• 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.

Trying to keep fun stuff someplace other than twitter, for reasons of trash fire.

• The magnificent Fate SRD Site now has a Patreon.
• 1600 Occult books have been digitized and put Onlime
• Really good Thread on pitching.
• My copy of the Fiasco boxed set arrived this week, and I’m really enthusiastic to crack it open this weekend.
• Harry Connolly’s Child of Fire came out on Audiobook and I’m pretty psyched. That is really good news, because it’s an AMAZING series and it serves more attention.
• Really fantastic article on Design Thinking that cuts through the BS.
• My ONE WEIRD THING to get people to see and think about your game. Also, a mammoth thread about RPG pricing.
• Quest RPG has made a very well made SRD available, and it’s pretty nice.
• Article on priming (that is, using cues to subtly direct choices) is an interesting read. The jump to subliminal advertising is less interesting to me that the explicit table technique, something I am pretty sure a lot of GMs have some practice with, if only unconsciously.
• Julia Evans makes amazing instructional zines, which I love, but are interesting to distribute on modern platforms. I see a lot of them on twitter, or via her mailing list, but every now and again she does a summary post so you can review them. These delight me. The topics are great, but every time I see one they make me thing I need to try out the format.
• Ulysses is my go-to writing app. It works in text, but has a lot of power to wrap it in, allowing me to do things like, say, these posts. It’s got many of the advantages of scrivener, but is definitely more lightweight and less featureful. One benefit of working in text is that collaboration has fewer technical challenges, and the Ulysses folks posted a guide on collaborating on docs over github, which is a useful read for any writing nerds who have been curious. The GitHub explanation works with almost any text docs, not just Ulysses, so if you’re on windows and using something like Writemonkey the benefits should be similar.
• Neat collection of underwater photography of all manner of strange creatures.
• Maps of Roman Roads in the style of the London Underground.