Weekly Roundup, July 31 2020

  • Fandom snagged the rights to the Dragon Prince RPG which is awesome in its own right, but Fandom is also currently home to amazing things like “Cortex” and “Cam Banks” so my expectations are at 11.
  • Washington Post article on the rise of tabletop gaming in the pandemic and some of the issues facing D&D
  • incase, who makes pretty good carry gear, has a $200 EDC kit (“everday carry” for the non-nerds) which seems decent, but most notably is apparently made of recycled bottles. This promotional article hits the high notes. Price is very reasonable in the fancy backpack space, but a little high for mortals, but possibly worth it for what it represents. I admit, I’m very curious about how these materials hold up.
  • Bit of material science nerdery – they’ve made a new material to resist cutting that’s going to be really useful for things like bike locks. As I understand it, because the core of it is less a matrix and more a collection of “beads”, vibrations get distributed and blunted by the material, so something like a rotary cutter will go blunt before this stuff cuts much at all.
  • Radical Focus, a pretty good book with an attached consultancy, has gotten active again because they released a new edition. One good upshot on this has been a pair of articles on feedback, one on the problems with constructive feedback and one on how to get people to give feedback. Roundup
  • Mark Richardson (my favorite RPG cartographer) has been posting his WIP for a post-waters-rise Los Angeles, and it’s delightful
  • Atomic Robo pin set kickstarter!
  • Even without Gencon, the awards march on. The IGDN awards have been announced, as has the Diana Jones award.
  • I’m a big fan of the term “security theater”, and now we have “hygiene theater
  • Apparently the Sentinels of Freedom game got released on the Switch yesterday, so I may vanish for a while.
  • After I talked about material components in D&D, someone was kind enough to share a link to a spreadsheet that breaks them all down.
  • Cool system for tracking D&D combat in text The model’s very applicable to other games, and also works very nicely with a kanban system.

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