Kind of a belated Character Creation Challenge post here, huh? ANYway. I was reading through the Hollows corebook after this weekend’s game, thinking about the Priest pregen, and I noticed that the stats on the preview seemed a little off in the low direction. I also had the aforementioned dissonance with optimal tactics for the two weapons. So I ran through character generation, mostly for the sake of checking the math but also to see if there were any easy tweaks I’d make if I wanted to play Caleb in a campaign. (Which I do, of course.) ...

I had the pleasure of playing in a one-shot of Hollows, the roleplaying game of tactical combat in a poisoned England lookalike from Rowan, Rook, and Decard. Yet another winner from Chris Taylor, Grant Howitt, and a very capable team. The crowdfunding campaign is more informative than the product page, so read that too if you’re curious. But basically you’re playing doomed Hunters who might as well spend the rest of their lives delving into Hollows, places where the world has encysted around horrible formerly human monsters, beating up those monsters, and bathing in their life force. The only significant fights are party vs. single boss creature, and there’s a lot of shifting around the positioning map, thinking about when to use special abilities, and getting seriously hurt. My kind of game. ...

One of the things that was really important to me was maintaining the ability to post to Popone from more or less anywhere. For the last year or so I’ve been using Obsidian with a Wordpress plugin to post; with the move to Hugo I needed to work out something new. I think I’ve got it now. The source of truth for posts is a private GitHub repository. In theory I could write the posts in GitHub’s web interface but that feels sloppy to me and it’s not a great mobile experience. What’s the point of using modular components if I just lock into yet another proprietary solution? The quest continued. ...

So here we are! As threatened/promised over a year ago, I’m moving off WordPress. Matt Mullenweg has not gotten particularly more relaxed about anything; last week he decided to tell a CSS framework to change names because their current name is similar to his company name. Given that the CSS framework is named Automatic, similar to Mullenweg’s company name, you can sort of see it, but really? No. They already added a disclaimer on their Web site, and “automatic” is a very generic term. I have still had enough of Mullenweg. Time to move.

November is unthemed this year: one noir collection but otherwise not heavy on the femmes fatale and criminal sorts. It’s also nicely varied, with one blockbuster of a collection and a fair amount of other cool stuff. Actually two blockbuster collections now that I think about it.

The news broke today that the performative anti-gay, anti-abortion activists Mayday USA are suing Seattle for imaginary free speech violations. Well that’s fun. I’m not about to waste the research effort I did just because the Seattle Times had to close their comment section, so here we go! One paragraph summary: they’re a bunch of New Apostolic Reformation assholes who came to Seattle this summer to fire up controversy and got what they wanted – counter-protesters, arrests, and a lot of free publicity. So it goes. Now they’re suing because the publicity is fading and the grift is based on constant weeping and wailing.

Well holy crap, that’s a year’s worth of these. I’m certainly not blogging like I used to but the monthly commitment is working out! And what a good lineup for my 12th month. The top line collections rotate around two unquestionable masters, and the good programming doesn’t end there. We’ll eat well in September. Let’s get to it.

It’s with some sadness that I decided it was time to turn off comments on this blog. I’ve enjoyed many of them over the years, even the guy who implied I was jury tampering. However, two changes have affected my desire to keep running them: First, I want to get off WordPress thanks to the dubious lawsuits and Internet fights that have been churning along for months now. This is not a stable platform any more. That’ll be easier if I just have to preserve old comments and I don’t try and add a comment section to a static page blog. ...

Hey, I’m using the year in the titles now! Shows I didn’t have much confidence that I’d keep this going a year ago. Well, a big raspberry to younger me. We’re getting spooky again, of course, with a lineup that is varied both in types of horror and in quality. I think we have another contender for worst movie to ever play on the Channel – read on to find out which one.

Welcome back to my read-through of Dark Inheritance, a mostly forgotten child of the D20 boom! Find all the entries in the series here. The first chapter after the introduction is a big old lore dump. This matches general expectations at the time, although you know there’s gonna be more lore integrated into the mechanics, and it’s also probably smart for the modern world but occult setting. It’s only 20 pages long, which probably helps explain why it was an impulse purchase for me way back when – I skimmed this quickly in the dealer’s hall.