Mick Jagger must take the orbital tornado from the home of a trusted friend.

April 14, 2025: Triangle Agency Is Anti-Trad

Have you heard about Triangle Agency? This fascinating TTRPG riffs on Control, Paranoia, and The SCP Foundation to make an urban fantasy RPG about working for a mysterious organization which captures and destroys anomalies that threaten existence. The game is brilliantly written, with a cheeky corporate wit à la Severance throughout the text, and multiple argumentative narrative voices that present different visions of the same world. The game is also, in a way I find really fascinating, anti-trad.

For those who aren't familiar, a "trad" game is a TTRPG like GURPS, Call of Cthulhu, or Dungeons & Dragons. It tends to be a big book with lots of stats, a traditional GM/player dynamic, and a design approach for long-term campaigns sculpted to the whims of the GM.

I come from a "story game" background, which has a very different approach to what a TTRPG looks like. This isn't . . . [more]

April 13, 2025: He Who Fears Being Conquered Is Sure Of Defeat

If you haven't figured it out yet, I watch a lot of nerdy YouTube videos. My latest find is a significant investment in time, clocking in at more than 90 minutes, but it is totally worth it. Super Bunnyhop is an eclectic channel with videos about history and the video game industry. The video that caught my eye is a deep dive into the history of strategy games that focuses heavily on Kriegsspiel and how Napoleon might be the originator of the hobby that so many of us love.

-- Will Schoonover

April 12, 2025: Save The World, Or Play Pixelated Golf?

I love the idea of hiding information in a tabletop RPG world in new and interesting ways, and I just stumbled across one I'd never thought of: putting it on an Atari 2600 cartridge.

This hacker programmed the Atari 2600 as a digital photo frame and shared details on the project, including how images are limited to 64×84 pixels, black and white. If you don't want to program the actual hardware to make it happen (although it'd be really cool!), the article provides enough information so that you can describe it vividly in a game or create a visual aid. The link even offers instructions on how to turn your own pictures into the suitable format!

If you want to amp up the challenges for the players even more, maybe make the heroes have to track down the cartridge buried among thousands of others in a New Mexico landfill . . .

-- Steven Marsh

April 11, 2025: Thinking About The Iliad

My mind has been on ancient Greece a lot lately. It started with the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad (both truly phenomenal and powerful reads), followed by the novels Song of Achilles and Wrath Goddess Sing, along with a valiant attempt to enjoy the Percy Jackson TV Show (before being put off by how it fumbles the last episode's pacing).

Ancient Greece is a fascinating historical period, and an even more fascinating mythological period. It's been valorized in western society for hundreds of years, from Raphael to the founding fathers. It contains echoes of many of our greatest triumphs and our primordial sins, all wrapped up in a culture that is now so distant from our own that we cannot help but project our own values back in time. Some TTRPGs touch on this period (GURPS, of course, has some fantastic rules for historical gaming, and Agon is an indie game from . . . [more]

April 10, 2025: Stakeholder Report For 2024

The 2024 report is here. I am already nostalgic for that relatively benign time . . .

-- Steve Jackson