i think I despise genAI because art is one of the things that has kept me alive and breathing and genAI is yet another way for capital to pervert art and stop us from connecting with each other

So an odd thing here is that if you say "an unidentified man dressed in a Batman costume" your point is to communicate "it is not really Batman" but the problem is that the real Batman, within the fiction of the comic book "Batman", is also, literally, an unidentified man dressed in a Batman costume

Toucant Blog: a Rich Man’s Game toucant.bearblog.dev/nine-to-five... This post began as a silly pitch for a dice resolution system, but over the past few days turned into an exploration of using core mechanics to inform a TTRPG setting #GameDesign #ElfGame #OSR #TTRPG

A very silly conversation this morning put a brain worm in my head, so I'm making it your problem. tbr.bearblog.dev/ballroom-bli...

Dredge Quick and Drown is a project written as a joke attempt at recreating the OSR from first principles. It has unsprisingly failed to do that but I'm very happy with whats come out of it. Enjoy Design Diary #1: covering stats, checks, skills. and equipment. thegardenbelow.blot.im/dq-d-design-...

Kermit is practicing his forms

Man, it’s wild that normal people just go to work every day while the people who run everything meticulously document their sex crimes

The latest from Anthropic: using Anthropic's products makes you worse at your job

A very silly conversation this morning put a brain worm in my head, so I'm making it your problem. tbr.bearblog.dev/ballroom-bli...

New Blogpost: Speedily write encounter tables by making a simple food chain network. bommyknocker.bearblog.dev/write-encoun... #osr #ttrpg #blog

Inspired by brilliant card fanatic @69dinguses.bsky.social, how about the Dungeon Deck: darker reactions as you go down… dreamshrike.blogspot.com/2026/01/hung...

Couldn't let Velocitree have all the fun, here's a remix of their post using a deck of cards tbr.bearblog.dev/overloaded-r...

I have been writing this blogpost for months to share my personal perspective and insight to the Indonesian Tabletop RPG scene. Check it out! afraidofencounters.bearblog.dev/afraid-of-co...

In my latest blog post, I give thee A Tactile Technique for Tracking Time in TTRPGs! Do with it as you will ⏰ (It can also track other stuff; I talk about it in the post) #osr #ttrpg

They left a great, wide wake, as though continually unrolling a great wide parchment upon the sea.

"this soda has 7 grams of protein" and this earth has fallen into irreversible corruption

I got paid (not much) to write a MUD, which involved a whole bunch of research and tact, and then diving in headfirst to start designing a masquerade ball for a bunch of my friends to enjoy. It'll likely never run, but, I designed a cool duelling system for it! tangentjoy.blot.im/masqueraded-...

Spent the last two days rethinking my approach to my 18th century survey game and found some inspiration in Vincent Baker's PBTA blog series! tbr.bearblog.dev/surveying-to... tbr.bearblog.dev/surveyed-by-...

What if I change Landmark, Hidden, Secret to use for character knowledge? idk! elmc.at/common-recal...

A blog post that is nearly 3 years in the making, one of my longest posts, and a treatise of dungeon design advice that is disguised as a review of an old module. Patreons get to see it about a month or two early #osr #ttrpg

I have donated an amount equivalent to the revenue I have received from Chain×Link to the Minnesota Immigrant Rapid Response Fund. This growing cruelty must be stopped.

WHO BROUGHT IT HERE THOMAS

Overloaded reaction rolls are good fun: dreamshrike.blogspot.com/2026/01/over...

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step. 1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish. 2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

I have been thinking a lot about pacing in sandbox games and how much leverage the GM should apply. I brought the topic up in the Prismatic Wasteland discord to hear other GMs' opinions and got some really fascinating insights! www.thenovelgamemaster.com/2026/01/paci...

What’s funny about the Oscar race this year is the CHUDs are mad at One Battle After Another because it’s “woke” and makes fun of white supremacists but they can’t derail it from winning everything because then the big winner would be SINNERS which is woker and makes more fun of white supremacists

heads up

we will greet them as liberators

Wanted to throw my hat into the ring with a functional analysis of treasure in #osr and adjacent games tbr.bearblog.dev/on-the-natur...

so a movie called 'SINNERS' gets 16 oscar nominations while a movie called 'FRIENDSHIP' gets none. trump's america

im not a christian but i am a type of christian (american lawyer). i think moral philosophy needs to play a part. i think cultural expectations and standards are probably good to have. stated ideals. this sort of thing. the longstanding moral rot of our elites is a problem! i think that matters

the tension between the "this is not who we are" set vs the "this is exactly who we are" set (tabling the "who do you mean we" thing for now) i do think misses out on the "who we pretend to be" angle. i do think it's probably at least somewhat bad that we've completely stopped pretending

Found the world's greatest clipart for my new blogpost. The bottom line: rolling 2d6 with advantage or disadvantage can give your weather tables a functional memory. bommyknocker.bearblog.dev/lightweight-...

(scrolling Bluesky) I reject the premise. I reject the premise. Granted. I reject the premise. Not my fetish. Granted. I reject the premise. Funny. I reject the premise.

no other nation has ever had any written whaling law, yet the American fishermen have been their own legislators and lawyers in this matter

Lord I've seen what you've done for others

New Review - The Electrum Archive! Checking in on the Dungeon Boys again. They are, as usual, getting up to strange tomfoolery. www.valerialoves.com/the-electrum...

In tabletop rpg design, sometimes gameplay doesn't come from the mechanics we add, but the ones we omit. www.explorersdesign.com/dominant-mec...

What if creating maps was done through letter writing? I give you....Epistle Maps. Frist write-up of my first system :) theplayreports.com/posts/epistl...

There's a lot of good discussion of randomness in tabletop, so I wanted to be a real sicko and talk about how to model random engineering processes with dice tbr.bearblog.dev/reliability-...

MISC/LOVE2.GIF

GREATURES RETURNS NEXT WEEK greatures.com

Interviewer: so, what makes you want to be a court jester Me: what? no, I applied for the treacherous butler position (Everybody laughs) Interviewer: you're hired

It's been a bit! NULL_SPACE is coming out in 🚨 three weeks 🚨 so let's get into how one of the core interesting mechanical ideas, Complex Challenges, works. 🧵

A tale of playtesting and how you don’t really know what mechanics work until you bring ones that don’t work to your table, maybe more than once

[guy who can’t fully remember that Gramsci quote] it’s Monster Time

If your TTRPG uses a deck of playing cards and want a nice question oracle format, I've got you covered. The odds of that thing are super satisfying!

New free post up! A simpler yet more open-ended way of handling conditions in Mausritter-like systems, or any system with a character sheet. I'm genuinely excited to experiment more with this one.