Right now I’m running a game of The Drowned Isles, a setting / ruleset I wrote to play a bunch of OSR adventures. There are plenty of inspirations for the game, but one its...

I want to declare book amnesty for myself, having fallen behind on my habit of writing up my reading habits (previously in January, April, and August of 2025). In rough order,...

Hey, did you hear it’s the Year of the Beta (at least according to Prismatic Wasteland)? And did you know that the year is… almost over[1]? Well (ready or not) I guess I have...

RPG blogging may resume soon; there’s another Drowned Isles playtest wrapping up next week and I have some thoughts. Crucially: the game works, I have fun running it, and my...

Wow, wonder what might have happened to totally blow up my blogging schedule. Well, time to look at the news and—blog posts have been delayed by a month. Ah shit. Well lemme...

Now that I’m once again employed, my reading has decreased. I’m still making room for books, but I’m trying to spend less time on the Internet - no “links” section this time....

In November, I ran a oneshot using my ruleset/setting/campaign, The Drowned Isles. I was trying to test drive the kernel of a ruleset I’ve written as well as some character...

The ICON campaign I was playing in wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, totalling 28 sessions in 9 months. I’m not going to write up a big comprehensive review[1]. Instead I’ll...

Not sure how much life-update I wanna put in these? Let’s see… I got over my COVID infection, the election happened, I began a gradual-but-long-anticipated life change, my...

Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts by John Harper is a new expansion for Blades in the Dark. It’s not marketed as a second edition of Blades; instead they call it a treasure trove...

Recently I noticed my desktop was struggling to run games that it should have no trouble with. My partner was getting severe frame drops playing Overcooked 2; Tactical Breach...

As the ICON campaign I’m playing in wraps up, I’m thinking about what makes games “slow.”[1] I’ve come up with four distinct sources of slowness: pondering, friction,...

Natalie’s vision of a sociable web is exactly what I’m hoping for in the post-Cohost blog era. Her post got me thinking about what a comments system for an indie, blog-based...

I got COVID right at the end of September[1], putting me out of commission for about a week. COVID infection and isolation means I’ve been reading less, coding less, going...

Let’s consider a game where player characters cook regularly, to resolve conflicts or scenes. During character creation, Alice selects the following ability: Keep the doctor...

A few sessions into the ICON campaign I’m playing in, I was struck by how much smoother the game played than its d20 cousins. There are drastic simplifications and streamlining...

This week I played my first session of ICON, Massif Press’s tactical fantasy RPG. It’s my usual group less two players, so that makes one GM and then four of us on the other...

I’ve got an RPG campaign burning a hole in my pocket. It’s a fantasy adventure setting, with a little world of my own devising seeded with smaller adventures and modules to...

Inspired by Throne of Salt’s bookposts, here’s what I’ve been reading in the first two months of the year. January The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera What a...

For the Queen, by Alex Roberts, made for the smoothest oneshot I’ve ever played. It took less than five minutes to jump into play, and the whole game wrapped up in under an...

In a 2010 blog post, John Harper argued that custom moves in Apocalypse World have a danger of “crossing the line” between player and MC roles. I’ve read it before, but only...

This year I’ve been playing Fellowship 2e, a fantasy adventure RPG that’s Powered by the Apocalypse, and I have a few gripes with an otherwise great game. Since session 1, I’ve...