Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 03/10/2026i will never acknowledge a typo in a post I made. this post is also not acknowledging a typo in a post I made 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 03/10/2026its 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 011
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 26/09/2026the 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 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 13/09/2026I 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 012
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 05/09/2026really fucked up that bi / ace couples average out to just be straight 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 03/09/2026an 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 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 17/08/2026In 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 110
Reposted by Dan HawkinsZedeck Siew @zedecksiew.bsky.social · 28/07/2026So, 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/ 310024
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 24/06/2026thinking 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 100
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 13/06/2026The 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 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 11/06/2026The Vast of Night is one of the best science fiction movies of the past decade, I think about it often! 120
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 29/05/2026I think Widow's Bay would make a great hexcrawl for a TTRPG 130
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/05/2026I 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.sitePunisher: One Last Kill Review - Daniel HawkinsIn its 51-minute runtime, it borrows heavily from many other action movies, executing on none of them particularly well. 121
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/05/2026And 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 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/05/2026Hidden Gem is the most fun card in Slay the Spire 2 by a mile 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 17/05/2026yesterday'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 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 15/05/2026Radagast the Wizard has died of the hantavirus 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 15/05/2026I 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.sitePunisher: One Last Kill Review - Daniel HawkinsIn its 51-minute runtime, it borrows heavily from many other action movies, executing on none of them particularly well. 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 15/05/2026Wow, 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 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 11/05/2026the 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 ... 110
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 11/05/2026Some 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! 130
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 10/05/2026Anyway, 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 160
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 10/05/2026Thinking 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 140
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 01/05/2026I'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 100
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 01/05/2026nothing better than sitting down and coming up with a d50 list of Starship backstories 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 21/04/2026I have built my abode upon the Intermediate Plateau and I shall never leave 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 20/04/2026Playtest 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" 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 18/04/2026Running 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 060
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 02/04/2026one 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. 110
Reposted by Dan Hawkinsaustin_walker @austinwalker.bsky.social · 01/04/2026REALIS, 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.comRealisA new tabletop roleplaying game by Austin Walker 9224601088
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 29/03/2026Essential part of writing sci-fi and fantasy is typing every new Proper Fantasy Noun into Wikipedia so you don't accidentally name something dumb 010
Reposted by Dan Hawkinssam “ludonarrative disinterest” sorensen @samsorensen.bsky.social · 20/03/2026it'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-... 13511
Reposted by Dan Hawkins🐔 Brian Bucklew 🐔 ₑͤ>∿<ₑͤ ∞🌮 @unormal.bsky.social · 17/03/2026imagine wanting an animated firefly when you can just watch legends of the glactic heroesmedia.tenor.coma drawing of a man with blonde hair and a collar that says ' s ' on itALT: a drawing of a man with blonde hair and a collar that says ' s ' on it 109114
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 16/03/2026I literally said this in my essay, "Her in the Age of AI" danielhawkins.site/her-in-the-a... 110
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 08/03/2026I 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" 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 05/03/2026pitched some friends on a game of Traveller so I spent a whole weekend rolling up this entire sector using the Mongoose 2e rules 3202
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 16/02/2026now that I'm done writing the Thousand Crowns campaign report, I can get back to doing research for my sci-fi game 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 14/02/2026my 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 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 13/02/2026Finally 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.siteCampaign Report: The War of a Thousand Crowns - Daniel HawkinsViewable 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... 0146
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 10/02/2026RPGs 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 020
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 08/02/2026Nearly done with my Cataphracts campaign report.... 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 08/12/2025this is one of the best streams of all time (because I won a t-shirt giveaway during it) 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 22/11/2025was 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.siteHer in the Age of AI - WelcomeAI — 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... 000
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 19/10/2025TTRPG 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 010
Dan Hawkins @daniel-hawkins.bsky.social · 12/10/2025been 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! 010