Senior research scientist by day and dad (aka children’s chauffeur), horror / sci-fi movie buff, and game designer / fan by night. I’m Chuck McGrew and this is the place I spew wisdom, news, and generally wax nostalgic about the world of role-playing games, publishing, interactive fiction, gamebooks and related geek / nerd culture.

I wrote and developed the horror role-playing game “Don’t Look Back” set in a world chock-full of conspiracies to hide the supernatural and paranormal terror that lurks around every corner. An actual government scientist who wrote a game about conspiracies, sinister laboratories, and alien technology — weird, huh? Click on the cover or here for more info. I can really geek-out over game mechanics so watch out.

I initially published DLB back in the 90’s and with all the craziness and talk of conspiracies and fake news, it seemed like the right time to bring it back so I did a Kickstarter at the end of 2017 and released the commercial version of the third edition in January ’19. Figuring out this new model for publishing and Kickstarters is fascinating to me these days so you’ll probably see some posts about that too.

As a busy working dad, I just don’t have the time I used to for gaming so I’m getting back into interactive fiction, gamebooks, and solo games too so you’ll see a bit of that here as well.