Right then. Nine years. Give or take a gap or three, a pandemic, a couple of creative crises and the occasional disappearance that lasted longer than intended. Nine years since I put up the Welcome to Red Circle Games post and said something like “there will be a mixture of system ideas, event concepts, scenarios and more than a few observations on style, safety and general gaming.” And honestly? That is what it has been. In a scattered, inconsistent, occasionally months-or-years-late kind of way.

I am writing this partly because I think it is overdue, partly because I have been writing a lot about AI lately and it has made me reflective, and partly because having the whole archive sit there without any signposting for new readers feels like a wasted opportunity. So here is my attempt at a map of this place.

Where It Started

In 2017 I had a bunch of ideas and nowhere sensible to put them. I work in tech, I was already using GitHub for everything else, Jekyll and GitHub Pages felt like the natural choice. The first post was short and fairly direct about what I intended: musings on RPG and L(A)RP, with a particular interest in where technology intersects with both. That intent has held up better than my consistency as a writer, which is saying something.

The blog’s name comes from Le Cercle Rouge, the 1970 Jean-Pierre Melville film, and from what became the central concept: a circle as the minimum viable game space. I wrote that up properly in Red Circle Game, the idea that the minimum you need to play is a boundary you can choose to step into and out of. Simple enough to sound obvious, which is usually a sign you are onto something.

The Themes That Kept Coming Back

Looking back across the posts I can see a few threads that run through everything regardless of whether I was writing about LARP, TTRPG, or some half-baked game concept at two in the morning.

Technology as a tool, not the point. This one shows up everywhere. Scrivener and version control for game writing. Web hosting and social presence for running events. Play by Mail as a game mechanic for Tales from the Loop. Technology, Trends and Developments looking at Discord, D&D Beyond, Pinterest and Google Drive as the scaffolding of a modern home campaign. And then the AI posts, AI Assistants and Gaming and AI in TTRPGs — Two Years On, which are probably the most thorough writing I have done on this blog. The through line in all of it is the same: tech is useful when it serves the game and the people playing it. It is not the interesting bit by itself.

Minimal Viable thinking applied to games. I borrowed the MVP concept from software development in Minimal Viable Products and I have never really stopped applying it. What is the minimum you need to propose a game? A circle and a concept. What do you need to run a campaign online? A Facebook group, Discord, D&D Beyond and Google Drive, as it turned out. Not every tool, just enough tools. This instinct to strip back to the essential thing has shaped every game concept I have written about here.

Aesthetics and inspiration matter. I wrote Neo Noir Gaming early on because I genuinely believe you need a look and feel to aim for before you can deliver it. The darkness as an undercurrent, scenes as pockets of light in a shadowed room. That is the thing I am trying to give players. Inspiration covered the sources — film, TV, music, theatre, books — with the argument that you should take it from everywhere and not be precious about mixing genres. I stand by that. Delta Green mixing Cthulhu and 24 is still one of my favourite examples of genre collision done right.

Safety, inclusivity and the rules of engagement. Suitable Props is about physical safety in LARP and what makes a prop safe or not. What is Session Zero is about psychological safety and why setting expectations before a game is not optional if you want people to actually have fun. The LRP or LARP post is about terminology and identity in the hobby. These feel like different subjects but they are all about the same thing: making the space work for the people in it.

Game concepts that live in my head. A fair number of posts here are not analysis, they are me thinking out loud about games I want to run. John Wick: The Continental — how do you LARP a high-end assassin hotel with guns and still make it work? One Night in the Star Chamber — Play by Mail as an interactive history game set at the turn of the century. Trauma Team 2077 — Cyberpunk airsoft LARP with mission-based run outs and colour-coded sets. None of these have run. One day.

The honest accounting of a patchy blogger. I am not a consistent content creator, I have said this multiple times and the post dates bear it out. One More Time With Feeling in 2021. Time Gone By in late 2023. Here We Go Again in 2024. I keep coming back, I just do not manage to stay consistently. At this point I consider it a feature rather than a bug.

