A home for my musings about gaming, history, and fantasy....
This Month on Table 46 I went to Gen Con this month and wrote up what I did there! Blog Posts and Other Gaming Reading Theory Rules Don't (Necessarily) Elide - Orkish Odyssey - an argument against Jared Sinclair's Rules Elide . Crossing the Rubicon - Woo the Moon - what does "linear" mean when it comes to scenarios? A Matter of Systems - Farmer Gadda - on rules and how they do and don't shape…
I made my annual high summer pilgrimage to Indianapolis as I always do, alongside my wife for the second straight year. This was a pretty good iteration of Gen Con, severe weather notwithstanding . Here's what I got up to while I was at the show. Wednesday My wife and I drove down to the show from Wisconsin, stopping for lunch with my grandparents in the Chicago suburbs. Once in Indy, we realized…
This Month on Table 46 No posts this month, though as you can see below, I did get a lot of reading done. I hope everyone was able to participate in Free RPG Day in some capacity! I'll be at Gen Con in two weeks. If you're interested in organizing a meet up or a game, send me a message on Bluesky (@lysus.bsky.social) or find me on Discord (@lysus). Hopefully I'll be able to offer some play…
There's (at least) three blogwagons currently ongoing! I encourage you to post about randomness , sex , or girly games if those interest you! Also, Valeria Loves is running a survey on what people in the community are running, playing, and would like to play in the future. Go check it out and give her some more responses! This Month on Table 46 I wrote about "magic" and wrote about when to be…
I waited a bit too long to roll my post for Prismatic Wasteland's Randomness Blogwagon , so when the d20 came up 6, it put me in a bit of a bind! Thankfully I rolled 7 on 2d6, allowing me to make this post as short or as long as I want, but I was a bit stumped when I drew the 7 of Hearts and I now have to work tenfootpole into this thing. Talking about randomness on blogs is pretty firmly tied to…
I've long disliked the way magic is portrayed in fantasy RPGs, with a neat delineation between "magic" and "mundane." I prefer a vision more accommodating of multiple perspectives, able to accept that there are feats that are outside the experience of some groups yet a part of daily life for others. I've tried to excise mentions of the word at all as I work on the Jewelsea RPG. It's too easy for…
This Month on Table 46 I blogged about why hex maps need blank spaces for the Maps Blogwagon as well as attending Forge Midwest 2026 . In the next few weeks I hope to present the systems I brought with me to Forge Midwest and to give more detailed play reports about what happened during my playtest sessions. Blog Posts and Other Gaming Reading I'm going to try splitting out posts by Bloggies…
Forge Midwest ran April 24-26 this year, so I'm quite late getting this report out. I had a blast as I do every year. I'd planned on running one session for each of my playtests, but we ended up short on pitches Friday evening, so I ran a bonus session of Jewelsea RPG. Without further ado, here's what I got up to this year. Day One Pits of the Curse Lords Pits of the Curse Lords was Mike Holmes'…
When I was first reading The Dark of Hot Springs Island , one of the things that struck me was that the density of points of interest on the island was almost completely uniform across it. As an OSR novitiate at the time, I didn't think too much of it, but nearly a decade of play onward, I've come to realize that there's a popular style of hex map that I don't like very much - the kind that puts a…
Welcome back to my monthly newsletter, the first of spring! Now that it's been a going concern for four months, I'm curious what people find useful, what they'd like to see more of, what could be improved on. Are folks interested in an email version of the newsletter? Should I try to split up the blog post roundup by categories? If you have any suggestions or ideas, reply to this post's thread on…