Blunt Damage Follow-up
And the x-ray image is in. Just a few shattered fingertips, no big deal. At best, a month of healing.
So, no bass guitar for a while. Trying to master touch-typing with just a left hand, right index finger, and right thumb. That's okay until I have to move around in vim, my chosen editor. Now I see how inaccessible that software is.
A fun thing happened last Friday. A heavy cutting board fell three feet from a shelf. Edge first. Htting a very solid wood surface. The problem was that my hand was in the way. That hand/eye coordination trained from youth through countless hours on controllers were no use now. I was too slow and it hit two fingers on my right hand.Blunt Damage
Of course, I waited a week for the swelling and pain to subside. The fingers weren't swollen any longer but the throbbing pain persisted. I continued to work, pack for our move, and shitpost. Eventually, I relented to my spouse's pleading and went to the doctor.
Turns out I broke two fingertips! The splints are annoying but typing this post wasn't too painful, just slow-gowing.
The last two packages I've gotten in the mail have spilled their contents. "Ooze Nun" is an adventure for Mothership - not sure how if I can slot this into the current campaign or not because it looks crazy. "Zombie Braineaters! Suburban Decay In The U.S.A." is an RPG that looks like a fun take on the well-walked zombie genre.New Zines - Cloud Empress, Mothership, and Zombie Braineaters
The three Cloud Empress zines and the shrimp-mouse patch are from the latest Worlds By Watt crowdfunding campaign "Stories From The Slip Vol. 1".
I haven't decided if I'll write up reviews of these from just reading them or from actual use at the table. I'm opting for the latter, so it might be some time before I can. I do have a campaign that is coming to an end soon. We'll see.
The Fediverse isn't the busiest hive of RPG activity but it's where some of us call home, even if only part-time. To get a handle on what others are posting on their blogs in this little corner of the internet, I'll put this list together. These are all blogs from responses to a Mastodon post I made this morning.Fediverse Blogs
These aren't meant to be federated blogs but blogs written by Fedi users themselves.
While these links are in the side bar, I'll also try to keep this post updated for a permalinked list. If your blog is listed here and needs correcting or removal, let me know with a private post on Mastodon.
- 6d6 RPG Blog - RPG content
- Among Cats And Books - Factions and sandboxes
- Archway of Glowing Orange
- Dogwood Tales - RPGs & other media
- Fight in the Shade - OSR and traditional TTRPGs
- Githyanki Diaspora - Judd Karlman from Daydreaming about Dragons' Blog
- In My Campaign - RPG design & play
- Marc Ueberall - Solo RPG plays
- The Monsters Know What They’re Doing - Ready-to-Use Tactics for D&D 5E
- Polyhedral Dreams - Thoughts about TTRPGs
- Polyhedral Nonsense - RPG curiosities
- Reviews from R’lyeh - Reviews of RPGs and their supplements
- Signals from Delta Pavonis - Gaming, books, SF, computing & life
- Spriggan's Den - Sword & sorcery RPGs
- Thought Punks - RPG design, free games
- Thoughts in Darkness - Melting pot of ideas
- Troy Press - RPG design, GM prep
- TTRPGs - TTRPGs
- Vague Countries - DIY D&D
- VDonnut Valley - TTRPGs
- Weaving Stories - Game design & stories
- Whispers from the Sky-Spire - Adventure Reviews
Edit: Added more blogs!
Minor update on the blog. Finally added slugs for URLs on posts. For some reason I thought it would require setting up another plugin but, of course, that's built into 11ty.Slugs All The Way Down
I'm working on digitizing my journey through Matt Finch's Tome of Worldbuilding. Hoping to have the first part of what will be a series. I have a few sessions working with this book in a paper(!) notebook.
I was inspired to start this blog because of the theme going around a lot of blogs was "Appendix N". It got me thinking about my influences. They don't all make sense but I am what I am.Appendix Null
The last straggler in the "Appendix N" posts came from Afraid of Encounters. Well, I can't be THAT lazy and with some encouragement from peole at the Prismatic Waystation Discord server, real life business, and procrastination I stream-of-concsioused my own Appendix Null.
This is semi-chronological. Apologies to any influences I forgot.
Kid Loitering In Used Bookstores
- Tolkien - the runes and descriptions of trees, pipeweed (foreshadowing)
- Alan Dean Foster's Humanx Commonwealth - praying mantis aliens, psionics, Quetzelcoatl aliens
- Elfquest - alien elves, cool mounts, might explain bi
- Fangoria - monsters and aliens, forbidden rated R
- Thieves' World - thieves, hub city, pentagram on forehead
Kid Loitering At The Gas Station Comic Stand
- Kirby Devil Dinosaur - poor kid's Kamandi?
