Paul Musgrave's comment that "Substack is like if the Ferengi had invented “humanities”" remains undefeated.

there's another episode of DEAD LETTERS out today! this one is about the GLOG, the Goblin Laws of Gaming, the biggest, weirdest, and coolest branch of the OSR. we cover blogging, 3.5, bizarro skill systems, Delta templates, and more. give it a listen! open.spotify.com/episode/60GT...

or, tbh, a lot of mainstream actual play, in which what is primary is the narrative they are sculpting away from the table. fiction-backwards: deriving the present from the past. fiction-forwards: considering all emergent possibilities from this present moment of gameplay & choosing one. then

the campaign to that arc. fiction-backwards & fiction-forwards are still fundamentally about emergent narrative, it’s just a question of what direction you look for that emergence. they are, at least in the ways that matter to me, more alike with each other than they are with play cultures where

Pacing my house back and forth on repeat because I just finished James Ellroy’s White Jazz while drinking an instant coffee, and now my mind feels like sweaty dynamite

I really enjoyed the Quinns’ Quest review of Stonetop. It celebrates what is good about the game, and also helped me to see some mistakes I made running it, that if I hadn’t made, would have made my game way better. AND ALSO…

ChatGPT mentat

I wrote a blog to condense all the fantastic TTRPG blogosphere GM advice I’ve read into something I could easily consult and use. Maybe it’ll be useful for you too! afcbrodie.mataroa.blog/blog/s...

15 MPs each submitting 1,000 or more written questions over the course of a single year screams AI to me.

I feel called out ... but also <_<

The daemons from His Dark Materials are their souls! It's a story you dipshits!! The idea is their souls live physically outside them!!! If you believe in souls in this world, good news: it doesn't have to a Pikachu to talk to it because it's already you!!!! You're souling right now motherfucker!!!!

Finished Zoha Waseem’s Insecure Guardians, an ethnography of police in Karachi, Pakistan. It is a feat, a level of access to and therefore insight into police corruption I would not have thought possible. The observation below in particular has been ringing in my head since I read it.

Having just read ‘The Machine in Shaft Ten’ I can see why MJ Harrison got annoyed at the reception of ‘Very Afraid’. Kinda feels like a ‘Triton’ & ‘Reading the Dispossessed’ situation. The story and the essay emerge from the same ground, but the story does so much more.

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.