It was spring of 1980. Steve Williamson was on a camping trip in the shadow of Mt. St. Helens, and the volcano was erupting sixty miles away. A fine gray ash drifted down through a light rain when his friend pulled out a rulebook and asked if he wanted to play a game called Dungeons & Dragons.
“What’s that?” Steve asked.
An hour later, his dwarven fighter had dispatched an orc with two swings of a morning star, and Steve was hooked.
What followed was the purchase of the D&D Basic Set — the purple box — and a campaign of carefully saved allowance money to acquire the three core Advanced D&D rulebooks, starting with the Player’s Handbook, then the Monster Manual, and finally the Dungeon Master’s Guide. He has been a dungeon master ever since.
Over the next four and a half decades, Steve played through every major era of the game — Basic/Expert and AD&D in the early 1980s, through 2nd Edition, into 5th Edition starting in 2016 — but never fully left his old-school roots. He still enjoys Old-School Essentials and more recently Shadowdark RPG. Today he runs the teens D&D group at his local public library, a program he founded in 2023, starting the group on Old-School Essentials before transitioning to 5e to make the game more accessible to kids who had never rolled a die in their lives.
D&D didn’t just shape how Steve spends his evenings. It shaped everything else he makes.
In 2011, on a quiet Sunday morning with a cup of coffee and nothing pressing to do, he started writing a fantasy story — not for publication, just for himself. He wanted to write something he’d actually want to read. Three chapters in, he stopped. Two years later, a friend read those chapters and told him in no uncertain terms to finish it. He did. That story became Ohlen’s Arrow, his debut novel, published in 2013. Three more books in the series followed — Ohlen’s Bane, Paragon’s Call, and A Riddle of Scars — along with a standalone murder mystery, The Quiet Hand. The full story of how that first book went from a Sunday morning idea to a published novel is worth reading on its own.
The RPG design work grew from a different obsession. Steve has always been fascinated by World War II history, and when he discovered the story of Britain’s Special Operations Executive (SOE) — the agents who ran daring covert missions behind enemy lines — he saw an immediate connection to something he’d loved since 1980: the fantasy of playing a hero against impossible odds. Ashes of Isar, his WW2 espionage tabletop RPG, was the result. Where his novels let him tell the stories, Ashes of Isar lets other people live them.
Ruckerworks exists because Steve believes the most valuable thing an experienced DM can do is pass it on. The blog, the YouTube channel, the games, the books — all of it comes from the same place: a genuine interest in helping other people run better games and tell better stories.
If you found your way here through a video, a search result, or a link someone shared on social media, that’s exactly how this was meant to work.
