My Quest

I'm Stephen DeBaun. I write songs, make games, write stories, and keep road diaries from a van named Sisyphus. The van was named before I read the essay.

I've been building things for a long time. The one that shipped on a table was Ars Victor, a one-hour wargame I published in 2013 with my own unit portraits in it. Before that there was a free video game, and before that a lot of code for other people. The songs are newer: the first one in fifteen years was written on a December night in 2025, and it seems they kept coming.

Part of the year I'm a Black Rock Ranger, which is a volunteer who walks around the edge of chaos and tries to leave people a little better than he found them. The rest of the year I try to do the same thing with a guitar, a rulebook or a story.

Everything here is free. Not free for now, not free until the good stuff. Free, because I'd rather have you around than behind a paywall. If something I made did something for you, there's a place to chip in, and that's the whole arrangement.