𝔗ℜ𝔄ℑ𝔓𝔖𝔈

A tessellation of aperiodic monotiles

”Oh you’re still using a hex map? That’s nice. I’ve switched to aperiodic monotiles. Never get the same pattern twice. I found hexes to be too… *chuckle* monotonous.“

It’s nice when a player forms a close bond with their retainer but what’s under-discussed is how fun it is for them to have a henchman they absolutely hate

RIP Thomas Aquinas you would have loved arguing about the right way to imagine fantasy scenarios on blogs.

New mission: Find the Ape

Alas, I would shudder with fear had I not already expected this to be the case!

I'm not above a simple roll-under-INT for incidental knowledge but I really like the idea of burning time for knowledge.

Some knowledge in my game has a level requirement, like "you need to be at least a 4th-level MU to understand these runes." Gives PCs a reason to backtrack or petition a patron.

I've read some Carter and enjoyed his work. Never got into L Sprague de Camp. I liked the Wizard of Lemuria but haven't read any of the rest of the series. No Gor unfortunately.

Rant and rave away; I'm very interested in your perspective

Vance and Lieber are simply more POWERFUL than Howard and Moorcock! I don't make the rules.

I do believe though that if REH lived longer and matured as a writer he could have become one of the greats of 20th Century American literature. He had the juice, just not a long enough runway.

Vivid Worlds Will Kill You The question “How do I make a fantasy setting feel real?” is one people never really ever stop grappling with. Especially in games. There is...

I wrote about the unique ways survival narratives build evocative settings and what we can learn from Scavengers Reign, Fantastic Planet, and a secret third thing to create more vivid worlds 🌎🐉
traipse.hexarcana.com/2026/01/vivi...

Instead of Kim you have Firx chipping in with descriptive pangs and jabs to your liver

Disco Elysium-style game where you play as Cugel the Clever and every skill just makes you a bigger asshole

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step.

1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish.

2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

How could I have forgotten!

Iirc contemporary Emily Dickinson scholarship is very interested in her em dashes, supposing she used variable lengths to convey different meanings. I always thought as social media and texting lead to more impressionistic orthograhy, Dickinsonian dashes are due for mass adoption ("hell—-- yes")

You know he's conspicuously absent from any scene where the whale is actually being hunted

Picture of four orc drawings in a pile on my drawing table

four Pig-faced Orcs inked today

#osr #ttrpg #art #inkillustration #dnd

The most notable works of American isekai are A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Three Hearts and Three Lions, and Homestuck

St Martga / Tarrasque

Ow fuck!!

Why do I like sword & sorcery?

The limitless potential of its hodgepodge worlds

Its maps are blank, full of liminal spaces

Weird mysteries and great wonders lurk around every corner

It is the physical space of a dream

You engage with it in short bursts, ere that dream crumbles

Lieber’s really fun; he’s got a wry wit to him that you don’t see a lot of in pulp fantasy. Swords and Deviltry can be a bit hard to get into but the rest of the Fafhrd+Gray Mouser books are solid. Except for the last one, which ought to be expunged from collective consciousness

That sounds about right. If you like BotNS and haven’t checked out Viriconium by M John Harrison yet I strongly recommend it. It hits at the same far-future science fantasy but it’s substantially weirder (and better imo but no disrespect to BotNS)

I love them all and they all made great stories but only two were actually good writers

Sorry but

Jack Vance>Fritz Leiber>>>>>Robert E Howard>Michael Moorcock

But the whole Hunter world is buzzing

This whole post is great but the detail about a hex with a megadungeon being like a Superfund site is particularly inspiring

One mind flayer as a villain is cooler than many mind flayers, but TWO mind flayers? Fire.

Hacking games is therefore a dialectical process: each ruleset reveals its own incompleteness, and by iterative negation and revision we may approach the absolute Form.

Crackpot theory I'm working on: all games are expressions of a single ur-game; our impulse to endlessly hack rules is actually the game-spirit pulling us to toward itself. The peeling away of contingent elements in finite rulesets is an attempt to approach the inexhaustible Form of the ur-game.

This guy gets it

watched Nausicaä for the first time last night