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Dan Hawkins

@daniel-hawkins.bsky.social
37 followers 84 following 102 posts

@Qmalvadore on discord and places where I play games TTRPGs, OSR, Sci-Fi / Fantasy Writing, and media criticism. Learning art.

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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
GOOD NIGHT
screenshot of a game of chess. I just got mated by a nice revealed mate by a knight that PISSED ME OFF
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
i will never acknowledge a typo in a post I made. this post is also not acknowledging a typo in a post I made
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
its important to build good sleep hygiene, which is I why I make sure to blast by eyes with the glowing beacon of despair every night, followed by losing a game of online chess, so I can go to bed upset and angry at the world in general and at my own abilities within it
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
the system works: I listened to the first 30 minutes of the new @friends-table.bsky.social Side Story episode on Incident at Galley House, bought it, played it, loved it, now I get to listen to the rest of the episode
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
I genuinely don't think that any actual advertisement has swayed me to spend money as much as the latest episode of Side Story got me to buy a bag of Chex Mix
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
really fucked up that bi / ace couples average out to just be straight
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
all AI images look so sad to be generated
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
an idea i've been kicking around for awhile is a fantasy OSR game compatible with most dungeon adventures, but is also modern military operators. the dungeons, the encounters, the loot is all the same, but you helicopter in, keep track of magazines in your inventory, and the kobolds have AKs
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
In January 2027 I'm going to run another campaign of Cataphracts (plus some additional elements) as a follow up to my 2025 War of a Thousand Crowns! In preparation for this, I hand-painted the player map in watercolors! First time making a map like this but I'm very pleased with how it came out
A watercolor map of a green region encircling a sea. The legend in the bottom right reads: 
"The RIVERLAND REPUBLICS
known to their citizens as
the FIVE CITIES OF EMDARUN
243 Years after the Drowning of Tyresia"
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Zedeck Siew @zedecksiew.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
So, I got into tabletop games by hanging out at a friend's game shop. (I'd met him while clubbing.) This was a fairly typical FLGS. 40K, Friday Night Magic, a coupla V:TM tables. The core group of dudes where old uni mates. These were true-blue grognards. They used to play Napoleonics. 1/
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
thinking about how I would run a Cataphracts-style megagame but for interagency espionage... right now i'm imagining that players take the role of Directors, Analysts, and Agents. Analysts produce Intelligence, that, if acted upon, gives some quantifiable bonus to the agency. Agents do the legwork
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
The Furious was really, really good. Not quite at the level of the Raid 2 for me, but there was so much in there that I had never seen before, kickass film
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
The Vast of Night is one of the best science fiction movies of the past decade, I think about it often!
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
I think Widow's Bay would make a great hexcrawl for a TTRPG
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
I appreciate this as it gets into the Punisher's comics history a little more than I was able to, but comes to pretty much my same conclusion in my review, that this was a regressive and reactionary special that intentionally counters Daredevil's radical premise danielhawkins.site/punisher-one...
danielhawkins.site
Punisher: One Last Kill Review - Daniel Hawkins
In its 51-minute runtime, it borrows heavily from many other action movies, executing on none of them particularly well.
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
And yesterday's painting study! Not quite as happy with it, but this was the first time I tried to really get into the fine details, so it was a great learning experience
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Hidden Gem is the most fun card in Slay the Spire 2 by a mile
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 17/05/2026
yesterday's ~3-hour painting study, reference by @trueref.bsky.social! I think this was my FIRST "finished" oil portrait, so despite all the anatomy problems I'm pretty happy with how I'm improving as a beginning painter
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Radagast the Wizard has died of the hantavirus
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
I had such a negative reaction to #ThePunisherOneLastKill that I immediately wrote a 2,000 word review of it, please read, share, and enjoy! danielhawkins.site/punisher-one...
danielhawkins.site
Punisher: One Last Kill Review - Daniel Hawkins
In its 51-minute runtime, it borrows heavily from many other action movies, executing on none of them particularly well.
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 15/05/2026
Wow, Punisher: One Last Kill was utterly hideous, a haphazard and incoherent regression for the character wrapped in boring, borrowed action cliches predicated wholly on a conservative-news brained hallucination of urban terror. Everything about it reminded me of something better
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
the math gets corrected later on in the thread, but this still illuminates something useful about how a lot of games are designed, which is that the rules themselves are often designed to be, effectively, a work of fiction that must be understood emotionally but not literally ...
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
Some discussion in here about Draw Steel tables or players or cultures of play that prefer to not kill the bad guys in their games -- whatever, that's not really the point that I was making. Of course people play games differently table-by-table, that's all of RPGs!
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
Anyway, I also really enjoyed the Quinns Quest video on Stonetop and his bit about games that feature violence versus games that are about killing, and his placement of Draw Steel in the latter category -- something to think about while I work on a game that uses DS' system, since I share his view
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dr. hazel 🕸️ @hazelmonforton.com · 10/05/2026
I’m so tired.
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 10/05/2026
Thinking about this a lot as I work on my TTRPG which has, among many others, Mass Effect as a core inspiration. How to center players in a military sci-fi story *without* tipping it towards a fascist aesthetic or perspective is a greater challenge than any single mechanic
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
I'm looking up some information about crew complements for different sized vessels for my game TUNGSTEN ROUNDS, and this article just references a 40k ship as if it were a real vessel, completely credulous of the claim that some frigates have 130 crew members, others have 26,000 and are a mile long
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
nothing better than sitting down and coming up with a d50 list of Starship backstories
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 21/04/2026
I have built my abode upon the Intermediate Plateau and I shall never leave
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 20/04/2026
Playtest went really well! Lots of work to do to get even just the tested material right, but I think the bones of my game are solid and its headed in the right direction. Unfortunately I do have to say farewell to my original plan, "design the whole game perfectly in one go, page by page"
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 18/04/2026
Running the first playtest session of my action-sci-fi game TUNGSTEN ROUNDS tonight, powered by Draw Steel (Drawn in Steel?) Can't wait, I think I got the bones of exactly the game I've been dreaming of for a long time now
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
one of the best decisions I made when running Star Trek Adventures last year was to toss out 100% of the rules for the episode that the crew were sent to the Mirror Universe. Space Lightning struck the ship and they were zapped into the MU as poltergeist-style invisible spirits.
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austin_walker @austinwalker.bsky.social · 01/04/2026
REALIS, the science fantasy TTRPG I’ve been working on for the last five years, is now live on Kickstarter! 55 Player Classes 150+ NPC Classes 29 Factions 20 Example Moons of Realis GMing and Prep Guidance Over 100 incredible illustrations from 17 artists! www.kickstarter.com/projects/cru...
kickstarter.com
Realis
A new tabletop roleplaying game by Austin Walker
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 29/03/2026
Essential part of writing sci-fi and fantasy is typing every new Proper Fantasy Noun into Wikipedia so you don't accidentally name something dumb
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sam “ludonarrative disinterest” sorensen @samsorensen.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
it's Cataphracts Design Diary #5! this one has a link to the official unofficial Cataphracts HQ Discord server (link below), as well as rules update v1.2, and a big old list of all the cool posts people other than me are making about Cataphracts! samsorensen.blot.im/cataphracts-...
image of Viktor Vasnetsov's painting "Knight at the Crossroads" (1882), with text overlaid in the lower right corner reading "Cataphracts HQ / discord.gg/QHpkPGAKC2"
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🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ>∿<ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
imagine wanting an animated firefly when you can just watch legends of the glactic heroes
media.tenor.com
a drawing of a man with blonde hair and a collar that says ' s ' on it
ALT: a drawing of a man with blonde hair and a collar that says ' s ' on it
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 16/03/2026
I literally said this in my essay, "Her in the Age of AI" danielhawkins.site/her-in-the-a...
Unlike Samantha, ChatGPT will never break up with you. It will never leave you as long as the data centers are still running. And when the model is eventually, inevitably, taken offline, the reaction will be withdrawal, not catharsis.

