I interviewed noisms, who blogs as Monsters and Manuals, publishes noisms games, and is best known for his fantasy game setting Yoon Suin, the Purple Land. Right now he'a running a Kickstarter for The Corridor of the Seventh Green Magic UserThe Hall of the Third Blue Wizard, a zine featuring high-quality commissioned RPG modules and short stories. Although I fucking hate acronyms, for sanity's sake I'm sure I'll be referring to it as THOTTBW or THotTBW or THot3■W by the end of this post, however dirty that makes me feel.
Here are audio and video versions of the interview, and below them are a summary of what we talked about with LOTS of notes and links and other good stuff.
The first review of Mostly Harmless Meetings is in, and interestingly it looks at it not from a gaming perspective, but as a work of literature: "a sort of Borgesian/Oulippian take on British rural folklore". I like that! Admittedly I've not read any Borges (I've just ordered a copy of Labyrinths, and I'm told that he also wrote a monster manual), and the closes I got to Oulipo was Georges Perec's Life, A User's Manual, which I've managed to abandon twice, because I can only take so many lists (here's an idea: a random stuff-in-the-attic generator, for 20th century horror games, based on Perec's lists; a sort of "Life, A User's Tables"). You can read the review, by my friend James Burt, here.
I have recently been reading, and been very impressed by, James's own work: dark, weird, sometimes horrific short stories. His story A Disease of Books impressed me so much that I resurrected a project I started during the first COVID lockdown: Yakanory. Basically me reading stuff aloud, this started with me reading Dr Seuss tales to friends' kids over Facebook Live, then briefly took on a bit of a life of its own. My reading of A Disease of Books is below, and I've put quite a few other readings up on YouTube and plan to do more soon. You can generally tell how manic I was at the time of recording by what I'm wearing (and I always was a little manic, otherwise I don't think I'd have had the courage to do something like this).
Just a quick post to say that the itcho.io Bundle for Ukraine sale ends in under 24 hours. It contains an amazing 998 games, for both tabletop and computer, covering every genre imaginable, and worth over $6,500 at their normal price. You can bag the lot for a minimum donation of a ridiculously low $10. Funds go to two carefully vetted charities who already have experience of working in Ukraine, International Medical Corps and Voices of Children.
My system-neutral supplement Mostly Harmless Meetings is in there as a PDF. To demonstrate the amazing quality of some of the other stuff in there, this tweet highlighting my contribution also contains works by two of the greatest names in TTRPG: Nate Treme, whose Haunted Almanac I recently purchased; and Isaac Williams, whose Kickstarter for Mausritter I recently backed. There are many, many other games of similar high quality in the bundle.
There's been a lot of talk in recent days about the new Doctors and Daleks series of roleplaying adventures, using Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition (5e) rules. I don't have very strong feelings about either 5e or Doctor Who (if I were to play a Doctor Who game, I'd probably opt for the Lasers & Feelings hack, Day of the Doctors). I do, however, have some very creative friends who are building a really special new Doctor Who multiverse...
In 1987, Colin Baker's Sixth Doctor regenerated. His replacement was Sylvester McCoy. But among others who had been under consideration for the role of the Seventh Doctor was McCoy's mentor, Ken Campbell. Ken's version of the Doctor was deemed too dark, and so McCoy got the gig. But what if...
