The Impetus

Many tabletop role-players are natural tinkerers, especially ones who spend considerable time behind a GM screen, and people have been producing their own rules from the very beginning of the hobby.

The impetus to write this particular rules set, Sorcery & Steel, grew out of the confluence of several events:

• I taught chess to children as a hobby.  During this time, I started to seriously analyze game mechanics in general.
• Concurrently, I started reading for fun about the history of Dungeons & Dragons (including articles from The Strategic Review and The Dragon).
• Also concurrently, I was lucky enough to join the table of a world-class GM, someone who has spent countless hours analyzing the mechanics of 1e Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.
• Finally, after many years of playing and running other rule sets, I also returned to GMing 1e AD&D for the first time since grade school.

Consequently, a light went off in my head and I was able to identify and to understand D&D's fundamental building blocks (e.g., its wargaming roots as expressed by the class mechanic).  And, not surprisingly, a desire grew to shape, rearrange and even replace these building blocks to better fit my own role-playing preferences and design goals.