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Hi all, I'm a Birmingham (UK) based gamer in my mid-twenties. My name's Tim Franklin.

My gaming history starts with Warhammer 40k (like just about every other twenty-something gamer in the UK); at university I dropped wargaming in favour of RPGs, mostly White Wolf systems and the totally awesome Unknown Armies (cosmic bumfights.) I've got plenty of ludicrous stories from the latter (which I'll spare you )

I came across Lamentations from some interviews on Atomic Array podcast years ago, but only picked it up last year and I'm finally getting around to writing an adventure. I love the aesthetic choices behind Lamentations, particularly the emphasis on the PCs as not particularly savory people - just a bunch of borderline insane, murderous, cynical treasure grubbers - and also their position in the universe, ie - totally insignificant.

Another big factor was my obsession with the Dark Souls vidyergame. If you haven't played, it's an incredible RPG with a nigh-incomprehensible world and a crushing sense of your character's cosmic meaninglessness. I spent ages trying to figure out an RPG that would handle that sense of doom, before settling on Lamentations because, well - Lamentations.

The other slightly weird string to my bow is that I co-authored an article in "Dungeons and Dragons and Philosophy" with my buddy Pete Wolfendale (he's a full-fledged philosopher as well as an ace GM). It's about the aesthetics of role-playing games and in a very-long winded way it says that the aesthetic power of an RPG comes from its ability to tickle our brains' world-building facilities: the combination of simulation and chaos in an RPG allow us to mentally simulate a world that is bigger than our capacity to understand it which gives a massive aesthetic hit. Lamentations' emphasis on an objective world that isn't narratively dependent on the players, but filled with chaos bombs that inject unexpected change and wild consequences is just a great example of pure RPG aesthetics.