Board game idea, chaos combat

A tote bag with a cartoon by Tom Gauld on it. The text reads "SHOP INDIE. SHOP LOCAL.". The image shows a sweet little book-filled cottage on a tiny island. The only inhabitant has set off on a very short journey by rowboat to a neighbouring tiny island which has a jetty and a small bookstore. The bookseller stands in ther door drinking a coffee.

"Independent Bookstore Day is a one-day national party that takes place at indie bookstores across the country on the last Saturday in April. Every store is unique and independent, and every party is different."

*Check the site for details www.indiebound.org/independent-bookstore-day/map

aKoB

a Kintsugi of Break

Me laying out my tshirts before packing for a trip:

Cherish nature!
#earthday

The Play Reports Fleurons, Mother of all Bullets

theplayreports.com/posts/fleuro...

Reading through my blog backlog on the bus again. Separately from restarting any debates about bullet points - I'm not really interested in discussing things on bluesky as a general rule - I thought the history was interesting

Babies

A sketch of an explorer holding a torch in a dark cave. The background is red with the word RUNE in white above the drawing.

Explore a dying world. Just make sure it doesn't become your tomb.

Check out my solo soulslike TTRPG, RUNE.

gilarpgs.itch.io/rune

The Worm Discord was thinking about keying Metroidvania maps and turned up this gem: maprando.com.

It generates a playable Super Metroid ROM with Rogue-like randomizations, including a random map.

@unenthuser.bsky.social wrote a seminal essay on clues, webs of information, and horror:
"Clues and the Web of Information"

If you run horror or any games that include mystery elements you need to take the time to read it!

www.patreon.com/posts/clues-...

Coachella is trying to wipe all of the footage of The Strokes protest set so I’m gonna post it here. The last images on the screen made me cry.

Shiny TTRPG links #273 Links of great interest from the breadth of the interweb. Not sated? Try last weeks collection or the weekly r/OSR blogroll or check the R...

Shiny TTRPG links #273

seedofworlds.blogspot.com/2026/04/shin...

#ttrpg #osr #dnd #diyrpg

How to generate a dungeon map Exploring the many ways to make a randomly generated map for your next dungeon crawl using dice and cards

Go make a dungeon map: www.skeletoncodemachine.com/p/dungeon-ge...

This place feels really ominous...

I ran all the pamphlet triptych adventures and all I got was a fantastic time Review and play report with likes and dislikes. Plus what I'd change for a second play-through.

My experience running the triptych pamphlets by @bradkerr.net and @skullfungus.bsky.social spoilers: it was awesome 🎉

There are other heavens.

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🧵

Continuing with Margaret St. Clair, one of the authors cited in the DMG's appendix N, I have read The Dolphins of Altair.

A psionic dolphin historian collaborates with three humans to flood the world. Trippy read.

attronarch.com/reading-the-...

#AppendixN #SFF #ScienceFiction #Doomsday

Phrase screenprinted on my underwear:

The Necessary Pain Involved in Blogging (if you want your work to be preserved beyond your lifespan) I am thinking a lot these days about my own mortality. That’s not because I am obsessed with death or anything of the sort. It’s more that my health problems are accumulating and I do not know how long my body is going to hold out against them. It might be that I can clear all my current...

Blogging is painful but essential for preserving my work beyond my lifetime. I discuss the steps I take, from metadata to digital preservation, and why it's worth it.

eve.gd/2026/04/19/the-necessary...

I would like to think that if you ask ChatGPT to order you a Starbucks drink, it says "sure thing, boss," but then when you go to pick it up it emerges that the Chat app has no way to communicate your drink order to Starbucks, it just said it could to be agreeable.

Mewtone – See You Tonight (Official Music Video) YouTube video by Mewtone

Today's #SundaySong is "See You Tonight" by Mewtone. Upbeat guitars and dual vocals sing about wanting to see someone you like. The video captures the carefree fun of spending time with friends. I would place this alongside Teens in Trouble's "Playlist" for capturing the feeling of friendship.

A screenshot of a New York Times Headline. Opinion, Ross Douthat, The Four Lessons Liberals Should Consider After Orban's Defeat, April 18 2026.

This is my least favorite genre of opinion piece.

Why would any liberal take political advice from Ross Douthat?

Why would anyone, of any politics, believe that Douthat is offering liberals sincere advice in good faith, rather than again attempting to persuade Dems to enact conservative policy?

I blogged again!

A crafting system with all the fun and none of the work...because I've done the work for you!

Enchantments! New items! One easy roll a week! Perfect for any table, especially open ones.

Check it out, give me feedback and share!

hardboiledfantasyland.blogspot.com/2026/04/craf...

Brown pencil drawing of a lady in fine robes and a headscarf walking a feathered Velociraptor on a leash.

'Princess Joveta sends her grateful thanks to her friend the great Khan for his kind gift of her new pet Velociraptor, with whom she is delighted. Isambart now responds to his name, is taking well to training, and bids fair to becoming a very fine hunter.'

Chain Stocking the Hex Map — Prismatic Wasteland A new method for procedurally generating the terrain of a hex map that adds some level of “memory” to the otherwise disconnected random tosses of the oracle dice.

Bluesky CENSORED me yesterday by just fucking up and not working, but here is a new blog post where I propose a procedural method for generating hexcrawl terrain, inspired by both Mausritter and the original DMG
#osr #ttrpg

Is it German? Their keyboards have Y and Z inverted relative to American ones.

Ridley's Lair from Metroid redraw

I Live for the A-HA Moment - Unwinnable Outside of rewarding exploration, the best feeling in a videogame is the “A-HA!” moment.

ICYMI: "But here’s the thing: While rewarding exploration might be my favorite thing, nothing else beats the feeling of figuring out how to do a thing in a game all on my own."

@robsteinone.bsky.social praises the "a-ha!" moments in games like Moon and Caves of Qud:

Writing Modules For Cairn Writing adventures for Cairn RPG is very similar to writing for other OSR systems, with a few additional tweaks. Before reading further, see my previous post...

As a follow-up to last week's post about writing modules, I wrote another post on writing adventures for Cairn, and how that might be different than other OSR systems.

newschoolrevolution.com/writing-modu...