A year into our Patreon, and we're spinning up 2 new games and a manga. Give it a share if you like what I'm trying to do :)

www.patreon.com/posts/render...

Guest columnist Michael Venne: Influential game designers have roots at Hampshire College - Daily Hampshire Gazette With Hampshire College closing, I took a moment to look at the alumni that have gone through the school and I got quite a big surprise. Two, in my eyes, of the most influential tabletop role-play game...

He’s right, Hampshire had a big impact, but perhaps not in the ways he expects. We sure did spend a heck of a lot of our free time playing #ttrpgs
gazettenet.com/2026/04/15/g...

the 'gayming' awards giving a noted virulent racist right-winger is a great fit in that the gayming awards have always been a joke with a very evident total lack of connection to the queer game industry

Think of how many games where the verb is violence. How many games (including the ones nominated for tonight’s BAFTA awards) where you shoot, fight, kill.
But when games want to explore the topic of violence in a meaningful way, that’s the issue?

BAFTA pulling a trailer for an autobiographical game about surviving sexual assault only hours before it was said to be a part of a showcase is an exceptionally bad look.

It really frustrates me that we continue to nominate and give awards for queer content to big AAA assholes doing the bare minimum with their eyes rolling and lips curled when there are so many queer indies out there putting their hearts on platters that get ignored because they don't have the budget

Preview image of four Eidolon Folio tarot-sized cards (left-right) A bright white person-sized bird holding a wavy-bladed sword in a set of ruins, looming tiger statue (with a sword in its mouth) in the background; a corpse lies on a bed of skulls, hand on the hilt of the sword it's impaled on, the sword bursting with magic energy; an enormous standing dragon looks over its right shoulder, framed over the mountain peaks in the forground; a person wearing a gold mask sits on a weird sculptural horse on a mound of rock, with an eclipse in the background, under a framed shooting star.

One continuous piece (bottom) split up into 4 tarot-sized card images (top); it depicts a meeting of insectoid alien beings bearing spiked polearms with a group of masked humanoid beings riding fanged camel-like creatures and bearing banners in an alien script, under a red skyscape with a green moon, an icy blue moon and a purple planetoid.

Our latest Swords Without Master update includes more Eidolons from @simonroy.bsky.social, @sambeckdraws.bsky.social, @newjackcole.bsky.social, @monstermonger.bsky.social and @azuremeraki.bsky.social!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/unw...

Four eidolon cards. The first two are under the title "Glorious Dreams of Eight Cursed Swords" The first of which is by Jack Cole and depicts a massive bird carrying an ornate sword under the stone statue of a tiger with a different ornate sword in its mouth. The second is by Sam Beck and depicts a long dead corpse on a pile of skulls, reaching up and grasping a sword crackling with energy that is lodged in the corpse's chest. The next two pieces are under the title "Fugitives of the Shattered Menagerie." The first of these is by indui and shows a dragon towering over two mountains and obscuring the sun, its tail wrapped around a lone cottage looking very vulnerable on a hill in the foreground. The last piece is by Saša Đurđević and is a wild scene, showing a horse with a human head ridden by a "human" with a sun mask or perhaps even a sun-head. Stars, a total solar eclipse, and a comet are visible in the sky and section at the top of the piece looks like a part of a sketchbook drawing close-up details of this comet.

So much art for the art gods!!!

www.kickstarter.com/projects/unw...

a real bittersweet bookend on this era of indie game dev community, and certainly a sign of the times

Read that again. This Louisiana bill forces homeless people to choose between jail and "treatment"—and if they can't pay for the latter, they will be forced to perform unpaid labor.

The historical precedents are clear: convict leasing, Black Codes, debtor's prison.

This is a choice.

we're live!

This is worth reading so that people can think about "the day after" - It's actually a good prompt in general 'what happens the day after you win whatever you are fighting for?'

It, again, truly doesn't matter whether vibecoding actually caused the outages or not - when you start bragging about how claude is making every engineer on staff more productive and the site goes through months of persistent downtime, that's a Statement.

