Here I be.

Loads of things, but I (Sasha) want to talk about my favourite thing about The Bad Year, which is all the different ways you can play it.

So, The Bad Year is a collection of 53 system-neutral, one-page horror investigation adventures that look like this:

All the clues and the links between them are on one side of the page, with a more detailed breakdown on the other. The idea is you can open it to any double page spread and be able to run that adventure with everything you need right in front of you.

But wait! There's more!

There's also a small section at the bottom of the clue map called "Links" which lists every recurring storyline, NPC and location that features in the mystery, along with the page numbers of every other mystery they appear in. So you can easily find all the entries in one of 7 (seven!) recurring plots and run them as mini-campaigns (or just pick one recurring NPC and follow them through the course of their own really bad year, if you want).

One of those plots - THE GRAND OCCULTATION - is basically the A-plot of the whole book. It's told over 13 adventures, so you can easily run it as monthly sessions over a year, and it explains why exactly this year is so very bad.

BUT WAIT! There's even more!

You can, of course, run each one of the 53 adventures, one after the other, to get the full, year-long, interconnected detailed campaign. And, if you start it and end it in Halloween week, every single adventure will be themed to the actual week of the calendar year that you play it in.

The planning that's gone into this book is wild and there are some intense spreadsheets behind it. Both the clue map format and the one-shots-but-also-interconnected-campaign were @jonnywaistcoat's idea and I am endlessly impressed with them. I think everyone else should be impressed with them too. Maybe check out our Kickstarter if you think it sounds as cool as I do.

I really like how the scientology speedrunning trend is developing, in this clip we see that the participants are

Not deterred by the closed door

Working as a group

Protecting their identities

Inflicting material costs to the institution via property destruction

Getting away at the end

“It is I, Andy Burnham, your socialist working class king of the north. I have the red wall behind me. We’re going to take on the establishment…

My fave part of this tweet is that even though a lot of people are assuming this was an AI thing or whatever

this is the actual lede of their review of the Super Mario movie