WELCOME TO THE TERRORDROME. It is lovely to have you.

TERRORDROME DISPATCHES are sent out once a month, and are a great way to keep up with my goofy foibles.

(I’m also on Bluesky as @cyborgurl.)

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ANNA ANTHROPY PATCH NOTES: SEPTEMBER 2026

• The Poetry of God, my latest for Fallen London, is September’s exceptional story! Here are the best and worst reviews of it so far:

  • Perhaps my favourite ES so far - wonderfully written front to back, and I loved all the themes it explored. The post-colonialist perspective on the correspondence is such an intriguing idea, and something that comes with implications I will get to chew on for quite a while.

  • I rarely had a displeasure of playing through a story so preachy and self pleasing about itself in FL...

• I spoke at the Chicago Indie Games Showcase (or CIGS), an event that bridged our local tabletop and digital game scenes. My talk was called Your RPG is Too Long, and was an excuse for me to talk through my one-page TTRPG design ethos. The event was super fun and left me feeling proud of the communities we have here.

• In the process of putting together a new zine to sell at CIGS (which will certainly be available again in the future!), I made a one-page zine version of my Manifesto Jam entry, Annafesto, which my talk drew heavily on.

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THE SECTION WHERE I POST A PHOTO MY UPCOMING BOOK

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"Here in London, we are governed by the laws of the Empress – or, I suppose, the Masters. The law dictates who can marry whom, who is beneath justice, what books can be published. But laws are slippery, if you are smart – and organised.

"But there are higher thrones. And those laws are written into the very fabric of the universe. Except that she has found a way, maybe, to change them. Imagine what can be done."

—The Poetry of God

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WHAT HAVE I BEEN PLAYING CORNER

• Moonrise Regalia: A Zelda hack for the Gameboy Color with a small, dense world map and complex, interesting – let's go back to calling them "labyrinths" instead of "dungeons," huh? The fights are a little too hard for me, and what's truly grating is how puzzles rarely stay solved, meaning I frequently have to re-perform a solution every time I pass through a room, but damn if this one doesn't have a Vibe, you know?

• NetHack. The recent update — to 5.0.0 — has been a good excuse to get back into the game after many years. It's been long enough that I'm not sure which things are actually new. I feel like I remember Archaeologists being able to identify gems, which is not archaeology — now they can identify scrolls instead, which is much more fun. I've been playing Wizards a lot, and I don't remember ever liking them before, but maybe I just had bad taste?

• Kamaitachi no Yoru. A seminal "sound novel" (precursor of the visual / kinetic novel) recently translated into English. Really slow to start – maybe it just felt that way to me because the protagonist was so unlikable – but once people started dying it really got going. Given that mystery games are having a bit of a resurgence at the moment, it's interesting to reflect on how many seminal narrative games are mystery stories. I've only gotten bad endings so far.

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THE CHICAGO BEARS: WILLOW AND PEBBLE CORNER

The tileset for version 5.0.0 of NetHack, for some reason, includes a "male" and "female" version of every creature, including those that don't have binary gender. Almost all creatures look the same across genders, but one of the exceptions is cats.

In NetHack, your character starts the game with a random friendly animal, usually a dog or cat. In 5.0.0, male cats are the orange cats they've been for the last several decades of the game's life — female cats, though, are now calicos.

To make a long story short, I modded the orange cat into a little black cat so cats in my game can be either Willows or Pebbles: the two genders.

If you want to try this very simple tileset mod for yourself, I made it available for download.

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And that’s it for this month! From our terrordrome to yours: Stay soft, stay strong, stay nasty.