Troy Press

Here are the top-rated Hugo winners of the past 10+ years, according to GoodReads.com: #1 Network Effect, #2 The Stone Sky, #3 A Desolation Called Peace.

Unlike the TMS1000, which had 32 bytes (bytes, not kilobytes!) of RAM, the unit in Dark Tower, the TMS1400, had twice that: 64 bytes of RAM. As perspective, this single sentence using ASCII takes 64 bytes! Bytes weren’t the basic unit: nybbles were (half-bytes, consisting of 4 bits). So, in Dark Tower, the amount of gold, food and warriors a player has are stored as two-nybble BCD representations rather than as traditional binary numbers.

Nothing breaks my immersion in a story so much as a coincidence. No spoilers, but two points in season 2 of The Last of Us with coincidences so angered me that I turned off the TV. And rewatching Strange New Worlds, in preparation for the new season, the one person who survives an attack that kills 200 is by coincidence the only regular cast member aboard that ship.

Hypothesis: The first IMDB ratings are by the biggest fans and therefore represent the peak rating, with stable ratings being lower as non-fans eventually catch up and watch something. I look at Section 31 ratings and Season 5 Lower Deck ratings to prove the hypothesis in that context.

When designing your game, it’s important to understand what your Harm and Recovery System is doing for your game. Both should create drama-filled moments, which means they need to have Costs associated with them: but those Costs not only need to be sensible for the touchstones evoked during play, but also carry a level of interest and intrigue all on their own. 

Jack Guignol has an oft-quoted post, “Just Use Bears,” about using the stats for a bear when the players outpace your prep and end up facing “some cool, weird-ass monster that you don’t actually have stats for.” Lars, at Dice Goblin, expanded this further, to leveraging animal archetypes in general, “Just Use Bears… Or Wolves, Dragons or Spiders.”

The fundamental tension of the Twilight Struggle series of Cold War games is that you often have to play cards that help your opponent. The strategy centers around determining when to play such cards.

Powered by the Apocalypse games take diverse approaches to representing injury, stress, and deteriorating health. Unlike traditional RPGs with their focus on hit points, PbtA harm systems often try for other narrative consequences. Thoughts about Harm Clocks, Debilities, Conditions, Stress, Dice Pools, and NPCs.

1) You can practice the language with hundreds of people on social media, in bite-sized chunks.

2) You can make up your own words in the language, using established roots and affixes.

3) Many of the speakers are multilingual—they may even speak one or two other conlangs…

Originally pitched as a prequel, Star Trek: Strange New Worlds now has to be conceived of as a reboot on an alternate timeline, based on its own changes to the timeline and to the development of its characters. Nor should this be a surprise. The future of the 1960s show didn’t quite pan out.

In 2023, Joey D. Jones of the University of South Hampton interviewed me and over a dozen others about the authorial burden of interactive fiction. His paper on the topic is now available.

After a thorough review of dozens of science fiction PbtA games, and after hacking the last two TTRPG systems we played quite a bit, I decided to create my own game with exactly the vibe I wanted. Why a new system? I didn’t want to set an adventure in a cinematic universe so that we could capture that feeling of exploring the unknown.

One of the things my wife and I love is the live music scene. Most weekends we can hear live music at our pizza shop, at neighborhood bars, at a food-truck fair, and so on. These are almost always cover artists, though they may play a song or two of their own as well. I’ve always wondered about the songs that they choose to cover.