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.
