Troy Press

I’ve tried 54 different pumpkin beers over the years, as part of flights, as singles at alcohol retailers, and at restaurants. The only six pack I buy these days is Voodoo Ranger Atomic Pumpkin, which packs a nice bit of heat and is definitely my #1 pumpkin beer. Here are my top 20 pumpkin beers.

You and your fellow villagers know that you can keep the iron-age village of Stonetop safe from the strange creatures of the wider world and even help it prosper. And you’re willing to adventure away from Stonetop to get the resources you need to do so. The GM is given three key resources: Book I, Book II, and Arcana cards. Each expands the state-of-the-art for fantasy PbtA games.

Today would have been my maternal grandmother’s 111th birthday (1915). Alas she was not as long-lived as a hobbit with a corrupting magic ring.

In the original spirit of Blaugust, here are some random observations of some of the games I have managed to play so far this year.

Some Esperanto words can be parsed into roots and affixes in multiple ways.

Early versions of my civ-lite BASIC game, Cycladic League.

A look at seven word forms in Esperanto that are homographs.

The details and discoveries tables from “The Paths of Ateşkazé” by Jeremy Strandberg in Perilous Almanacs remain my favorite caving adventure.

Mango man, mango man
Thinks he’s the entire universe, man
Usually mean to smaller man
Mango man
Is he depressed or is he a mess?
Does he feel totally worthless?
Who came up with mango man?
Degraded man, mango man.

As an adult, I rarely try to do things I’m no good at. At work, I do things I’ve done for decades. Same for my hobbies.

Trying something new means being embarrassingly bad at it.

That was awkward and difficult to work through.

I developed Cycladic League by re-imaging what Cyclades might be like it were a BASIC game, then iterating on the design in an agile fashion.

I have created three new background playbooks for Planet of the Week: the Belter (inspired by The Expanse), the Throwback (think Buck Rogers, or Steve Rogers, and maybe John Crichton), and the Terran.

“On their way back home from the war, the heroes have become lost among strange islands populated by mythical creatures, dire beasts, treacherous landscapes, legendary kingdoms, and desperate people—all somehow cursed or abandoned by the cruel power of the capricious gods.” — Evil Hat

Richard Adams’ Watership Down (New York: Macmillan, 1972) is one of the classic works of xenofiction (the fiction set in strange cultures, real or imagined), placed as it is among and between the warrens of rabbits in the English countryside. Lapine, the language he sketches for his rabbits, is arguably the best naming language ever created.

This is an analysis of the Furbish of the first-generation Furby toys.