thinking about how I would run a Cataphracts-style megagame but for interagency espionage... right now i'm imagining that players take the role of Directors, Analysts, and Agents. Analysts produce Intelligence, that, if acted upon, gives some quantifiable bonus to the agency. Agents do the legwork

The Furious was really, really good. Not quite at the level of the Raid 2 for me, but there was so much in there that I had never seen before, kickass film

The Vast of Night is one of the best science fiction movies of the past decade, I think about it often!

I think Widow's Bay would make a great hexcrawl for a TTRPG

I appreciate this as it gets into the Punisher's comics history a little more than I was able to, but comes to pretty much my same conclusion in my review, that this was a regressive and reactionary special that intentionally counters Daredevil's radical premise danielhawkins.site/punisher-one...

And yesterday's painting study! Not quite as happy with it, but this was the first time I tried to really get into the fine details, so it was a great learning experience

Hidden Gem is the most fun card in Slay the Spire 2 by a mile

yesterday's ~3-hour painting study, reference by @trueref.bsky.social! I think this was my FIRST "finished" oil portrait, so despite all the anatomy problems I'm pretty happy with how I'm improving as a beginning painter

Radagast the Wizard has died of the hantavirus

I had such a negative reaction to #ThePunisherOneLastKill that I immediately wrote a 2,000 word review of it, please read, share, and enjoy! danielhawkins.site/punisher-one...

Wow, Punisher: One Last Kill was utterly hideous, a haphazard and incoherent regression for the character wrapped in boring, borrowed action cliches predicated wholly on a conservative-news brained hallucination of urban terror. Everything about it reminded me of something better

the math gets corrected later on in the thread, but this still illuminates something useful about how a lot of games are designed, which is that the rules themselves are often designed to be, effectively, a work of fiction that must be understood emotionally but not literally ...

Some discussion in here about Draw Steel tables or players or cultures of play that prefer to not kill the bad guys in their games -- whatever, that's not really the point that I was making. Of course people play games differently table-by-table, that's all of RPGs!

Anyway, I also really enjoyed the Quinns Quest video on Stonetop and his bit about games that feature violence versus games that are about killing, and his placement of Draw Steel in the latter category -- something to think about while I work on a game that uses DS' system, since I share his view

I’m so tired.

Thinking about this a lot as I work on my TTRPG which has, among many others, Mass Effect as a core inspiration. How to center players in a military sci-fi story *without* tipping it towards a fascist aesthetic or perspective is a greater challenge than any single mechanic

I'm looking up some information about crew complements for different sized vessels for my game TUNGSTEN ROUNDS, and this article just references a 40k ship as if it were a real vessel, completely credulous of the claim that some frigates have 130 crew members, others have 26,000 and are a mile long

nothing better than sitting down and coming up with a d50 list of Starship backstories

I have built my abode upon the Intermediate Plateau and I shall never leave

Playtest went really well! Lots of work to do to get even just the tested material right, but I think the bones of my game are solid and its headed in the right direction. Unfortunately I do have to say farewell to my original plan, "design the whole game perfectly in one go, page by page"

Running the first playtest session of my action-sci-fi game TUNGSTEN ROUNDS tonight, powered by Draw Steel (Drawn in Steel?) Can't wait, I think I got the bones of exactly the game I've been dreaming of for a long time now

one of the best decisions I made when running Star Trek Adventures last year was to toss out 100% of the rules for the episode that the crew were sent to the Mirror Universe. Space Lightning struck the ship and they were zapped into the MU as poltergeist-style invisible spirits.

REALIS, the science fantasy TTRPG I’ve been working on for the last five years, is now live on Kickstarter! 55 Player Classes 150+ NPC Classes 29 Factions 20 Example Moons of Realis GMing and Prep Guidance Over 100 incredible illustrations from 17 artists! www.kickstarter.com/projects/cru...

Essential part of writing sci-fi and fantasy is typing every new Proper Fantasy Noun into Wikipedia so you don't accidentally name something dumb

it's Cataphracts Design Diary #5! this one has a link to the official unofficial Cataphracts HQ Discord server (link below), as well as rules update v1.2, and a big old list of all the cool posts people other than me are making about Cataphracts! samsorensen.blot.im/cataphracts-...

imagine wanting an animated firefly when you can just watch legends of the glactic heroes

I literally said this in my essay, "Her in the Age of AI" danielhawkins.site/her-in-the-a...

I would have done the "9 Games" thing earlier but I legitimately didn't realize that it was a site you could go to, I really thought that everyone was just photoshopping identical images and was like "well I can't be bothered to do all that"

pitched some friends on a game of Traveller so I spent a whole weekend rolling up this entire sector using the Mongoose 2e rules

now that I'm done writing the Thousand Crowns campaign report, I can get back to doing research for my sci-fi game

my hunger strike, meant to last until we got an immersive sim dungeon crawler, has left me as a desiccated, restless skeleton... perfect for an immersive sim dungeon crawler

Finally finished the campaign report for my game of Cataphracts by @samsorensen.bsky.social that I ran for 6 months last year! 131 pages long, please enjoy! danielhawkins.site/campaign-rep...

RPGs are about creating stories with your friends and the emotional vulnerability of sharing a table... and they're also about pages of tables showing minute differences in damage types and ranges of different types of pole arm

Nearly done with my Cataphracts campaign report....

this is one of the best streams of all time (because I won a t-shirt giveaway during it)

was inspired by work of @priscillapage.bsky.social to do some long-form writing about film, and so I have inaugurated the blog section of my website with this essay on one of my all-time favorite films, HER, and revisiting it in an era of predatory AI danielhawkins.site/her-in-the-a...

TTRPG hot take: RPGs should have complexity estimates like board games do, along with estimates for how much time its expected the GM has to prep before a four hour session

been here pseudonymously for a bit -- don't love it but there's enough I want to put out there with my name attached, so, hello!