- Micronauts - a multiverse as they say these days
- Ninja and Mercenary magazines - shuriken and nunchaku, Rambo shit
Getting Beat Up At School
- Moorcock's Elric and Eternal Champion - drugged-out sex elves, elemental pact magic, chaos lords, multiverse, tragic anti-hero, Tanelorn
- D'Aulaires' Books of Myths - the gods as psychedelic assholes, creepy
Descrambling HBO
- Blade Runner - flying cars and Han Solo
- Alien - Giger, Ripley, Jonesy, working class, FLAME THROWERS
- The Omen - secret devil stuff, freak out check my scalp
- Amityville Horror - flies, these ghosts will kill your ass, the devil
- The Shining - scary, weird, Donner party
- E.T. - playing d&d while smoking, dominoes
- Conan the Barbarian - serpent cults, Crom, magic is evil
- Krull - boomerang named after a polearm
- Road Warrior - battle cars, gyrocopters, eating dogfood
- The Thing - body horror, FLAME THROWERS
Bored Hot Summers
- Badly dubbed Shaw Brothers films - blind fighting, you killed my master, epic facial hair
- The Young and the Restless - hugging someone while staring off into space thinking about that secret thing you're hiding from them
- Bonanza - guns, protecting your land
- Grizzly Addams - grizzly bear familiar, he wins
- Ben - giant rat familiar, he wins?
A Well-Adjusted Adult
- David Lynch Twin Peaks etc - weirdness in the mundane
- Lovecraft - read on LSD, cosmic horror as nature
- Akira - psionics, cyberpunk, body horror
- Cronenburg - body horror
- Tetsuo - man and machine, body horror
- William S Burroughs - embrace randomness, addiction, secret hidden world
- Robert Anton Wilson - conspiracies, coincidances
- Maximum Rock n Roll - the world of punk zines
- Giger - dark sexual imagery, body horror
- TAZ - self-governing communities, pirates
- Crowley - occultism as cover for fringe beliefs, rituals, willpower
- Tai Chi Master - inner power, cinematic fights
- Hard Boiled - cinematic fights, violence, overly dramatic
- Chinese Ghost Story - non-Euro/US ghosts
- Dark City - dreams, opression
- Event Horizon - horror, not the eyes
Well, nothing too interesting. I just noticed a few things that I left incomplete after sharing the first post. I forgot to add any OpenGraph tags, which results in a barebones look when shared on social media. Just a side effect of deciding on writing my own 11ty template. This and a few other technical changes have gotten in the way of an actual blog post. Now that that's out of the way, post incoming!Making A Few Adjustments
Finally getting this blog off the ground after a year of procrastination and tinkering. The last time I blogged was in the height of the blogging boom that social media destroyed. It's hard not to get inspired to blog again with so many great RPG blogs in what is something of a new renessaiance.The Eye of the Cyclops
What do I want to do with this blog?
- Reviews - There's a huge amount of both vintage and new material out there and not nearly enough reviews, especially from actual use. I can't claim to have good taste, a designer's insight, or a critic's eye but I'll give my honest opinion based on real-world use in prep or at the gaming table. I'll leave the "read only" reviews to others.
- Play Reports - Intended for players on the Psionic Cyclops server. I like to think that reports on lesser-played systems and settings can help spread awareness of some awesome stuff people have made.
- Zine Making - An interest of mine from an earlier period of my life. I've gotten the bug again in a big way, both in and outside of an TTRPG context. From low-tech printing methods to layotu and design. I've only just started making pamphlets for my in-person games as practice to making something more widely available.
- RPG Content - Setting ideas, rule tweaks, and possibly some digital tools. I may also post things that works-in-progress in the spirit of open collaboration.
So this post isn't just about me, here's a magic item for Swords & Wizardry Complete Revised or any compatible system.
Eye of the Cyclops
A tarnished medallion wrought of meteoric rock and metal contains a singular fist-sized closed eye. The eye is the alchemically-preserved orb of an ancient cyclops sorcerer from the age before humans, fey, and other beings inhabited the world. The eyelid and surrounding flesh feel slightly warm to the touch as if still alive. Once per day, the wearer can command the eye to open providing the ability to see the true nature of all creatures and objects in a 60' radius. This could be a being's alignment, whether or not they are telling the truth, and magical effects of items in the vicinity. It additionally grants the ability to see invisible creatures and into other planes of existence such as the ethereal or fey realms. With each use, whatever the eye observes is transmitted back in time to the sorcerer the eye came from.
Usable by: All Classes