I apply some basic first aid, but without an apothecary there isn't much more I can do but staunch the bleeding.

After cleaning the wound with some water and a vial of relatively pure alcohol, and bandaging it, I test her and see if she can walk. Enough adventuring for today, perhaps.

Let my hireling root around in the furs while I investigate the two doors. Have either been adjusted lately?

We open the door together, my crossbow pointed in the direction of the movement in case of sudden danger.

"Evie, we should step *over* the rest of the tripwires. You know, save some crossbow bolts for the next group. Its only polite."

We move to the far side of the room, and set ourselves up by the next door. Is it locked? Can we hear much beyond it?

The first couple of years would be fine, just developing language skills as they explore the starter dungeons, but I wouldn't want to GM for Year Sevens, so I'd maybe pause the campaign for a year until they were adolescent.

When they all go off to uni scheduling might get tough.

Ensure that my beloved hireling Evangeline is wearing her steel greaves and breastplate, and send her forth to investigate the door.

This is why our loyal Daimyō banned their swords. No glory can be won at the tip of a tanto-style point.

universal based income

I've been really impressed with his performance lately, it'll be going in the report.

Girls who only have you on one platform are *losing it* abt the contrapositive here

-, to keep them in the party feeling like theyre really fighting back, while the machine chugs forwards exploiting the power our two party system grants them to do immense harm on behalf of millionaires and billionares whims.

Like, against a backdrop of antiscientific transphobia, xenophobia, austerity and cruelty, they are still using Starmer's "I welcome X, but I invite them to go further..." formatting and its sickening.

The cynic in me reads this as a way to placate labour members with a conscience-

> We welcome advances made by this Government, such as the ending of the two-child benefit limit, but we know that Labour must be bolder, braver and broader than ever before to rise to the immense challenges of the current moment.

Even this capitulation to the weakest of wins hurts so much to read.

- and also in how deeply *my own* that experience always felt. How earned the wins were. How free I am in that game to define who I am, and who I want to be.

I'm looking forwards to coming back to it, and hope my friends will get the same kick.

Arcs is a great game.
I've heard strong things about Root.

But there's an aspirational side of me that I don't think I'll ever fully disentangle from the design of Oath. Something captured in how easy it is to fail, and be left despondent and powerless and isolated-

So, eventually, I got corrugated cardboard from palette-orders of lime coke that my then addicted housemate would summon to the address, layered it and crossed the grains like plywood in macroscale, and extended the table by half again, so that my friends and I could finally play Oath.

When I finally moved into a student house, in my second year, I bought a table for the game. We took a trip to ikea, measured it, picked it out, I assembled it up in the attic where our friends could cram round, but it turned out to be too small still to play.

When I got to my little studio apartment, on campus, I unpacked everything. Had a hopeful corner of board games that, with covid then in full swing, I knew I wouldn't play any time soon. And it came with me.

So we left room in the car for a one foot by two foot beast of a box, and took a detour, one last stop in the hunting grounds.

The copy of Oath that I had ordered, this speculative, huge, strategic, storytelling board game that had captured my imagination, had arrived at the bookstore in town where I used to work. The place where I had earned the money that let me claim my independence, let me buy this thing for myself.

I got into fights with my parents about it, as they tried to support me and protect me and pull me in competing directions at the same time. I left that house on rough terms, and it took a while to heal.

But the morning of my departure, as I packed the car with everything I'd own, I got a text.

I went off to university, to finally stop studying maths and start learning philosophy, another huge transformation in how I defined myself academically. I was so used to being a good mathematician, but I wanted to become a good person, and I figured defining that for four years might be a start.

So about six years ago I moved across the UK. I came to terms with ending the most important romantic relationship of my life until that point, with moving out of my childhood room and accepting that when I returned it wouldn't be mine anymore, with leaving the city I'd grown up in and loved.

I'm having a few friends over for board games, some old, some new, this weekend, and I'm slowly getting excited to introduce Oath to a new group.

It's been nearly a year since I last played it, but I actually owned my copy of that game for well over 18 months before I ever had my *first* game.

Once I started doing this with encounter design it actually liberated me to get meaner. I didn't have to hedge for randomness, *I* could say that 1d6 was now just 6 and see how things went, loads of fun!

The first by far, intensely interested in where you take it!

New post up, this time about a sandbox adventure I'm writing for a friend, and some tentative steps I'm making early in that process. It meanders a lot and doesn't finish a lot of its thoughts, because I'm still working on them, but I found it interesting to write!

tangentjoy.blot.im/monaco-2150

Thanks for the firstly there!

image of text across two pages of a spread with a dividing line in the middle: the left-hand page is all simple basic roman text arrayed in three paragraphs; the right-hand page is one paragraph followed by a set of increasingly-nested bullet points, all with lots of boldings, italicizations, and underlinings

new blogpost! this one's a defense of regular sentences and paragraphs in an RPG world awash with boldings, bullet points, and bolded bullet points. check it out: samsorensen.blot.im/apologia-for...

Day 1 of Dragoons resolved!!! It took me about two hours, hoping that'll decrease as people submit fewer longer orders over time, and also as I get more used to the process.

Really excited to run three months of this wargame, and get some good workflow practice in for Solar later this year.