Cyborg Commando is kinda amazing, with the way it takes the concept of "you're a robot shooting shit up" and makes it dull. Compare to Steve Jackson (US) and his Robot Commando gamebook where he went "hmm, this has robots but needs something else. I know! Your robots fight dinosaurs!".

John still pretending he's not just a Temu Simon Hedges I see.

I think that we could all do with turning down the temperature on this issue for 2026. Free GMs need to stop going on the attack whenever paid games are mentioned. Paid GMs need to stop promoting their games by implicitly putting down free games.

The game that has most succesfully implemented "combat as failure state" is RIFTS because "oh, god, I'm going to spend the next five hours doing a RIFTS combat what I have I done"

All I'm going to say about current dog discourse is that I've never seen a police cat. (Joke stolen from the Furry Freak Brothers).

What the sensible adults in the room don't seem to realise is that Polanski is *way* nicer than many of us on the left would be. If they take him down, you're going to get the left populists *far* more comfortable with throwing rhetorical punches against establishment figures.

This is actually the best Gen X film. And it's not even an actual film. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wpgy...

In terms of the attempts to portray players wanting to play "special" races as a new thing in D&D, I want to point out that Arduin includes playable insectoid star warriors as an option.

The OSR should spend less time on old D&D RAW (we have enough retroclones now, people) and start exploring stuff like Arduin and the Atlantis Trilogy. The "Dungeons and Dragons is too important to leave to Gary Gygax" people were always the most interesting community segment of the original D&Ders.

Apparently 1k Followers is the magic number when you get porn bots autoliking your posts.

"You're impressively well spoken for a working class person".

Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. House ruling is necessary. System implies it. It embraces a designer's mechanics, makes use of their expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.

Star Wars - Overthrows the evil Empire using political violence Liberals - This is an obvious metaphor for voting

This isn't new, surely? Especially as we're talking serious dating, not casual shagging. Not to say I didn't date across the political spectrum when younger. I dated both extremes, anarchists and Bennites.

Membership Class: The RPG To be added to any other RPG. For each pound you give the Storyteller, you get to automatically win a challenge.

And what you've all been waiting for, Flintlock's best pop single of 2026. Competitive year, with strong entries from Chloe Slater and Bob Vylan. But just pipping the rest at the post is... KEITH www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PTv...

Gaming predictions for 2026. 1. APers and D&D Youtubers will start to drift towards LARP. (People like Ginny Di are already starting to do this). This may lead to, god help us, lead to a MET revival.

I've been at this point for at least 15 years, I just try to channel it to talking about those old games in their own right rather than leaping out of bushes screaming "Dallas did it" in the face of random designers.

All RPGs are actually Glass Towns.

"People didn't put politics in their gaming in the old days". The year is 1969, a 25 year old Jim Dunnigan designs the wargame "Up Against the Wall, Motherf*****", a game about the student demonstrations at Columbia. One player plays the Administration and the other the Radicals.

I did a history.

With PBMs it's weird to think that while they might have been past their glory days by the 90s, the PBM magazine Flagship still kept going until 2010. And only stopped because Carol Mulholland (RIP) got ill and couldn't carry it on.

It's the RPG version of the Gordian Knot. "Arneson or Gygax?" Tony Bath.

OSR and Storygames are both over. 2026's big thing is going to be hacking Postal Diplomacy and 80s PBM games. Well, ok, it won't, but it should be. There is so much treasure to be unearthed in some of this stuff.

My most vanguardist opinion is that if you're going to bang on about loving Stalin you should have a selfie that at least makes it look like you might have been in a fight one time. Most of you would crumble if they cancelled your Crunchyroll subscription.

Alright, actual RPG discourse rather than shitposting. 1/ It's *all* rules. Handwavium? Rules. Hard skilling? Rules. Dropping a safe on Steve's PC because he stole your weed and didn't replace it? Rules. And only one of these is dysfunctional and Steve deserves it.

In my games the "incentives" are that I won't throw a dice at your head if you don't annoy me.

Which musician do you like, but it's entirely unsurprising and everyone who hears that goes "yeah, obviously". I'm a Luke Haines fan.

One issue with the "find a game that suits what you're after rather than homebrewing" is that if you're looking for something niche, that frequently doesn't exist.

I got the Usbourne book of the future for Christmas and it's both sweet and depressing how optimistic they are. "Machines will be able to do more jobs, leading to everyone having more leisure time as they can handle the drudgery for us!"

what the fuck is a bluesky

New followers, so trying to decide on why 20 post thread on esoteric historical events will most likely to scare them away. Obviously, this won't work on the history nerd weirdos. Not sure what to do with them. Well, at least not until the next series of Gladiators rolls out.

Four (analogue) games that defined my 2025

Fish's "Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors" is kinda the perfect 90s album. Vaguely "leftish", but all about not trusting alternatives either and making it all about you.

My most boomer (but correct) opinion is that it was far far better when you got tickets from local record shops than from the legalised touts that are ticket selling websites.

I'm pretty sure that most of the "famous RPG people" I know are a combo of "we've LRPed or TTRPGed together years ago" and "we've talked the toot online".

"Mrs Brown's Boys viewers criticise 'woeful and unfunny' Christmas special " The Cure concert attendees criticise "dark and depressing" setlist.

Vampire is an odd beast, because I do think that a lot of its reputation for being good at political/intrigue play came first and foremost from the LRP, even with groups that didn't participate outside the tabletop. It was the LRP that had much more extensive social rules, for example.

Back when I was on dating sites, someone went to the effort of doing a line by line parody of my profile. And I'm overly verbose at the best of time. I applaud anyone who hates me with that level of effort.

Contractors! Why not make Christmas extra special by putting the concept of "pay per word" in the dustbin where it belongs. Pay by hour if you fucking *must*. Pay by project if you don't want 70% of writers to secretly despise you.

My partner adopted an Orangutan for me for Christmas. She knows me so well. They sent us a cuddly Orangutan toy. She is hoping that by the end of the year I have got bored of holding it up next to her and claiming I can't tell the difference. (I will not get bored of doing this).

While this article is right that a) Monopoly is not actually a good game and b) people make it much worse with house rules, the reasons it gives for it being bad are way off kilter. "It encourages deals and trades, which provokes sulks. " This is also the other major thing that stops it dragging.

The issue with the US is not that they're an unusually bad people. (That's theological bollocks). It's that they are the only superpower and have an undue influence. And that's not really the fault of the US per se; it's the fault of geopolitics in general.

Just got off the phone with my nephew. My magical trick for not having younger members of the family cutting off contact with me? Not being a prick to them.

I'm no fan of the Lib Dems but I have to give Davey credit for being willing to acknowledge the US are a hostile power out loud, while Starmer continues to do his appeasement act.

I've noticed that a lot of people are posting lots of games they want to run/play in 2026, but I've found increasingly I want to run a longform campaign (at least 9 months) which doesn't leave time.

Join me for more history next week when I launch my new theory about the early days of D&D being an extended fanfic war.

The theater kid hijacking of RPGs actually happened in 1876 when General Verdy looked at Kriegsspiel and went "what's with all this rules shit?". Then he accused Reisswitz of "ruleplaying not roleplaying" and the rest is history.

For my next Wednesday campaign I'm deciding between Delta Green, The Laundry and Rivers of London. It's lovely, because they are all so similar, while at the same time being so incredibly different in worldview.