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My cartoon for this week’s New Scientist magazine

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I was recently in a pub, talking to a friend about their collapsed game of Dungeons & Dragons. I was somewhat frustrated by their tale of woe – perhaps the most common tale of woe. I imagined all these decades of people wasting time, just waiting for that one player to be free on Friday.

I decided to solve their problem by writing a patch for the 2024 edition of the D&D Players handbook.

There's a PDF to download in the link

Print it out and slide it in after Page 8.

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Could you maybe reblog this post if you think respecting trans peoples' names and identities is a basic right and not a political opinion?

No pressure. Just seeking some validation of my sentiment. Due to some. people

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Truth, justice, freedom, reasonably priced love, and a hardboiled egg. Did Ankh-Morpork get those things, in the end?

They got truth, there was a whole book about it. Vimes didn't want it when he got it, or at least he didn't want the political cartoon section of the newspaper, but Ankh-Morpork got the free press whether anyone liked it or not.

They got justice, thanks first to Carrot and then to Vimes, forcing the City Watch to reform into an organization that helped the citizenry and would arrest the patrician or a whole invading army if it had to. Vimes had to wage a constant war with himself not to turn into just another gang leader, but he waged it.

They did not get freedom. Pratchett was very clear on that. Things got comparatively better, and immigrants flocked to the city despite it being a hellhole, because the dictator didn't care about persecuting any minority groups or whether or not people made fun of him, but it was still a dictatorship. When Pratchett was alive, fans speculated that he was subtly training Moist von Lipwig to become the new government leader- the Lipwig books always had an emphasis on Vetinari getting older- and Lipwig would have had nothing to fear from an election by popular vote, but that's all fanwank and speculation.

They got reasonably priced love right away. That may have even been one of Vetinari's first acts as patrician, since Mrs. Palm is leader of the Seamstress's Guild at least as far back as the early Watch books.

John Keel's grave got a hardboiled egg every year.

Four out of five ain't bad.

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Because Vampires can only sleep in sacred earth that has later been rendered unhallowed in some way - that is, specifically desecrated earth - the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII Tudor and the concomitant iconoclasm and destruction of the Abbeys left England uniquely vulnerable to vampiric expansion due to a glut of ruined holy sites. In this essay I will

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A Halloween cartoon for the Guardian.

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Wow what an interesting way to say "countries with strong employee protection laws aren't at the mercy of tech billionairs in late stage capitalism" but with a real boot licker angle.

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Dear Mr X...

It’s hard to give up a relationship, even when it has become toxic. Even when it brings you no joy, it’s hard to accept the fact that you’re better off without it. To look at the time you spent building it, to write off those years and start again can feel like jumping off a cliff into a bottomless precipice. You start to think of all the things you’ll lose if the relationship ends; the good times, the shared friends, the laughter and the memories. Your heart sinks at the thought of trying to rebuild all that from scratch. The time. The work. The energy. It feels like a bereavement.

I feel like that about Twitter now. A relationship that began fifteen years ago, when I was someone different, and the platform was new and hopeful and designed for communication, rather than spreading division. Sometimes I still find myself mourning that time; the friends I made; the stories I wrote, the thousands of incarnations of the Shed. Some of my friends have been left there for good, their Twitter accounts frozen in time; their words all that remains of them. Perhaps that’s why I’m reluctant to leave, even though the bluebirds have flown, and even the logo is changing to something that looks to me a lot like a modified swastika – an apt comparison, given the way in which certain voices and political views have been given unasked-for prominence, while others seem to have vanished altogether from my feed. Feed someone garbage for long enough, and they start to sicken and die. That’s what happening via this site. I have watched it happening ever since Elon Musk arrived - a man so cartoonishly self-obsessed that it’s hard to even believe he’s real, except that no writer of fiction or game designer would dream of creating such a crass and substandard character.

X. What a choice of symbol.

X marks the spot for pirates in search of buried treasure. X is the mark of a person who is unable to write their name. X is the identity of someone who needs to stay anonymous. It’s a voter’s mark; an erasure; a mystery; a chromosome.

