Michael Prescott (Trilemma)

Splurged on an airbrush and now it's glowing heat sinks for everyone! This lance is lit up like a Christmas tree!

One of my personal favorites is Litany in Scratches. It's not my best-looking map, but the gradual increase in tension, the sudden serious danger and punchline of the barricade has worked both times I ran it.

The Lost and the Damned chaos gods were extreme, of course, but had these lovely contrasting aspects. Nurgle was disease, but also the spark of living zeal in the face of mortality. It's great when there's enough for two adherents to have very different motives.

Slightly diminish a game:

Blame in the Dark

I'm not sure what it's like on the written page, but with Ray Porter actually doing Homer impressions for the dialogue, it has a huge influence on the tone. There's a lot of cool ideas in the story, but it feels as if it's the the novelization of a 4X video game on easy mode.

The way it depicts social challenges is especially child-like. Politicians are only capable of irrational squabbling or scowling until dad sorts them out. And no joke, the most worrying threat to the delicate emerging order is 'deliberately annoying' choices of VR avatar (e.g. Homer Simpson).

Cover of 'We Are Legion (We Are Bob)' by Dennis E. Taylor, showing a science fiction battle in an asteroid belt. pew pew

The audiobook of 'We are Legion (We are Bob)' really leans into the 'comic store guy' vibe of the narrator, highlighting the unintentional comedy that all you need to sort out humanity's problems is to put one former programmer (with some project management experience, let me tell you) in charge.

Two cast members pose for a promotional poster for Pu Songling.

Toronto folks looking for some zany live theatre featuring Chinese fables, head to Pu Songling at the Crow's Theatre. Minimal set brilliantly used, very physical performances. Tons of inspiring, weird tales. Cuddle up with a hopping corpse and get a facelift from one of the Ten Kings of Hell!

Dice where some numbers are blurred out or redacted. The Security Die.

Hi, I'm Justine! I like to draw beautiful and scary things, weird/ dark fantasy stuff, mostly in gaming. I've done work for Magic the Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons, Kobold Press, Old School Essentials and many others. #portfolioday
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🐲web: JustineJonesIllustration.com

Sam Reid as the vampire Lestat

We watched the old Interview with the Vampire, then Prime decided to auto-play the TV show as a chaser. That's a hell of a contrast. Seeing TV Lestat made it all make sense, that guy totally kills that role. I thought we were going to get some Murdoch Mysteries villain, then he speaks.. jesus.

Cover of the book, 'There is no antimimetics division' by 'qntm'.

My gosh this is entertaining, right up my alley. Insane amounts of gaming fodder. Also kind of depressing, because the stakes to those involved are rendered so well. Bracing myself for a dismal ending.

Reminds me of the advice to go to the doctor utterly disheveled, ripe with evidence of your infirmity. For ADHD, I guess that means you need to miss at least three appointments before turning up to the fourth one, no less than an hour late.

Just read that they're now making two 600 page books (!) of my favorite-favorite fantasy game of all time.

We ran a gorgeous campaign of Stonetop here a couple years back and it was some of the best gaming of my life. How much of that is the game? Read my 10 part AP and decide for yourself:

Could you build a 2D computer out of the minute gravitational interaction between photons, then send it out into space to wonder why you did that to it?

No, it's permanent, it's in a retail space (rather than a park or whatever like the name suggests).

Hey, East Toronto folks in need of a last-minute gift, I stumbled on a whole display of @portablecity.bsky.social treasures at 'Arts Market' on Danforth. By Crom is amazing of course, but also zines galore and these beautifully soft illustrated maps to snuggle while daydreaming about elves.

I still haven't checked if they're 100% polyester or something, I'm normally too red-faced and irritated to remember to look, down on hands and knees trying to sop up the water after kicking the cat's water bowl (again). But that's my current theory, pure water-repellent plastic.

The inspiration to write a good holiday-themed adventure often arrives mere days from the holiday itself, which by my reckoning is about nine months too late given that you have to actually write it and then schedule a group to play it.

Our bathroom towels are okay, but I feel this way about almost all of our kitchen towels. Why is this just pushing water around?! Don't they know how messy we are here? Send something useful!

The forest's dangers and promises were visceral: fucking under a berry bush; avoiding starvation, hypothermia, or being torn apart by predators. Those of the back rooms are psychological: seeking a moment of peace, risking lateness, purposelessness, irrelevance, alienation.

The banal threats of surburban life, however, unfold against a different backdrop. The night forest is replaced by an endless landscape of waiting rooms, photocopier nooks, stained rec rooms, and deserted retail space.

Musing on the 'back rooms' as a manifestation of the collective unconscious. When we're asleep, we're psychically alert for potential threats around us. For most of human history, we've been surrounded by wilderness, so in our dreams we prowl a night-black forest, lush and threatening. 🧵

I'm imagining the party looking at everything as omens.. animal calls, weather, etc.

Yes, for sure. Especially awesome if parts of the world's color turns out to be magical omens that the players weren't recognizing. So the GM is casually describing blueish sunrises, but on reaching 6th level the mage suddenly realizes this means someone was using Flight the previous day.

Oh no, I do! Now I have to pay more attention!

Cubed is better!

What would be so tasty would be learning a new spell and suddenly realizing that the taste of metal was someone using Invisibility nearby all this time. All manner of omens in thr early game take on crisper meaning as the acolyte decipher the runes or transcribed the scroll.

For sure, I think it only works in a much less high magic setting, where wizards are only as common as dungeons or less.