While @senfoonglim.bsky.social and I were diving into two great interviews with @ehronlime.bsky.social and Alessandro Giovannucci for RPG Roots, my dog Loki decided it was time to lick clean the yogurt container!
#priorities #researchpets #rpgroots
Fifteen tomato seedlings potted in red solo cups, under the purple glow of grow lights.
My tomato seedlings this year have had a rough start to life. We’re down to fifteen, and I’m hoping they stay strong in this harsh and unforgiving world (the pantry).
Hell yeah.
"to a calamity which is unavoidable. If to the duties already enumerated we add the duties even those in health are obliged to perform for their sick comrades; for the dead, wounded, and deserted; one ought not to wonder that the battalions are reduced at the end of a campaign to 100 men.”
I bumped into it recently in Maurice de Saxe, written in the early-to-mid-1700s, in an essay on wet uniforms: “It is therefore no longer surprising to see so many diseases in an army. Those who have the strongest constitutions perhaps escape them the longest, but they must at length submit...
If you stepped into a ballad, who would you be?
The doomed lover, the wandering knight, the clever survivor… or something darker?
Tell us your role and post it with #BalladHunters
Source: the DoD’s rebranded website. www.war.gov/News/News-St...
Mandatory vaccines have been a part of the service for as long as there’s been a service; Washington inoculated troops at Valley Forge against smallpox. Everybody who’s been through boot camp remembers getting 50,000 shots. Vaccines are critical to military readiness. What a fuckin’ moron.
SECDEF just made the annual flu vaccine optional for service members, probably as a prelude to further loosening of vaccine mandates. Anybody who’s served aboard a ship knows how contagion (usually gastroenteritis) sweeps through the crew after every port call—and now we’re gonna make that worse?
Drive it like you stole it!
The most excellent folks at Roleplaying Public Radio did a most spooky Ballad Hunters actual play with ghosts, a fairy castle, and some really bad magpies!
In this appearance on the @wetinkgames.bsky.social Youtube channel, we talk about Ballad Hunters from @pelgranepress.bsky.social and about a pirate-infested road in Panama. But we also talk a bunch about my career and the way I approach game design. It was really fun! youtu.be/1XjrvZtQQpo
TIL about the 1698 song collection “Pills to Purge Melancholy.” Since melancholy is caused by an excess of black bile, the title is a joke about laxatives. A+, no notes.
If you want to see a really cool Ballad Hunters actual play, the melodious folks at @happyjacksrpg.bsky.social did one where they sang at the table! happyjacks.org/os41/
I bet most of the time being a pollster is grinding. People yell at you and hang up. But then one day you get to ask "how much do you like dinosaurs?"
I bet that's a good day.
Yeah, how can you pick a favorite? Most dinosaurs are so cool that having a clear standout seems well-nigh impossible.
Then, what to do with the monster’s body? Dispose of it swiftly or respectfully? We compromised: burn her quickly just in case, then solemnly dispose of the ashes using a traditional Duck post-cremation ceremony so her ghost wouldn’t curse us. #ttrpg
We had to kill the monster and clear the dungeon for the safety of the villagers, but what of the two triggering injustices? Our greedy Ducks extorted a “fine” from the people who wronged the monster, but had no way to address their tragedy.
This week in Dragonbane, our dungeon crawl resolved in a Witcher-style revelation. The dungeon—and all the suffering it caused—was a monster’s reaction to having been unjustly wronged by people who were themselves lashing out after an unrelated injustice they’d suffered.
I know I'm right in the middle of the Venn diagram of "TTRPG players" and "broadside ballad enthusiasts," but if you're anywhere on that diagram at all, you should pick up this game!
Board Game Origins of The Human League Plus Ballad Hunters RPG by @moltensulfur.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/critical...
In Copland’s “Variations on a Shaker Hymn,” when the strings double up on themselves (1:13 in this recording).
HEY! Did you know I’m currently Kickstarting Ballad Hunters with @pelgranepress.bsky.social, and it’s the best #TTRPG in history?*
*For the subset of RPGs that are about parsing the text of traditional English and Scottish ballads
Oh man, Crawl looks really good! I'll put it on the list in case it ever pops up on a streaming service we're temporarily subscribed to.
As has been said before, the road to fascism is lined with people telling you you're overreacting.
11 out of 188 is really good! Does it cross the threshold to "good, actually"?
I represented my precinct at the convention for my Minnesota state senate district, endorsing candidates and appointing delegates to send to the state convention. Lemme tell you, nothing gives you more love and hope for democracy than this rowdy, chaotic process.
Oh, what a beautiful spot!
Quoth the GM: “I’m now jealous of the GM whose players fixate on Boblin the Goblin.” We repaid him by fixating on the hydrology of the dungeon we cleared, but hey—we’re ducks! (It was a fabulous session, and we all told him so.) #ttrpg
This week in #Dragonbane, our all-duck party fixated on the hydrology of the Misty Vale, noting that the official map suggests its rivers run backwards and that the color of the water in its haunted marsh is instead consistent with a hardwood swamp.