Her is one of the best-performed, most visually fulfilling science-fiction films of the 2010s, and it is this quality — along with the proximity of its subject matter to the current projects of the technocrats — that has captured the interest of the AI-developer class. Partially, this is due to their own illiteracy, where even the obvious points of the film are beyond their limited grasp, so they reach for what’s easy, the taglines and synopses. Since Her is a good movie about a man falling in love with his computer, LLM developers want you to fall in love with their products, regardless of what Her has to say about the importance of human connections. They have and will continue to style themselves after the film, mimicking fictional technologies and aesthetics in a cargo cult of perceived achievement. But their allergy to meaning will always be inherited by their products. To use them is not to become Theodore as he is at the end of the film, where he has learned to really love again. No, to attach to these LLMs is to prolong oneself in the mind of Theodore as his lowest: lonely, sad, and unable to discern his own emotions — at least, without the help of a machine.
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 08/03/2026
I would have done the "9 Games" thing earlier but I legitimately didn't realize that it was a site you could go to, I really thought that everyone was just photoshopping identical images and was like "well I can't be bothered to do all that"
1. Hitman 3 2. Mount & Blade Warband 3. Dishonored
4. Crusader Kings 3 5. Planetside 2 6. Star Wars: Republic Commando
7. Halo 2 8. Disco Elysium 9. Blue Prince
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 05/03/2026
pitched some friends on a game of Traveller so I spent a whole weekend rolling up this entire sector using the Mongoose 2e rules
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 16/02/2026
now that I'm done writing the Thousand Crowns campaign report, I can get back to doing research for my sci-fi game
Wikipedia article: "List of 40mm grenades"
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
my hunger strike, meant to last until we got an immersive sim dungeon crawler, has left me as a desiccated, restless skeleton... perfect for an immersive sim dungeon crawler
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 13/02/2026
Finally finished the campaign report for my game of Cataphracts by @samsorensen.bsky.social that I ran for 6 months last year! 131 pages long, please enjoy! danielhawkins.site/campaign-rep...
danielhawkins.site
Campaign Report: The War of a Thousand Crowns - Daniel Hawkins
Viewable on this page is the campaign report for the game of Cataphracts that I ran for six months in 2025. As I say in the introduction, this was one of the most intense and rewarding role-playing ga...
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 10/02/2026
RPGs are about creating stories with your friends and the emotional vulnerability of sharing a table... and they're also about pages of tables showing minute differences in damage types and ranges of different types of pole arm
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
Nearly done with my Cataphracts campaign report....
screenshot of Affinity Publisher overview panel, showing a project 126 pages long
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
this is one of the best streams of all time (because I won a t-shirt giveaway during it)
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 22/11/2025
was inspired by work of @priscillapage.bsky.social to do some long-form writing about film, and so I have inaugurated the blog section of my website with this essay on one of my all-time favorite films, HER, and revisiting it in an era of predatory AI danielhawkins.site/her-in-the-a...
danielhawkins.site
Her in the Age of AI - Welcome
AI — or more accurately, the large-language models masquerading as intelligences such as ChatGPT and its ilk, dominate our current economy, businesses, and conversations. Truth and reality have been f...
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/10/2025
TTRPG hot take: RPGs should have complexity estimates like board games do, along with estimates for how much time its expected the GM has to prep before a four hour session
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Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 12/10/2025
been here pseudonymously for a bit -- don't love it but there's enough I want to put out there with my name attached, so, hello!
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