funkaoshi @funkaoshi@tabletop.social

Social media is transient, but blogs are forever.

https://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/

I’m @savevstpk on Twitter, and run the blog Save vs. Total Party Kill. This account exists to talk about D&D and it’s friends. #OSR games and all that. I guess I am also obsessed with Warhammer. Who isn’t?

Part of the #torontOSR. Or #StorYYZ when we are playing story games.

And just like that someone found it: https://maliszew.livejournal.com/450708.html

Blogged it: https://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/microblog/dnd-is-always-right/

An idea I read on James’s blog Grognardia long ago, which I quite liked, was what he called “D&D is always right”. Rather than assume the idiot choices the designer of some old module from the 80s made are incorrect, give them the benefit of the doubt! Try and work out how the oddly placed monsters, treasure, and traps fit into a coherent whole. Treat it like a creative exercise and you’ll end up with something good. My dilemma is I can’t actually find this blog post, though i’m sure it exists!

Jason Tochi of 24XX fame wrote a great post a little while ago about what he calls the three layers of rules: social, fictional, and abstract. If you’re interested in game design it’s a great way to think about things, especially in more rules light games. Where do the unspoken rules go? Probably to the social and fictional layers.

https://pretendo.games/2022/04/15/three-layers-of-rpg-rules/

My favourite OSR newsletter is out with its latest collection of links: https://questingbeast.substack.com/p/the-glatisant-issue-28 I love the Glatisant, and not just because it links to my blog. There is a lot of good stuff throughout, but I thought the dungeon design and world building sections were extra good this go around.

Another friend Brendan responds to Alex. I love to see this much blogging. This is good as well. Thinking about rules in terms of prosthetics.

https://www.necropraxis.com/2022/05/31/towards-objective-prosthetics/

My friend Alex discusses "Fuck You Design", an interesting response of sorts to my post about negative space in RPGs.

http://todistantlands.blogspot.com/2022/05/fk-you-design.html

His post in turn has me wanting to write more myself. I love simple systems, so I am always looking for a good minimalist one. The problem is so many miss the mark. It takes a lot of care to make one that isn’t just you filling in all the holes with D&D as you remember it.

I wrote about OSR play and the negative space of rules in a game. https://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/blog/negative-space/

Spotted on the NSR discord. This is amazing:

“I made a post-apocalyptic name generator for an upcoming collaborative project. We combined 200+ names from the Iliad and Odyssey with hot-rod terminology to get some really whacky results that are perfect for our setting.”

https://games.elijahmills.com/tool/nomad-name-generator/

Still finding it a struggle to get invested in Mastadon. It suffers from the problems of twitter (short posts, no comments), while also lacking the critical mass of people. The later might change slowly, but I discussion via threads is still disappointing. A shame pillowfort.social never caught on. Feels like a better fit for RPG discussion. Was reminded of it again today.

https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/2713689

The new issue of Glatisant just came out, and it’s full of good stuff as usual. https://questingbeast.substack.com/p/the-glatisant-issue-27

You can grab the PDF of Grok on itch.io. The cover isn’t even the best picture in this book! Worth checking out just for the art. Everything else is a nice bonus. Best dollar I have spent in a good long while.

http://itch.io https://lestortoise.itch.io/grok

Social media is transient, but blogs are forever.

https://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/

I’m @savevstpk on Twitter, and run the blog Save vs. Total Party Kill. This account exists to talk about D&D and it’s friends. #OSR games and all that. I guess I am also obsessed with Warhammer. Who isn’t?

Part of the #torontOSR. Or #StorYYZ when we are playing story games.

On deck to play Torchbearer next week. Anyone have good advice or resources for players. I have forgotten just how extra this game is. 😂 Brendan wrote about the first edition, advice for D&D players. What else is out there?

https://www.necropraxis.com/2014/03/04/torchbearer-primer-for-dd-players/

“In a dramatic game … not deciding whether you hate your mother or whether you want to poison or sleep with your rival will stall the game.”— Paul T, ethnographer of the #torontOSR. His thoughts taken from discord after running 4 games of Cartel with us.

https://save.vs.totalpartykill.ca/blog/epistles-1/

Like all good reviews, this one is meandering, ends abruptly, and is mostly me talking about myself. Enjoy! I ran 12 sessions of Gradient Descent and have lots thoughts and love for the module. https://bonesofcontention.blogspot.com/2021/08/trespasses-gradient-descent.html

This site _seems_ like a poor substitute for G+. Maybe it's actually amazing, but the fact that everything is seemingly public and you can't comment on posts to keep a discussion organized in one place seems less than ideal. Anyway, G+ is disappearing so need to figure out where to go next.