The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

Intro & Review Hi! Not dead! The RSI is slightly improved, so I'm going to see if I can step up the writing pace this month & maximise the number of posts I can still get out in Q1 of 2025... watch this space.  This is a series I'm doing monthly for 2025 where I take a book I'm reading for pleasure and make gameable content for  something  from it. You can find the first one here . In brief,  How to Think Impossibly: About Souls, UFOs, Time, Belief, and Everything Else  is a text by Rice University religious historian Jeffrey Kripal, published by University of Chicago Press, which takes various eclectic academic approaches to experiences of what he calls the 'supernormal'.  Kripal sets out to 'think-with' a series of people who've experienced otherworldly phenomena of various sorts, taking their experiences seriously as describing real events. There's no attempt at a comprehensive survey - the chapters deal, in turn, with near-death/afterlife...

See previous post ! The game was goodish. The PCs didn't interact much with each other, doing their own things, which is fine by me contra many others, but never sparkles. Two questions about any bit of prep to assess it postfacto: • Did I use it in some way? • Was it/would it have been better than I could improvise? 1. Ideas from the daydreaming walk • While cool, the view down the stairs at an angle wasn't used. It did inspire a little 3rd person intro snippet I did with a view of *somebody* (the doctor) getting arrested • The octopus was referenced, in a big tank in Durret's study when etric went to visit. The image got appreciative comments & bond villain comparisons; without prepping it I'd never have done it, I'm awful at improvising set dressings like that • Didn't use the little oil lamp. Eh. Obviously these are all unimportant descriptive fluff. But does matter in a description based medium. 2. Notes on Notes The player's account of last time I ...

Dear Players of the Pillar of Velkith campaign, I know some of you read this. This post will both spoil the plot and expose my GMing methods' sticky guts in a way you may not actually want to know. I can't stop you, but I recommend: Owwww T his post is being written almost entirely through the medium of  speech to text , w/ minimal post-facto editing for sense.  The reason this happening is because I am to my significant regret developing a repetitive strain injury from work in addition to trying to write for this and for games. I don't want to have RSI; that sounds unpleasant to the long term. So instead I am going to do my writing in the immediate through this medium and I'm going to do something a bit experimental where I try to adapt my normal game prep processes from having my hands available to minimally  having my hands available . This is going to make things somewhat difficult/interesting but I think offers a unique opportunity: because my usual prep method is ...