Here's a random GMing thing: when the group needs to talk with someone, look for a natural countdown and anchor the scene off of it. The florist only has time to talk while he prepares the bouquet. As the convo goes on, keep coming back to him working and being closer and closer to finishing.

This essay took Doyle two years to write and the result - about war, about being a soldier in your mind - is worth every minute. jude-doyle.ghost.io/the-rat/

Tattooing ‘throw away the genre emulation’ onto the inside of my skull. Good shit from @sandroad.moe. www.failforward.moe/2026/03/i...

A bonobo’s pretend tea party suggests that imagination predates humans. A study in Science shows that Kanzi, a 43-year-old bonobo, could track imaginary juice and grapes in during a tea party, reliably distinguishing pretend from real objects. buff.ly/7ysy0fq #ShareGoodNewsToo

New blog, for the first time in months. I wrote about the source of the joy I find in drama-focused gaming, using a response to Sorensen’s Three Question Taxonomy as the scaffolding. Enjoy! My blog: afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/blog/joy/ Sorensen’s: samsorensen.blot.im/sams-thre...

Podcasting is what happens when you industrialise the Shakespearean jester.

Listen to @mealofthorns.bsky.social

Feel pretty sure Storm of Wings is the bleakest Harrison book. Expanding his motif of a momentary impossibility of communication into a constant cosmic reality is an act of some awesome pessimism. Eden Kupermintz is right about scale.

overcast.fm/+ABDNpY3yI14 Listening to this Strange Horizons pod on book clubs, and chiming with the value of a book club being a space for discussion where, uniquely, a book does not have to preemptively justify its presence through what it may contain. Its import derives from my friend’s interest.

I say this with real sincerity: While I think we've pulled certain parts of The Train to the forefront with our take on Sangfielle, moving them towards Horror Entitites actually makes them much, much less powerful and scary than they are (and especially were) in the real world.

Been thinking about @explorersdesign.bsky.social's recent post ("Against Dominant Mechanics") and what we can strip away to maximize the RPG experience. Yes, there's a backhoe in this.

It is wild, reading MJ Harrison’s Pastel City after having read Climbers and Course of the Heart, how “he” is in there - particularly in a classic M John refusal to speak - and also how the fantasy is a wall between “him” and me.

I submitted one post for the Bloggies, in the reviews category. It's a review I wrote of All That You Know, an actual play podcast, and how it as a low-documentary actual play communicates its images despite my inevitably wandering attention.

Harrow’s The Everlasting absolutely rules, goddamn what a book

Gary Larson: In my cartoon I invented Cow Tools as a cautionary tale Cows: At long last, we have created the Cow Tools from classic newspaper comic Cow Tools

I really liked B. Catling's The Vorrh, and also, I plan to pass it back into charity book circulation. I kind of wish I could cut the Muybridge storyline out of it as its own thing. Perhaps that would diminish the effect, but, with Ishmael et al. even as I enjoyed reading, reading felt like wading.

Not only does this blog’s topic relate closely to what I want to do with my in-progress game - short version: what if BitD Scores were made of relationships - but also tasker.land’s grounding of theory in TTRPG history, enriches that theory significantly. tasker.land/2026/01/22/maps-m...

Cool game idea by @Bakenshake! Can see myself having a fun time with this. theplayreports.com/posts/epis...

Six warmups for TTRPGs (mostly from improv): 1. Indigo Montoya Each player creates an introduction for their character in the style of Inigo Montoya, as if it were directed at their main motivator - Greeting, Name, Personal Connection, Action To Be Expected.

The constant delight of the TTRPG blogosphere is finding essays that express points you have been edging towards for ages, with far more sophistication and thoroughness than you could ever have managed. This is one of those essays (HT Patchwork Paladin). lichvanwinkle.blogspot.com/20...

Immediate Bloggies addition. In full agreement about laws - they’re in my game and now so is this. Determined to show the thing. Fascinated by where the chain of argument ends. wasitlikely.blogspot.com/2025...

Fucking hell this review is good. tasker.land/2026/01/08/on-at-...

god help me someone asked what i'm looking for in short fiction. how do i say: horror but not like that, questions without answers, short, and fucking weird. the thing that makes good short fiction to me is that the final act of the story is in your head, not on the page

please fund my startup which provides political advisory services. yeah it's called Wormtongue.

So amped for this. Really diving into TTRPG blogs was one of the best things I did in 2025, and can't wait to see what more there is to read!

