December's Secret Bonus Thing is a special optional archetype for Podcast From Another World. Both The Bugle and What a Time to Be Alive have producers who only occasionally chime in, and I realized that Chris and Shelby from those podcasts make an ideal model for someone who wants to act as a facilitator for e.g. convention games of PFAW.
2023-01-07 16:53:46 +0000 UTC View PostNow that I'm over COVID, it's past time to get caught up. The Thing of the Month for December is the first draft of Hellcast, an alternate setting for Podcast From Another World where the human host is a recently deceased person who went to hell and their punishment is to do a podcast where they have a mixture of famous sinners and demons as guests. The Good Morning From Hell podcast was the major inspirati...
2023-01-07 16:50:40 +0000 UTC View PostIf you’re wondering why it’s been a while since I last posted anything here, basically to round out the year, the universe apparently decided to send me a series of unpleasant curveballs.
My roommate decided to quit his job to pursue a PhD. He’s an awesome guy and I want him to succeed, but I have clinical anxiety so I had a bit of a nervous breakdown over the possibility of him moving out. The rational part of my brain knows that even if he did, the place where we live is eminent...
2023-01-02 23:35:58 +0000 UTC View PostThis is the result of trying out SleepQuest for myself, an adorable little story about a very sleepy dragon stuck in the Demon King's castle.
2022-11-06 16:27:52 +0000 UTC View PostMore than once I’ve had people suggest doing some kind of solo RPG/journaling game. They’re an interesting medium, and also a way to get around my current difficulties with getting people together. I have a list of about a dozen ideas, and I’ve now finished a one-page journaling game called “SleepQuest.” The primary inspiration for it is the anime/manga Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle, where a princess being held captive in the Demon King’s massive ca...
2022-11-01 12:01:47 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's Secret Bonus Thing is another Secret Bonus Table. I decided to do something I'd just have fun with, and apparently that means more old timey silliness, this time around a table for generating names of mad professors like The Shocking Phineas L.L. Snickleheimer or Mistress Lachryma X. Lemonchopper.
2022-10-09 00:45:15 +0000 UTC View PostNot unlike with TTRPGs, I’ve wanted to write stories pretty much since I understood that they’re a thing that a person can write. People seem to think I have a certain talent for dialogue, but I’ve always struggled with plotting. Not every kind of prose writing depends on plot, whether it’s nonfiction or literary fiction that emphasizes other aspects, but a lot of what I want to write needs good plotting. I have ideas for stories that involve adventure, sci-fi, and fantasy, e...
2022-10-03 22:26:20 +0000 UTC View PostI ended up following some members of the Jewish community on Twitter. Part of it is that they’re good people (there are of course Jewish jerks out there, including Jews who are jerks to other Jews for flimsy reasons), and part of it is that they regularly get into arguments with the more unpleasant kinds of Christians, people who are ill-equipped to handle the fact that Jews didn’t all convert to Christianity and stop being so darn Jewish. (I probably should cut down on Twitter honestly.)...
2022-10-03 22:07:34 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's Secret Bonus Thing is a Secret Bonus table, for generating names of vampires in the style of the hit FX series What We Do in the Shadows. Read the introduction in Lazslo's voice for extra comedy fun times!
2022-09-24 14:35:43 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's Thing of the Month is the current version of Podcast From Another World! This is a weird hybrid of improv and tabletop role-playing, heavily inspired by the Hello From the Magic Tavern podcast. In it, you sit down and pretend to be doing a podcast from a fantasy world, posting the audio to the internet via a shaky wi-fi signal through a portal.
I need to do more playtesting, but it...
2022-09-24 14:14:59 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve been working on my 90s anime comedy fantasy RPG Dragon World off and on for nearly a decade now, and I really need to finish and publish it, for a variety of reasons. When that’s out of the way I want to do some supplements, including alternate settings. One that I started on a little bit is “El Kazad,” which draws on weirder bits of fantasy like Bastard!! and the Elric stories. I also want to do an Asian fantasy setting, and there’s just no way I’m going to...
2022-09-14 03:40:34 +0000 UTC View PostIt’s been a while since I had regular Patreon updates, and I’m realizing that it’s a symptom of a shift in focus that I’ve been going through over the past few years now. Between my extant personality, having such a hard time getting friends together to actually play, and a deep cynicism about the industry, I’m not quite as enthusiastic about TTRPGs as I used to be. I haven’t given them up or anything—in fact I just started a Scum & Villainy campaign with some frien...
2022-09-03 14:09:29 +0000 UTC View PostI’ve now had this Patreon on pause for like 4 months in a row, and it’s fun because Patreon only lets you pause for one month at a time, so if you forget (which I’ve somehow managed to avoid) it goes ahead and charges patrons.
