Back in June, I wrote about getting back into photography. When I wrote that, I had some pictures taken with my phone. Since then, I've shot through the three rolls of film that were hanging around in my camera bag as well as several fresh rolls, including my first black and white roll since high school. One of the common places I've taken photos is around Downtown Warren when I've been on lunch breaks.

My wife and I have slightly different tastes in most movies and shows. She tends toward comedies, I tend toward big epic space operas. One show which we both enjoyed, now unfortunately canceled, is The Hunting Party. The premise of the show is that there was a top secret prison hidden inside a nuclear silo […]

Sly Flourish wrote about methods to make monsters unique that don't rely on mechanics. Prismatic Wasteland wrote about how random tables are akin to Kinder Surprise Eggs in the joy they bring. At Bastionland, there was a discussion of what takes a game from something you could play to something you will play, even if that sacrifices some replayability.

One of my good friends going back to elementary school is the son of a professional photographer. So growing up in the late '90s and early '00s, we had some interesting hand-me-down cameras to play around with. The main one we messed around with was a 35mm Nikon SLR. Later on I got my own Canon EOS Rebel 200p 35mm SLR.

I've loved some of the previous Blogwagon topics from Prismatic Wasteland, but never got around to writing on them. The latest topic is randomness. It features a roll for date of post and for length, then a card draw for a blog to look through and include a reference to. For reference, my rolls and card were: 1d20: 14 (post on June 14)

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While looking for stories from Appendix N, I came across The Eldritch Dark, which catalogs the works of Clark Ashton Smith. Since my own local bookstores are devoid of Smith's works, it's been a great find. Over at Prismatic Wasteland, there is a blogwagon on the theme of randomness beginning. I can't wait to share my own contribution on this one.

Issuing a challenge to all bloggers: blog about the topic of “randomness” on a random day in June. Additional random tables are provided to assist you in your posting.

One of the first non-D&D RPGs I played was the fourth edition of Shadowrun. I was hooked from the start. It has fantasy. Check. It has Cyberpunk Dystopia. Check. Its default setting at the time I was introduced to it was Seattle. Check. It felt like this game was made specifically for me. Were the books easy to parse for the rules?

In the Player's Handbook, there's a recommendation to read The Return of the Sorcerer by Clark Ashton Smith. I thought it was a book, so I spent a bunch of time looking for it. It's really a short story from 1931, and I was able to find a copy online. The premise is that the unnamed narrator is hired to assist a researcher as a secretary, in part because of his ability with Arabic (longtime mythos readers will know where…

I really enjoyed a review of Reactionary Worldbuilding: From Speculative Imagination to Political Practice put together by Ancillary Review of Books. The review takes a look at a book that tracks connections between Speculative Fiction and the ways it has been co-opted into the libertarian/alt-right circles. It's added a book to my TBR list. I really liked a discussion at Sly Flourish about the…

In the last couple months, I've been getting back into "retro games" aka the ones that came out as I was a kid, and increasingly, the ones that came out while I was a teenager. Gameboy Advance and GameCube being "retro" is crazy, but such is the way of linear time. Pokémon Fire Red This one kind of started the most recent kick with its release on Switch.

This year, I've been making a concerted effort to track down and read some books from Appendix N, as well as from the comparable lists from Pathfinder, from 5e 2014, from Dolmenwood, from Numenera, and honestly from every TTRPG in my collection I could find a list for. I also wrote a list of some media I find inspirational…

For the last couple years I've been reading some early books from fantasy and science fiction, like Ensign Flandry. This week, I continued that trend with Sargasso of Space by Andre Norton. The book was originally released in 1955, under the pseudonym Andrew North. The copy I have is a digitized release by Open Road Media. I mention that, because I have some critiques that are not of the writing itself.

A couple weeks ago my usual game night had a cancelation and since I'd picked up XCrawl Classics on a whim during the DCC Sale at DriveThruRPG, I ran a one-shot. Since hearing the premise of the game, I'd been itching to get it, itching to read it, itching to run it. The premise is that in a fantasy dystopian United States analog (an empire ruled by Emperor Ronald I, aka Ronald Regan kept alive by an unholy mixture of advanced medicine and necromancy), dungeon crawling has become a reality TV phenomenon.

Justin Alexander of The Alexandrian discussed what his session prepped looks like. I like to look at what other game masters do and see if there's anything I can steal borrow for my own prep. Dave Clark at Full Moon Storytelling speaks about how maps don't need to be fancy battlemaps in HD with all the whizbang features. I like the discussion of how even simpler maps can help us understand the relationships between locations.

Recently, I grabbed some lists of science fiction and fantasy authors from my hometown of Seattle, as well as some more local to my newer home in Northeast Ohio. One new-to-me author from the Seattle list was Kira Jane Buxton. I looked her up and came across her debut novel, Hollow Kingdom. The blurb on Libby about "Watership Down…

Over at Full Moon Storytelling, Dave Clark has a fun discussion of the challenges for DMs with the new weekly Beyond Drops and decisions about whether they fit into your campaign. At Bastionland, Chris McDowell uses an analogy with racing circuits and rallies to talk about different types of locations and play loops that you find in the same game.

