This is the official intro post to the Missives From Mooncastle blog, the online home of the email newsletter of Insane Angel Studios and Scott Fitzgerald Gray.
Scott Who?
Scott Fitzgerald Gray (9th-level layabout, vindictive good) is a writer of fantasy and speculative fiction, a fiction editor, a story editor, and an editor and designer of roleplaying games — all of which means he finally has the job he really wanted when he was sixteen. His work in gaming covers three editions of the Dungeons & Dragons RPG, including working as an editor on the fifth edition Monster Manual, Dungeon Master’s Guide, Player’s Handbook, Starter Set, and Essentials Kit.
All told, Scott has written or edited upwards of two hundred books, adventures, and articles for Wizards of the Coast, including writing Dead in Thay in the Tales from the Yawning Portal anthology and being managing editor and co-creative director for the Acquisitions Incorporated book from Wizards of the Coast and Penny Arcade. He’s written or edited for MCDM, Ghostfire Gaming, Schwalb Entertainment, Sly Flourish, Gamehole Publishing, Green Ronin, Frog God Games, and others, as well as for Dragon, Dungeon, Dragon+, and Arcadia magazines. He also creates and publishes under his own Insane Angel Studios imprint, including the recent monstrous-advice-and-tools tome Forge of Foes, created with Mike Shea and Teos Abadía, and the CORE20 RPG — a new classless, freeform-character approach to story-focused d20 fantasy.
Scott shares his life in the Western Canadian hinterland with a schoolteacher, two itinerant daughters, and a number of animal and spirit companions. More info on him and his work (some of it even occasionally truthful) can be found on BlueSky, Mastodon dice.camp, and Twitter (all @scottfgray), and by reading between the lines at insaneangel.com.
What to Expect
The Missives From Mooncastle newsletter covers a broad range of random ideas revolving around Scott’s love of D&D and fantasy gaming. Sometimes this means digging into game mechanics. Other times, it means talking about things we can learn from the older editions of the game that are all but unknown to most new players. Sometimes it’s about making up random adventure or encounter generators, new magic items, or mysterious dungeon maps. And a lot of the time, it’s just a lot of thinking about the unique nature of fantasy RPGs as a medium for shared storytelling.
The blog is updated with new newsletter material on the newsletter’s irregular schedule. But if you’d prefer to get Missives From Mooncastle delivered straight to your inbox, you can subscribe!
The Old Lore
If you glance at the Blog Archive sidebar to the right of the page, you’ll note that even though this is the official intro post to the Missives From Mooncastle blog, there are a bunch of older entries. These are a selection of RPG-themed entries from Scott’s no-longer-extant personal blog, more details of which can be found here.