And it’s also an occult symbol, a rune: the rune Gyfu according to the Old English Futhorc, and Gebo in the Elder Futhark; both of which translate as “gift”.

The Anglo-Saxon rune poem that accompanies it goes like this:

ᚷ Gẏfu gumena bẏþ gleng and herenẏs, ƿraþu and ƿẏrþscẏpe and ƿræcna gehƿam ar and ætƿist, ðe bẏþ oþra leas.

which translates as follows:

Generosity brings credit and honour, which support one’s dignity; it furnishes help and subsistence to all broken men who are devoid of aught else.

At first glance, this seems the opposite of what Elon Musk has done for the world. A man who sees social media as his own personal platform; a man who sees the cosmos as his own personal joy-ride.

The mistake we made was believing that Twitter was our playground. Elon Musk has made it his, and is currently in the process of breaking the toys, chopping down the trees and nuking the site from orbit, just to prove that play is overrated, and that only money counts. I can’t help feeling sorry for the little boy he must have been, and to wonder what he might have been like if he’d actually had any friends. But it’s time: and the change of branding makes it even easier to step away.

So maybe this is a kind of gift to the ones of us leaving Twitter. Misinformation, misogyny, transphobia, conspiracy theories and other kinds of social media poison have already made it increasingly difficult to feel safe there. (And fun fact, the word Gift in German happens to mean “poison”.) Perhaps the ultimate gift of X is the freedom from the toxicity that has built up in this most volatile of media; the gift of better mental health; of greater connection to our world; an escape from a toxic fantasy back into the open air.

I won’t leave altogether – Threads still isn’t open to Europe, and the jury’s still out on Bluesky - but I don’t want to give any more of my content to a man who values power and money over human connection. I’m @joannechocolat across all my social media - that’s Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr and Instagram – and I’ll still be posting stories on my ko-fi account at: https://ko-fi.com/story. But if you want to know what I’m doing, then sign up to my free newsletter on my website at joanne-harris.co.uk. I’m coming to believe that social media as I once knew it may have run its course for me: I won’t leave it altogether, but from now on I plan to invest more of my time and energy elsewhere.

And as for Mr X - I doubt you’ll be around forever. But while you are, my gift to you is this final story: written live on Twitter, as was, for all the little bluebirds.

There once was a boy who had no friends. His father gave him everything money can buy: toy cars, model aeroplanes, even rockets that really flew, but friends were impossible to buy, and the boy was lonely, angry, and bored. 

One day, when he was playing alone with one of his expensive toys, he saw a group of children playing in a nearby park. They sounded so merry and carefree that the boy was jealous. 

“Why don’t I have friends?” he cried. “I shall buy the park, and then everyone will notice me.”

And so the boy asked his father to buy him the park for his very own; and he settled there with his expensive toys, and put a notice on the gate, saying: Entrance fee, 8 shillings.

The children of the neighbourhood looked enviously at the empty park. Some of the wealthier ones paid the entry fee, but many of the children did not; instead, they waited outside the gates, and looked into the place where once they had all played together.

But still the boy was not content. None of the new children played with him. Instead they played their own games, and climbed trees, or played hide and seek, or lay on the grass watching the clouds. None of this served the boy at all, and he was sulky and discontent.

“If I have all the trees cut down, then maybe the others will notice me,” he thought.

And so he ordered his servants to cut down all the trees in the park. But apart from a few toadies and flatterers, the children still did not play with him, but mocked him secretly from afar, and fell silent whenever he passed by.

“How ungrateful these children are,” said the boy, getting angry. “I bought this park for them, and still they refuse to play with me! Very well, I shall cease to pay the groundsmen and the gardeners. The park will be overrun with weeds. Wild animals will roam there.”

And so the boy did as he had promised, and the park became a wilderness. No-one wanted to pay for it, and even the toadies and flatterers and children of wealthy families went elsewhere to see their friends.

