Jonathan Tweet

Thanks! I'm glad someone loves them because I love telling them.

Rob's dead fighter was portrayed by the Diablo fighter mini, here face-down, surrounded by Diablo skeleton minis. The Regdar mini is the victorious paladin. I painted that mini 25 years ago to be my Living Greyhawk PC. But Skovos died in his first session.

This classic RuneQuest/Glorantha supplement changed the way I design RPGs. The "cult initiate" concept in RQ became the "wizards' houses" of Ars Magica, then Vampire's clans, then all the factions in the '90s-era RPGs. Hard to part with.

Lots of old stuff on eBay.
www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...

The paladin led the party toward a monastery for a parley, and on they way they were ambushed by a death cultist who summoned skeletons and killed himself into a ghost. The 19-Strength fighter chose to delay healing and ended up dead. The die is the ghost's delayed damage, which finished him.

Recent data and analyses show that the genetic difference between humans and our closest relatives (chimps and bonobos) is not 2% but about 15%.

whyevolutionistrue.com/2025/12/07/h...

Hard to believe that we can compare the brain anatomies of various kinds of early arthropods, but there it is

I shared this one with my gaming group, and it turns out that the original is a favorite of one of the players

Thanks! Nice list.

"I knew him when..."

Congratulations!

Yes, but it was real strange that all healing was magical. You couldn't "pull yourself together" (heal independently). That's why I'm glad that, starting w 4e and carried in to 5e, characters can self-heal.

Also, why is it harder to heroically dodge a poisoned arrow than a non-poisoned one?

As the covenants in Ars Magica demonstrate, I favor the idea of the characters having a "bastion". It's an idea that takes a lot of work to get right! Here's Brandes doing some of that work for you 5e players out there.

Yeah, at some point I consciously decided that I couldn't really keep up with how weird and dark the world is. Maybe it was when ISIS was selling sex slaves online, and I threw up my hands. I don't want to keep up with that. Al Amarja is pleasant escapism compared to today's reality.

In my interview, I talked up @ryandancey.com and his contribution to the success do 3rd Ed. Not sure that I talked him up enough.

Me too, I went into the theater knowing that it was going to be magic v technology but assumed the magic was going to be evil. Sort of blew me away. It was part of the cultural shift from magic being sinister to it being healthy and natural, with technology envisioned as evil. See also Star Wars.

It's actually really good, and I almost held onto my copy. It borrows the system from Pendragon, so that's solid. The vibe is "brave elves against Nazi mutants", which is also solid.

happy to see this gem of a game find a new home

nice

Here are two more boxed sets from Mayfair's "Role-Aids" line—basically "d20 before there was d20". They took advantage of their creative freedom with their high-powered supplements.

There's no room in my new house for all my game stuff, so lots of it is now on eBay.

www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_...

Learn astronomy with space game Planet Voyagers Learn astronomy facts in the Planet Voyagers space game! An educational, social science board game for grades 3-5.

In addition to #evolution games for kids, I did one about the solar system. The publisher did a lovely job with the pieces, and the educational elements are sneaky. A dad told me it was his 7-year-old's favorite game ever! Xmas is coming! #kidsgame #astronomy

simplyfun.com/products/pla...

'There are usually no mutations that are “universally” adaptive in that they convey a benefit without any cost.'

Various amniotes have returned to the water over the last couple hundred millions of years. Walking on land is hard! Lizards never got good at it, which is why we got snakes and mosasaurs. Air has 30x the O2 of water, so air-breathing predators have a natural advantage over water-breathing prey.

It's different things for different people in different groups. For me, it's collaborative creativity. That's why I take TTRPGs to be something special and why my TTRPGs lean into collaborative creativity.

sold

Once I showed my kids' book, Grandmother Fish, to a street preacher. It shows how humans descended from fish (via earlier reptiles, mammals, and apes). He looked the whole thing over without saying anything, then packed up his stuff and left. Maybe you can use it in your work.

grandmotherfish.com

Yes, indeed, and thanks for noticing. Social media is for understatements. Meet me at the bar at a convention someday for plain-spoken statements.

Bonkers that TSR didn’t advertise Buck Rogers as compatible with D&D! I blame the Buck Roger heiress running TSR at the time. She didn’t understand gamers and probably she didn’t like us that much.

Not that big a surprise that DNA repair in mitochondria is way worse than DNA repair in the nucleus. Creationists would say that our low level of mtDNA repair is a consequence of the Fall rather than our original state. In heaven, glutathionylate won't attach to any of our DNA (I guess).

this game just keeps on giving

Back when I was self-publishing RPGs in the 80s, art was a tight bottleneck, and as soon as I saw AI art get going I knew that lots of game designers were going to jump on it

Companion Collector Cards - 1995 Edition — The Everway Company Published by FPG, Inc., these cards bring the very best of world-renknowned artists to your Everway game! Each box contains 36 packets of cards. Check out these stunning images while our limited stock...

Yeah, and then for RPG's licensed art cards I had to find 90 cards from their previous sets that suited Everway. Not easy, and the results were not perfect.

I can't really answer your question about your art bec it depends on the vibe you're trying to achieve.

www.everwaygame.com/shop/everway...