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My wife and I have slightly different tastes in most movies and shows. She tends toward comedies, I tend toward big epic space operas. One show which we both enjoyed, now unfortunately canceled, is The Hunting Party. The premise of the show is that there was a top secret prison hidden inside a nuclear silo that was experimenting with behavioral therapies and psychiatric drugs on the worst serial…

Sly Flourish wrote about methods to make monsters unique that don’t rely on mechanics. Prismatic Wasteland wrote about how random tables are akin to Kinder Surprise Eggs in the joy they bring. At Bastionland, there was a discussion of what takes a game from something you could play to something you will play, even if that sacrifices some replayability. TTRPGKids reviewed the Cozy Companion…

I’ve loved some of the previous Blogwagon topics from Prismatic Wasteland, but never got around to writing on them. The latest topic is randomness. It features a roll for date of post and for length, then a card draw for a blog to look through and include a reference to. For reference, my rolls and card were: 1d20: 14 (post on June 14) 2d6: 8 (post as long or short as you want) Playing Card:…

While looking for stories from Appendix N, I came across The Eldritch Dark, which catalogs the works of Clark Ashton Smith. Since my own local bookstores are devoid of Smith’s works, it’s been a great find. Over at Prismatic Wasteland, there is a blogwagon on the theme of randomness beginning. I can’t wait to share my own contribution on this one. Rob Heinsoo wrote about the Free-form Demo for…

One of the first non-D&D RPGs I played was the fourth edition of Shadowrun. I was hooked from the start. It has fantasy. Check. It has Cyberpunk Dystopia. Check. Its default setting at the time I was introduced to it was Seattle. Check. It felt like this game was made specifically for me. Were the books easy to parse for the rules? Absolutely not, Catalyst is not the best at organizing…

In the Player’s Handbook, there’s a recommendation to read The Return of the Sorcerer by Clark Ashton Smith. I thought it was a book, so I spent a bunch of time looking for it. It’s really a short story from 1931, and I was able to find a copy online. The premise is that the unnamed narrator is hired to assist a researcher as a secretary, in part because of his ability with Arabic (longtime…

I really enjoyed a review of Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice put together by Ancillary Review of Books. The review takes a look at a book that tracks connections between Speculative Fiction and the ways it has been co-opted into the libertarian/alt-right circles. It’s added a book to my TBR list. I really liked a discussion at Sly Flourish about the…

In the last couple months, I’ve been getting back into “retro games” aka the ones that came out as I was a kid, and increasingly, the ones that came out while I was a teenager. Gameboy Advance and GameCube being “retro” is crazy, but such is the way of linear time. Pokémon Fire Red This one kind of started the most recent kick with its release on Switch. I picked up Fire Red, and got my…

This year, I’ve been making a concerted effort to track down and read some books from Appendix N, as well as from the comparable lists from Pathfinder, from 5e 2014, from Dolmenwood, from Numenera, and honestly from every TTRPG in my collection I could find a list for. I also wrote a list of some media I find inspirational when I make up stories for my players. So far this year, I’ve finished 34…

For the last couple years I’ve been reading some early books from fantasy and science fiction, like Ensign Flandry. This week, I continued that trend with Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton. The book was originally released in 1955, under the pseudonym Andrew North. The copy I have is a digitized release by Open Road Media. I mention that, because I have some critiques that are not of the writing…

A couple weeks ago my usual game night had a cancelation and since I’d picked up XCrawl Classics on a whim during the DCC Sale at DriveThruRPG, I ran a one-shot. Since hearing the premise of the game, I’d been itching to get it, itching to read it, itching to run it. The premise is that in a fantasy dystopian United States analog (an empire ruled by Emperor Ronald I, aka Ronald Regan kept alive…

Justin Alexander of The Alexandrian discussed what his session prepped looks like. I like to look at what other game masters do and see if there’s anything I can steal borrow for my own prep. Dave Clark at Full Moon Storytelling speaks about how maps don’t need to be fancy battlemaps in HD with all the whizbang features. I like the discussion of how even simpler maps can help us understand the…

Recently, I grabbed some lists of science fiction and fantasy authors from my hometown of Seattle, as well as some more local to my newer home in Northeast Ohio. One new-to-me author from the Seattle list was Kira Jane Buxton. I looked her up and came across her debut novel, Hollow Kingdom. The blurb on Libby about “Watership Down meets Dawn of the Dead” and a foul-mouthed crow protagonist…

Over at Full Moon Storytelling, Dave Clark has a fun discussion of the challenges for DMs with the new weekly Beyond Drops and decisions about whether they fit into your campaign. At Bastionland, Chris McDowell uses an analogy with racing circuits and rallies to talk about different types of locations and play loops that you find in the same game. At Nerds of a Feather, Flock Together, there is…

John Scalzi heard back from the FBI about his request for their (admittedly thin to the point of non-existant) file on him. Whomst amongst us has never wondered if the FBI file we joke must exist on us is actually there? I know my own jokes about an FBI file go back to things like being interviewed by a local socialist paper for my (albeit small) involvement with anti-Iraq War demonstrations at…

Full Moon Storytelling writes about how Downtime could be a fourth pillar of tabletop RPGs. Uncanny Magazine released the Table of Contents for their upcoming Issue 70. There are some titles here that have me excited to dig into my subscriber copy. I’ll likely continue to link to stories I really enjoyed as they go live. TTRPGKids did an interview with a Speech Language Pathologist about how…