It’s been a while since I put anything here, no?

Quite a while indeed. And, sadly, not for any good reason. Living on Plague TERF Island during Hellworld isn’t exactly easy, and I spent much of 2020 and early 2021 in a series of mental breakdowns. Right as I was finally pulling myself out of that mire, I smashed my elbow and had to go through surgery to put it right.

Since kicking off my Patreon, my muse has given me ideas! Not the time or energy to push them to completion (yet), but ideas are a good start. So this is what’s currently on my slate.

A while back, before I went silent for a few months (it happens), I mentioned that I’m tinkering with my toolchain — the physical and electronic stuff that I use to project my ideas into your brain¹. Mostly, it’s about consolidation. What prompted this post, however, is that I finally made a major change. This blog no longer runs on Wordpress; it’s now powered by blot.im.

While I’m pretty sure nobody will notice, I’ve changed the theme for the blog. All the menus, categories, and generic crap that litters every page is now hidden neatly away, leaving just the text to speak for itself, as it should be. Makes things easier for me to find old posts to reference when making something new, and hopefully it looks good for people reading as well. Not that anyone does; the sparseness of updates here is something I want to fix, but…

The lack of updates is down to a couple of things. One is ideas; I’m not out of them, but sticking things up here doesn’t have a lot of visibility and I don’t want to post random crap That’s what I have social networks for¹. This blog is meant to be for game design, and my muse is a fickle beast. It doesn’t help that any post here has to go through the Wordpress editing interface, which is a pile of lukewarm dogshit that gets worse with every release. The ongoing inability of a website to let me type in fucking markdown rather than some godawful WYSIKWYGIYLADTTDAI² bullshit³ seriously limits my willingness to engage with it. I’m hoping that some tinkering with my toolchain⁴ may help with that, but whether such a thing is a) possible and b) functional remains to be seen.

I’ve had to think quite a bit about this post. Some of you may be aware that the tabletop gaming community has been having its own #metoo moment, starting with Mandy Morbid’s post here. I already thought that the subject of that post was a shithead. Her post was followed by others.

I believe Mandy, Hannah, Jennifer, and Vivka. But it’s easy for me to believe them, because I already had no respect for their abuser. Due to his harassment, a friend of mine removed her online presence, and other friends had to move countries — but these posts made it clear that he is a proper waste of a human genome.

Originally prompted by some of the ideas thrown around on the SomethingAwful Traditional Games forum (registration possibly required), I’ve fallen in love with hacking John Harper’s Lasers & Feelings. It’s a very nice, very light system that’s I’m using as the basis for a rough sketch of an urban-fantasy game with possibly-obvious inspirations (currently a pre-alpha; I’ll write about it here when it’s done).

But that’s not all I’ve done. I have committed hackery¹, to tune Lasers & Feelings to different styles of game.

Sanity & Sorcery — Lovecraftian horror

Shaken & Stirred — Stealth action

Power & Responsibility — Silver-age superheroics

Swashbucklers & Scoundrels — Pirate adventures