Wandering Adventure Party

Okay, so today is my birthday. The week has also seen the third anniversary of my mom dying, so feelings have been complicated this week. I read Seanan McGuire’s Aftermarket Afterlife and have been reading Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.There’s been a big online discussion about a post by Snow railing against overly simplified bullet points as design. My take is that there’s a point there about how sometimes the messiness of the words can be the point. Like if we simplified one of Tolkien’s tree descriptions to “There’s a tree.” That just doesn’t give rhe same feeling that evoking the history of the tree, the colors, the richness gives. I feel that the “you shouldn’t understand it” is getting misunderstood as a literal statement rather than as the slight hyperbole it feels like. Like in good literature, you can write sentences that have questions and good weight behind them. And sometimes that weight can go missing from a description simplified down to “wooded area”.Alex Schroeder broke down the costs of operating federated social media instances, laying out the costs of escaping corporate owned social media. Mastodon users, tip your instance mods.Standard Ebooks ReleasesThis week was a busy on on the Standard Ebooks mailing list, with nine new books released!The Inspector General by Nicolai GogolThe Varieties of Religious Experience by William JamesThe Princess and Curdie by George MacDonaldMaria by Jorge IsaacsThe Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. SayersCakes and Ale by W. Somerset MaughamMary Olivier: A Life by May SinclairBlack No More by George SchuylerPlays by Zeami Motokiyo

This week, I discovered (through a referral that came into my own blog) the TTRPG Blogosphere Graph from Among Cats and Books. It is a great rabbit hole to go down if you have some time, and I found some interesting blogs to check out.I’ve also been continuing my reading this week with Wuthering Heights.What Fresh Mess is AI Up To This WeekSo, AI use and costs seem to be popping up everywhere, so this feels like a category that could just be its own thing.Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy wrote about her experience using Claude in her job in software development. Did it work? Sort of. Is it worth the computational costs? Eh…John Scalzi is so inundated with spammy slop generated by AI that he can no longer respond to book clubs reaching out to him, because that’s what the AI is pretending to be now.GamesSo last week, I talked some about Prismatic Wasteland’s Into the Oddish hack for Into the Odd. This week, they did a room-by-room breakdown of White Plume Mountain, one of my favorite AD&D adventures.ReadingNerds of a Feather Flock Together is doing a read through of the Realm of Elderlings books by Robin Hobb. This week, they covered Fool’s Quest.The first half of Uncanny Magazine Issue 69 is now live. Michael Damian Thomas’s introduction to the issue is great as always.  I enjoyed reading to Jim C. Hines’s unfortunately prescient of this current week discussion of American Military Boondoggles Past.The introduction to this issue of Uncanny Magazine also reminded me of my favorite short story they published last year. When He Calls Your Name by Catherynne M. Valente is absolutely great, and has a referential twist that elevated it from a great story to one I passed around to friends shouting how they had to read it.Nightmare Magazine has released Issue 162, their March 2026 issue.Standard Ebooks ReleasesMurder by the Clock by Rufus KingGallion’s Reach by H.M. TomlinsonThe Venetians by M.E. BraddonThe Lusiads by Luís de Camőes

I got a lot of reading done this last week. Got through Their Eyes Were Watching God and Automatic Noodle, I’ve also started reading Wuthering Heights with the new movie out.These are a few of the things that have caught my attention this week.GamesVirtual Moose wrote about an argument made in a Discord server he’s in in favor of LLM use using a false equivalence with the unsustainable ways games get made. Which is certainly an argument that was made. Also, some links there to some other cool projects I’ll definitely be checking out. I’m in agreement on the ‘why do we think the plagiarism machine that still manages to get things wrong improves productivity’ bit. When GPT was first taking off, I tested it and spent more time correcting the things it got wrong than I’d have spent just writing an argument from scratch.Prismatic Wasteland compares Pokémon to the OSR right in time for the 30th Anniverary. Also, they created a new Into the Odd Pokémon hack, Into the Oddish, available for preorder. They also have written about a change they made to Into the Odd to model the importance of accuracy and evasion in Pokémon.Grognardia asks what you’re running or playing right now.Humble Bundle has a huge Shadowrun Fourth Edition bundle going. It includes the Anniversary edition of the core book along with the entire 3rd and 4th seasons of Shadowrun Missions. I’m a big fan of the 4th season of Missions and its storyline of the Ork Underground seeking recognition.Sly Flourish breaks down the applicability of the Eight Steps from Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master to games other than Dungeons and Dragons.PoliticsSarah Gailey wrote about a terrible bill coming out of Congress which creates national book bans. Book bans are stupid and just get used by the worst people you know to target already marginalized authors.When the world is on fire, sometimes the best resistance is taking care of ourselves to get back to it tomorrow. Virtual Moose wrote of a trip to the Detroit Institute of the Arts which has me thinking about checking out the Butler Institute of American Art near me again.

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.

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.

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.

@firesidefedi @Gina @ruud Awesome glad to see you both join the Fireside Fedi club