The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

 Both a necessary antidote to the conventional wisdom of consumer-focussed technocratic interventionism in the DRC and a dense mass with little readability for at least this non-specialist,  I don't find I have much to say about Conflict Minerals Inc . It taught me a lot of stuff I didn't know before. On the other hand, most of that isn't stuff I'd be particularly comfortable gamifying for popular consumption; for deeper thought from somebody with much more knowledge of the issues, see this post . So instead here's a brief little trick it inspired me to come up with, virtually setting-agnostic except that it needs a hex-map. The book includes a lot of maps of factional control in particular years, like this: Each then has a key with scores to hundreds of groups listed in (very) brief. This kind of massive overlap between factions, with several sometimes overlapping in one area (more if you were also to try to map the power of the state) hasn't been adequately a...

  For those not familiar with the practice of a slush pile in TTRPG blogging, it's basically 'throw all the stuff you've lost motivation to write/found wasn't worth writing about out there so people can pick through the ruins.' For various reasons - possibly I'm not naturally as productive as I was in 2024 over long periods, possibly just a tough few months - I have a fair old bit of slush this season. I hope you find something worthwhile in it! NOT SLUSH The following projects are still ongoing. Slowly.  What Interesting Terrain Looks Like, where I argue for a change in the way people approach exploration play in games towards the mundane difficulties and small scales rather than the weird and grandiose Folkloresque-Ritterian North West Mageckrawl, Part 1, in which I'll go through the placement of sites of power, nodes, ley lines etc. over which our mages and other supernaturals will  compete . This is the thing I've done most writing on this season, i...