Playing Jordan Palmer’s “Our God Is Dead”

The other day, with a group of three other people, I got a chance to play Jordan Palmer’s “Our God is Dead,” which, as the game’s itch.io page explains, is “a comedy role-playing game about clerics hiding the fact that their god has died just before a celebration in their god’s honor.” Players play the clerics, but in the process of play, they build out not just the clerics but also the god, the community, and so on… while having to desperately struggle to prevent others from catching on to the horrible truth: that the deity they venerate is dead.  …

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Books Read 2025: January–February

This entry is part 1 of 2 in the series Books Read 2025

Well, with a new year comes a new books-read series. This series will include all the books I read in 2025. It’s been a busy couple of months, between teaching a winter class and my wife and I finishing up a big translation project, but I got some solid reading done too.  Here’s what I read in January and February of this year: Rimbaud Complete is what it says on the tin: the complete verse and prose poetry of Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Wyatt Mason. My first encounter with Rimbaud was the poem “Roman” (“Novel”) which was handed to me during a …

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Revisiting Wraith: The Oblivion—Part 1: Overview

This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Revisiting Wraith the Oblivion

In 2017, I undertook the project of reading and reviewing all of my Wraith: The Oblivion RPG books. I dutifully read everything I had on hand and wrote up a series of blog posts about the books… and then, for some reason, I never posted them.  Stumbling onto those posts now, I am baffled that I did so much work but never published it, and figured I might as well go ahead and do it. That’s what this series is about. If you think the last thing the world needs is a discussion of the books released as part of …

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Series: Paranoia XP Reviews, Book-by-Book

This entry is part 1 of 21 in the series Reading Paranoia XP

A while back, I became fascinated with the classic RPG Paranoia. I’d seen advertisements for it in Dragon as a kid, and been curious, but of course it’d never been easily available where I lived as a kid. Well, in 2017, I ended up picking up everything in the “XP” line while it was still available—barely—through various online sellers. (The core book had gone way up in price, and a few supplements were so rare it took me a while to track down copies. Indeed, I was only able to get the Little Red Book by trading a module with …

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