What was your first Superman story? It should be a simple question. I can tell you my first Batman story - the 1966 Adam West series, of course, which remains one of my favorite comic adaptations. Or my first Spider-Man story, via a tape of the 1967 animated series episodes. But for Superman, it’s not as clear. Every time I think about it, an earlier memory pops up. Superman II (taped off HBO)? The Fleisher cartoons (copied from a rented collection)? A couple comic issues from a yard sale? The Atari 2600 game? General vague awareness aside (all of these were preceded by Sesame Street’s Super Grover, after all), that first piece of actual Superman media remains shrouded in some half-discovered, half-imagined past - not unlike the man’s own experience with the world of Krypton. While I was born into the tail end of 70s-80s Supermania (and, thankfully, a family with a relaxed attitude toward copyright law), I doubt my experience is unique. Superman has been a towering presence in popular

Let’s start this off by establishing my relationship to Star Wars: I love Star Wars. Love it. I still spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about the brilliant storytelling of the Original Trilogy. I should emphasize, however, that I tend to think of anything outside those three films as addenda of sorts. To me, the prequels and recent trilogy occupy a similar space to novels, video games, The Ewoks and Droids Adventure Hour , etc. Being addenda isn’t a good or bad thing in itself - in fact, my very first exposure to RPGs was the original West End D6 Star Wars. It taught me a lot about gaming could be, and gave me my first lessons in the methodologies of storytelling.   I also love addenda that stretch the idea of what Star Wars is, especially at the very beginning when the first film’s success took everyone by surprise and imaginations went wild. The early Marvel comics, for instance, are an exercise in playful genre-bending as tropes from  westerns, monster movies, 50s

Welcome to the blog reader. I hope that you are finding the posts entertaining if not informative. I’m Andy, half of the team known as Disco Stu Never Say Dice. In no particular order I’m: a dad, tabletop gamer, console gamer, amateur musician, community theater tech, aspiring tabletop game designer, and all around nerd. Much like Bugsy, I thought I’d write a bit on why I wanted to start this blog and where I want to go with it. I had a less creative and less interesting answer than Bugsy if you’d asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. When I was a kid, I would have told you an Architect. I was likely told I should say this because of my enjoyment of legos. Certainly sketching out plans for a structure, or anything else really, isn’t one of my strong suits. However, I have always enjoyed building things, I still enjoy building with legos now and again, and I’ve passed the love of building down to my kids. It can be little colorful bricks, or something else entirely, but buil

Hello, Dear Readers. I’m Bugsy, and I make up half of Never Say Dice. I am a writer, a gamemaster, a musician and songwriter, a scholar, and  most  best of all, a  fool . I’d like to talk about why I’m here, what I’d like to accomplish in this space, some things we might talk about, and we’ll start with the totally not made-up thing I wanted to be when I grew up: a Magician-Detective. Two of my absolute favorite, best-loved books as a kid were The Young Detective’s Handbook by William Vivian Butler and The Magic Handbook by Peter Eldin. Maybe I just liked handbooks, but these two made my most voracious obsessions both practical and real. I wanted to be the knower of secrets: to find them, to learn them, to keep them. The seeker of truth and the teller of lies. The Magician-Detective. Many years later, when faced with the obligatory “when did you first want to be a writer,” this imagined vocation immediately sprung to mind, and I realized that, without knowing, I had fu