The Tavern That Built CritForge
The Tavern That Built CritForge
The front of Emerald Tavern Games and Cafe on Research Boulevard in Austin, Texas looks like someone airlifted a slice of English Tudor pub into a North Austin strip center and just left it there. I'd lived in Austin since 2017 and had never once walked in. That morning I did, because friends I hadn't seen since before the pandemic were waiting at a table in the back, and because the whole point of the day was to close the gap the last few years had opened.
Inside, the smell of Cuvee coffee, the tap handles, the shelves of board games stacked three deep. Somewhere near the door was a wall of D&D accessories that did something unexpected to me. Painted minis. Dice towers. Terrain tiles with little felt moss. Map grids on vinyl, custom dice trays, pewter figures I recognized and dozens I didn't. It had all come a long way since I'd last been part of this. I never got into miniatures back then. We used graph paper and whatever coins were in somebody's pocket (and sometimes, purely our imaginations).
I stood there longer than I meant to.
The Michigan Years
I learned to play in 6th grade. AD&D 2nd Edition, then the old Basic and Expert boxes, then anything anyone at the table would run. By college I'd moved sideways into White Wolf's "World of Darkness", which is where the characters I actually remember started to live. But in middle school, the sessions were anything goes, even if the battles were clearly beyond our character's capabilities (a 2nd level player fighting a King Lich? Yeah, right), and then challenging ourselves with intense combat and high-level characters just to get completely crazy. I loved to throw things from "Dieties and Demi-gods" into those sessions.
Then college came around, and those games were full weekend sessions, starting Saturday afternoon and playing through the night well into Sunday before we crawled back to our dorm rooms to cram for our Monday classes.
Eventually I drifted into MUSHes, text-based multi-user worlds where I spent more time building the worlds we played in. Rooms, objects, scripts, entire neighborhoods for other people to wander through. If you had asked me then what I did with games, I would have said I made places for stories to happen. That turned out to stick.
Lani was a Virtual Adept, one of the Mage traditions, and she made her magic through music. She believed in the digital substrate the way other people believe in God. When she cast magic, she was composing. Sonny was Sons of Ether, a motorcycle mechanic who couldn't leave a carburetor alone for more than a week without persuading it to do something it wasn't built for. He talked to his bike like it had opinions. It did.
And then there was Elizabeth. I've lost her surname somewhere in the last two decades. Elizabeth was a Malkavian vampire, which is already a particular kind of trouble (IYKYK), but my Elizabeth was a fun throwaway I built for a one-shot who refused to stay disposable. She believed she was a character in a roleplaying game. Every decision she made, every door she opened, every confrontation she walked into, she made by rolling dice. Inside the game, and for everything, including while her player was generating rolls online. She carried her die in a little velvet bag and would solemnly consult them before doing absolutely anything. I can't tell you how many DMs and messages I received telling me how fun it was to see the game within the game. She was, in a completely accidental way, the best character I ever played.
I would sneak down into the school library and log onto the terminals with the grand intention of playing "just a little bit" before my classes, and then caught myself skipping classes way more than I should have.
The Grand Rapids Table
In my late twenties, living in Grand Rapids, a close friend invited me to his college buddy's weekly D&D game. The campaign had been running, in one form or another, since the 1980s. Characters had died, been mourned, been replaced by their sons and daughters. New players had joined and stayed for a decade. The GM kept the whole thing alive in his head and in a stack of binders that were older than I was.
He's gone now, well before his time. The friendships I made at that table are still with me. So is a specific memory of him looking up from his DM screen mid-session, reading the room before the room knew what it needed, and pivoting the whole evening in a direction none of us had seen coming. It looked effortless. It wasn't. It was thirty years of practice pretending to be instinct.
We miss you, Scott.
There's a version of this essay where I try to say more about him. I'm not going to. If you've had a GM like that, you know. And if you're that GM for someone right now, you should know too.
The Accessories Wall
Back to Emerald Tavern. I was still looking at the accessories wall when I said it out loud, sort of to my friends, sort of to myself.
"I want to play again so badly. But homie ain't got time for prepping. I just want to type an idea in and out comes the materials, ready to go."
My friends, who are not strangers to my particular brand of enthusiasm, nodded and suggested, rather matter-of-factly, that I should build it.
Somewhere in the middle of the cafe, a table was mid-session. I didn't know their system. I didn't need to. One of the players was half out of his chair, gesturing, doing a voice. The GM had that slightly glazed look of someone holding six plates in the air and still having a good time. Everyone else was leaning in. The sound they were making was the sound I've heard at every good table I've ever been part of, going all the way back to a basement in Michigan in the mid 80s.
I said something else then. I don't remember the exact words. It was about how the tools must be so much better now, how someone with my kind of brain could probably cobble something together, how surely, surely the thing that had always stopped me could be handled.
My friends looked at each other in a particular way.
"Maybe you should go build it, with all the tools available today."
Why I'd Stopped
Here's the honest part. I have always had a difficult time following published modules. My attention didn't hold detail well enough to absorb someone else's world and make it my own on the fly. I didn't always like the NPCs that came pre-packaged. So I'd run my own stuff, and then run it badly, winging it when the plot stopped making sense to me, which was often. I wanted to make my own worlds and could not summon the patience to draw the maps. When I did draw a map, I reused it for every dungeon I ran henceforth. I never took a module to completion. When players went off-script, which is every session of D&D ever played by any human anywhere, I couldn't pivot fast enough without losing the thread.
The ideas were never the problem. The execution was. And under the execution, the time. I often had one and not the other.
Friends who've watched me run games know I can come up with the stories, and I really got into it, but a lot of the time I was also just making stuff up as I went along, trying to keep things interesting for the players. I am, apparently, a lot easier to get excited than I am to get prepared.
Why Now Is Different
I'm 55 this year, which is either a reason to stop trying things or the best possible reason to start them. I've made my peace with which one it is.
What I know now that I didn't at 25: I do not have patience for prep anymore, in the sense that I no longer have the time for it. I need a framework and a start button. I need sessions that run a couple of hours and send people home wanting more, not dragging into the night because I insisted on narrating one more tavern. I need the worlds to be mine, genuinely mine, not someone else's setting I'm failing to memorize. And I need to be able to flex when the party does what parties do, which is the thing I always wanted to be good at and never was, because I was too busy hunting for the stat block I'd forgotten to print.
The ideas, as ever, are not the problem. The ideas were never the problem.
What We're Actually Building
CritForge exists because of that moment in front of the accessories wall, and because my friends gave me permission to treat the idea like something I could actually make. It's a tool for the GM who has a head full of worlds and a calendar that won't let them draw the maps. It helps you prep fast without prepping shallow, and it remembers what your campaign knows so you don't have to. It does not run the table. You run the table. That part still belongs to you, because that part was always the point.
Thank you Christian and Sophya.
The Table in the Back
When I left Emerald Tavern that afternoon, the session at the other table was still going. The player with the voice was sitting down now. Someone had rolled something good. The GM was laughing. I don't know what their story was. I hope they finished it.
I'm still working on mine.
Find Emerald Tavern on Instagram if you're ever in North Austin and need somewhere to roll dice and drink good coffee. Tell the table in the back I said hi.