20 Questions and 20 Blogposts
I ask myself and then answer 20 questions and also highlight 20 recent posts from across the blogosphere
Questions and Answers
What are you playing? There is a playtest version of Worldwizard by Jason Lutes that a homie on my discord server is running as a lead-in to running Songbirds. Sort of Cyberpunk 2077, but I find video gaming hard in the era of me being a parent to an infant, and frankly just in the entire era of me being an adult. As a child I would just play for hours and hours and it never became something I did in teeny bursts like writing can be. Also I played a lot of 2-player Splendor recently, because it is a very addicting little board game.
What are you watching? Like in the moment I am writing this post, the Action Button Reviews review of DOOM. I sort of background watched it a while back but am now background re-watching it. A few more of these and it counts as a real watch! Yesterday, I watched Boat People and re-watched Parasite.
What are you wearing? I’m not answering that. Please, be serious.
What are you reading? Besides blog posts (as always—I read at least 40 posts just in constructing the post you have in your virtual hands), Queen City Jazz by Kathleen Ann Goonan, Cardboard Ghosts by Amabel Holland, and Happy City by Charles Montgomery.
Which of those would you recommend most? Cardboard Ghosts by Amabel Holland if I’m recommending to a crowd who reads game design theory for fun. It is board game focus, but still applicable to tabletop roleplaying games, discussing how games model and critique real-world systems, including systems of oppression, and make unseen or misunderstood systems something that can be manipulated and, in the process, misunderstood slightly less.
What is your favorite game? Tough question, but because of its profound influence on my young psyche, I have to say Pokemon Red. It taught me to read.
I meant tabletop game? You should have said that then. This counts as a question.
Fine, what is your favorite tabletop game? Similarly to citing Pokemon as most influential to me, I gotta go with Ultraviolet Grasslands. It was my gateway substance that turned me into the addict you see before you.
Are you an addict of anything other than TTRPGs? No, I could be a monk. I could easily be a monk. All my vices I choose willingly each time afresh.
What is your favorite game mechanic? I think someone asked me this recently and I said the blackjack variant of the roll under test where you both roll under your stat and over a difficulty score. There are just so many possibilities!
Where have I heard of that? Most likely Errant where it is the core mechanic, but my own game, Prismatic Wasteland, builds on some of the cool stuff Errant did with it. Shoulders of giants, and all that.
What is your favorite blog? My own would be a cop-out, I suppose. Mindstorm has the highest critical hit rate, DIY & Dragons or Bastionland have the singular posts that I think about the most and…
I said blog, singular, not blogs plural! Hey, I thought this was going to be sort of an informal exercise where I could ramble on whatever given…
No, you thought incorrectly. Can you explain this gap on your résumé? I didn’t hand you any résumé, but maybe you mean 2022 where I didn’t release a TTRPG thingy. That was mostly a year where I was working on Barkeep on the Borderlands. 2023 was my real fallow period where I was mostly recovering from the harrowing process not of creating Barkeep but of the logistics.
Will you have a fallow period this year? Hopefully not. I already plan on releasing the beta rules of Prismatic Wasteland, since it is the year of the beta, but hopefully I can at least do something short and lowkey every year, as side alleys to my more ambitious projects.
How do you manage so many projects? First off, it is probably a normal number of projects for one of us abnormal hobbyists. Secondly, I actually think it would be harder for me to just have one project going. My artistic process, as it were, is to wildly bounce around projects as my fancy strikes. It’s why I probably wouldn’t be perfectly suited to the grind of doing this professionally. But like, if I reread True Grit (great book) and then rewatch 2010 True Grit (great movie), you can bet I’m going to drop whatever else I’m working on to write cowboy rules for a few days. It’s just in my nature.
Or perhaps your nurture? I’m not sure what you’re implying. That I was raised to occasionally go on a bender of writing rules about how to pretend to be a cowboy?
Moving on, what do you hope to achieve with running a substack concurrently with a blog? I am like an idea-exhibitionist. I just like people reading what I write, my words swimming around in the soup of their mind, getting stuck in the crevices until they have the good sense to have their brain washed. Idk I feel like I addressed this in my opening post on substack; did you not read that?
Are you a washed-up has-been hack? Not yet, but I aspire to be. First I must have-be to has-been, and having-being is a pleasant state. Once I’ve had it with having-being, I’ll retire to has-been status.
Why are you using this format? I feel bad just sending out a collection of links—something about it just feels lazy even for a newsletter I write for zero dollars and only slightly above zero readership. In future roundup issues I may just do like a 2 paragraph stream of consciousness of whatever is on my mind when I’m writing it.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the blogosphere:
Prismatic Wasteland: Sharing the Spotlight is Insufficient (perhaps this one isn’t as “elsewhere” as the others, but you can’t begrudge me my spotlight in my own theatre).
Two Copper Pieces: End Your Online Sessions 5-10 Minutes Early
Failure Tolerated: Writing rooms in pairs
Skeleton Code Machine: How to generate a dungeon map
A Blasted, Cratered Land: Magic Hexcrawls
The Hapless Henchman: Dead Malls as Dungeons
evil baboons or perhaps mandrills: the player who sucks/what alignment is for
Fail Forward: Fantastical Character Classes
Bastionland Presser: The Right Suit for the Job
Rolled Low: High energy players - finding the right initiative system
Temporal Negativity: D&D shields SUCK, here is how to FIX them
Idraluna Archives: Negative HD
Knight at the Opera: Defeat, Not Death
Cannibal Halfling Gaming: Diegesis, Mimesis, and You
Benign Brown Beast: 2035 Predictions
Lithyscape: I Quit My Job To Make Games
Weird Wonder: Arthurian Mysticism and Violence: a Mythic Bastionland Analysis
Playful Void: Bathtub Review: The Blancmange and Thistle
Fool’s Pyrite: The First Outing to the Drowned Isles, feat. Tannic
Dreams in the Lich House: Shadowdark: The Good, The Bad, the Ugly