Slightly Late May 2025 update
Blog posts
I've managed to get a few of them done. The one I'm probably most proud of is a belated entry to the Conclave blog jam(?):
Including topics such as:
falsehoods worldbuilders believe about religion
how religion works in the implied setting that a bunch of my writing is set in, including A Gathering Storm
some WIP Cairn stuff, including how to model the powers of minor gods
some types of gods, or how to make the concept of "domains" more relevant to the society that your game exists in
I also wrote a long post on Grounded Fantasy, trying to define a genre I've been writing for a lot lately, and how it differs from other popular NSR-adjacent genres.
I also wrote up my experience with NSR camp - I'd been to another one since my previous newsletter - the value of online conventions and convention-adjacent events, and thoughts on the value of NSR camp specifically.
I also wrote up a short play report of the solo game Haxen, a diceless exploration game with some really interesting mechanics.
Public domain art
I've been working on this more. I spent a while going through the work of Johann Friedrich Wagner, cutting it up, and making collages.
More recently I've been working on extracting vehicles from other images. Here's a preview:
I'm continuing to add images to this itch page, but eventually I want to set up a dedicated website for this so that you don't keep having to download unorganized zip files.
What I'm working on
I've been redoing A Stolen Sword in a Dark Forest. I want to finish it this year. It's basically a tutorial about some of the ways I play solo games, as told through a solo adventure. It’s turned into a much bigger project than I intended.
I also put up a page listing my perchance generators. I updated my Cairn magic user generator as well as a Cairn lifepath generator that is getting way out of hand while still being very much an early draft. Here are some screenshots:
None of this is remotely balanced or anything, I haven’t checked that it matches how Cairn does things, it’s just been me dumping all my ideas into a giant document.
I'm going to work on the train adventure for Knights of the Road probably later in the year.
Games I've been playing
I guess this isn't something I've previously talked about much in the newsletter.
I've been playing a campaign of Frostwyck for Cairn, which I've been really enjoying. I've also been playing a campaign of Uncharted Worlds (a PbtA game), which we are playing as a very low-stakes, no-combat, sitcom-esque story about a small tourist town in space. As mentioned in the NSR Camp blog post, I got to play a game of Lancer, something I've wanted to try for a while. I also ran Stygian Library, which has been sitting on my to-play pile for years.
I set a goal about a year ago to try to actually play in more games, so I seem to be getting there. My next goal is to find the energy to run more games as well. I also want to keep up solo games as well - I have two different "campaigns" where I haven't touched them in like 6 months.