Reading The Warren by Marshall Miller (and a new World Playset: Deck 17-R01)

This post is a brief overview of an RPG I managed to read through, but not yet try out, called The Warren. It’s a story game about… you guessed it, intelligent rabbits, sort of a RPG adaptation of Watership Down and stories like it. (Did the cover art above give it away?) This post includes short explanation of my (honestly sketchy) familiarity with the family of games it belongs to, an overview of what I found interesting in the game’s design, and a free (but not yet playtested) “World” playbook I designed for the setting, and a pretty wacky one …

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The Taste of Melbourne: Beers Part 2 (BBCE)

The remainder of these beers, I tried at the Belgian Beer Cafe Eureka, which I highly recommend to anyone in the Melbourne area. The first three are from the first visit, the rest from the second. All of these were bottle beers except the Kriek. Visit 1: Silly Saison: This was the beer I started with on the first trip to Eureka. I wanted to get a better handle on this style, since I will be trying to make one sometime soon, but I still feel like I don’t quite know exactly what a saison is supposed to be like, beyond …

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The Taste of Melbourne: Beers Part 1 (Around Town)

Well, actually, I could rant about the horror of the meatpie I had at the Aussie Rules football game we went to, but instead I’m going to talk about beer. I had a lot of different beers in Melbourne this week, and many of them are worth talking about: Carlton Draft: This was plain old terrible stadium lager. Pass it, or pass out. I had one cup and shuddered at the idea of drinking more, but it was the stuff that everyone at the football game was having. Apple Cider — Bulmer’s? Mangan?: I’m not sure which brands I tried, …

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Beer Festival (at Homeplus) and man, VB sucks!

So, a guy I know at work (hi Dave!) alerted me to the fact that the local Homeplus (a grocery store chain) is holding a “beer festival” which means 5 bottles of a number of imported beers were on sale for for $10-ish. (Probably more like $12, but we think of W10,000 as about $10 here.) He specifically noted that Paulaner Hefeweissen was among those beers, and it turned out to be the only beer worth it, unless you have fond nostalgic reasons to want to drink Singha outside Thailand. (I figure there’s a reason why Beerlao — the Laotian …

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For you Home Brewers out there…

… or anyone interested in beer, brewing, and associated lore. I doubt the whole book will be of interest, but these few pages I typed out are probably at least a little bit interesting if you’re a brewer: From Roles of the Northern Goddess by Hida Ellis Davidson. London: Routledge, 1998. (from the Chapter titled “Mistress of the Household” (Pg 138-141): Yet another important use of water by the women was for brewing ale, the usual drink for all ages at a time when water was often suspect. Its association with a goddess may be seen in ancient Egypt, where …

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