I’m still kicking, and ever so slowly getting back into properly working on various creative endeavors. Life has been stressful, and that doesn’t seem likely to let up any time soon. My mother has had Alzheimer’s for a few years now, and more recently ...
2022-04-15 16:35:57 +0000 UTC View PostRemember like a million years ago when 2016 was the terrible year we couldn’t wait to see the end of? Like John Oliver did a video where he blew up a huge 2016 sign? Then every year after tried to contend for worst year in recent memory? Sigh.
I try not to put too much stock into digits flipping over, but we somehow made it out of 2021. The COVID-19 pandemic is still going on and in many ways worse, Jo...
2022-01-17 18:34:29 +0000 UTC View PostA few years ago I was on the way home from a job interview when I had a powerful case of l'esprit d'escalier (“the spirit of the staircase”), the thing where you think of the perfect thing to say after it’s too late. They’d asked if there was something about me that they’d learn after working with me for a while, and in the moment I’d said something about how they’d find out that I...
2022-01-01 19:01:52 +0000 UTC View PostI recently finished a second play through of Persona 5 Royal, and I’d gone through regular Persona 5 twice before that. I’m a big fan of the series, in case you couldn’t tell. Playing it a second time was more just because I felt like it than anything—I’d done a second playthrough of Shantae and the Seven Sirens a bit before—though some interesting things emerged. I’ve tried to keep this as free of spoilers as I can, even though the game is already a f...
2021-12-04 19:22:06 +0000 UTC View PostDoes being kinda sorta on-theme count if it's late? Well, here's an Anime Oracle for heartwarming tales with supernatural stuff in rural Japan, which is to say very much in the vein of Golden Sky Stories.
As I mentioned in a Musings post, this year I decided to give mostly 3D printed Christmas gifts, and for most of them I was able to find something on Thingiverse. There was one gift that I ended up commissioning a guy to do an original design for, which is a dice tower in the shape of an arcade cabinet. I'm really happy with the results, and I wanted to share it with you guys. I don't know how many of you actually do 3D printing, but here's the STL file (for personal use). If you really want ...
2021-12-01 15:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostKyle Kinane is one of my favorite standup comedians, and on Trampoline in a Ditch, his most recent comedy album, he did a bit about how retired guys get into model trains because it’s a little world where they’re the boss. During the pandemic I adopted some new hobbies and got deeper into others, and being able to have something more or less under my own control has helped me get through living in...
2021-11-01 17:01:02 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's secret bonus table is for generating methods of divination, in case you need a hot new mancy to tell the future or something.
I discovered System Mastery a year or two ago, and it quickly became one of my favorite podcasts. In it, Jef and Jon go over old and usually bad RPGs and crack jokes along the way. One thing that’s emerged is how comedy RPGs are bad more often than not. There are some gems like Ghostbusters, but a lot of unfortunate attempts at writing a humor book with game rules tucked in. Humor writing is hard to do well, ...
2021-10-01 16:01:05 +0000 UTC View PostThis month's Anime Oracle is "Blood Legacy," which is for cool vampire stuff, and it's the reason I'm re-watching the original Vampire Hunter D movie from 1985. Also, it was an good excuse to dust off Exocet a.k.a. The Diablo/Planescape Font.
Hey, I'm nearly caught up somehow! This month's (and for once it actually is _this_ month's) Secret Bonus Table lets you quickly generate a horoscope that will be just as factual as the one in your local paper or one of those YouTube channels.
A special double secret bonus table, with band names and album/song names from death metal.
Fun Fact: All of the good death metal fonts cost money.
Another anime oracle! I'm getting some momentum on these or something! This time it's for fantasy adventures!
As I continue getting caught up, have a table of "alternative" cures, which is to say things that are alternatives to getting actual medicine.
June's belated table pack is another anime oracle, this one for dark magical girl stuff, I guess because I'm doing what I know.
Over the past decade or so I reached a point where I’m relatively good at actually finishing RPGs I start. My record for novels is not so good, with only one finished so far. That’s Nekomimi Land, which I periodically picked up and put down for about a decade before waking up one day in November of 2016 and resolving to finish it to deal with the realization that the world is a worse place than I’d thought. I still have a lot of other novels in various stages of completion, and...
2021-09-06 02:52:53 +0000 UTC View PostI'm not entirely sure what it was that led me to make this table--I think it might've been dunking on Giantlands or something? In any case this is a satirical table making fun of the thing where an RPG will have what amounts to magic but give it a weird name, especially if they pretend it's something groundbreaking when it had spell slots from 1974.
This is one that I've been wanting to do for a while, and for whatever reason I suddenly had the motivation to get it done.