How Much an Indie Game Costs to Make YouTube video by Moo Yu

I love sharing numbers so here's a video of how much we spent to make Mythmatch.

I break it down by time, discipline, and funding source.

youtu.be/cB5lanPUQ1o

Fellowship is such a cool game. I think about the thing it does with handing world and culture authorship to individual players based on the the classes they pick all the time

Go get it. Don't ask any questions just do it

OpenAI: We’re burning money like the Joker. A miracle needs to happen for us to turn a profit

Microsoft: Please please use our AI systems, we’re teetering on the edge here

Anthropic: I wonder what’ll kill us first: lawsuits, regulations or model collapse

Media and universities: AI is here to stay

UFO 50’s Japanese title screen

Japanese translation credits from UFO 50 (1/2)

Japanese translation credits from UFO 50 (2/2)

The PLAY FOREVER screen from UFO 50 in Japanese

UFO 50 hits Japan today! This was a pretty huge undertaking given there were several dozen games to localize but the team did an amazing job and the Japanese version looks awesome. Big 💙 to @mossmouth.bsky.social and @perryjon.bsky.social and everyone who worked to make the JP release a reality!

Playlist Dungeon by Thoughtcrime Games Micro-musical TTRPG dungeoncrawl

Playlist Dungeon, a 1-page "songcrawl" #ttrpg where you build characters and dungeons from your favorite songs, is out in the wild, along with the Wu-Tang inspired intro adventure, "Last Chamber".

Check it out and start your own playlist below!

Stand with Kali Akuno: Help a Movement Builder Heal Kali Akuno—co-founder of Cooperation Jackson and a lifelong movement builder—is facing a serious and urgent health crisis. He needs immediate access to specialized cardiac care that he simply cannot g...

"Kali Akuno—co-founder of Cooperation Jackson and a lifelong movement builder—is facing a serious and urgent health crisis. He needs immediate access to specialized cardiac care that he simply cannot get in Mississippi."

please give what you can if you can!

chuffed.org/project/1771...

We're not gonna tell you anything about the games in this bundle. These are experiences best entered knowing as little as possible.

store.steampowered.com/bundle/70688/Hidden_Dept...

It's been three years since the three-years-of-funding Kickstarter campaign for Lancer Tactics completed. Time for a report card! www.kickstarter.com/projects/wic...

Additionally, the Module Editor is live. Lancer Tactics is now equipped with essentially a miniature visual novel editor.

AI Use Appears to Have a "Boiling Frog" Effect on Human Cognition, New Study Warns A new study claims to offer the first causal link between AI dependency and cognitive erosion. Researchers warn of long-term implications.

NEW: A new pre-print study offers the first causal evidence that outsourcing reasoning tasks to AI can rapidly erode users' independent performance AND their will to persist despite difficulty.

"People’s persistence drops... they’re also not willing to try without AI.”

futurism.com/artificial-i...

Despicable fucking government.

I have quite strong opinions about this. Humour, or moments of levity in general, provide an important contrast to frame more serious content against. Unending bleakness (or any emotional note) is exhausting and rapidly loses its impact without that.

awwww yeah, Sokpop’s @tijmen.sokpop.co took a genre (deck builders), then took a core part of the genre out (playing the cards), and then made the game very very juicy.

he shared an early build with me and its very good. (all the @sokpop.co members are very good at making games, jealously so.)

holy shit

Transcript: Weak, Strong, and Regular Moves (Dream Askew / Dream Apart) with Austin Walker - Dice Exploder Listen to this episode here. Austin Walker's new game Realis is on Kickstarter now, and it's been making splashes in the indie rpg scene since last year when the ashcan...

This week on Dice Exploder I've got @austinwalker.bsky.social on to talk Dream Askew / Dream Apart's weak, strong, and regular moves and how they influenced Realis. Diceless games are good! Randomness is overrated! Precise word choice is good game design!

AND in case you missed it, Tyler and I were invited to play Realis over on One Shot. Character creation is up now and the rest of the eps will be up over the next couple of weeks. A great way to see the game in action. And I got to play a PC instead of GM, which ruled.

bsky.app/profile/ones...