It's counterintuitive, because there's a generation that's accustomed to James Cameron being the interior decorator of their inner landscape. But with this series he just... did not do that. They make a ton of money and have zero fandom, and that's no different from a lot of other successful series.

I mean, is there any question about the world about which our uncertainty is lower as a result of the estimate? Is there any sense in which the results are added to the general stock of human knowledge?

I'd missed this until the indie RPG newsletter linked to it - Cannibal Halfling writes on the OSR onion structure and compares and contrasts how you can view Burning Wheel and DIE RPG's structure tweaking the layers, both putting character at the centre. Er... that's not the best paraphrase.

#BlogsOfTheWeek 1. 'Three decades ago, most extremely poor people lived in Asia; today, most are in Sub-Saharan Africa. In the coming years, this trend is expected to continue.' Max Roser ourworldindata.org/end-progress...

#BlogsOfTheWeek 1. 'John Gerard’s 1597 botanical reference book explains that the [horsetail] plant’s roughness "is not unknowen to women, who scowre their pewter and wooden things of the kitchen therewith".' Erin Braid. tinyurl.com/dcrjv8zv

#BlogsOfTheWeek 1. "To start, I want to pull on some threads from the incident two weeks ago, when I—and many Palestinians—came very close to being lynched by a mob of Israeli settlers." (Jasper Diamond Nathaniel) infinitejaz.substack.com/p/a-lynch-mo...

Offhand reaction to post below - creeping nationalisation of elections is also a problem in the UK, because the nation in question is the United States. www.gelliottmorris.com/p/demo...

The Prisoner's Dilemma by @brendanmcleod.com and @matthewguz.bsky.social is really great, a podcast with material limitations but that doesn't cut corners, much like its subject.

I have written a guest-post for Adam Kotsko's "Late Star Trek" blog, on a bizarre Deep Space 9 episode. latestartrek.substack.com/p/resurrecti...

#BlogsOfTheWeek 1. '...inasmuch as so many people have said that a roleplaying game is, at its heart, a conversation, I do think that the way we “talk” at the table has larger ramifications for the whole game.' (Patchwork Paladin) patchworkpaladin.com/2025/10/29/c...

with the release of Outer Worlds 2 - now thoroughly sick of the omnipresent "Fuck Capitalism" story: loose, toothless, mugging at the camera with no specificity or intent. it has gone the way of "be gay, do crimes"

A thread of quotes from the online Samuel Delany interview on Triton that I found interesting, made ahead of book club.

Given how self-abnegating a lot of GM-ing is, we probably owe ourselves a little onanism

I've been loving this series on Backwards Tabletop about books and their presence in play, while also feeling strangely at a distance from the project. Which is cool! I don't need to be included. But I wanted to know why I felt apart. www.backwardstabletop.com/liz...

I have a blog waiting to be fully written about why Sean McTiernan is the world’s best podcaster, but perhaps I could save my time and just post this image he sent out on Patreon

Just about landing within my self-imposed deadline, I have posted a new blog: afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/blog/all-tha.... It's about All That You Know (@allthatyouknow.com) an actual play that just returned from hiatus, and I'm very happy to be listening to again. CW: body horror, gross descriptions

Today I fully restructured the rulebook for Other Side Station, tossing out old and extraneous rules, and making room for new (and more necessary) thoughts.

guy who's only seen 'boss baby' meeting a real baby: there's a few things here I wasn't expecting

they're calling her "the coolest person who has ever been alive"

In fact, Labour to Reform voters on average see themselves as less right-wing than other Reform voters, while also not sharing those voters’ view that Labour is a very left-wing party. They’re also a little less enthusiastic than other Reformers for the party or Farage.

Incredible chart here. The cross-voter opposition to spending cuts, matched by an ideological split on wealth redistribution, a recipe for our current paralysis. The vehemence of opposition to immigration on the right, and the lukewarm "ah lads do we have to be bothered about this" left sentiment.

Ok now, this blog is good. I suppose I think they're all good, otherwise I wouldn't post them (or at least bad in an interesting way) but this one is **good**. Five years into consistent roleplaying and I feel I have grasped what it is I've been doing. afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/blog/common-...

an interesting challenge i sometimes run up against is the tension between the anti-canon quality of RPG as game-objects and the benefits of a single consistent visual style / canonical set of appearances in a game-book

I wrote a blog about how games are made of speech not writing, and what that means for GMing. afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/blog/games-a...

This here: GM Kayfabe is a whole, extensive thing, to the point that some games ought to address it way more directly.