@benjaminterry.com
I'm a GenX guy living in mid-Michigan. I work in IT for a health system. For kicks I enjoy tabletop role-playing games, fiddling with tech and playing music (mostly on guitar). You can find links to all of my things at: https://benjaminterry.com/
CYOA books are pretty wild. In 3 pages you can go from traveling to your threatened Antarctic research station, to abandoning that to rescue a colleague, to being sucked up by a CIA submarine & being pressured to wear a wire to see if your colleague is working with aliens from Europa.
Shock Troopers for NeoGeo is my favorite "Run & Gun" shooter of all time. Great classic 2d graphics. Great gameplay. 8 characters! Multiple routes through the game. Crazy good Jungle-ish soundtrack reminds me of Street Fighter: 3rd Strike. Old school fan site. :-) bbh.marpirc.net/shocktherapy...
Car map display showing exterior temperature of -20 degrees Fahrenheit at 12:32 a.m.
It was cold coming home from game night tonight, but worth the trip!
My e-mail client automatically marks mail from my House Rep. as a potential scam with no intervention on my part. It's basically right, as the mails are always "surveys" where he is supposedly looking for my opinion, but all of the available answers are highly loaded right wing nonsense.
My interest in the Street Fighter RPG, and a blog post about a game called "Burning Spirits" possibly being in a September 1994 Japanese RPG Magazine literally called "RPG Magazine" had me bidding on a Japanese auction and shipping across the ocean to see what's what. Now for translation...
My Top 10 Fav Guitar Players (I guess? At the moment.)
Vernon Reid
Kaki King
Ichiro Agata
Marnie Stern
Jimi Hendrix
Eddie Van Halen
Dimebag Darrell
Omar Rodríguez-López
Jerry Reed
Thurston Moore
"Guy goes to tiny cabin in winter, splits some wood, starts a fire, cooks a thing using the fire & sleeps through the wintery night" I must admit, is among the YouTube video genres I sometimes watch.
This weekend I've read both E.C. Tubb's "The Winds of Gath" & H. Beam Piper's "Space Viking", 2 books said to be inspirations/influences on the Traveller RPG. I'm glad I read them, but didn't fall in love. Gath was more of a fun adventure. Space Viking was more of a detached reciting of events.
I'm not anti-AI, but this AI-assisted Google search, you're trying to find something & it's like "Here is a kinda plausible story I cobbled together from a couple of places & it's totally wrong, but I don't know anything & will tell you it's the truth with total confidence. Was this helpful?"
My 2025 RPGing in review:
Played 51 sessions (5 of which I GM'd, 3 DC Heroes, 2 Street Fighter)
12 - Skeleton System (Friend's homebrew)
10 - Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game
10 - Night's Black Agents
7 - Mongoose Traveller 2022 Update
5 - DC Heroes (3e)
4 - Delta Green
3 - Call of Cthulhu (7e)
True. Interesting that REUP is the version chosen, being a maximalist fan compilation edition. Also, recommending a group choose it so they can all purchase the same edition... I guess you could "purchase" REUP by printing it through Lulu or something, even if it is technically, umm, "pirating" arr!
Man, if you click through, the 1st paragraph actually does talk like it's referring to the Marvel Multiverse RPG, mentions the playtest rules, says it's due in 2022, has an Amazon link to it... but the actual review is of MURPG. Is this site a hallucination? :-) www.eternityttrpg.com/tabletop-rpg...
Yeah, naming 2 games "Marvel (something)-verse", easy to see. I have a soft spot for MURPG with its stones-based resolution, but it always struck me as "Intriguing early draft I wanna see a later version of" more than "best all-around games, with no major weak points."
I also think this is just a... not great list. Still, maybe I'm missing some context, but didn't the Marvel Universe Role Playing Game come out in 2003, 5 years before 4e D&D?
Image of Guildmaster's Hall of Fame from the old game Rogue. Shows 5 characters that failed to reach the Amulet of Yendor.
It's a long way to the Amulet of Yendor...
While it is the game that spawned a genre, it feels like the original Rogue is underrated. The original terminal graphics, the gameplay that takes a little bit to get but isn't ultra-complicated. Turn based. Good for casual play, running around some dungeons figuring stuff out. Dig it.
A list no one cares about: My top 5 Intellivision Games!
- Tron: Deadly Discs
- B-17 Bomber
- Tower of Doom
- Sea Battle
- Space Spartans (still like Star Raiders on the 5200 better though)
Image of a slashdot.org story about electronic implants for restoring sight, over top of Spotify in the background, showing the playing of the TRON: Ares soundtrack.
Watched Tron: Ares on Sunday. It was some fun, groovy sci-fi. Reading stories on the internet, listening to the Nine Inch Nails soundtrack. Loved the original back in the day. Sometimes it feels like the sci-fi of my youth is really coming in...
Both @thiagorosa.bsky.social and @ericmusashi.bsky.social could be useful. I think Thiago may have written for Dragão Brasil, and I know Eric primarily through the Brazilian Street Fighter RPG scene, but am sure he is involved more broadly in the RPG scene there as well.
I'm not sure if my friends just discovered them, or GMail just started sending them, or my Proton mail started sending them along, but now whenever I check my mail and a thread has a bunch of replies, chances are they're all emojis attached as, like, a half megabyte sized image.png.
Significantly damaged cardboard shipping box with tape haphazardly applied that states "Received in Damaged Condition"
1:10a, Carson gas station, kids yell out to me "Fix that greasy assed hair (n-word)!" over and over while laughing at each other. Wake up to grab a package from the post-office during the one hour it's open that I'm not working (Sat 9:30-10:30a). Fortunately it was not fragile goods.
I'm very locked in to my routine. Today I'm gonna stop in to a general store in Eureka, a barely-a-village I've never been to close to my way home from work. It's supposed to be old-timey and novel. I should treat my local environment more like a tourist coming here to find fun things.
I'm not asleep now, but this feels like a week I might just sleep through and see how life is on the other side.
What were your first 3 #ttrpg box sets?
- TSR Marvel Super Heroes Basic Set
- MegaTraveller
- Top Secret/S.I.
I played 6 playtest hall games at GenCon. I bought and read a dozen comics from an Indianapolis comic shop. I ate out at some decent restaurants. This is all OK. Between the crowds and general hassle, my feelings are a little mixed though not bad.
It's cool to watch the ISS cross the sky. Just went by from the NNW across under Cassiopeia out to the NE here in central Michigan.
It looks like Ray Winninger's Underground takes the full color crown in '93. Sounds like The Monstrous Manual for AD&D 2e was also full color in '93, it came out after those b/w + blue Monster Manual ring binder packs.
In a work meeting today, someone mentioned "Moving into the 21st Century", and I realized that it's getting pretty late in the century to finally be moving into it.
RPGs have made me curious about exoplanets recently. The field is so entertaining and active. It had me looking at RPG planetary system generators and having feelings about them. Not their fault for being published before the last few years though... skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-ne...
