Welcome to the Valley!

Hello, there! I'm Stephen Collins. You can read more about me over here.

Long ago, I wrote a blog about design thinking, organisational and service design, running a business, and my perspectives on leadership. You can probably still find a lot of it on archive.org or Medium if you go looking.

I've wanted to blog again for a while, and write about things like living in the bush and how it differs from the city life I spent my first 50ish years living; being a maker, maintainer, and repairer of things; the books, games, and music I encounter; and not least of all a place to write about interesting and useful material for your 5e tabletop roleplaying games.

Everything here is 100% human-made. No AI. Probably flawed. Very human. Hopefully interesting.

Things of (possible) interest

I live in a place called Brogo, which is a hundred-or-so square kilometres of farmland and native bush about 25km from Bega on the far south coast of New South Wales.

That puts us 25km from the nearest town of Bega, 3 hours from the national capital, Canberra (and the nearest game store), 5 hours from Sydney, and about 9 hours from Melbourne.

IRL I run a sustainably-managed, dog-friendly B&B on 100 acres in the hills of the Bega Valley (NSW, Australia), which is Djiringanj Yuin country for our First Nations people. I work on a large dairy farm. I'm (mostly) retired from 20+ years of working in design of user experience, services, and organisations.

I'm an outdoorsman, a bowhunter, a console, board, and TTRPG gamer, a democratic socialist, a husband, a (grand)dad, a DIY/Maker, a volunteer RFS firefighter, a 🐈 and 🐕 dad.

My pronouns are he/him, but whatever works at the time will never bother me.