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Another Quick One
I. Dear Reader, Been a long week, work-wise, so no preamble from me. Enjoy the links! Yours recoveringly, Thomas II. Media of the Week III. Links of the Week From the archive: IV. Small Ads All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section…
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Possible Landscapes
I. Dear Reader, I’ve had two essays published over at Rascal in the last month that I’m really proud of. The first was a look at Austin Walker’s Realis, which I turned into a history of surrealism. The second was this week’s review of Impossible Landscapes. I mentioned wanting to run Impossible Landscapes back in…
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June Mini-Letter
I. Dear Reader, I was on vacation this week so enjoy another issue with just the links! Yours mountain-ly, Thomas II. Media of the Week No TTRPG stuff this week so I’m going to share something full aware that most people simply don’t have time for it: this six hour review of a Japanese dating-sim…
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New Games on Itch: April-May 2025
I. Dear Reader Another edition of my regular round-up of new games on itch. If this is the first time you’re seeing one of these: many of these games came through this form but others I just stumbled across. I haven’t played or read them but each of them has something that made me sit…
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Skipping Past The Ending
I. Dear Reader Another week, another little anecdote. If you’re following me on bluesky, you might’ve seen this already. Last week, in my Apocalypse World: Burned Over game, an interesting thing happened: all my players teamed up. Now this is something that you might take for granted in most games… but in AW, you shouldn’t.…
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RPG Networks
I. Dear Reader, On reddit, azura26 did some interesting graphical visualization of what games get recommended and how connected they are to each other. You should check out the thread here because it explains how the chart was made and how to read it. But I’m also posting the image below so you get a…
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Why talking about RPGs can suck
I. Dear Reader, Over on Bluesky, there was some conversation about one of the long-running cyclical conversation that happens in RPG spaces. This time, it was about the category of statement that goes something like “I hacked D&D to run Cyberpunk 2077, just as god intended” to quote the original poster. To put it another…
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Scenarios!
I. Dear Reader, I’ve been thinking about scenarios and railroading and ease of GMing. Let me take a step back. GMing is hard. It’s not so hard that people don’t constantly just learn how to do it on their own but it’s hard enough that many people don’t do it. It’s also hard to talk…
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April Mini-letter
I. Dear Reader, Just the links this week! See you next time, Thomas II. Media of the Week III. Links of the Week From the archive: 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…
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Prep Preferences & Interpretive Labour
I. Dear Reader, I’ve started three campaigns recently with three different games. But the thing I want to talk about is how they’ve each demanded three different kinds of prep. That isn’t something I’ve really thought about in the past. Prep is prep, you know. Names, places, animals, things, we’ve all done it, we get…