The feed of updates to Ratcatcher
Basically this is my version of a D&D fantasy setting, generic enough so I can slot in other peoples’ dungeons without much modification but weird enough to be interesting. Big sources of inspiration are the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories (Ziragzar is just Lankhmar), seventeenth-century India and America, and Ghibli fantasy. THE SUNDER is a continent which holds forests as old as the world and…
Short post for you all today. Notes on Lancelot (T.H. White) Fifteen Questions and Ten Principles (Dieter Rams) 128 Things about the City (Edwin Heathcote) What Every Kid Should Be Able to Do by Age Sixteen (Audrey Sutherland) The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowlege (Borges) The Catalogue of Ships (Homer) 250 Things an Architect Should Know (Michael Sorkin) Reading lists. Bibliographies and…
The 1976 Fender Guitar catalogue was fairytale-themed. Lot of links today, not much commentary, just to get rid of a few open browser/mental tabs. Currently: Maybe part of it is just that you can hear what the characters are saying . Watching: All the President’s Men . The definitive paperwork movie . For a film that’s almost completely made up of people making phone calls and writing things down,…
I can’t think of a computer I’d rather have break on me, mind you. Frame.work laptops are designed to be repaired, hacked, and upgraded — it even comes with a screwdriver so you can take it apart. It only took a few e-mails to support for them to send me the part I needed, under warranty. My daily-driver laptop — a frame.work 13 — carked it a few days ago, and while I’m waiting for a replacement…
Some good lists: Unsolicited Thoughts for the Young Men of New York , 1d50 Things I Learned in 2021 , Better Living , Unsolicited Advice ( 2020 , 2021 , 2022 ) I like reading other peoples’ lists of advice or rules of thumb. Life’s too short to learn only from your own mistakes. Sometimes I find the tips useful, but what I’m really interested in is how much you can learn about the person giving…
Busy lately, doing all the things I promised myself I’d do when summer started. Fell down the note-taking rabbit hole . This had been on the horizon since the beginning of last year, when I found out about the online ‘ Zettelkasten’ scene. Most of the people I’ve seen setting up digital notes systems are STEM types, but it should also be useful for the humanities/literary criticism stuff I do.…
Seasoned spacers use adrenalin injections to avoid ‘ cryosickness’. Previously: Gradient Descent new campaign handout . Computer terminals start to beep. Overhead lights flicker on. Heating systems stir up the layer of dust that covers everything. After 55 years in cryosleep, the crew of MHI Falstaff begin to wake up: Dr. Conrad Matherson (Scientist PC ). He/they. Research professor, AI…
Hi, Lesley. Since we talked a bit about newsletters last time we called I’ve made a note of a half-dozen you might find interesting. I’ve included a link to a good entry from each. The Contender . David Coggins is a men’s fashion writer and fly fisherman who writes about his idea of the good things in life. It’s funny how much travel can teach us about dressing. This starts when we’re packing and…
The longer I use this website, the more uses I find for it. Currently typing up a few after-action reports for the first three sessions of my new Mothership campaign . Meanwhile, here are a few things I’ve been looking at. In other news Reading: Julian , by Gore Vidal. First-person account of the Roman emperor who rejected Christianity and tried to re-instate paganism, already (in the book) a…
When I was in high school the main thing I spent my free time on was playing D&D. We would have these huge six-hour sessions every Saturday or two, and if we ran over time we’d sometimes stay over at each others’ houses. It was great! It was also completely unsustainable, which is why when I left high school I stopped playing RPGs pretty much entirely. All that game time, and all the prep that…
Listen while reading // MATSUNDAI HEAVY INDUSTRIES TO CREW OF MHI FALSTAFF . TRANSMISSION BEGINS . CEP = Common Economic Protocol. Enables co-existence of, and efficient trade between, megacorps. Established in aftermath of the first Zaibatsu War. WARNING : The contents of this message are confidential. Any unauthorised access or distribution to any third party is strictly prohibited. Unauthorised…
I made a mailing list under duress. I prefer RSS , but a few of my friends asked for e-mail notifications. This isn’t a ‘ newsletter’ really, just a one- or two-line update whenever I make a new post or something. I’m using the free version of Buttondown by Justin Duke . E-mail: If the form’s not working, click this link .
Some advantages to doing this on my website rather than by message: other visitors can read / contribute; easier to find a post than to scrub back through old messages; I can come back and update this page later if I want. Still experimenting with different ways of using this site . One idea is to use it to follow up on meatspace conversations; could send someone a short collection of links and…
First thing: Maya at maya.land uploaded a response to one of my RPG posts ! Go read it, it’s very good. I don’t have webmentions or anything set up (I’m not even sure they work on blot ), so I only saw this just now when I spotted it in her RSS feed. And of course the urban fantasy counterpart would be set in the 90s, done in ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper, and the gazette would be a lofi…
Site’s back. Between leaving school and the Global Pandemic I stopped running and playing tabletop RPGs almost entirely. (I like the idea of online games, but I’ve never enjoyed one in practice.) Just started getting back into the hobby on a smaller scale, and I missed sending people my RPG campaigns page again. Also, I missed having and using my own website. I’m not really into long text…
Anna & Elena Balbusso Had some ideas over quarantine for a letter-writing RPG in a Jonathan Strange + Mr Norrell -type setting. You play as Regency-era occultists. None of the play happens in meatspace, it’s all play-by-post. Literal post, as in tree-corpses letters. Each turn takes a month. You can write multiple letters in a turn, to the GM and other players. The world is split into three…
A 2656-series Companion Unit First session of my new Mothership campaign Something to Burn . The players — a ragtag team of ‘ cowboys’ — are the crew of IMV The Machine, an old blockade runner from the Franchise Wars, mortgaged by Matsundai Heavy Industries . The crew: Florence Vassey. Teamster. Has nightmares from a hyperspace accident six years ago. Synthetic Humanoid Starlight Companion Unit…
Cowboy Bebop The first session of my new Mothership campaign featured a game of poker between three humans and an android. One of my players came up with this system. The players seem to like it. The higher your dice pool total the better your hand Each player starts by rolling 2d10 Place bets (call/raise/fold) each round (clockwise around table from dealer) Roll another d10 each round Everyone…
As soon as I read the Mothership rulebook , I wanted to run a game. Then I watched Cowboy Bebop and Alien in the same day and it all clicked. I want to capture the feeling of players being “ cowboys”, desperate outsiders on the margins of society, in crushing debt and struggling to survive through loopholes and dirty tricks. The group starts with a ship and a huge amount of debt . Things get worse…
Somehow I expected to be blogging a lot more during quarantine. Anyway. There are as many ways to play RPGs as there are people playing them, so it’s worth making sure GM and players are on the same page before you start a whole campaign. No reason to assume that the game you want to run is the game your friends want to play. The trick (assuming you’re the GM ) is to make sure your prospective…
Drink . The classic. Easy to make, but they usually expire in a month or so. Tablet . Crunchy. Tastes bad and not as effective as a liquid potion, but they don’t come in smashable glass bottles or expire. Bubblegum . Slow-release of the potion over twenty minutes or so. Don’t pop the bubble. Aerosol spray/gas . Usually come in a glass tube (snap + inhale) or sometimes in bellows. Difficult to…
You’re dragging yourself away from Security, leaving a trail of blood dark on spotless linoleum tiles. Tinny music plays through hidden speakers as you reach behind you — only to find you’re out of crossbow bolts. Security comes closer, scales silently sliding against one another. You’re exhausted. You don’t know how long it’s been since you slept; there’s no day or night here. Security opens its…