Wandering Adventure Party

My attempts to read more have expanded this week. I actually listened to an episode of the Zero to Well-Read podcast that talked about setting reading goals and deciding what reading more or reading better means for you. (Not at all from this week, so it’s up here with the intro). Part of the episode talked about how you choose to create the time to read, including things like setting up Android’s digital well-being tools to alert me if I’m using up a chosen allotment of time I’ve now set for doomscrolling social media apps. Apparently, if you can squeeze an extra half hour of reading into a day, the average reader will see an extra couple books a month from that. This week, I’ve used some of my squeezed-in reading time to work on Sword of Shannara and How to Read Literature Like a Professor. Both of which I really enjoyed.TabletopKeith Ammann of The Monsters Know What They’re Doing is currently working to improve the tag system of the entire corpus of his blog. This will make searching for things from the same source easier for DMs who want to bring tactics to their games.TTRPGKids interviewed Yeet the Kobold from 9th Level Games (creators of Kobolds Ate My Baby).I really enjoyed Grognardia’s retrospective review of the AD&D 2e Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting boxed set.Sly Flourish writes about understanding what would possess your player characters to leave safety for adventure and building hooks into your adventures for them.Video GamesI enjoyed the History of Gobliiins post from Virtual Moose. I really want to look up these games and try them after this. The title letterplay is really cool.FictionJohn Scalzi did a cover reveal for Monsters of Ohio. Which I am absolutely pre-ordering.The Canadian SF magazine On Spec has published its final issue, and the Unofficial Hugo Book Club Blog covered its history, including publishing Cory Doctorow’s first story, and called for readers to nominate it for Best Semiprozine on their Hugo ballots.

Hey, you, reader:Ever been browsing someone's blog, website, repo -- even their social web profile -- and thought to yourself "Wow, that's really neat. I love what they did here!"Consider telling them! Someone on here made a post a while back encouraging people to do just that, and I've tried to make a conscious habit of contacting the authors of neat little indie and smolweb sites.Email, guestbook, comment; whatever it might be, consider reaching out somehow to share your appreciation. You might be surprised at how much it makes their day.You might also be surprised to discover how much making their day makes yours, too.#IndieWeb #SmallWeb #Community #Blog #Blogging

I’ve been making a concerted effort to do less doomscrolling and spent a lot of the last week reading novels. I finished Twelve Months and started on Sword of Shannara since it’s in the 2014 Player’s Handbook Appendix E.The effort to not doomscroll means my links for the week come from a the same places I already knew and already followed in my RSS reader.Tabletop RPGsI always enjoy posts from Sly Flourish. This week’s post about using X and / to track damage quicker is no different. I love thinking through things to make combats run more smoothly at the table. It’s a beat that is usually a moment of excitement in books, it’s the part of the game that most of D&D’s rules and abilities cover, but the accounting part of combat can really slow things down and have the opposite effect. So a discussion of how we do the accounting is definitely interesting.I enjoyed reading Grognardia’s retrospective review of Forgotten Realms Adventures for Second Edition. My own D&D experience began in the closing days of 3.5e but the group I started with was full of players who’d started with Second and who had all these associations with the Forgotten Realms, with Ravenloft, and settings that I knew nothing about. I like seeing reviews like this that put older stuff into its original context.I also really like Githyanki Diaspora’s DM advice on reddit. This week’s especially hits well for me as someone who tends to second- (and third- and fourth-) guess myself and plans I make for games. I think a lot of us tend to overthink what’s really meant to be a fun time around the table with friends. So sometimes we just need a reminder that we’re doing great.FictionLast week, I put in Chuck Wendig’s thoughts on Generative AI, this week we have John Scalzi’s thoughts. I like his comment that he’s not particularly worried about the slop hose displacing real novelists, not just because the novelists are better than spicy autocomplete could ever be, but because the kind of people who outsource writing to ChatGPT tend to put the exact same amount of effort into marketing the generated books as they put into writing them (read: none). Also, cat pictures.Uncanny Magazine published the results of their reader poll of favorite stories from 2025. There are some great stories there.

