334: wizard reasons
Hullo
Gosh
Crikey
Why?
Hurrah
Links
Bye
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It’s the time of month again, when I bang a big ol’ drum encouraging folks to pre-order the Power Fantasy. We do that by the medium of a teaser.
This is the teaser.
We’ll be releasing that in an even more censored format on Instagram, because basically we fear angering the algorithm with the word s-e-x. This world is fucking nonsense.
Anyway - order the book.
Out July 9th
Orders cut off June 16th.
Lunar Code is 0525IM418.
It’s a good one, I think. Like all of them. We only do bangers in this here parish.
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While we’re on a The Power Fantasy teaser tip, I didn’t do a newsletter last week due to reasons (wizard reasons) so haven’t had a chance to show you the (er) ten of these I released after issue 9 came out. Here they are.
I actually did more, but thought 10 was already overkill. Sometimes the Muse compels you, and sometimes no-one takes your copy of Affinity Designer away from you when they really should.
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Talking about that, there was a thing going around the socials of a berserk emotion wheel, with an AI making up emotions that sounded like something Lovecraft squeezed out. I had a bunch of people tag me, joking that it should make it into a DIE expansion.
I am a very poor person to make jokes at.
You can download the full PDF here.
DIE RPG is available from Rowan Rook & Decard. I now realise you could abstractly run this expansion with the free Quickstart too, but don’t do that to yourself.
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This was lovely. The Foreword reviews indie awards announced their winners, and We Called Them Giants got the Silver award for Graphic Novels and Comics. Picked by librarians and retailers, it’s just lovely to be highlighted by folks who really do see a lot of books.
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We lost Sly Stone, which – as many people have said – seems a miracle that he stayed around as long as he had. An obvious enormous talent, with a small core back-catalogue, so it’s an easy one to go “Just go listen to all the Family Stone albums”. If you want an overview of his career, I gesture at the dual 500 songs episodes – part 1 here, part 2 here. They sent me down an enjoyable Sly Stone exploration when they dropped last year.
And in the gap between writing the newsletter and sending it out, we lost Brian Wilson too. This one hit hard. Just one of the most complicated, fascinating and weirdly beautiful figures in pop history. Hickey especially is a huge fan, and linked this playlist of what he describes as relatable to neurodivergent depressives, which is great. Oh – and the Good Vibrations episode is one of Hickey’s best too.
The current hyper-obsession has been Julian of Norwich, Anchorite. This was set off a couple of months back by Sarah Gordon talking to me about her, and a couple of things said just lodging in my head. That the first woman writer of prose we know of was a literal Anchorite is kind of taking Woolf’s A Room Of One’s Own as far as it can go. If you don’t know about here, here’s the In Our Time podcast episode on here, which is (as always with In Our Time) a good intro and overview.
Dan Carlin arguing that the only way to avoid war is to look unflinchingly at its reality. I think of the push and pull of this in fiction a lot. There’s certainly been times that I’ve considered it actively immoral to not do so, which led to things like early Uber – and while I question my execution, I do recognise what I was trying for.
Bundle of Holding is on a powerful place. There’s a Pride Games bundle which is just all great stuff – really great games from queer designers, all of which you should own if you have any interest in the form. Also, an Inevitable bundle is on sale – the game of sad Arthurian cowboys, to which I contributed a character, an undead knight who is basically a living creepy avenging sandbag.
Talking Heads releasing an official music video for Psycho Killer nearly 50 years after the record was released is the sort of thing I applaud. It helps that it’s really good too, of course – video and song both.
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It’s been a fascinating couple of weeks, and I wanted to write about them at length. I carved out enough of my schedule that I could devote three full days to a playest of Jay Dragon’s forthcoming Seven Part Pact, where various excellent people gathered in Bath to play in a fancy house. I’ve never done anything like that – even as a kid, I wasn’t a marathon tabletop RPG gamer, so to spend four days basically disappear into this world and then emerge to do family stuff, and dive right back in… well, it was a lot.
But I’ll be writing about it on Old Men Running The World, soon enough. Yes, that experience of play was a lot, but the game is a lot – a GM maximalist game of wizards influenced by Johnathan Strange & Mr Norrel, Earthsea, Sandman and a bunch more. I’ll save it for the essay. It was a lot.
However, Iris has been sick last night, so the whole household is on survival mode – no-one is asleep, and I’m stealing moments to make sure tasks which need to be done are done. Like this newsletter. Like lunch.
And now: baked beans*.
Speak soon.
Kieron Gillen
Bath
12.6.2025
* It wasn’t baked beans. Today, it may be eggs. We have a lot of eggs. This newsletter is full of fascinating material, I know.