You possess the wonderful miracle power within you (says an old videogame screenshot)

Your #RetroGaming affirmation for today.

Warrior 13 (1347)

The show's take on the promise of progress feels very Lucasesque.

George's "Young Indy" showed how change at the turn of the 20th century turned into world wars. Alex explains here how optimism of a new millennium has soured. And "Shadow Lord" explores that same fragility in a galaxy far, far away.

We Saw The First Twenty Minutes of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu - Backstage Tour YouTube video by Star Wars Explained

We saw the first 20 minutes of Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu AND got a backstage tour!

Check it out 👇 tickets go on sale tomorrow! youtu.be/o34wEOU3Ko4?...

JD Vance: "I rallied people to Orban in Budapest!"
Hungarians:

The box art for the Nintendo Game Boy game Alleyway features a pilot (Mario from Mario Bros) in a futuristic, capsule-like spacecraft preparing to receive a metallic ball from a glowing explosion on a white grid, all set against a colorful, starry deep-space background.

I remember drooling with envy over the box art for Alleyway (Game Boy, 1989), with MARIO piloting a capsule-shaped spaceship. 🤩

A few years earlier, the Arkanoid (1986) arcade game in a shopping mall had been my first encounter with a video game, and I was soooo eager to play a block-breaking game!

There is a _tremendous_ body of beautiful promotional and box art for videogames in the 80s and 90s, all of it kind of overselling what the game actually is, but in a way I find absolutely forgiveable. Some of the box-art for early Atari titles is so _brazen_ in a way, but beautiful.

So happy for the wonderful, resilient people of Hungary — they’ve been through so much, for so many decades. Cheers! 🥂

a woman in a dark room with the words that 's what a reckoning sounds like Alt: a woman in a dark room with the words that 's what a reckoning sounds like

A bad day for the enemies of the rule of law is a good day for everyone else.

First game: Marvel Superheroes
Last game: Doctor Who AiTaS
Longest game: Risus
Favourite game: Ghostbusters 1st
Favourite mechanics: A great GM
Favourite art: Any nice map

#TTRPG

SPLASHDOWN CONFIRMED!

There we go, for the first time in over half a century, humanity has reached the Moon and safely returned.

A small step in a journey of a thousand miles.

Congratulations to the crew, NASA, and everyone involved 🍾

The last #TTRPG to make me smile with my whole heart and breathe a sigh of relief thinking "yeah, roleplaying is still a thing" was The Princess Bride RPG, 8 years ago.

What's worse, it's a game I was asked to work on, and bailed.

(I would bail all over again, it was the right call, but still)

They'll never miss just ONE Grogu, right? 😆

This reminding me to be sad all over again to the edits that happened to "Win or Lose."

It's still a very good work, but you can absolutely see where the trims were made, and it just ... guh. SMH.

I was very stoked for the film immediately, but of course had no notion that the show might happen.

I was very stoked for the show as soon as it was announced, though!

And yet, I was somehow under-stoked for what it deserves!

An album cover from the 80s, with what we might now call pretty standard 80s graphic-design geometric devices and colors, featuring Snoopy and Woodstock. Snoopy is dancing; Woodstock is flying upside-down.

The album-cover for Flashbeagle, arguably the least-explicable Peanuts special (and yes, I watched the hell out of it when it aired, but I never did get the album ... I'm tempted to become one of those vinyl hipsters with just ONE album forming my entire collection).

#Peanuts #Flashbeagle #1980s

One notable sub-set of the demonic realms are the elemental planes, but they, too, elude most attempts to classify them. Each embodies the essence of one of the elements from which the universe is constructed, but here’s the rub: nobody agrees on which elements compose the universe, and every competing theory seems to be equally correct, at least to the extent that there’s a universe somewhere from which “elemental” demons can be summoned. Threadbare old standbys like Fire Elementals and Water Elementals reflect the quaternary Earth/Air/Fire/Water scheme most wizards know but make light of, but more avant garde casters subscribing to (for example) Hyrion’s theory that the entire universe is composed of just two elements (Noise and Stink – the result of an epiphany while babysitting his sister’s triplets) can summon those elementals, too. With hundreds of competing theories, ranging from the prosaic to the truly abstract, the possibilities are a little unsettling. Just an autumn ago, a clutch of Indifference Elementals did unspeakable damage to the Sindran freeport of Zyrias (small comfort that no one in Zyrias really cared).

Convo over on another social put me happily in mind of this passage from Uresia: Grave of Heaven (one of my books from years ago). 😆

Hammondal: Light of the Candle Islands won't have this particular detail, but it definitely continues this attitude.

#TTRPG #UresiaRPG #WorldBuilding

That's one of the big challenges I'm facing writing the upcoming PDFs for the Trusty GM series. It's hard, in 2026, to advocate for a design style I love without people taking it as a challenge to every other design style ... which it isn't.

The discourse is so primed to see everything as a fight.

I'm long accustomed to hundreds of games in hundreds of styles and modes across both genre and genreless play.

Quite a few of which aren't specifically seeking to emulate - or even evoke - static media like film, TV, prose fiction or comics.

Many are, but the options are so vast. Innumerable.

The idea of a campaign being "explicitly not x" is kind of bizarre no matter what x is or what value someone assigns to x. 😬

Or maybe I'm weird for thinking of my runs in terms of what they are.

"This new campaign is explicitly not Italian Sex Comedy. For once."

Okay but now the phrase "Eric Clapton and Eric Clapton Accessories" is in my head and that's not a phrase. 😧

And now, because of how my brain works, I have an Eric Clapton song stuck in my head. 😆

Trostig Map - Two Alternate Takes by Temphis on DeviantArt

A lot of my current "town style" evolved in a single project, the town map for Toast of the Town. This shows some of that evolution by highlighting two very different styles I opted _not_ to use, each presenting the same underlying map.

www.deviantart.com/temphis/art/...

#FantasyMaps #TTRPG

A high-angle studio shot shows a weathered, tan-colored model of a Thunderfighter, featuring two prominent front prongs, orange markings on the wings, and two large dark grey engines at the rear.

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981): Thunderfighter, design by Ralph McQuarrie, filming miniature by Universal Hartland

And in some cases they're just regurgitating what they've already internalized and never questioned.

I grew up in some very poor districts where teachers weren't really subject to much scrutiny as to quality. 😧

And in general, while our culture war is often (and rightly) framed as Bigots v. Wokes, the actual mechanics are always Belief v. Knowledge and Fear v. Empathy, with _belief_ being the chief instrument of fear.

Which, like free speech, is hardly unique to us, but boy howdy.

That's literally an assertion I've seen schoolteachers make here.

Italian lobby card for HAROLD AND MAUDE (1971)

Directed by Hal Ashby

Starring Bud Cort - BOTD in 1948

Eek. May a gaming rain come to relieve you of that drought. 😧🙏

But, just in case it was not clear: I would __never__ personally choose a game like that, but I'm glad it exists for those who enjoy that kind of thing.