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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
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After: Stonepunk Dreams at the End of the World
Every few months I get the itch for “my” post-apocalyptic game. I’m not looking for the one with gun-nuts in ice-cream vans or zombies in tactical vests, but something stranger: broken worlds, new cultures, weird ecology, big feelings about the end of everything and the awkward beginning of whatever comes next. Then I look at
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How I Run Session Zero
There was a time when my “session zero” was about fifteen seconds of nervous throat-clearing followed by, “Right, you’re all being hunted / fighting some gobbos / on a job for BigCorp. Go.” No discussion of tone, no boundaries, no sense of what anyone actually wanted out of the game. We just hurled ourselves at
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Dolmenwood: Pixie Boots on Firm Old-School Ground
There are books you leaf through and think, “Lovely art, someday.” Then there are books that smell like a campaign, the kind that squat on your shelf and mutter rumours until you give in. Dolmenwood is the latter: three brick-thick hardbacks that look like a children’s fairy atlas left out in the rain and retold
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A Simple Call of Cthulhu Chase System
I like Call of Cthulhu’s chases in theory. On the page, they’re clever: abstract locations, hazards, vehicles, movement rates. At the table, though, I always hit the same snag: I can’t remember the sequence, I start flicking through the book, and what should feel like a breathless sprint turns into a rules consult. So I
