Dispatch from Singapore

I. Dear Reader

I’m writing this week from Singapore. I’m on break. Well, mostly on break, because I just visited a D&D play studio, which is a place where professional Dungeon Masters run paid games for people, using fancy maps, minis, music, lighting, and stuff like that. They have more than 50 DMs running games there. So you know, I’ll probably be writing about it for Rascal and thus, I’m kinda working.

I came to Singapore for a wedding though. Well, not a wedding, a wedding banquet. Shao Han, who I interviewed on Yes Indie’d a while ago, got married in 2022 when public events were restricted. He and his wife decided to throw a party in 2025 and I was invited. It was a fun evening! Shao Han teaches at a university but he also freelances regularly for Paizo and there was a table at the front of the reception hall displaying the books he’s contributed to. World’s first Pathfinder wedding? Maybe. At one point, there was a game where people rolled a giant d20. It was cute because his family didn’t even blink. Lot of old Chinese people taking this nerd stuff in their stride!

Right now, it’s Sunday and I’m at the Singapore Botanical Gardens, which is a UNESCO Heritage Site. It’s a big beautiful green place and I’m enjoying the peace and quiet. A jungle rooster just walked past me. The garden is on a street called Napier Road so I quickly checked if it was named after the same Napier that gave his name to a bridge in Chennai, the city where I live.

Napier Bridge is actually on my podcast cover art. When the city hosted a FIDE Chess Olympiad, the government painted the whole thing to look like a chess board. Chennai takes chess pretty seriously because of one of its favoured sons, Vishwanathan Anand, five-time World Chess Champion and the first GM from India (Grandmaster, not the other one). I chose the picture because I thought it was a nice intersection of games and public life. It’s interesting to think about what games are considered reputable enough to get a city excited, you know.

Paul Morphy, a legendary chess player, once said, “The ability to play chess is the sign of a gentleman. The ability to play chess well is the sign of a wasted life”. This may be apocryphal but also Morphy was just a sassy guy. On the other hand, there’s another anecdote about Bobby Fischer, an even bigger legend (played by Tobey Maguire in a movie I believe) who when asked about his sex life (journalists, I swear to god) simply said, “Chess is better.” So clearly there’s more sides to this chess thing.

Anyway, I was talking about a bridge. That bridge is named after a guy called Francis Napier who was Governor General of India in 1872. The road in Singapore is named after some completely unrelated lawyer with the nickname Royal Billy. To be fair, Francis Napier got around and could easily have come to Singapore. He was a diplomat who represented the UK in both the USA and Russia (among other places) so Singapore could’ve been on the resume. But sadly (?), it turns out our colonial history wasn’t that connected.  

That was a lot of rambling so I’ll stop now. Next week will have a more normal RPG-related post, maybe? 

Yours meanderingly,

Thomas

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II. Media of the Week

• On Yes Indie’d, I spoke to Emily Allen (Cavegirl, Dying Stylishly) about their body of work. From the best-selling Gardens of Ynn and Stygian Library to their recent work with sapphic and violent Dungeon Bitches and the allegorical (?) Black Death Rising. I’ve been a fan of her work for a long time and the interesting space she occupies that happily cuts across a lot of the silly storygame/OSR boundaries.
• The latest Quinns Quest is a review of knightly fantasy game, Mythic Bastionland, which I think is a really interesting work that again busts some of the aforementioned boundaries. As a capsule game with a focus on more mythic logic, I think will be pretty approachable for people who aren’t interested in the “challenge play” of OSR games.

• For those looking for more on the game, Chris McDowall has these nice deep dives on his channel.

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III. Links of the Week

• Building on some of the Roll20/DrivethruRPG controversy from last week, I enjoyed the commentary from Olivia Hill on bsky reading the entire situation in light of current US politics as well as Caleb Zane Huett about how companies construct policies and think about PR.
• Emily Friedman has started a patreon blog for her actual play criticism and other writing. It’s all free and there’s some posts already including one about organizing sprawling wizard game, Seven Part Pact, as well as a review of an “ancient” actual play on Shut Up and Sit Down.
• Talking about Seven Part Pact, Dwiz on the Knight At the Opera blog wrote a whole series of posts exploring different aspects of the game. I particularly enjoyed the one on Combat and the one on Consequences.
• Aaron King has a nice post on tumblr about running 90 minute sessions. This is something I do so I’m happy to see posts about it. It’s good and fun.
• On Explorer’s Design, Clayton Notestine writes about the work of being an Ennie’s Judge. Clayton is giving us a peek into all the work (which I had a sense of) but also the mental framework you need to have because you can’t really talk about the work as you do it.
• I enjoyed this short review of Mothership adventure, Owe My Soul to the Company Store, which calls it the “Greatest Political Module Ever Made” but with the caveat that it “took three cover-to-cover reads to sit comfortably in my head”. Nabokov famously said that there’s nothing wrong with making the reader work for it which is often where I stumble with these texts.
• On Prismatic Wasteland, a good post about turning encumbrance into a positive mechanic rather than a negative one. It builds on Trilemma Adventure’s wonderful insight about allocating responsibility to track a rule to the person who benefits from it.

From the archive:

• I’m not sure the designer is still active but I remember really appreciating their ideas about publishing games: “In the WOP model, independent publishers choose to release three broad editions of our works: Web, Offline, and Physical, in roughly that order.” (Issue 102, July 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.

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This newsletter is sponsored by the the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

• The Dark Eye gets a huge bundle of stuff in English. Great intro into the much-loved setting.
• Play out inverted fairy tales where the good and bad are reversed in Broken Tales from World Anvil Publishing.

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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!