The boy was very angry at this, but there was no-one to be angry with. All the other children had gone. And so he took out his rage on the deer who had begun to roam in the park, shooting them with his toy crossbow, and became known throughout the land as a mighty hunter.

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Disney is going to stop selling DVDs and Blu-rays in Australia and to think of what this means for accessibility, residuals, quality, public libraries here etc and the precedent this will set for other studios and distributors around the world oh it's never been more over

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A few facts for you as we contemplate all things [sub]marine today:

- more than 600 people, many of them Afghans and Pakistanis, may have drowned in the Mediterranean last week after Greek authorities allegedly chose not to intervene when they encountered the vessel in distress to avoid the politically toxic spectacle of allowing so many migrants ashore.

- $250,000 in the right hands could arrange asylum for up to 12 refugees or, alternatively, support an Afghan family for about 80 years.

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My cartoon for the latest issue of New Scientist.

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If you see this you’re legally obligated to reblog and tag with the book you’re currently reading

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Given that you're working with RRD on the Die RPG, can you and Grant somehow be persuaded/bribed to make "Honey Heist: the comic" happen? I mean, I'd back the Kickstarter for that one.

Much more seriously (although I probably would back that Kickstarter), any particular thoughts about RPG adaptations of stories and story/comic adaptations of RPGs? It occurs to me that you've done this in both directions, and I can't think of anyone else who has.

Joking aside, I'd love to see RRD do comics. There's some great universes there which would work great in comics

This could go on much longer, I suspect, but I'm going to try and keep it simple.

Comic adaptations of RPGs

There's a key thing here - most comic adaptations of an RPG isn't an adaptation of an RPG. It's an adaptation of the game world where the story is set. This is a significantly different thing.

Exceptions are telling, in that they lean a lot more into the explicit conventions of RPGs, to play with, parody or critique. These are rarely actually direct adaptations of a world. People don't read a D&D comic to have characters keep on having short rests to get their hit points back, or whatever.

In reality, comic adaptations of RPGs are less like an adaption, and more like a tone piece - like the pieces of fiction in an RPG manual. They're about what the game is trying to evoke (and sometimes not even then, right?)

RPG adaptations of comics

I'd note that DIE isn't actually an adaptation of DIE the comic. They were developed simultaneously together, with elements appearing first in one or the other, and being ported back over. They're both me trying to execute an idea in the ways which best suit each medium.

Classically, most RPG conversions of comics is basically the same as any piece of fiction. The only real difference to converting a comic to a novel is that you've got a bunch more free art to use in your manual with a comic, which saves money.

I'd say the best RPG conversions are those which understand the art they're converting and create a game which allows players to experience their version of that. This doesn't mean they're the best game (though they may be) but they understand what is interesting about the fiction they're converting. More commonly (though perhaps less so now) is basically just taking the fiction and lobbing it all into whatever RPG world you have.

Compare and contrast MERPS from teh 1980s and The One Ring from the 2010. MERPS is a cut down version of Rolemaster, and while it has a bunch of tolkein detail, it doesn't ever really feel anything like Middle-Earth. It's just an RPG set in Middle Earth. Conversely, The One Ring is all about walking and feeling sad because you're walking, and having your hope and despair score go up. It understands and shows the understanding of middle-earth in a way which MERPS simply didn't.

People often talk about Powered by the Apocalypse games as Genre Emulation (which isn't 100% necessarily true - it can be, but that's a goal a designer may have). In PBTA you dig down to the fiction and work out what elements need to be mechanised for it to feel like the fiction they're representing. I think that's true of any game adaptation - it involves looking, thinking and working out how you can put that magic in a bottle.

TL:DR: I did not keep it simple.

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“If this hurts my shows I’m gonna riot” “they better not cancel my favorite show” “this is so selfish I NEED this show” “what about my mental health now that they—“

So you agree. Show-writers are important to you and to the industry and should be compensated accordingly for their important work.