John Scalzi heard back from the FBI about his request for their (admittedly thin to the point of non-existant) file on him. Whomst amongst us has never wondered if the FBI file we joke must exist on us is actually there? I know my own jokes about an FBI file go back to things like being interviewed by a local socialist paper for my (albeit small) involvement with anti-Iraq War demonstrations at my high school.

Full Moon Storytelling writes about how Downtime could be a fourth pillar of tabletop RPGs. Uncanny Magazine released the Table of Contents for their upcoming Issue 70. There are some titles here that have me excited to dig into my subscriber copy. I'll likely continue to link to stories I really enjoyed as they go live. TTRPGKids did an interview with a Speech Language Pathologist about how she uses TTRPGs in speech therapy.

At All Dead Generations, there was a look at what a Beholder might look like as a biblical angel. Wejia Cheng, an editor with Standard Ebooks, wrote about how eschewing automated shortcuts and doing the work can sometimes further our goals better than having the work done for us. At Sly Flourish, there's a discussion of mixing and matching preferred rules from different 5e versions…

Many of my favorite memories from college come from the Friday Night Tea Parties my floor threw the whole time I was in school. They started on the first night we all moved into the dorms, as the members of International House learned we all had water heaters and our own diverse stashes of teas (and tisanes). We stayed up until sunrise chatting over tea and it became a tradition, expanding into whole trips down to the grocery store and shifts at the oven scheduled around classes to make cookies or bread or whatever to hand out.

I've been reading titles from Appendix N and other lists of inspirational fiction from different role-playing games this year. There's been some really good and some stuff that wasn't quite my cup of tea, but definitely got me thinking about what stories influence me when I start prepping situations to bring to the table for my own groups. I was also inspired by some lists from…

So, Pokémon games have been in my wheelhouse since 1999, when a friend from school let me try his copy of Pokémon Red on a flight from Seattle to Washington Dulles for our school DC trip. They were one of my earliest introductions to RPGs, so I guess they're responsible for my interest in a bunch of stuff I've written about here.

Alex Schroeder wrote about the difficulties in the modern blogosphere of connecting through comments and email. At The Soloist, there's a discussion of playing Solo RPGs together. Whether that's just each playing your own thing at the table and talking afterward or making each person's solo RPG part of a greater whole. At Prismatic Wasteland, there's a great description of the…

Earlier this week I finished Maria Dahvana Headley's translation of Beowulf. It's a story I know well, having read various translations of the poem over the last couple decades. I loved her translation. There's a mix of modern language and archaic formalities. It's a translation you can feel the fun she had in writing it. In undergrad, I majored in Linguistics.

Alright, so it's been a minute since the last post I wrote about Eveline Hawking and the Vigilant. If this is the first you've seen me mention this solo campaign I've been running you can catch up with the earlier posts too: Part 1, Part 2. We last left Eveline Hawking aboard the Rookery, speaking with a figure from her past.

Over at Grognardia, there was a discussion of Mage: The Ascension and how the world view of magic in the setting shapes the mechanics and experience of play. Over at Bastionland, Chris McDowell looked at his own game of Intergalactic Bastionland and how referees can alter the moment-to-moment pacing of the game by shifting to different discrete units of time…

Charlie Jane Anders wrote about the difficulties of making YA Star Trek as a reaction to the cancelation of Starfleet Academy. It's an interesting look at the ethos at the core of the YA genre, of Star Trek, and of Star Wars. There's interesting overlaps of Star Wars and Star Trek both being visions of the role of the United States post-World War II.

So I've definitely mentioned before my love for the movie 10 Things I Hate About You. When I was younger (and being perfectly honest, anytime I get a chance as an adult) I was a theater kid. I've loved going to see shows and I've been in a few shows. My grandparents used to take my sister and me to a local theater for puppet shows and fairy tale plays and stuff.

The Hellbound Heart was, to me, an odd inclusion in the Pathfinder Core Rulebook (1st Edition) Appendix 3. This is, after all, the book that was adapted into Hellraiser. Yes, the movie with the creepy guy with pins in his head The inclusion of a contemporary horror story into a list that had historically included sword and sorcery pulp adventure, HP Lovecraft, and Lord of the Rings intrigued me.

The Dying Earth was always the book I heard referred to as the inspiration for D&D's "Vancian" magic system. In more recent days, the publisher has taken to calling that book Mazirian the Magician, the first book of The Dying Earth series. I've had this book sitting on my ereader for around ten years waiting to get around to reading it.

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I've been continuing my read through of titles from Appendix N and other RPG inspiration. In case you're one of today's lucky 10,000, Afroman won his case where the officers who entered his house without evidence sued him for saying they entered his house with less than enough evidence. Traverse Fantasy wrote interesting thoughts on James Talarico as a candidate…

Whenever I read literature from the Victorian era, I'm reminded a bit that the "repressed Victorian" is rather more a cultivated image than reality. I came across the title for this one from the Dolmenwood Player's Book list of Inspirational Media. So far, this one is unique among "Appendix N" reading I've done by being a poem (though I suppose Beowulf in Pathfinder Appendix 3 is one as well when I get to it...).