Link Roundup 005

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// 2026-01-11

First of all, allow me to wish you all a very happy new year! 2026, blimey. We're only two years away from the setting of a futuristic story I remember writing as a child. But let's turn our attention away from looking forward for a moment, and instead cast our minds back to last month.

Yes, the link roundup for December 2025 is here at last! I can barely remember what I included as I type this, so it'll be a fun discovery for both of us!

Links

Well, this first link is about stuff that's already happened now—but it hadn't when I added it to my list! Yes, Public Domain Day has come and gone for another year, but it may still be worth reading about what's become available to artists in anticipation of the weird and wacky things they'll create this year.

A trio of excellent McSweeney's articles next. This one about Google rang true for me. One of my hipster boasts is that I started using DuckDuckGo instead of Google way back in 2013. I even got a t-shirt from them for telling them I'd spread the word!

The next one made me laugh out loud even though I've never seen the box art in question: it's all about the board game Mastermind.

And this one's a send-up about the most ridiculous part of my favourite Christmas film, It's a Wonderful Life.

One more “normal” thing before the monthly deluge of RPG (and Lord of the Rings) stuff. Here's an essay by Stephanie Yue Duhem about how Only Bad Poems Go Viral.

Okay! Now we're onto the nerdy stuff. First up, a great article about how the moral of Denethor's story in The Lord of the Rings is basically “stop doomscrolling”. I love this piece because not only is it LotR analysis, but it's also quite hopeful. Optimism doesn't necessarily mean burying your head in the sand: to try and do something in the face of overwhelming danger even though the odds are stacked against you is an act of optimism (and courage)!

Another article from Polygon (and another LotR article at that) builds on the stuff I mentioned above and discusses how the trilogy faithfully adapts Tolkien's unrelenting belief in hope.

Revivify Games gives some great pointers on How to Run a Sandbox Adventure.

The above article mentions that you need to be good at improvisation. Fortunately, here's a post that tells you how you can do just that!

The idea of Landmark, Hidden, Secret is a great method for running rooms in a dungeon and stuff like that.

Finally—and forgive me for sharing a link to a product, especially one I haven't even bought myself yet—here's a cool idea by InfiniBadger Press (great name, by the way): a guide for players (especially in OSR systems) written as though it was penned by a seasoned adventurer that exists in the game world.

Sorry again that this came out so late, but I hope you've had a great start to the year. Until next time!