Personable Thoughts

This month, for the Quinns Quest book club, I have been reading Girl Frame, the toxic yuri mech game by Isabelle Ruebsaat.

I was having a discussion on the Prismatic Wasteland Discord about RPGs as "gamey games" vs "storytelling".[^1] Once again, I am reminded of a particular deficiency in the English language when discussing games.

The locals say that a Man lives deep in the forest, unlike any of the village.

I have read another book, and return to blog about it.

I have once again been reading a Mark of the Odd game, that is, a game descended from Chris McDowall's Into the Odd.

As mentioned in a previous post, I played a lot of Baseline Drift.

Back at the end of May, I decided to once again join the blogwagon hosted by Mr.

Over in the Prismatic Wasteland Discord server, we have recently been discussing the play culture of fifth edition Dungeons and Dragons.

Some time ago, the pink bird over at Prismatic Wasteland called for a blog bandwagon on the topic of maps (check the rootring to keep track of any ongoing bandwagons).

As the time of writing, it is currently Orbital Blues Month over on BackerKit, and I thought this would be as good a reason as any to finally collect my thoughts on the system in a little review.

I love a good manifesto, and so I thoroughly enjoyed reading The Literalist Gaming Manifesto from Unboxed Cereal.

I'm currently in the process of preparing for a Play-by-Post game of Luke Gearing's Wolves Upon the Coast.

Recently, JD Clément wrote a blog post over on The National Centre for Tabletop Games entitled Against Abstraction, Or, Tags Are A Mind Virus, a provocative title if I ever saw one.

Wolves Upon the Coast is a game in the category 'viking age games set Fantastic Britain with wolf in the title', sharing this genre with Wulfwald and Wolves of God, and surely others.

Tabletop games are played by humans with humans (sometimes just by a human with themself).

Kingdoms is a game by Sophia Tinney, available in print and PDF from her Gumroad page.

Once again, I light my imaginary pipe and lean back into my proverbial armchair to do some outsider analysis.

As 2025 has come to an end, I have now been blogging a bit over a year, so it's maybe time to look back on what happened in 2025, as well as some thoughts on what I would like 2026 to be like.

After a year and a bit over on Blogger with my store-brand Blogspot domain, I decided to invest in a proper domain name and set it up.

I have recently been playing a lot of Over/Under (and hence not been writing any blog posts), and I was recently asked to provide my services procuring a selection of nasty drinks for a competition (and in the game).

We're bandwagoning a again, this time on the suggestion of kick ass blogger Marcia B, the Appendicitis N blogwagon!

The Ennie awards have just been awarded for another years, and as is tradition, this means that there has been a load of chatter about award shows and their merits.

The fruitful void, whitespace, rules-lite, et cetera.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a destitute adventurer, in possession of a sharp blade, must be in want of a hole.

After two iterations of the age of Industry, and once in the age of electricity, Chris McDowall, AKA Mr.

This week, I did something that is probably rarer than it should be in the tabletop RPG sphere: I ended a campaign, rather than let it fizzle out or changing tracks and leaving it hanging.

Once again, I am stretching the definition of "big book", firstly because the Cairn 2e books are not that big, at least compared to chonkers like His Majesty the Worm or The Hidden Isle, and secondly, because I am actually looking at TWO books: the Player…

The Pope is deader than the OSR, and we're posting through it.

Like all good recipe bloggers, I have added a big preamble about why I wrote this, and my thoughts on Cairn 2e backgrounds.

In a confluence of events, I ran my first session of Mothership this week, after having played it most weeks for the last six months or so, coinciding with the Paul Beakley of Indie Game Reading Club posting his review of the game.

Inspired by a discussion in the RTFM Discord, I have decided to write up some thoughts on how the properties of a modern "roguelike" video game could be adapted to a tabletop RPG.

Recently, there has been discourse on the social medias about the prices we pay (or perhaps rather, do not pay) for our RPG PDFs, including the thread by Chris Bissette of LootTheRoom, and a sternly worded blogpost from Ramona of Alderdoodle.

As has been established by the big pink bird over at Prismatic Wasteland, 2025 Is the Year of the Beta.

Hot on the heels of my previous review (of the down and dirty game of criminals, Swyvers) comes another look at an even bigger book!

Once again I have read a book.

It's no secret that I kind of like the bones of the 5e skill system, even if that implementation is flawed.

A recurring element of many role playing games is crafting systems, whether for alchemy and magic, or more mundane pursuits.

Another year passes, another set of Bloggies is awarded.

Bear with me folks, I'm going to do a discourse.

While calling Infærnum a big book is perhaps a stretch, the lavish 192 page hardback is certainly not a zine, and these are obviously the only two categories of book and thus it must be a big one.

Christmas has come, and is well on its way to going, as I write this.

A common type of resolution mechanic in tabletop role playing games is the skill check - often resolved with comparing the value of a dice role plus a skill bonus to a target number ( E.g. difficulty class/DC, actual terminology may differ).

This December, I am participating in the Covert Critic blogging extravaganza, as celebrated by the bloggers nesting in the Prismatic Wasteland Discord server, inspired by Clayton Notestine's 2024 Gifts for RPG Designers.

It is said that no plan survives contact with reality, and I find that the same is often true of RPG rulesets.

One of the staples of old school play is gold for XP.

I finally found the time to read Nova's post on hyperdiegesis, which, among other things, has taught me a new word.

One of the accepted wisdoms in the OSR (as codified in e.g. the Principia Apocrypha), as well at the NSR (as defined by Yochai Gal or Pandatheist) is that lethality is good, and a core component of OSR/NSR play, because it means that player choice has real

Having read through another Big Book, I am here to offer my thoughts my thoughts once again.

It's Mothership month, and that's as good a kick in the backside as any to finally get around to reading Cloud Empress.

import { YouTube } from 'astro-embed'; Role playing games and music have been entwined for a long time, in many different ways.