There's a new feature on #BurgeonLab right before CNY! It's the Guestbook page I've been longing to have since I started my blog. 🥳️ https://burgeonlab.com/guestbook/Thanks @zacharykai.net and Zak https://html-chunder.neocities.org/ for being the first to sign it.It'll make me a happy camper if you decide to sign it too! #webdev #smallweb #indieweb #personalblog #personalsite #webdevelopment #blogs #blog

I really enjoy reading the Blog Roundup posts by Virtual Moose as well as the section of Sly Flourish posts listing links to references made in the week’s Talk Show.So here are some of the blog posts that have popped up in my RSS Reader this week that I found interesting.Tabletop RPGsI really like the Sly Flourish discussion of the multiple hobbies within the RPG space. It hits close to home for me, with being a player being one hobby and my endless ideas spinning out into campaign prep that maybe I’ll eventually get to DM one or more of being another.Chris McDowell of Bastionland Press has released the public playtest of his new game. Intergalactic Bastionland, as I read it, looks like Into the Traveller. Which definitely piques my interest. I love Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland. (Also, the title makes me want to say Planetary, Planetary)Keith Ammann wrote a piece about the state of the Dungeon Master’s Guild. In it, he talks about his total royalties from things he’s posted there versus what he’s gotten from books seeing wider distribution. He also talks about how tools for discoverability and filtering are insufficient for players and dungeon masters to sift through a bloat of AI slop that has gone up in the last couple years. As someone who grabbed a ton of adventures to read alongside The Monsters Know What They’re Doing and Sly Flourish’s Lazy Dungeon Master when I returned to DMing in 2020, mid-COVID, that same dive into materials is so much harder to find the quality stuff lately.FictionGrognardia wrote about the end of the mass market paperback book format. As someone who got my start as an avid reader picking up cheap, puppy copies of Animorphs at the school book fair, these tiny books hold a special place in my heart. Trades take up so much room on a shelf, are so much less convenient than the mass markets.Chuck Wendig tells us what he really thinks about “writers” who replace the act of writing with prompts to GenAI. The opening image in the post kind of says it all.John Scalzi announced the completion of his next novel: Monsters of Ohio. As someone who, like Scalzi, resides in the Buckeye State, this title definitely made me look.

@gabz a lovely website!@SeaFury

Way more personal than my normal blogs. Reflections on the last half of the year. CW: Medical issues.#ttrpg #blog https://www.ofgodsandgamemasters.com/blog/reflections-on-the-last-half-of-2025-cw-medical-problems

@juergen_hubert Thank you! X1 is a classic due to being one of the first published hexcrawls and its lost world vibe, but it's not entirely to my taste these days. Besides, I never could resist fiddling with things.

I read a blog post from Virtual Moose about how we should consider making 2026 The Year of the Personal Website.Like he says, it’s nice having a place of my very own to put down thoughts on things I enjoy without worrying about the 288 character limitation of the Social Media site formerly known as Twitter, or even the more generous limits on Mastodon. It’s nice to not need to engage in the dystopian self-censorship that rules in places like Facebook and TikTok. I set my rules for what I think the proper tone and vocabulary for speaking about things are.I also love using an RSS reader to curate my own feed of people I like to hear from and want a chance to go back and see their stuff if I wasn’t online at the exact right moment to see it. Nothing in my RSS feed gets buried by the latest thoughts on Milkshake Duck or Bean Dad, or whoever the internet has dubbed the main character of the day.So go out and fight against the status quo that Doctorow dubbed “four websites filled with pictures of the other three” and make your own space to fill however you like!

Und der Blog wird natürlich auch weiter gefüllt. #KenntIhr Isabella Leonarda? Nein? So ging es mir auch bis vor ein paar Tagen. Aber damit ist jetzt Schluss! Isabella war Nonne und hat gleichzeitig begeistert komponiert - und das schon im 17. Jahrhundert. Ihren Namen hat man unter den Tisch gekehrt. Wir räumen damit jetzt auf!https://www.blog.der-leiermann.com/isabella-leonarda/#FraueninderMusik #Kunst #press #Komponistin #blog

@audreygwinter I have no idea. I tend not to post on the weekends cuz I have other things I wanna do.

OK, I need people to do better because this is just too evergreen in too short of a time for me to stay feeling good about it. (People shouted out a couple good examples that avoid these pitfalls. If you got more, yell them at me!)https://thoughtpunks.com/lets-talk-about-ghibli-inspired-ttrpgs/ #TTRPG #Blog #Ghibli

If you have a #blog , does it have #ActivityPub integration - either natively or via an appropriate plugin (such as the ActivityPub plugin for WordPress)?If so, share its account name here - so that people can follow them and comment on them with their regular #FediVerse account!I think this functionality is one of the most underappreciated aspects of the Fediverse. It's not quite an #RSS feed, but it's awesome in its own right.

New on the website for the world of Archaea:The Steel Hand Warriors of Pindoramamartial artists of the southern jungles#ttrpg #worldbuilding #bloghttps://www.ofgodsandgamemasters.com/archaea/the-steel-hand-warriors-of-pindorama