Tangent Joy

Marathon is a great game. It's also a brilliant Pear Wiggler - the social layer is sure to get the O/U sicko in your head chomping at the bit.

Feat @tjslotus.bsky.social and @juniperhl.bsky.social (and @eldritchbee.bsky.social's character Noll, but not by name. Lol.)

amby.navy/marathon-pea...

tangentjoy.blot.im/dragoons-a-w...

Okay the link there broke this one should work!!

me talking about game design like *references The Quiet Year* *references The Quiet Year* *references The Quiet Year*

A map of a fantasy kingdom, with regions north-east to south-west including the Bound Forest, the Riverlands, the Reach, Spiral, the Vale, the Banner, the Coast, and the Hinterlands. It has a hex grid, factional borders, and regional boundaries naming different forests, mountain ranges, famrlands and strongholds.

So it turns out there's an upper bound to how many times I can say "if *I* ran a cataphract game, here's how I'd do it" before someone pays me to just fucking do it already. Here's a bit about how that happened, and my thoughts that led into the design.

tangentjoy.blot.im/dragoons-a-w...

A mustachioed man with a wheellock gun over his shoulder

a purplish-red alien with huge teeth and horns

A tan woman with messy greying hair. She is wearing a large gold earring and a fur collar.

A small robot with a marshmallow-shaped head. He is holding a knife.

A smattering a profile pics I've done for discord rp pfps

I'll do a full play report when the game wraps up, but its from Dragoons, the 3 month wheellocks wargame I'm running starting in the next week or so.

Over/Under Diary: Day 15 Everybody matters or else nobody matters

#over/under Day 15: The game leans heavy on roleplaying as tensions heat between the Union and the Mob. Otso has conversations that create ripple effects throughout the game, and the game ramifications of story coalesce around a throwaway line in a background barfight between NPCs.

Eyes Sunday.

Doing the same this weekend for the exact same reason, best of luck ^-^

- the last message Earu ever received
[Author's Note: Arit left the city of Buvik hours later, and Viceroy Earu immediately assaulted it and took control, claiming victory for the Mountain Kingdom.]

I need to get a beautiful girl to walk me through setting it up :head_shaking_vertically: :pray:

Tremendous number of content warnings with this one, it feels like hearing a girl shout in pain and having to decide whether or not you want to join her

Obviously, as with everything she writes, very compelling

Receiving a song about how badly I betrayed someone in miniphracts was uncomfortably effective in guilting me. As was your commentary of "the thought was there, perhaps".

Obviously didn't stop me taking the holy city, but, I felt worse about it. -2 morale for Earu specifically.

an AI summary of Glass Men sounds like a cautionary tale about what data we feed to robots lmao

Dice Curves (Make Dice Work For You #3) Make Dice Work For You is a series where I’ll regularly talk through a new way to use dice in your game. It came out of conversation surrounding What to randomise when you’re randomising, and what …

Continuing my basic dice concepts series with another basic dice concept, Curves. idlecartulary.com/2026/02/19/d...

Donate to Help Maya Find a Safe Home, organized by Goose Wittke Maya, known to some as “Millie, Bartender of the Ember”, is a much beloved staple of the ttrpg… Goose Wittke needs your support for Help Maya Find a Safe Home

Hey. I know everything is a lot right now, but I'd love it if you could take a moment to help Maya find a home. I've been here, maybe you have too. Let's help her not have to fight so hard. You dm me a screenshot receipt, I send you a code for a dungeon. Cool? Cool.

www.gofundme.com/f/help-maya-...

Regarding playing and craving simple fun with friends: "For a lot of people, that’s the optimal play, they have too much to lose." I get what you mean about needing that escape, and not wanting to risk having a pretty shit time and losing your fun night. I've 100% been there before don't worry haha

I've also come to realize I like games (board, ttrpg, etc) where the possibility exists for a kind of bad, boring, underwhelming session. The possibility of a wide open, surprising, unpredictable narrative space basically requires the possibility of a kinda mid game sometimes. See: all sports.

It's a good post. I've heard people discuss the "tyranny of fun" before, in the context of say, handwaving the vestigial bits of old D&D stuck onto newer D&D. Encumbrance isn't fun, random encounters aren't fun, resource management isn't fun... (1/2)

I have an almost identical experience from the culmination of a player event, standing outside a tent in the rain while a climactic conversation happened, as one of the only people with enough energy to fight if it came to it. No barbarians came, but someone needed to be out on watch all the same

Thanks, I'm not done w/ this thought, I think it extends to a bunch of other elements of design and I really want to write a bit about minimalist worldbuilding as an extension of this philosophy, but that'll have to be another time, I'm so sleepy rn

"Players seeking to have fun is bad for many games" is the opening statement of my latest post, where I argue that players should stop playing games trying to have fun, and instead let the game systems take them where they will, and trust that the fun will come.

tangentjoy.blot.im/against-intent

Locking in, evil dogshit commander

Nope!!! Still playing my naga war witch Guineve!!

I did Concordia yesterday, and I'd forgotten how much fun it is to just be a character for a bit, really healing.

Glad that somewhere on the other side of the country you were doing the same thing ^-^

Alone In Space by Millicent Malice A mass-multiplayer realtime letterwriting game.

Made a mass-multiplayer letterwriting game about playing exocolonists adrift in escape-pods! Gonna be running a big game of this soon.

millicent-malice.itch.io/alone-in-space

The rules of the game (almost the whole blog post) written into layout (my scanner)

Ballroom Blitz - Tactical Court Intrigue This morning Liz over at offhandedly made a joke about a tactical RPG for concealing your affair at a Coldplay concert (it made sense in context of the conv...

A very silly conversation this morning put a brain worm in my head, so I'm making it your problem.

tbr.bearblog.dev/ballroom-bli...

Up until now, I've been at about 8 Love 10 Anger on reaction rolls. Cautious, wary, wanting to see more, but more likely to just flee.
Busting out the d12s was a Calming action, and then when you hit the coloured diagrams?? Let me tell you, we're *firmly* in the positive reaction space, real big fan

I got paid (not much) to write a MUD, which involved a whole bunch of research and tact, and then diving in headfirst to start designing a masquerade ball for a bunch of my friends to enjoy.

It'll likely never run, but, I designed a cool duelling system for it!

tangentjoy.blot.im/masqueraded-...