Some vanity searching revealed someone recommending my unofficial Turnip 28 rpg (yay). And describing it as "Mörk Borg-inspired" (absofuckinglutely not).

And two smaller #Turnip28 buildings with just their tops still showing above the mud.

#Turnip28 buildings painted! Wet sinking messes, but hopefully deliberate-looking.

Still painting up my #turnip28 houses, but in the meantime I made some barricades. Haven't decided what to fill the gabion baskets with yet - sand? Tubers?. Since the picture I've added more homemade tufts to help blend the roots in better. The gravestone one came out nicely.

Well Alien: Earth didn't have much of an ending now did it.

having an absolute ball making Turnip 28 terrain.

One day I will show something off without apologising for it. But not today!

Finished my kitbashed/scratchbuilt "virtual boys" today. I 100% did not have the talent necessary to pull of the colour scheme I chose, but they're OK at tabletop distance.

Sarah Gailey - The Echo Wife Scientist finds her husband left her for her clone. Walks that fine line between cloning as plot device vs seriously considered scientific endeavour so we're not distracted from the emotionally harrowing plot. It's very important that we be harrowed.

Sometimes writing in my own voice means conveying important setting material through sarcasm.

Grace Curtis - Floating Hotel Mystery in a luxurious space hotel. Fantastic character sketches, sense of place and rewarding finale. Especially enjoyed how much it trusted the reader and had the courage to leave important things unsaid.

T Kingfisher - Hemlock & Silver A grounded poisons expert is press-ganged into investigating an impossible poisoning. Ursula Vernon has never written a novel that wasn't worth my time. Romance seemed a bit abrupt, but perhaps I was just too fixated on all of the everything else to notice.

AE Marling - Murder in the Tool Library Solarpunk murder mystery. Kept expecting a twist that never came. But fun depiction of distributed citizen response to murder, warts and all. Liked how many caustic weirdos there were even in a post-capitalist utopia, which may have been the point.

Roger Zelazny - My Name is Legion Oldschool hypercompetent engineer in episodic investigations. Surprisingly straightforward for a Zelazny. Mostly interesting for its low-key and naive depiction of a surveillance state.

Catherynne M. Valente - Space Oddity The joy of an unexpected sequel to a book I loved. What do you do after winning space Eurovision? This one wore its Douglas Adams influence on its sleeve even more. Sometimes I got lost in the tangents but it always pulled me back.

Django Wexler - Everybody Wants to Rule the World Except Me This was fine. Some fun new characters & closure. At the end of the day the premise was always promising a Big Answers climactic ending but I'm not sure that's what the story wanted.

Django Wexler - How to Become the Dark Lord and Die Trying Horny time loop "comedy" fantasy isekai. Very not my favourite genre combo and the protagonist was obnoxiously flippant rather than funny. But it was energetic, with a decent fantasy story underneath it all and I've queued up the sequel.

Ada Palmer - Perhaps The Stars Actually ends with a definite answer for the issues raised over the past three books. No last-second cheat, no deus ex machina. Just sincerity.

Have kept tweaking and adding to this. It comes out with some pretty fun stuff: * Trench Hound! * Tripunk! * Gun Puppet! * Baron Reaper! * Turbo-Grave! * Professor Kick!

Likewise I hang out in some RPG design spaces but don't much post WIPs any more. I mostly did it to air out ideas and get a vibe check, but all anyone ever wanted to do is design (or redesign) the game for me. Bugger off! That's the fun bit! That's the bit I want to be doing.

While I'm RPG-posting- -I don't post about on the internet RPGs nearly as much as I used to. And it's because I realised that it's much more constructive, communicative and fun to demonstrate ideas through play and design than to talk (often argue) about them.

My GMing golden rule is "when in doubt, do what's most fun for the group". It doesn't meant ignoring the rules. It means sometimes it's fun to evoke realism, sometimes it's fun to be absurd. Sometimes it's fun for things to be easy and sometimes it's fun to feel they're working for it.

I enjoyed making this 90s comics antihero generator. Once upon a time I made a lot of random generators and I'd forgotten how much fun it was. perchance.org/fgu70wdfjd

It's Whine Time !!!

It's a shame that most RPG assassin archetypes are combat monkeys. It does a disservice to the character concept. I like the idea of an assassin RPG character as someone who isn't a fighter, but can solve any problem so long as the solution is murder.

You can make stuff that kind of sucks, yknow? You can remain incredibly mid forever, it's allowed! You're not stuck deciding between super intense honing your craft vs. never drawing again. It's fine to be just ok at stuff!

Productivity strategies for writing RPGs forum.rpg.net/threads/prod...

Drawing more foods.

Ada Palmer - The Will to Battle So glad to be returning to this series. Social science fiction with historical sensibilities that acknowledges but doesn't ever focus on technology. With inexplicable divine miracles. It's like the series Dune wanted to be.

In Alien, when Ash calls the xenomorph a perfect organism, it's him being creepily reverential of a monster. Taking it as a word-of-god objective truth for the franchise to hitch its wagon to is... a choice.

Aliens: Romulus was quite a good film except for: * Metaplot nonsense from Prometheus * All the distracting recreations of scenes from other Alien films * The last 20 minutes Ok, so maybe it just wasn't a good film. But it almost was. And for the Aliens franchise that's not bad.

Writin' about worms.

Sometimes I want to post snippets of writing from what I'm working on, but that always feels a bit naff an unexciting compared to art. Maybe I'm just afraid to show off WIP trash.

"Oh! It hurts!" "Of course it hurts." "What's the trick then?" "The trick, William Potter, is not minding that it hurts."

Was sketching out worm-hunting dustships for scale and I don't hate how they look. Might actually use these.

Shipping container builds from the weekend painted up sloppy-style.

Every time I get a comment on one of my Itch publications it's like a little shot of joy into my brainstem. Thank you friendly commenters - you give me motivation to make more stuff.

Two shipping containers: one occupied, one sinking. Foamboard and cardboard. (The black primer is just in places I knew I'd have trouble reaching with a brush later.)

Benjamin Stevenson - Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone Top tier title. Technically a whodunnit, but mostly enjoyable for the family drama and exceptionally playful genre-aware narration.

Blades '68: Player Principles handout.

I am bored of self-proclaimed "RPGs suitable for players new to the hobby", and annoyed with most of their designs and assumptions. I want to see RPGs made for people who have never GMed before.

I feel like the internet would run a lot more peacefully if people weren't always trying to win the thread.

Today I found a document full of old drafts that I thought I'd lost. There was so much there! And it's a lovely surprise to find out that past-me was actually writing some pretty fun stuff. Just need to start organising it all...

Made some more jenga block scatter walls.

George O. Smith - Pandora’s Millions Humanity is plunged into a post-scarcity economy. Only one bold titan of industry has the gumption to mansplain basic supply/demand economics to stick-in-the-muds and flighty broads. Then re-invents scarcity (or at least his pet scientists do) to save capitalism.

Elizabeth Moon - Moving Target Cadet-turned-trading captain finds everyone's suddenly out to get her and copes with aplomb. Very detail-focussed book. And felt like every character interaction was about until all possible ambiguity was aluminated. Fun book, if oddly particular.

A Borges story about a guy who gets AI to summarize all the world’s information for him, and then summarize the summary, until the AI has the whole world summarized into a single word. He sits alone at his desk, staring at the word, repeating it endlessly, certain he is experiencing everything

A productive weekend of painting. Finished some scatter walls made from Jenga blocks, and a squad of converted moon troopers. With a family shot of my moon squad so far. Just needs a leader....

Finally 30 familiars