Made the beginnings of an OD&D variant thing. It hasn't been playtested yet, but I'm happy with the way its shaping up www.imaginaryhistory.org/scribblesand...

Will Barnet (American, 1911–2012) "Chess Game", 1973. Oil on Canvas, 43 1/4 × 33 inches. Private Collection. #art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

Finished Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy and it may be the best book I’ve read published in the last 10 years. Slippery perspective and time/place shifts yet note-precise prose, magical realist satire that does a better job of summarizing the absurdity of life rn than anything else I’ve yet read

L. Birge Harrison (American, 1854–1929). Frosty Morning.

should revisit Microscope's voting system during scenes. I think I will find it distressing.

I feel like I am sympathetic in theory to the idea of a PBtA--I really like the idea of "moves". But it seems like many of the moves in PBtA are the most boring mechanical implementation possible? (Roll a die to reach a target number) Why should I bother? Happy to be refuted.

Ilya Kabakov Untitled, Colored pencil on paper MoMA

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossa... Will Crowther's 1976 Colossal Cave Adventure, the OG text adventure game. He was an avid caver, he and his wife hung out all the time in the Mammoth Cave of Kentucky, doing surveys of it and exploring it and doing pretty much the first computer-assisted cave maps

Jeremy Miranda (American, b.1980) "Valley Nocturne / Late January," 2026 Acrylic on board 11.5 x 14 in #Art

The only true OSR game is The Realm of Yolmi.

The more I read, the more I think OSR is a complete misnomer. A kind of taxinomical waste bin that is either so broad as to be a useless analytical tool; or so narrow as to be misapplied to works that are at best iterative, but not in any way revivalist.

Paul Nash, 1913. “A Drawing.” #drawing #penandink #watercolor #crayon #pencil #chalk #1910s #PaulNash

Weight being measured in coins and all coins weighing the same really reinforces my belief that early DND images gold as a kind of naturally growing... Thing. Part fungus, part mineral

Every RPG is a one-page RPG if you only read one page of it

I made a blog post about a dungeon map I'm retiring from my underworld: www.imaginaryhistory.org/scribblesand...

hyperfixation project is going well

#MaxErnst, Young Man Intrigued by the Flight of a Non-Euclidean Fly #art #painting #Ernst

I made this drawing when I was fourteen

My dreams of a Nomic - D&D hybrid are closer than I thought.

This discussion of OSR is really interesting, there are lots of good points, but I'm intrigued by this insistence that "game design on the fly" is inherently improper or outside of the story of the game being played. Nomic is a game where the whole story of the game is "game design." Why not rpgs?

Mechanics are these amazing little mental machines - little bits of text that run in your brain and use random numbers or tokens or points or whatever to generate story. They are NOT the enemy! They're your lever, your wrench, your fulcrum, your inclined plane, everything you need to tell a story!

this is what incenses me, like, please...fuckin...play literally any other game I am begging you osr types i call the osr a mind virus created by satan to destroy TTRPGs as an art form and I'm not joking, it has destroyed one or two generations of talent completely

I enjoy that the reason there are so many random castles in the wilderness in OD&D is for tax avoidance

I enjoy the deterministic procedures in OD&D, something that has been lost in favour of stochastic elements. Knowing that a wizard will put a geas on a party if they can't pay up gives a heap of concrete info about how the game world operates

does anyone else hate making maps for dnd? I Especially hate making dungeon maps, shit is fucking MISERABLY boring and also really difficult

We're making dungeon poems now y'all. Just the barest hint of dungeon with no maps or tables, sorry, but also not sorry. charvus.itch.io/shining-stat... It's a pocketmod, it's pages for screen-viewing, it makes sense? No scratch that last one. There is birdsong down there in the Earth.

This Bsky account exists solely to proselytize about Nomic to TTRPG folk.