Hey! Welcome to my site!
Hi I'm Geoff - aka Snapping Branch. Bienvenu, Willkommen.
Afraid I'm just another middle aged British geek and gaymer trying to engage with the D&D world over the net. I rediscovered D&D, roleplay and miniatures shortly before the world was rocked by Covid. I had played as a kid a little with my brother after being gifted the Red Box one Christmas, but with no fellow nerds or adults to explain the rules our little brains never really grasped it and we moved on to Warhammer (ahh my old Chaos Dwarf minis!). Those interests waned shortly before going to university. Geeks were really not in the ascendancy back in the 90's, I don't remember any of my school friends back then were even lucky enough to have a PC to play Wolfenstein or Doom on .. let alone hooking two up over a LAN! A long story short - I dropped a lot of my hobbyist activities, and remained a PC gamer wrapped up in his own internal RPG fantasy worlds. Until recently!
It has been such a strange and unexpected relief stepping back into D&D and fantasy roleplaying, a 30 year itch that has had cure wounds cast upon it. Although it was almost cut short when lockdowns rolled across the UK, I found online play pretty smooth (if a little headache inducing - I just can't sit in front of screens for as long anymore folks!) particularly when I started using FoundryVTT. Check it out if you haven't already. Eventually the UK returned back to some sense of normality (what's not normal about old Etonians fucking things up for the rest of us - amirite?!) and real play around the table resumed. It has been a blessing for 2022 - so much so that I decided to start this site!
Some other things about me. Well I keep dropping the gaymer hint, so ye out and proud & in the day to day I am public servant in the university research space. I was an academic briefly, my PhD is in palaecology and specifically what-dead-beetles-can-tell-you-about-the-landscape-they-were-buried-in, but, well academic life ain't easy - especially when as it turned out 10 years later, I have ADHD. I've lived in the french countryside, Belfast, the middle and north of England, and now my home is in Bristol. It's a fantastic city.
Anyway, I have some neat ideas (I think?!) which I would love to share with you and in time this site will grow with my content, images and thoughts about D&D and wider fantasy and sci-fi braincakes. Oh and that's my beautiful niece and goddaughter, Ariadne, pictured above.