i’m not sure this is actually a contrarian take (many such cases with Matt Y) but i 100% agree

Something very similar could be said about the obsession with political parties releasing election costings in #auspol

LORE - A Lord of the Rings Adventure Game Retroclone "I would draw some of the great tales in fullness, and leave many only placed in the scheme, and sketched. The cycles should be linked to a ...

Every year, I reread the LotR trilogy. This last year's reread amped me up and I started keying Middle-earth 12 miles at a time

Concurrently, without meaning to, I wrote a game to run the hexcrawl

I call it Lore - a Lord of the Rings Adventure Game retroclone

Here's what I think is fun about it🧵

of course elves don’t have souls, that’s why it’s okay to eat them

praxis is you carry on kid stuff and check all your own stuff

Mechanics Microblog: Secrets, Tension & Pipeweed When your dungeon is full of cool secrets, you don't want them locked behind a skill check the players might fail. But they're not secrets if you just give t...

Why are wizards all chain-smokers? Because their beards are full of secrets, obviously.

cavortingwhorl.bearblog.dev/mechanics-mi...

Contra Benn Jordan, data center (and all) sub-audible infrasound issues are fake One of the most popular videos made about data centers ever is a complete moment-by-moment disaster

Folks, infrasound issues are fake. This was truly an insane experience to write and I hope you enjoy blog.andymasley.com/p/contra-ben...

There’s already a huge black market for cigarettes in Australia and we haven’t even banned them, just taxed the shit out of them. It’s a massive problem - there’s significant issues with organised crime as a result.

you’ve stolen Jonathan Swan admittedly

there's a better solution to the local government turnout problem than the one canvassed in the report

they also recommend “citizen’s assemblies” though

Travis’s work is referenced by Grattan, but I think his recommendations are much sharper and more actionable.

it’s fine but @grugstan.bsky.social did it better:

inflectionpoints.work/articles/reb...

anyway if you want to understand anything about the english-speaking internet, you should pay for archives access

Wish these academics criticising my history of Australia's space program would realise they are being used as pawns in a culture war.

Sorry, your argument is that Dominic Kelly should have ignored glaring factual errors in order to… avoid participating in the culture wars?

Just because the right has embraced post-truth doesn’t mean the left needs to.

Howard deserves excoriation, but you don’t need to invent facts to do so.

Wait how are we going to know whether the paladin or the wizard goes first?

Old School Police: How to Run an OSR Crimecrawl The sky above the city was the colour of syrup, poured from a bronze ladle. In the golden afternoon light, with a squint, you could have mistaken the foam cu...

Running a murder mystery in the style of an OSR dungeon crawl? It can absolutely be done. Here’s how:

cavortingwhorl.bearblog.dev/old-school-p...

as all true wizards know: symbolic representations and physical fetches hold great power

when playing 7PP: it helps to have a friend with a 3D printer or have a metric tonne of board games and craft supplies to steal materials for Gamechanging Impacts.

there’s a huge difference between “do you want a witch to help you?” and “if you let the witch help, you get a little witch hat token”.

what is an old-school crimecrawl? i'm glad you asked!

cavortingwhorl.bearblog.dev/old-school-p...

in our game we’ve already added mechanics for the Devil to steal destinies and for the wizards to secure assistance from friendly(?) witches, all arising from the game’s fiction as it unfolds

love the board game element in 7PP; it’s absolutely key that the game has these gears to grind up against the player’s dreams.

but it’s also key that the game explicitly gives players license for the fiction to gear back into and change the board game rules.

NASA isn't why the US doesn't have universal healthcare, or a social safety net. The US doesn't have those things because politicians with the power to provide them choose specifically not to (with varying levels of support from voters). Enthusiasm for human spaceflight doesn't drive that choice.

i'm working on something extremely dumb

i know these options don’t specify cis status and are not mutually exclusive with the other gender option, but there’s something very powerful about the fact that you can’t just pick “male (he/him)”

one slightly overlooked bit in 7PP’s gender stuff is how well jay nails how even male-presenting masculine cis men have complex feelings about masculinity and their place in society

i’m a big fan of crappy google slides maps, in my head they’re the same as me doodling in my school notebooks

the red dotted lines are minecart tracks and you better believe that there were multiple minecart chases over the course of eight sessions

How cool! Glad folks are finding the Designing Dungeons course useful for not only making dungeons but getting them *played at the table*! Also big fan of assembling your own ruleset to play them as well.

It’s so well put together. It’s an incredible piece of both instructional design and inspirational writing.

My friends are now using it to write their own dungeons, having never GM’d before and mostly being new-in-the-last-year to RPGs.