Day Late

I. Dear Reader,

Spent this week mostly grieving. It’s not a normal newsletter subject and I don’t really have much to say on something so personal. But I have this poem saved from Ghayath Almadhoun and I thought I’d share it. It makes me think about how sometimes the natural response to grief is to become a poet and by that, I mean, see the world differently. It also makes me think about how this keeps happening, how universal it is, how we’ve all lost people and that makes it in a way the most ordinary thing in the world.

And yet.

The poem is called How I Became:

Her grief fell from the balcony and broke into pieces, so she needed a new grief. When I went with her to the market the prices were unreal, so I advised her to buy a used grief. We found one in excellent condition although it was a bit big. As the vendor told us, it belonged to a young poet who had killed himself the previous summer. She liked this grief so we decided to take it. We argued with the vendor over the price and he said he’d give us an angst dating from the sixties as a free gift if we bought the grief. We agreed, and I was happy with this unexpected angst. She sensed this and said ‘It’s yours’. I took it and put it in my bag and we went off. In the evening I remembered it and took it out of the bag and examined it closely. It was high quality and in excellent condition despite half a century of use. The vendor must have been unaware of its value otherwise he wouldn’t have given it to us in exchange for buying a young poet’s low quality grief. The thing that pleased me most about it was that it was existentialist angst, meticulously crafted and containing details of extraordinary subtlety and beauty. It must have belonged to an intellectual with encyclopedic knowledge or a former prisoner. I began to use it and insomnia became my constant companion. I became an enthusiastic supporter of peace negotiations and stopped visiting relatives. There were increasing numbers of memoirs in my bookshelves and I no longer voiced my opinion, except on rare occasions. Human beings became more precious to me than nations and I began to feel a general ennui, but what I noticed most was that I had become a poet.

Yours, thinking about lateness,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• A new season of Dice Exploder has begun with an episode about Wreck this Deck, a game of destroying cards and summoning demons.
• The Open Hearth Community has restarted what was previously the Gauntlet podcast, where three people get together and talk about three games they played in the community, teasing out what worked for them and what didn’t. The first episode talked about UVG and Community Radio. The second episode talks about Mythic Bastionland, Kingdom 2e, and Red Markets 2e.

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• We got 3 new patrons last week which is fantastic. Thank you to Robert, Nik, and Gabriel.
• You too can support the newsletter on patreon!
• If you’ve released a new game on itch.io this month, let me know through this form so I can potentially include it in the end of the month round-up.

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III. Links of the Week

• On Rascal, a fun story about attending the Dimension 20 show at Madison Square Garden: “The only way to keep going amidst it all is to find reasons to be happy, to tell new stories that will keep us warm through the long, cold winter nights.”
• On Cannibal Halfling, Aaron Marks writes an interesting intellectual essay about diagesis and mimesis in games: “If you’ve ever talked about a game being immersive, you need to understand diegesis and how the game works around the player/character divide. If you’ve ever discussed suspension of disbelief, you need to understand mimesis and how game logic and world logic interact.”
• On the elmcat blog, a nice piece about using calendars to build worlds and keep them dynamic.
• On the semitext blog, a good read on Realis from Austin Walker and who might enjoy it: “The delight of Realis is not just its simplicity, but the way it makes its ruleset comprehensible through ordinary, natural language.”
• On the Fail Forward blog, a post about something I think about a lot: asymmetrical, extreme, and fantastical class design.
• This post on the Whose Measure God Could Not Take blog reminds me about Pendragon’s passions and how much of game design is just good words. It’s about 10 alternatives for “testing morale”.

Misc

• The Diana Jones Award for Emerging Designers is now open for nominations, closes 14th Feb. Just takes a brief note and the prize is mostly sponsorship to GenCon.
• The Legacy of Kain RPG has flow a bit under the radar but it’s another lush production from the Lost in Cult folks who made videogame-related books.
• Jeff Stormer of Party of One has a book out called The Ultimate Fantasy Character Creator. You can learn more about it on the podcast episode here but it seems like a nice gift for gamers.

From the archive:

• This is a nice post on Tor’s magazine by someone who stopped playing D&D: “It took three and a half failed campaigns and a boatload of self-exploration, but I finally understand what it takes to break off a relationship that isn’t working.” (First shared in Feb 2022)

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IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

• Can you outfox the world’s most fur-midable villains and claw-ver criminals with nothing but your wits, a trench coat, and a trio of raccoons? Find out with the Mission: ImPAWsible Zine & Box Set!
• Dig deeper into high-level play with “The Château Amongst the Stars,” an adventure of time-bending magical mystery designed for Shadowdark. Launching Feb 17th on Kickstarter, sign up today.
• Grimwild is a FREE game of cinematic fantasy adventure, taking the thematic tropes of D&D and mixing it with the gameplay of games like Blades in the Dark, Fate, and Burning Wheel.
• The Wild Frontier of Venture – Lassos & Six Shooters on a weird, rugged world. In Venture, you can’t run from your problems – but they can’t run from you, either.

This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding.

• CBR+PNK, the rules-light cyberpunk game from Mythworks and Emanoel Melo
• Dusk City Outlaws, one-shot game of fantasy criminals from Scratchpad Publishing
• A whole bundle of anti-authoritarian themed RPGs like Eat the Reich, Grey Ranks, and Misspent Youth.

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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!