Hard Travelin'

I've been havin' some hard travelin', I thought you knowed

I've been havin' some hard travelin' way down the road

I've been havin' some hard travelin', hard ramblin', hard gamblin'

I've been in some hard travelin', Lord

-- Woody Guthrie

I’ve written a lot about White Dog WHISKEY. Marketing materials, content, random musings that -- for good reason -- will stay as drafts. But I’ve never really spent the time to put pen to paper and express why I’ve written these things. I’ve never taken the time to talk about what White Dog WHISKEY means to me. And it means a great deal.

I created White Dog WHISKEY on June 29th, 2023, at 1:00 A.M. on the dot, with the record of my trance existing in my Google Drive history. It was an attempt to veer from the hole I was about to happen into with the TTRPG hobby.

I was playing a lot of high-fantasy d20 games, mainly Pathfinder 1st edition, with an occasional break for the Cyberpunk Reds and Call of Cthulus out there. And while I love all those games, it wasn’t what was satisfying me as a storyteller.

The scope was too high or fantastical for me to truly get into it. I love the lowly. I love salt-of-the-earth fiction. I love hope, but not through otherworldly salvation -- through the beauty of life. So, I sat down at 1 A.M. a couple nights before I was to run a session for some friends.

I then created the framework of what I simply called WHISKEY. It had the same bones as now, though accented with the charm of 1 A.M. ramblings. And despite that, it played better than it had any right to.

I had the most fun I had in close to a year playing that day. And it's stuck with me since. That session satisfied my storytelling wants. It was lowlier, rougher, and more personal to me. Because that's what I want the game to be. Bittersweet, personal, introspective.

White Dog WHISKEY is for you if you want a different scope, a different lens, a different take. It's for you if you want to tell more human stories. It's for you if you love nature and folklore. And it's still for you if you just want a fun western with cryptids.

White Dog WHISKEY is an engine for stories. Not the story itself. But I like to think it knows how to make those stories count.