The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

I set myself a challenge this year to read a big and/or complicated book for pleasure every month and produce a blog-y thing about it. In January, I read Tim Harper's Underground Asia , and then proceeded to make so many notes that it took me until today to get a post out of them! Oops !  If you're playing a character in a port built around a giant mysterious adamantine pillar in the middle of the ocean, I may well be stealing ideas from here, so feel free to read the intro/review and the game-system stuff at the end but be aware that you might spoil yourself if you read the middle sections. Introduction and Short Review TL;DR: How revolutionaries (first Anarchist, then Marxist, then nationalist) began to undermine imperialism in Asia, 1900s-30s. Fantastic read if you're good at remembering lots of names. Underground Asia is a marvellous work of the kind Allen Lane/Penguin History seems to manage on the regular: pop-history enough to be a snappy and enjoyable read, well-cit...

Slow January! Work, plus a couple of big posts in the works, have really reduced my pace. Good news: those posts are nearly done and ready for release now. Expect one in the next day or two and another next week. Meanwhile, to tide you over, I'm sharing all of the homebrews I made during the 6-to-8-depending-how-you-define-it years when 5e D&D was my primary game. It's not now; the halfhearted attempt to have your tactical-focus cake and eat your social and exploration pillars too without increasing rules density started to bore me. I do still have a lot of nostalgia for the game, and I find mucking about with its procedures and setting assumptions to produce silly outcomes very fun, but I doubt I'll ever homebrew for it again. Given that fact, it feels quite nice to have an archive where I can put my sum contribution to 5e design, some of which appeared in Reddit posts of old, some of which has never seen the light of day, for anybody who's still enjoying the game ...