The Drafts Folder Problem

I posted my drafts folder publicly for accountability. I stand by that instinct. In there you will find ideas for GPS tracking of players at LARP events, RFID for player identity, invite-only events and why I am ambivalent about them, a Strontium Dog LARP, a Bad Company LARP, and more. They have been sitting there since 2017 in some cases. I will get to them. Probably.

The VTT post in the drafts folder did eventually become part of Technology, Trends and Developments, which is how the drafts folder is supposed to work. Ideas that sit long enough eventually either collapse under their own weight or suddenly feel urgent and get written. The AI drafts from 2022 made it out, eventually. The RFID and GPS ones are still waiting.

The Arc, If There Is One

2017 was about foundations: the concept, the aesthetics, the technology stack, the game ideas.

2018 looked forward at tech trends and LARP’s future, asking questions about augmentation and wearables that are still relevant.

2021 was a quiet restart after the pandemic took the wind out of everything.

2022 and 2023 shifted almost entirely to TTRPG, specifically to the D&D campaign I ran for a couple of years, the tools I used, the OGL debacle and what it meant, and the reinvigorated thinking about session zero and player experience that came with sustained GMing.

2024 brought me back to writing properly, with posts on encounter design — Do Owlbears Shit in the Woods is still one of my favourites for the title alone — and the long-delayed AI post.

2026 has me revisiting the AI conversation with the benefit of two more years of watching that space move at a pace that makes everything else feel slow.

The honest version of the arc is: I am a thirty-plus year gaming veteran and a tech professional who finds the intersection of the two genuinely interesting, gets distracted by life fairly regularly, and keeps coming back because the ideas do not stop even when the posts do.

Where I Think This Goes Next

Here is what I intend to write. Whether I actually write it is a separate matter, but putting it here is at least some form of commitment.

The RFID and GPS posts, finally. I have been sitting on ideas about tracking player positions at large LARP events, RFID player identity cards, and how cheap wearable tech could augment the experience for a long time. The tech has matured since 2017. Raspberry Pi prices have dropped, RFID readers are trivial to integrate, GPS precision on consumer devices is better. The 2018 Coming Trends post was already pointing at this. Time to follow it up.

The VTT question properly answered. I have danced around Virtual Table Tops in multiple posts but never sat down and compared them properly. Foundry, Roll20, Demiplane and the rest. As a theatre-of-the-mind GM who reluctantly adopted online tools, I have an opinion now that I did not have in 2022.

Daggerheart and the new wave of systems. I mentioned Daggerheart in passing in Here We Go Again and I want to write it up properly. The post-OGL landscape has genuinely produced interesting alternatives. Dragonbane. Daggerheart. Pathfinder 2e and why I bounced off it. The distinction between Rules as Written and Rules of Cool deserves its own post.

AI NPCs in live play. I touched on this in the AI revisit post. I think there is a proper article in the mechanics and ethics of running an AI character at a LARP or TTRPG table. Not just whether you can do it with ElevenLabs and Ollama — you can — but what it means for game design, for player agency and for the social contract of the table.

The Star Chamber and Play by Mail, properly. I wrote the concept up in One Night in the Star Chamber but never ran it and never wrote the actual game design. Given that I have thought about this for nearly a decade it seems overdue. The mechanic of a unified GM voice, physical post as a game component, and player-driven alternative history could be something. There are modern tools that make the physical prop and postal element much more achievable and affordable than it was in 2017.

Running games for new and younger players. I care about this. Session Zero is one part of it. But there is more to say about the difference between running games for people who grew up with D&D 5e as their first contact versus those of us who started with BECMI or second edition, and about how the hobby’s dramatically widened audience changes what a good GM does.

The Continental, properly designed. One day.

So that is the map. Nine years, twenty-something posts, a drafts folder full of good intentions, and more ideas than I have ever managed to actually write up. If you are new here, start with Red Circle Game for the core concept, Neo Noir Gaming for the aesthetic, and the AI revisit for where my head is at right now.

If you have been here a while, thanks for your patience with the gaps. I am still here. The circle is still red.