Hi. I am Joonas Laakso. I live in Helsinki, Finland. I’ve been running tabletop roleplaying games since at least 1988 – might be a few years earlier, but that’s when I got the Finnish edition of “red box” Dungeons & Dragons Basic. I was 10 years old. I didn’t understand the game at all to begin with, but there was no going back: roleplaying became an obsession for me. I don’t say that lightly – it is by far my most important, most defining thing in my life that isn’t my family.
In August 2023 I decided to get back into blogging about RPGs after an almost complete hiatus of a decade, owing to work. My original drive to write came from wanting to work in game development professionally. Once I got into gamedev, that drive diminished. Recently it’s been rekindling. Probably because I’m running more RPGs than in decades.
In January 2024 my WordPress installation got hacked. I lost all of my sites. I decided to use the opportunity to retire my old general gaming site, Dusty Gamer, and relaunch as a tabletop gaming specific site – Roleplay Letters.
When I say “tabletop gaming” I mean roleplaying, be it physically in a room with friends, or online in a video chat, and roleplaying adjacent “hobby gaming” – all things miniatures. While playing with miniature giant robots may not be strictly speaking “roleplaying”, for me there’s a lot of overlap, as most of my miniatures are used with tabletop roleplaying games.
I don’t have a content plan for this site. All I know is that as I am running games, I have thoughts on roleplaying that I want to get out there, and I will use this space for that purpose.
You can find me online on Instagram, Threads, and Bluesky, until another billionaire screws those up to the degree that I abandon them. I am @jlaakso or discoverable by my full name everywhere.
I’ve self published some roleplaying content. It’s all up on Itch.io under my name. I’m proud about my Mörk Borg rules for rising from your grave, and my cyberpunk stuff under Systems For Punks.