Further Strangeness: Now Available!

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I’ve created another RPG thingie! It’s an unofficial, unlicensed supplement titled Further Strangeness: Twelve New Knights, Seers, and Myths for Mythic Bastionland. I got a kick out of reading Mythic Bastionland, Chris McDowall’s new game, of which the majority of the content is two-page spreads laying out the information on Knights (potential PCs or NPCs), Seers (NPC sages), and Myths (which are basically adventure materials). It was fun homebrewing these up, and quite a challenge trying to come up with things McDowall hadn’t quite covered in the original set of 72 of each. Some are a bit close, but I …

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Digimon Live Concert (Encore Performance)

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My son is a huge fan of the Japanese anime series Digimon—like, big enough of a fan that when I said, “It’s kind of like Pokémon, right?”I got an earful about how no, it’s not at all like Pokémon. This is unusual for a kid his age: none of his friends are into Digimon at all, and, as I discovered for myself last weekend, most of Korea’s Digimon fandom is much older than him.  The event that established this fact for me was a concert I took our son to: As you can guess from the poster, it was a performance …

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Circe’s Grin and the Appx. N Jam

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So, over the weekend while I was waiting for my summer class’s students to turn in their final writing projects, I put together my entry for the Appx. N Jam. If you’re not on itch.io, you’re probably unfamiliar with this “game jam” concept: basically, someone suggests a themed creative project and people can join it and submit their own take on it. Some have prizes (like the Appx. N Jam does), some don’t.  Come to think of it, if you’re not deep into D&D lore, you might also not know about Appendix N, to which the jam’s name refers. But …

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Isle of Joy Nominated for an Ennie

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So, a few days ago Ahimsa Kerp (of Knight Owl Publishing) let me know that my RPG book Isle of Joy has been nominated for an Ennie Award in the Best Adventure—Long Form category. (Ahimsa and Wind Lothamer were the book’s wonderful publishers.) It’s very flattering and exciting, and our book is in good company with a lot of really spectacular stuff on the awards nomination list!  Anyway, if you’re interested in voting, this is the place to do it!  Oh, and Knight Owl is in the running for Best Publisher, by the way. They deserve a vote too! 

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Books Read: May–June 2025

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This entry is part 3 of 8 in the series Books Read 2025

Here’s everything everything I read in May and June of 2025. It’s not much: I blame my heavy workload along with the fact that my ancient Kindle died somewhere in there—and the replacement I got happens not to have a backlight, which is annoying since I usually read the Kindle at night. Besides all that, I also spent a chunk of May quite ill from some medications I was on, and we were also busy with editing meetings on a book-length translation of our own (which we edited by committee, which can be great, but takes a lot of time).  …

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Something Tookish! Interview

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Recently, I’ve been corresponding with the friendly and affable Pat Eyler, who reached out to me out of curiosity regarding my Brindlewood Bay hack, Something Tookish! (See here if you don’t know what I’m going on about here.) Anyway, Eyler interviewed me about the game, my background in gaming, and what I learned hacking the game together. Here’s the interview! 

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Playing Jordan Palmer’s “Our God Is Dead”

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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

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This entry is part 1 of 8 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

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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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