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Arcana Rising: Fireballs, Day Jobs, and the OSR Urban Fantasy That Got Away
There’s a very specific brain-worm that afflicts some of us. The conviction that surely there must be a game out there that does “modern wizards in our world” in a way that clicks with your group. I’m not talking high-concept urban horror and this isn’t about superheroes either. I’m talking about people with rent, phones,
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Children of Fear – Episode #3
22–23 September 1923. Peking fell away behind the convoy under a low, rinsed sky, the city wall shrinking to a pale bruise against the rain. General Wu’s escort moved with competent purpose. Trucks that coughed and rattled, carts and canvas covers tapping like loose drumskins, flags snapping in the wet air. The investigators sat among
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Out of the Ashes: Community at the End of the World
Sometimes I look at my fantasy campaigns and realise we’ve spent several sessions arguing about which direction to march in and about twenty minutes talking about what anyone is actually marching for. We do the epic road trip, we do the last stand on the battlements, and then the curtain falls before anyone has to
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Children of Fear – Episode #2
21 September 1923, Peking. The morning after the lecture carried the familiar texture of routine. Breakfast trays, soft voices, the faint clink of cutlery. Yet it landed wrong. Too many of the investigators had woken with the taste of their visions still on the tongue, the sense of having been briefly displaced into somewhere real
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Is this blog AI generated?
Last night I finished watching the Traitors (UK) – don’t worry, no spoilers ahead. Then this morning I got asked by Thomas at the Rascal whether this blog was AI generated. He has enjoyed my writing but was warned off it by someone else. Besides being chronological events in my life there was something about
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Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells: A Hexcrawl Stress-Test
I’m doing this review because I’ve got The Evils of Illmire sitting on my desk like a wet promise. I want to run a hexcrawl. I want the feeling of a map full of bad decisions, where the party stares at a stretch of swamp and argues about whether the safest path is the one
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Dragonbane – The Secret of the Dragon Emperor #3
Morning in Outskirt comes grey and damp, the sort of light that makes the palisades look taller and the hills beyond a little less inviting. Inside the Three Stag Inn, the smells of porridge and smoke do their best to make the world feel normal again. Silas sits with his grief and a mug he
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Children of Fear – Episode #1
20 September 1923, Peking. In the Foreign Legation Quarter the air always feels a little staged, as if the city has been asked to stand politely behind a rope while the West takes its tea. Outside those streets, Peking is vast and alive and complicated. Inside them, the rules are clearer, the uniforms sharper, the
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Terminus: Cthulhu Hack remix
I really like TERMINUS. It’s got that specific London-transport dread: fluorescent logic, wayfinding that assumes you’re compliant, the sense that the building is designed to move bodies efficiently… and then the geometry starts moving you. When I prepped it for The Cthulhu Hack, I found myself wanting one extra layer: a sensible structure that makes
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Hillfolk: Talk First, Fight Later (Maybe Much Later)
Hillfolk sits on that part of my shelf where the “conversation-forward” games congregate like gossiping aunties at a wedding. But I didn’t come to it for the soap. I came looking for a low-magic, community-first historical game, something that could live in the day-to-day friction of a tribe trying to survive winter rather than the
