Just Crunch Games

Hi, I’m Paul Baldowski.

I’m a UK born and based writer who has been involved in role playing since 1984. That year, I played my first Red Box Dungeons & Dragons game and got a copy of the Games Workshop edition of Iron Crown’s Middle Earth Role Playing game for my birthday.

In my teens, I contributed to eclectic fanzine Delusions of Grandeur, wrote several play-by-mail games (amongst them, Darklands and NXS), and spent time as a columnist for Roleplayer Independent magazine.

Leaving university, I carried my growing game collection with me and took to working rather than playing. While I wrote a couple of pieces for Games, Games, Games (long-running small press ‘zine) and attended a few conventions, nothing more happened.

In 1999, I finished running Play-By-Mail games out of pure exhaustion. I married in the following year and discovered (or re-discovered) collectible card games, having dabbled in the early 90s. Several thousand Pokemon and Magic: The Gathering cards later, I rediscovered a bit of gaming mojo.

In the mid-Noughties, I stumbled across Allen Varney‘s project to re-launch PARANOIA and offered my services, writing a couple of dozen pages in the new XP edition (which have found their way into the new edition as well). After that, I became part of the Traitor Recycling Studio – and participated in the writing of Crash Priority, Flashbacks, Stuff, Stuff 2, Service Service; culminating with The Underplex, my first major solo writing project.

Later in the Noughties, I found Arion Games‘ Graham Bottley looking to revive Maelstrom, a paperback game of my youth popular when Fighting Fantasy made its mark. I assisted with the writing of The Maelstrom Companion, a supplement to the original volume, before writing The Sward and The Stone, an adventure, and The Beggars Companion, a larger volume providing considerable detail on running a Tudor beggar character or beggar troupe.

More recently, I have had the chance to dabble across a broader range. I wrote a neanderthal versus zombies adventure for the small press Outlive Outdead (Happy Bishop Games) and had the exciting opportunity to add to the Dracula mythos for Night’s Black Agents in the Director’s Handbook of the Dracula Dossier (Pelgrane Press).

Currently, I’m writing and developing The Cthulhu Hack, a quick and simple investigative roleplaying game set against the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft’s classic stories, and The Dee Sanction, an in-development game of espionage and dark magic against the backdrop of Elizabethan Europe. I’m also posting like a corruption-riddled abomination on The Iron Pact, a blog devoted to Järnringen‘s grimdark fantasy Symbaroum, distributed in the UK by Modiphius