You can find the How Many Dudes? demo all over the Web. After playing it a bit on itch.io, I installed the Steam version on my Steam Deck -- and the "demo" is virtually a whole game in itself. Give it a try if you need a bit of lighthearted laughter. What a great, ridiculous, funny break from reality's responsibilities! Fortunately, my Steam Deck needs recharging right now, so I can get back to work.

Image by Taylor Burnett from Pixabay There's a quandary at the heart of entertainment, and recent events with Ed Sheeran's concert tour of the Americas illustrate it perfectly. Hold that thought. A Buddhist student once asked their master, "How can I be happy in a world where so many are suffering?" And the master said, "It does the world no good for you to add one more unhappy person.

I posted this message earlier on Kickstarter, as an update to the Children of the Elder Sign project, but it's too good a story to not share here. Hey, gang! Gen Con was great, but exhausting. Friends dragged me into four different Call of Cthulhu adventures—from 1920s, to cyberpunk, to the depths of space—and introduced me to several new board games.

As I write this, my spouse is in the hospital. (Nothing currently life-threatening, just severe systemic pain from a common localized infection.) She's been there pretty much the whole time since three days ago. It seems likely she may get out tomorrow. I'm holding down the fort, which mainly means keeping our dogs from stressing in her absence. My biggest problem right now is trying to divert my autistic hyperfocus from being pissed off that, because the hospital didn't actually admit her as an inpatient, our health insurance won't pay for the over-the-counter painkillers they're giving her, and as of yesterday that meant $500+ in debt for Aleve.

The Bookmark No HP RPG is proving to be the "Little Engine That Could," in that it just keeps chugging along with best-sellers. Most recently, the Swords & Spellbookmarks! setting hit Gold Best-Seller status on DriveThruRPG. This despite the fact that I haven't had much chance to pay existing settings the attention they deserve. I hope to rectify that soon with some three-act adventures in the various genres, and a few solo adventure cards are already underway. In any case, thank you to everyone who has taken a shining to this little system.

I need an AI assistant to "Please wait on the line while I connect you with a customer service agent."

I'm happy to report that the Bookmark the Apocalypse! sourcebookmark is now a DriveThruRPG Silver Best-Seller! This sourcebookmark adds a Humanity Attribute to character creation, and exciting vehicle chase scene rules, along with game host suggestions for defining your apocalypse and randomizing three-act adventure seeds. Additionally, the Children of the Elder Sign and King of Elfland's Daughter sourcebookmarks are now available there in printed playing card format.

I had to kill a tiny mouse today. Yesterday it kept scrambling across the back of my desk, peeking out from around my monitor, and I could hear it gnawing on things it shouldn't be gnawing on. I hate snuffing out their little lives, or adding any measure of suffering to this world. But left alone, they leave droppings all over and can gnaw through a home's electrical wiring.

If you're anywhere near Waterloo, Iowa this weekend, come check out Con-Quest 2026. And if you do, be sure to look me up and say "Hi." I'll be attending several panels, running two games, and hanging out at a signing booth in the Vendor's Hall, with some Fanged Smileys dice sets and ultra-premium D13 RPG books for sale, along with a few other things.

The Children of the Elder Sign sourcebookmark for the Bookmark No HP RPG is now live on DriveThruRPG! The print-and-play PDF contains four pages to choose from: bookmark format in full color or printer-friendly black-and-white, and the same options for playing card format. Physical bookmark and playing card versions are in production.

(Inspired by War and Peace, Vol. 3, Part 1, Chapters 1–7) A river does not choose its course to sea. Winding across the plains, water discovers its way—among gullies and hills encounters a natural inevitability. Nor does a seedling choose its path through earth to sun. Sensing the pull of gravity, it pushes upward—finding a destiny of gaps between the clods that give it birth.

As you may recall, as part of Kickstarter's "Witchstarter" promotion last October, I launched a role-playing game project titled Children of the Elder Sign.* It's been a bucket-list idea for more years than I can remember, and this seemed a perfect motivation to tackle it at last. The idea is basically "What if Hercules, et al., were offspring of Lovecraft's pantheon instead of the Greek/Roman gods?"

Photo by Katelyn G on Unsplash One more step toward ditching Windows is now accomplished: I've restored and backed up locally all the files they "conveniently" moved to their cloud. For someone with rural Internet, clicking to open a file on my PC, and then waiting for it to download from OneDrive, is problematic, to say the least. This step prepares me to shift from Windows 10 to Linux---probably Mint---on this ThinkPad W530 by Win10 ESU EOL on Oct.

To the members of Dark Horse Workers United and everyone at Dark Horse: I am pleased to announce that Dark Horse Comics is willing to voluntarily recognize Dark Horse Workers United as a recognize...

"Everybody feels that way sometimes," they say. "Everything's a spectrum, and everybody's on it." Tell that to the seven-foot-tall woman and the two-foot-tall man. Yes, there is a range of people between those record-holders and the average 5' 8" for men, and the average 5' 3'' for women. Just as there is a range from the average IQ of 100 to…

YouTube video by ReasonTV

While extroverts command the room with quick wit and seamless small talk, the quiet ones are crafting texts and emails that reveal a startling truth about how different minds process the world—and why...

