Hi, I’m Steve, and I like to do longsword. Sometimes I also have thoughts about longsword, which I write down and store in a Google Drive folder, and maybe share them with a couple people. A couple of them have been featured on Tea Kew (www.fechtlehre.org) and Sean Franklin’s (http://swordstem.com/ , https://swordstuff.blog/ ) websites. That’s fine, but a lot of them either don’t fit in with the content there, or I just don’t want to clutter up other peoples’ blogs. I was going to make my own, but there were complaints of too many disparate resources instead of one place to find everything, so now I will post them all here on the Game Design for HEMA blog. This way anyone who has the desire can see what they say, and if I end up in a conversation about one of the topics, I can easily link them to it.
The current plan is to post one per week. Since I already have a bunch sitting in a folder, it should keep going a fair amount of time. After that I don’t know, I’m not going to force myself to write an article every week, that’s how you end up with a bunch of shit content.
Speaking of content, I’ll explain what my articles are going to be about. Topics that I enjoy talking about are coaching theory, [longsword] fencing tactics, game design (for tournaments and otherwise), and the RDL (Ringeck/Danzig/Lew) longsword sources. All of my content will be related to longsword. I am interested in other sports and weapons, but LS is my main focus.
The articles will vary in depth, scope, and rigor. Sometimes I go deep into a topic, make my club do activities related to it, pore over hours of video, collect data, and analyze what it could mean, sometimes I just write down a couple paragraphs on an idea that I have been thinking about. I don’t think there will be much rhyme or reason to how and when I upload them.
I expect that visitors to this website will be mostly people who already know me personally, but in case you have stumbled upon it in some other way, I’ll provide a little bit of background information about myself. My main background is kendo, which I practiced from 2008 until the pandemic in 2020, in various capacities ranging from casual to highly competitive. I started HEMA in 2015. At first it was a fun goofy side hobby and cross training for kendo, but in 2017 I shifted focus and started considering longsword my main thing. Over the years I have also done various other martial arts and sports as cross training, including kali, judo, and modern Olympic fencing.
I started my club Bucks Historical Longsword in 2016, and have been coaching there ever since. During the early pandemic in 2020-2021, we shut down our practices, which gave me a chance to step back and read some material on coaching and fencing. This led me to re-evaluate and ultimately re-structure the class format at Bucks. I feel that the new format has been a huge success, and many of my articles in this website will relate to that topic in some way.
That’s probably enough info to get started. Thanks for reading and I hope you get something out of this website.