I currently hate poetry because I’m reading a book on the Waste Land which has forced me to buy another book on modernism in the hopes of remembering who’s who and honestly it’s all getting a bit like reading the Silmarillion must be for non-nerds.
Because I could not stop for Death -
We played some D&D.
The GM’s screen between ourselves
And Eternity.
There was an orc. I cast haste
And smote Him round the head
I looted the body too
Finding 1d6 GP
The cover of the dungeon book, showing an old-school cutaway diagram of a dungeon, complete with a dragon.
Lo, 'tis THE DUNGEON BOOK cover!
The Jungle Book meets Dungeons and Dragons with a dash of Pan's Labyrinth in this gleefully fun standalone fantasy narrated by a sentient skull, in which a small girl is thrown to a dungeon full of monsters, who decide to raise her rather than eat her.
11th August!
My pretentious version is “I’m the set painter in a theatre moonlighting as a dramatuge”
So, an rpg is a game where you make up a story, and an adventure is suggestions for how the story might go. Yes, with elves and dragons. No, not a computer game, but it’s sort of like that. Sort of a computer game meets improvised theatre.
Yes, people pay me for it.
- conversations with my aunt
… and a sense of change and evolving context for that core idea, which is one of the virtues of a campaign. You take the main activity of the game and recast it to keep it fresh.
I don’t think they’re contradictory impressions (and again, it’s years and years since I read it), but what the PCs are feeling is downstream to my mind from what they’re doing. You could still have misery and hardship in my setup; it’s just giving them a clear reason to face that misery…
So you’ve still got the core gameplay loop, but there’s another layer of the PCs having to protect their home base and find a way out before everyone dies/goes mad.
Bearing in mind that I‘ve never played Torchbearer and haven’t looked at in years - start off standard. There’s a village, there’s a dungeon, go delve.
Then - magic earthquake, village ends up falling into underworld. Now the challenge is to find the route back up to the surface…
My interview with Gareth Hanrahan @mytholder.bsky.social about @rowanrookanddecard.bsky.social upcoming Metadungeon for DIE RPG
“Goth Jumanji” will forever stick with me.
How Die RPG's Metadungeon Celebrates 50 Years of Gaming Evolution | Interview with Gareth Hanrahan
youtu.be/XV8U1JUja58
"conciousmess" #typoOfTheDay
The NYT thing - On one hand I’m just speechless at the crass misunderstanding of what makes good writing. It’s such a wild self own, it’s so bizarrely reflexive, this pride in such ignorance.
On the other hand, if that’s what people want? We’ll be over here doing something different? Same as ever.
Gamergate is the Dreyfus Affair of the 21st Century and I don't even know if I'm kidding or not.
Ah, thank you! Definitely filler art then. (Which is mildly weird; if you're working on the Magic game, then one thing you're not short of is art assets!)
That's what I assumed, but I was intrigued by the possibility that it was a draft cover, and what that implied about the content.
I have a followup question.
... is that guy on the cover holding a gun?
SPUD
A photo of copies of the Collins paperbacks of Mythago Wood, Lavondyss and The Hollowing by Robert Holdstock. The cover art on Mythago Wood is by Peter Goodfellow, on the others by Geoff Taylor.
"Each dawn, since the hollyjack had come to the cathedral bringing her strange dreams, the boy had started to think of waking as the opening of petals, or a form of budding."
It's time to face the music
It's time for searing light
It's time for all things ending on the Muppet show tonight
It's time to dig a bunker
it's time to bemoan our plight
It's time to drop the curtain on the Muppet show tonight
How did we ever get here?
Oh we all truly know
They elected Muppets...
Just came across this line about a review of Eliott that also applies here. “Readers were told they would benefit from a dictionary, an encyclopaedia and a martyr’s spirit.”
I don't know if you can still get the paper rolls, but you can get guns with stupid rings of stupid caps and when your kids go through a Wild West phase and buy a million of them you find the stupid rings everywhere and they hurt when you step on them in the dark.
No, but if you also join the Shield of the Americas you get a 10% discount on green fees at Mar-a-Lago.
Watching a retro games video yesterday, and I caught a glimpse of the ABC figures for Amstrad Computer User.
The second-best magazine for the third-biggest microcomputer was selling… 63,000 copies per month. In the UK.
Incredible to think about how publishing has changed.
Hopefully some of this will be scaffolding and I can strip it out; at the same time I’m interested in scaffolding and how things arise even if they’re not totally germane to the story
This is an excellent rule for storytelling but also implies that Philip Pullman witnessed the death of God as a boy.
Who's at the top of the thread, eh? Who cast the first post?
Q: What can you write easily?
A: 1000 words on the economic and cultural ramifications of wizards.
Q: What do you struggle with?
A: Characters talking to each other.
Q: What did you just write?
A: 1000 words of wizard nonsense.
Q: What were you supposed to write?
A: Not wizard nonsense.
