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.

LeGuin wrote a utopian story about a guy who’s socially alienated because he’s a genius, and Delany wrote one about a guy who’s alienated because he’s a prick, and all I’m saying is guess which one the readership likes more

I have gotten to the point in Triton where Bron takes The Spike out to dinner, and I’m sorry, this is just a British sitcom now

Latest ITV BarnCymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 poll confirms trend seen over last 6 months - neck and neck race between Plaid Cymru and Reform UK for largest party, with Labour falling to even more distant third. Evidence growing of distinct realignment in Wales 🧵

For this week’s blog I decided to extricate a bee from my bonnet, that often gets to buzzing when I see TTRPG people start talking about ‘stories’: afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/blog/a...

The truly bizarre thing about the Ezra Klein interview with Ben Shapiro is that it is billed as ‘we are going to have to live here with each other’ and then 90 minutes in, it turns out Shapiro does not want to do that at all!

Like everyone in TTRPG blogging atm, I have been inspired by @jdragsky.bsky.social's expressionist manifesto to think about rules and what they can do for us. afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/blog/w...

Research projects I will never have time to do but wish I did: the sources and spread of the capitalist critique of imperial corporate government.

Well then, let’s see if this most miniscule of efforts is sustainable as a weekly blog

Writing a GM section is hard. So instead I wrote down every role I could imagine that a GM might play and instructed the reader to kind of figure it out themselves as they go

this is, arguably, the sweetest story i've ever written. i've also never had a story called "disgusting" as many times as this one has been. which is, y'know, probably due to the whole "35 million ticks" and "nipple piercing body horror" stuff, but hey!

I found Idle Cartulary’s blog encouraging the reader to design open-ended challenges by making sure that they can be solved with each of the three Cs (combat, communication, cunning) really useful. idlecartulary.com/2024/03/15/...

if youre going to be simulationist give me the gravitational constant and periodic table of your stupid made up world anything with less fidelity is narrativist bullshit

I think when we look back on RPGs, the continued communication gap between people who want their games to be about overcoming challenge and people who don't care about challenge in that way will be really embarrassing.

The hardest thing about GM-ing is knowing that the best time to update your unseen iceberg of note-documents with all the events that happened in-session would be right after it ends, and also knowing that you will never ever do that

24. ‘And no-one shall buy anything over four pence in value, either livestock or other property, unless he have four men as trustworthy witnesses, whether [the purchase be made] within a town or in the open country’ #medievalsky #law

Can I get a "speeding up production behind a bottleneck can't increase overall output, although it can reduce it"? Did Eliyahu Goldratt die in vain? (Did he die at all?)