Players not knowing the details of a setting is awesome because they get to experience the thrill of discovery and learn setting pillars by making gaffes, while the whole group plays an emergent, unique story that sets their own sessions apart from everyone else’s.
*Doctor looking at my X-Rays*
Doctor: Ah, this is exactly what I was afraid of.
Me: Oh my God, what?
Doctor: Skeletons.
Saw a guy do it at karaoke once
Pixies are good at that stuff. Tony's Theme starts in a similar way: "This is a song about a superhero named Tony.
It's called 'Tony's Theme.'" Hell, yes, Tony, what are you up to?
A collage of images from #Nosferatu of 1922 - on the left a dramatic poster portraying Count Orlok, on the top right the iconic scene of his shadow ascending a staircase, and in the lower right Orlok is fatally exposed to the sun.
On this day in 1922, German director #FWMurnau released the iconic expressionist silent movie #Nosferatu – Eine Symphonie des Grauens (A Symphony of Horror).
![GUNSHIP - Dark All Day (feat. Tim Cappello and Indiana) [Official Music Video]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:llct76ixb6tmf2k3ikgslrgq/bafkreiboup4sanl6mdwoljgupcapj73yzkxrb7yu5hr2klonsk2w5q7smy)
BTW, the sax guy’s name is Tim Capello, which I know not from much Lost Boys watching, but because one of the CCP WoD marketing guys paid him for a Cameo vid where he called one of the WoD MMO producers “Big Stupid” and then peaced out with a sax riff.
I love that all the art in BREAK!! feels like a "found" still from a formative show or movie that lives hazily in memory. All of the art very immediately communicates "make it feel like this."
Wait until you see how many legislators have for-profit health care investments in their portfolios.
Separately, been doing this-and-that on an espionage game and one of the design hurdles is the horrific nature of any state capable of fielding modern spies. My solve is to have the characters be stateless operators, because testing shows that the game's themes are at odds with many gov't agendas.
Along these lines, one of Le Carré's foundations being compromised morality avoids the jingoistic traditions of some other genre writers. Wonderful reading for "wheels-within-wheels" enjoyers, and those enjoying psychological tales of justification and misdeed. *ahem vampire players take note*
I know it's the least of its crimes but I really do resent the way that AI has taken the em dash from us
i demand an apology for the time i was caught running a "prediction market" in high school and disciplined
maybe stop calling them "prediction markets" and just refer to them as the bookies they are
75% of shrimp & 60% of oysters consumed in the US come from the Gulf of Mexico. These are filter-feeding animals, so whatever gets dumped in the water ends up in the food supply.
Cartoon of two immigration agents, one masked and the other unmasked, carrying large weapons. “The government doesn’t need A.I. that kills autonomously and never refuses illegal orders … They’ve got us!”
Sunday Taquitos #17: The Human Touch
By @ivan-ehlers.bsky.social
Apollo with the dodgeball of prophecy
Years ago in another life I gave a guest lecture at The Hague warning “AI weapons” could be invoked to remove accountability for war crimes from the chain of command. I said “there are no autonomous weapons, only unsupervised ones,” and sadly it seems I was cooking with that one
It is because what they have devised and monetized are instruments of control, which they largely believe are for classes other than their own.
They used to have backbones & we know this because we keep finding fossil sturgeons curled up inside fossil hadrosaurs.
Which is weird because hadrosaurs didn't eat fish
In the big-picture sense, yes. Acts of creation like game design are inherently, humanly satisfying.
I think for many, though, the practical, “small bits” of design don’t have the same allure. “Run 25 A/B tests so we can figure out if the macguffin gives +2 or +3” is less of that big-picture joy.
1. The footage shows Homeland Security is lying when he got indoors and was wearing prison booties I doubt are good for the cold.
2. Nurul Amin Shah Alam apologized to police BEFORE he was tasered when he was originally arrested.
wapo.st/3OCwNx8
YES! And those systemic divisions then support part of the setting divisions (clans), which themselves had subsets of systems (Disciplines) that reinforce them. Tremere are dangerously smart but you don't want them at a party; Gangrel are tough and can shred you but you can perhaps outwit them, etc.
Interesting observation. I think clocks serve two games "needs," both as a system for expressing things that will eventually pass/ fail, but also as intuitive "UI" for the system.
Definitely agree here, and the intentionality is part of the design. Example in practice is Vampire, which leans hard, setting-wise, into "A Beast I am, lest a Beast I become," and then reinforces it with the Humanity system.
...to support campaign play or homebrew narrative, assuming that each group is telling their own stories using the published engine.
I also distinguish narrative design from systems design, but they're both critical parts of game design proper.
Oh, no, that's not the intention behind what I'm describing. Unsupported by hard data, but I would estimate that more people design along the lines of having a story they want to tell and using extant systems for it than they are building new systems. It's why most commercial games are built...
Somewhat analogous to computer gamedev, where most teams don’t necessarily want to build their own engines, which is how Unreal, Unity, Godot, etc. gain widespread traction.
I think there’s much to your idea. Any kind of systems design is hard, often not much fun, and un-glorious. I also think more people generally want to do more -setting- design than -systems- design (not a criticism), so they adopt engines that already exist to “run the sim.”
After the arrests of powerful men across the world, you might be asking why the US has so much trouble holding its leaders accountable for lawbreaking. Since Nixon, all three branches of government have worked hard to ensure they can break the law with impunity www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...
