Access Denied!™

A World of Difference...

Welcome to the website of Robert M. Schroeck, gamer, author, husband and a few other things, established 1997 and maintained continuously since. While there's no small amount of self-promotion and personal ego gratification to be found here, the major reasons for this website are firstly to provide support and information for many of the gameworlds that I have had published or in which I currently run games, and secondly, to host the for-fun writing I do on the side when not writing for pay. I maintain an Amazon.com Associate bookstore on this site for those who are interested in buying my or others' books.

Thank you for visiting my site, and I hope you have fun and find whatever it is you're looking for!

And now, the news...

Access Denied! News

Latest Update: 5 April 2019

Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends...

Okay, 21 months between updates this time. I'm getting better at it... I guess the problem is that I don't really think of this as the blog-like news page that I try to make it serve as, and instead whenever I have something I want to say or bring to the attention of my readers, I tend to post it on my forums instead. If you always look here for news on my writing, perhaps you should add checking my forums to your routine from now on, because after twenty-five-odd years of biannual updates or worse, it's unlikely I'll get in the habit of updating this page all that frequently.

At least I keep the RSS feed up to date.

Let's see... what's reasonably recent in my life that could merit a bit of text here? Ah, right.

After a several-year hiatus caused by practically everyone moving across the country, all the players in my D&D campaign have moved back into areas close enough to make running the campaign practical again. So last summer my fabled Narth campaign — run since 1982 with only two breaks — was relaunched with a ten-year time skip and several new players along with the old, established ones. And one of the new players was the first second generation member of the campaign: Nina Avins, daughter of Kat and Joe Avins, who have had characters in Narth since 1987 (twelve years before her birth).

It's not many campaigns that last long enough that the players' children grow up with and join them.

As is traditional — and after more than thirty-five years of gameplay I can definitively say that this really is a tradition — a new deity based on Nina was added to the pantheon of Narth: Aneen, lesser goddess of personal ornamentation and presentation and aesthetics.

Tiffany, our other new player, has yet to design her goddess, but I've been nagging at her to do so.

On the subject of revived campaigns, our longtime friend Helen Imre revived her long-defunct Shadowrun campaign a year ago. However, rather than just pick up from where we left off at the end of the 1990s, she has chosen to go for something new and different. The player characters are all children. In Germany.

Yeah. Imagine The Little Rascals with magic, cyberware and guns. And "do you haff your paperz?" accents.

Well, maybe not that last.

In any case, since as a player I have the opportunity to, I've been documenting the campaign since it started, and posting it all to a thread on my forums, where you can read all the wacky hi-jinks the so-called "Fourth Graders From Hell" have gotten up to, as well as the occasional comment on the action.

Beyond that, life continues apace. I'm still at Kamine Technology Group and still loving what I do. I've pretty much completed all the duties required of me as the executor of my late mother's estate. My muse has, for the most part, stopped being terribly erratic and has gone back to being mildly erratic. Consequently, I've gotten a fair amount of writing done — including a new release I'll mention below — and even better, Helen has told me that she's ready to go back to work on the long-moribund Drunkard's Walk 13, which I'm looking forward to.

What's New on the Site:

Since my last update to this page there have actually been lots of small changes to the site -- and a couple of big ones. The single most significant one has been the wholesale move of my forums from TapatalkCrapatalk to right here on Access Denied! With the help of forum members Morganite and Labster I was able to rescue all the old forums' content from the horrendous mess Crapatalk made of it and move it into an instance of MyBB running on the site. The new forums have been running now for well over a year and a half and it's just fantastic. Of course, we have a veritable army of spammers and other bad actors who have been trying to beat down our gates since they noticed we were here, but since I have to personally approve every new member, none have ever gotten in.

The other big new thing has been the second chapter of Drunkard's Walk S: Heart of Steel, which was released in August 2018.

And most recently, after far too many years, Ian McLeod's muse has returned and he has begun writing once more on Dead Bang, the authorized sequel to Drunkard's Walk II. Chapter 8 and chapter 9 are now complete and posted here, and I know that he is hard at work on chapter 10.


This page was created on January 14, 1997.
Last modified July 31, 2019.