Richard Sembera

Meditation: A Self-Study Guide is a do-it-yourself guide to the practice of meditation. Unlike other books on the subject, its approach is secular, rational, and pragmatic. Its aim is to explain in detail one possible approach to the practice of meditation and to present it within a modern conceptual framework that eschews the religious and mythological trappings that characterize most approaches to the subject. It also attempts to distinguish between potentially helpful and potentially harmful forms of meditation and to give a rationale for the approach that it recommends. Finally, it borrows concepts from psychoanalysis, philosophy, and computer science to explain what meditation is and why it works. In this way it aims to be a really complete guide to meditation in both practice and theory that ordinary people can use to teach themselves how to meditate.

The book is available now and you can buy it through Lulu.

Metapsychology for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (Routledge, 2017) was originally supposed to be called "Mind, World, and Self" because that's what it's really about, but the publisher preferred a more descriptive title, so we went with that.

In a nutshell, the book is an attempt to replace the traditional drive–defence model of Freudian tradition with an information processing model of the mind. Whereas Freud understood human beings as essentially pleasure seeking beings motivated by the need for drive discharge, I argue in my book that the most basic human need is the need for clear thinking, and that physical drives ultimately only have significance for the mind insofar as they tend towards the one central and fundamental aim of self-knowledge.

Some distinguishing features of the book include its in-depth theory of trauma, its careful distinction between overwhelming experiences and traumatic experiences, and its conception of trauma as playing a central role in normal mental functioning.

The book is available on Amazon.ca and through Abebooks.com.

Rephrasing Heidegger (University of Ottawa Press, 2008) was my first major academic publication. In this book I showed that there is indeed method to the madness that is Heidegger's Being and Time, and succeeded in paraphrasing its main lines of argument to make them intelligible to the general reader.

The book was fairly successful and managed to get 5 star reviews both on the Amazon and Chapters websites. It is currently out of print, but is still more or less readily available through used book sites.

I was somewhat flattered to discover that the digital version has also been pirated, so if you really want a digital copy of the original edition, you probably know what to do.

On the other hand, why would you do that when you could get a paper copy of the revised and expanded edition at a reasonable price?

SPACE DUNGEON: BX PARADIGM is my latest and I think greatest venture into role-playing game design. After a disturbingly fallow period during the COVID-19 pandemic that saw me begin and fail to complete 2 entirely different games, I finally decided to return to the game that started it all for me and forge a new path from there.

As the name suggests, SPACE DUNGEON: BX PARADIGM is a distillation of the essence of the original SPACE DUNGEON poured into the beloved "BX" rules framework. Where the original game values detail and crunchiness for their own sake and sets them all within a framework of organized chaos that makes for a lot of fun, if that's what you enjoy, in SPACE DUNGEON: BX PARADIGM everything possible has been done to avoid detail and crunchiness in favour of a "roll and go" approach. The result (I hope!) is an SF role-playing game of unparalleled speed, smoothness, and ease of play.

Purchase of the downloadable PDF (fully indexed!) includes an official SPACE DUNGEON: BX PARADIGM character record sheet and a 2-page introductory adventure, Escape from Acheron-7. For those who may want a paper product, a print on demand version of the rulebook is also available at Lulu.com.

POCKET-SIZE FANTASY is my first completely original fantasy role-playing game. It's a compact, old-school, one-rulebook, d6-based Fantasy RPG that is designed to be fast, fun, and flexible. It features a completely skills-based character creation system defining characters in terms of 4 basic ability scores and is designed to balance simplicity with character depth and detail.

Like pretty much everything I write, it's text that talks up, not down, to you. It combines classical 1980's gamebook feel with updated and streamlined mechanics, and is an attempt to cram as much game as possible into as little space as possible.

The result is an entire standalone Fantasy RPG in 1 slim 64-page booklet with no filler and no wasted space. It also features a completely original combat system, lineup combat, that makes ranged weapons meaningful without opening the door to tactical miniatures gaming.

The PDF version is available at DriveThruRPG and a print version is available at Lulu.com.

SPACE DUNGEON was my first ever self-authored role playing game. Its origins lie in a fortunate convergence of several different undertakings.

In 2017 I had some time on my hands and decided to fill it by playing through a couple of excellent Shadowrun computer RPGs on iOS. I enjoyed them immensely and was struck by how successfully the time-hallowed dungeon crawl mechanic had been translated to a science fiction setting.

In early 2018 I finally got my hands on a commercial reprint of the four booklets that constituted the 1975 iteration of the Original Role-Playing Game (which cannot be named here for reasons of copyright) and asked myself the question: "What would have happened had the authors of the Original Role-Playing Game been avid fans of Golden Age science fiction instead of fantasy?" Several frenzied months followed during which I worked out a speculative answer. SPACE DUNGEON is the result.

For links to order both PDF and print versions of the original SPACE DUNGEON please visit the dedicated section of my FRP Games Page.