploring and re-reading the AD&D DMG. Needless to say it remains the profound and seminal document it has always been. More interestingly I decided to sail on over to Oriental Adventures, a book I had been dimly aware of but had never actually sat down and read before. It proved far more compelling than I had initially anticipated! Before I begin to extoll what I have been tinkering with the past few days, I will digress for a moment to talk about the allure of the rising sun
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