Hey, gang. To compensate for extra postage outside the US, I've been giving your choice of PDFs on DriveThruRPG equal to the added cost. So far that added cost has been roughly $12 to Canada and the UK, $15 to Eastern Europe, and about $18 to Australia. Add that to the US price of $21 for your total of dice plus shipping.

I'm no Luddite. I was raised on hard sci-fi as much as any other sort, and as an adult I've dealt with much more code and gear than is typical for my profession. I wouldn't be surprised if a machine intelligence inherits this earth from us in the far future, as the next evolution of human intelligence. That having been said, what we're being pitched as AI right now is a buzzword for a stock market feeding frenzy.

Black Oak Workshop recently produced a limited run of "Fanged Smileys" dice for me, based on my Lester Smith Games logo. The set includes one of those d2 coins pictured above, with their company logo on one side and mine on the other. To say I'm thrilled is an understatement! An entire set of polyhedral dice with my goofy fanged smiley on them?

Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

Stand With Minnesota is a hub for supporting, learning, and taking action to support Minnesotans impacted by ICE and federal enforcement.

If you'll forgive this YouTube video's clickbait title, the content is actually a pretty balanced explanation of what's happening with Windows right now. For most of the past 40+ years, I've been a Windows user because that's what was generally an employer's OS for writing and editing. And for a home computer, it's been cheaper than Apple. But when when an employer preferred Apple, I've happily used Apple.

“Voting Rights: The Struggle To Be Counted 1619-2014” is a 35-minute film documentary, written and produced by Phil and narrated by his wife Pat Sloan. Through words, music, and vivid images, he tells...

Hey, gang!As I write this, we're about nine hours away from the Kickstarter's close, and at 272% of the funding goal. Your enthusiasm for the Children of the Elder Sign premise has been both heartenin...

Image by bafritch from Pixabay In my head are two horses. One is a creative force, prone to enthusiasms, award-winningly clever, easily bored, easily dispirited. The other a disciplined adult, clear-eyed, trained as an editor and educator, tempered by experience. Faithful, honest, enduring. As a writer, I've learned to nurture the first when starting a project. After all, it's the one that came up with the idea in the first place, the one with a view beyond the horizon.

This "Children of the Elder Sign" idea has been rattling around in my head for a few years. The success of The King of Elfland's Daughter bundle, and Kickstarter's October "Witchstarter" promotion, inspired me to finally tackle the project, and to do it for all four Lester Smith Games role-playing systems. The premise is simple. Imagine you're a demigod like Hercules, except that your supernatural parent is one of the Lovecraftian deities, like Cthulhu or Nyarlathotep.

We're all familiar with the "fight or flight" concept: Our early ancestors, when faced with danger, instinctively either fled or fought that danger, depending on the situation. It's easy to think that we've somehow outgrown those instinctive impulses. We're more civilized, and life is less perilous for most of us than it was back then. Although I think of myself as a cerebral guy, I can say from personal experience that the genetic instinct remains—red flags that flash before the danger becomes consciously evident.

What with the end of support for Windows 10, and a bit of self-publishing windfall a few months ago, I bought a brand-new HP ENVY x360 laptop for a move to Windows 11. Didn't want to, but it seemed a necessity. Then, a couple of weeks ago, I discovered that Windows 10 security updates are extendable for another year. (See my earlier blog entry.) So my old workhorse of a ThinkPad still has life in it.

The Battle Bookmark has reached Silver Best-Seller status on DriveThruRPG! This is the Bookmark HP RPG supplement that adds tactical options—including range, movement, ambushes, outnumbered foes, cover/concealment, and deadlier damage—while still retaining the game's storytelling focus. To celebrate, here's a discount link to get it for just 25¢ through Thanksgiving: Battle Bookmark 25¢ sale!

It isn't yet the apocalypse, so there's still time to have some escapist fun Borderlands style, or Mad Maxish, or Twisted Metallic, or whatever brand of ruined wasteland you prefer. Speaking of which, Larcenous Designs released a new apocalypse-themed GameMaster's Apprentice oracle deck on DriveThruRPG today; I released a Bookmark the Apocalypse! sourcebookmark for the Bookmark HP RPG; and they're…

Most of my actual writing nowadays is done in Google Docs on a Chromebook. But most of my graphic design and layout over the past several years has been done on a robust Lenovo ThinkPad running Windows 10. As you probably know, Windows 10 support is ending in a few days, but my workhorse of a ThinkPad isn't upgradeable to Windows 11.

My horror-themed card games have joined the role-playing games in celebrating Halloween! Through the end of the month, these card games are just 66¢ for the print-&- play PDFs, and 31¢ above my cost for print decks. Here are direct links to those card games: Wolf Man's Curse! PDF: $4.95 66¢ / Print: $9.95 $6.87 Monster Con! PDF: $4.95 66¢ / Print: …

Through the end of October, all Lester Smith Games horror RPG titles on DriveThruRPG are on sale for 1/3 off! Including all four best-selling core rules titles! Here's your chance to score something new to celebrate your Halloween on the cheap. Dare I say, "monstrously" so? And here are direct links to the items on sale: Bookmark No HP RPG…

Way back in April, I started reading Lord Dunsany's The King of Elfland's Daughter, due to its reputation as a fantasy classic before there were fantasy classics. (The Hobbit wasn't published until 13 years later; Lord of the Rings fully 30 years later.) Having read less than half of it, I was already in love and knew I'd want to role-play in this world myself.