Rob Donoghue

Indie & Local Tabletop Games Fair featuring Samovar Games Emissary: A story game inspired by Ursula Le Guin's Hainish Cycle 📆 Sat, Oct 18 🕛 12-5pm 📍 People's Book, Takoma Park MD

Once you start going to local tabletop design events you start realizing how many people make games, some right in your own hometown. @playsamovar.bsky.social is someone I'm delighted to share a neighborhood with. Come check out his love letter to Ursula Le Guin's Hainish cycle:
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I am not terribly moved by surprise twists in stories, but I am incredibly appreciative when I can 100% see something coming and the author completely nails it all the same.

Visualized: Stablecoin Market Size Forecast into 2030 See the stablecoin market size's growth from 2020 to 2025 along with Citi's bear and bull case forecasts for the stablecoin market in 2030.

So, I view this with the same skepticism I do any other Hockey Stick graph, but I admit that stablecoin news has made me curious whose lunch this is proposing to eat, since it seems it’s seizing value rather than adding.

www.visualcapitalist.com/visualized-s...

Good read and a good reminder that RSS is still a better way to consume the web than anything else.

inessential.com/2025/10/04/w...

Well I hope it works out because it sounds like it would be really fucking bad if this was a bubble.

I started my career in civil legal aid, and there is never enough money to serve most of the people in need in eviction, unemployment, debt, and immigration cases. As the DMV region suffers from the government shutdown, those needs will just grow. Please give this games bundle your consideration.

80's movie! With some Stupidly Young people who arena longer Stupidly Young.

After listening to part 2 of the Planet Money #boardgame series, I raise an eyebrow as they hype up this being such an original game concept. Emphasizing that misleads the audience about how much the market values originality AND how original this game actually is. (It's an I-cut-you-choose game.)

This is compounded by the actual endurance challenge of just managing to listen to Pete Hegseth for 45 minutes.

If you have experienced this speech only in snippets, first: good, don't change that. But second, you have not fully imbibed how incredibly vapid and annoying it is.

“Artless” is a harsh condemnation, and hard to apply cleanly without sounding like a snob, but I feel like it is summed up by those who understand the profound power of stories but also think that it can be achieved by telling what the story is rather than the more onerous act of telling the story.

“God dammit, past me knew what he was doing.”

REAP The lands of Obron are dying. You are a necromancer, striding between the lands of the living and the dead. Wander this broken world. Seek Horrors, and reap their souls. What Is REAP? REAP is a solo t...

The spooky season is upon us! I've put my spookiest game, REAP, on sale for the rest of the month.

Grab this excellent solo TTRPG of a wandering necromancer for 25% off. Sale applies to book and PDF versions!

gilarpgs.myshopify.com/products/reap

YouTube video by NPR Planet Money X Exploding Kittens Board Game | NPR

Planet Money is developing a party card game with Exploding Kittens, which means they're explaining to NPR listeners the absolute basics of how to pnp a prototype. youtu.be/coTkbsBeSYY?...
#gamedesign #boardgame

This is the most amazing bit of cross-cultural mythmaking ever. I wonder if this was inspired by myths of Talos? Anyhow, I am very sorry that the secretive guild of ancient Roman robot engineers never existed, though pleased they were appropriately unionized.

Have I just spent an hour on my phone in the car because I didn’t want to go into the supermarket? Yes.

Is the store going to be that much more crowded and unpleasant because I delayed? Also yes.

I don’t need opposition - I do a bad enough job on my own.

I get that this may seem like a really kind of strange thing that falls into no particular bucket, and that makes it a hard pitch. There is a lot of “what even am I looking at?” If you explain it.

And yet.

Ettin is fucking funny. And he delivers.

If you’re *faintly* curious, this is a good bet.

CRINGE WIZARD: A TTRPG Isekai Light Novel A light novel about a guy forced to live through the terrible TTRPG campaign he ran when he was a teenager.

The KS campaign for my light novel (about a guy reborn in the bad RPG campaign he ran as a teenager) is on track to fund with 10 days left! If you're at all into TTRPGs, check it out while you can!

(Already backed? Tell your friends, tell your enemies, get abducted by aliens and explain RPGs to em)

Time to repost a classic.

clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/

Of all things, this is a lens I really like applying to shonen anime. The whole genre lionizes willpower/grit/resolve but often fails to SHOW it in any way other than “yelling louder”. I am FASCINATED by attempts to actually fold it into narrative.

I am somewhat horrified by how badly “Turk 182” dates me as a reference. There has got to be something more current. Any thoughts?

(Not Leverage. Similar Robin Hood cleverness, but the political element of Turk 182 is essential to its use as a reference.)

Not to say there is no place for antiplumbing, rather that it is not an alternative to *showing up*.

Your(my) hypothetical future heroics are less than a wet fart compared to the work of the person willing to go stand in the crowd and be seen.

And to be clear, this brush of condemnation colors me quite strongly. I absolutely bought into that idea, and the whole anti-plumber things remains one of my absolute favorite sorts of escapism. The trick comes in recognizing that it *is* escapism.

This is vastly more exciting and heroic than things like “showing up”, “being visible”, “using privilege to protect others” or “getting the shit kicked out of you on camera before being detained without legal recourse”. It’s a lot easier to keep putting it off.

There’s a heroic idea of the Turk-182 style super-clever anti-plumber which absolutely resonates with a lot of people, especially smart, engineering types. If things were to get REALLY bad, they’d be undermining everything super cleverly, you betcha.

There is a wonderful bit in Snow Crash where Stephenson observes that every American guy believes, on some level, that they could be Batman. If really bad shit went down, they could do a hard montage and become super badass, if they absolutely had to.

I think this also informs ideas of protest.

It is not heartening to start at “software to write more things people won’t read is silly” and end up fearful for the future, but this is where we are now, and that’s before we even start talking about secret police, concentration camps and federal conquest.

GenAI spending/investment seems to be keeping the American economy afloat. It’s a huge subsidy for stability, and that scares the absolute crap out of me, because that cannot sustain. I plan for retirement with the full knowledge that it’s all tremendously conditional.

Specifically because when you start looking at the spends going into “AI” and compare them to the entire size of the market, the math very quickly shoots past “bubble” and into “unprecedented fraud”.

It would be a gross simplification to say “The Market” and it’s oligarchs are out modern First Estate, but it’s not far off either.

Also, it’s not that I deliberately start talking GenAI and end up at billionaires, it’s just that the models are genuinely that linked.

This isn’t the first time a platform has been created. The divine right of kings didn’t come from nowhere. Systems of arbitration (moral and otherwise) are always the first thing a smart, ambitious, would be leader grabs and re-purposes for as long as the name has cachet.