mitchelldailygames

[mitchelldailygames]

the one culturally unique thing about the US is the fact you have to travel off the continent to experience a meaningfully unique culture

[mitchelldailygames]

Dragon Rot Rat King

Around a month ago, I scheduled an rpg session with only vague ideas of what I would run. My game No Nut November: Squirrels of the Post-Apocalypse got floated as an idea, so I started thinking about what I could do as a one-shot. There were two published adventures for NNN, one by me and the other by Sprinting Owl; I love both very much, but they were too much for a one-shot. So, I reached for my stash of OSR adventures.

I landed on A Rat King’s Realm from JunkyardTornado, a tight tangle of horrible tunnels wrapped around a showdown with a rat king beneath the bones of a dragon. I loved the horror in the tunnels and the set-piece at the center. Rats are prominent antagonists in NNN already, so it felt like a natural conversion. I ended up doing an extensive reskinning of the adventure to fit the Fallout-but-rodents vibes of NNN and really loving how it turned out!

I had my players delve into the guts of a ruined Ohey (human) facility where the skeleton of an Ohey flying machine disintegrated under the weight of time and the paws of scavengers. The tunnels were full of rats, but also:

A buzzclack (robot) that thinks it’s a rat

Strange slimy experiments

Anti-rodent traps

And more!

We ended up with only time to explore a couple of rat nests (the first almost killed them, so the clever use of an explosive was employed for the second), sniff around a couple of rooms, and finally take on the rat king, winning the fight by dropping scaffolding on its head. Only one player was very familiar with OSR play (the other two, most recently, have been in a Never Stop Blowing Up campaign with me which is a very different vibe), so they learned the consequences of recklessness in an OSR dungeon and how to apply their wits to the situation as they played.

I’m really pleased to have two first-party adventures out for No Nut November: Squirrels of the Post-Apocalypse. Want to connect Against the Insufferable Bears and Dragon Rot Rat King? Thunder probably knows about an old Ohey facility out in the desert.

--Daily

[mitchelldailygames]

god can you imagine glados equipped with tiktok therapyspeak. she’d be unbearable

[mitchelldailygames]

Some of the illustrations I've done for Under a Pale Sun, a gothic science fantasy TTRPG which you can grab in early access here!

[mitchelldailygames]

It’s Not a Plot Hole, It’s Foreshadowing

vs.

It’s Not a Plot Hole, It’s Just Something That They Opted Not to Spoon-feed You Because It Would Be Obvious If You Thought About It For 20 Seconds

vs.

It May Be a Plot Hole, But It Still Works In Terms of the Story’s Themes and Character Logic

vs.

Okay, It Is a Plot Hole, What Are You Going to Do, Cry about It?

[mitchelldailygames]

Something so perfect about the “+1” in “1D8+1”

Also, glad to have confirmation that I picked the right nut-shaped die for my post-apocalyptic squirrel game.

in breaking mr moustache news i just had to wrestle a D8 away from him because he was dead set on trying to crack it open like a nut

[mitchelldailygames]

Watching white tumblr users interact with black things is funny because they will always misapprehend things and just generally be reductivist.

So I’m seeing a lot of people going “haha Kendrick got awards for being a hater,” “Drake lost so bad lol.”

And I’m just massaging my temples at the irony of nonblack people en masse misunderstanding a song called “They not like us.”

Kendrick has a whole verse in the song breaking down the commodification of blackness and the history of colonization apropos to Black Americans. That’s what the whole Drake beef was about btw. It was about Drake’s pattern of ripping off black culture just to peddle it to the uncaring masses and make millions off of it, while the smaller artists he steals from get no recognition (money). Drake was getting called the rap goat by nonblack people, he was getting looked at as the greatest in a tradition he has no roots in. Kendrick’s distaste for Drake was years in the making. FdSignifier has some great vids from like 2020 about Drake’s rise in the rap world. There’s also Pusha T’s diss from 2018 called “The story of Adidon.” My point is, Drake is a culture vulture and the Drake v. Kdot beef was about reclaiming what Drake (and other culture vultures) stole.

Drake is also problematic for other reasons, e.g. sexually exploiting women, allegedly participating in sex trafficking, and so on.

It does a disservice to Kdot’s message to reduce this beef to an apolitical 1v1. It was never a 1v1, it was always political, it was always about the broader culture, it was always a culture war, etc.

[mitchelldailygames]

The cruelty of racist white men.

[mitchelldailygames]

I do my best to give credit to great lists like this even when I don’t make it on to them. But one of my first games, Adrift, is on this list and that’s a neat feeling.

I’m not going to link it here so you have to click on the post and be exposed to other games to get to it.

Put together a catalog of over 500 solo games.

[mitchelldailygames]

For anyone who hasn’t gone to many concerts yet or is worried about it, nobody is going give you shit for ear protection, even if it’s super visible, over ear protection. And if anyone does, everyone else will be on your side.

This goes double for metal shows (for any band worth supporting). The meanest-looking dude in the pit will have your back and is wearing ear plugs.

[mitchelldailygames]

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

[mitchelldailygames]

stop fucking using the word psychotic to describe bad behaviour and violence already god fucking damn it

[mitchelldailygames]

2024 Book Round-Up

I’m doing this again! These are things I read this year, not books that came out this year. They’re not in any particular order.

The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross I read this book and the next from this series (the Laundry Files) this year and kind of fell in love. It’s about an agent and IT guy from a secret British agency in charge of stopping demons and other monstrosities summoned by computers from destroying the world. The horror has a very cosmic/eldritch vibe. I also find it quite funny with almost Pratchett-like dry humor, though with a pitch black coat of paint on it. Office politics is also a big part of the stories, but resolved in much more grisly ways than hopefully you’d find in your workplace. There are a lot of books in this series, so I have a lot to look forward to.

Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert Just finished this one. I wasn’t expecting to like it as much as I did. A lot of the book happens inside Paul’s head or through political conversations, but I felt the story still moved along well and had interesting twists and turns. The weirdness of the Dune universe also takes a big step forward which I appreciated here. You could leave the first book still debating if Paul still fits in the typical white savior narrative, and this book shatters that really effectively.

Erasure by Percival Everett I think I heard about this one from an interview with the author on the On the Media podcast. The basic premise is a Black author is critically well-received but not commercially because he writes experimental fiction that publishers and distributors find to be not reflective enough of the African-American experience (something that he’s not trying to write about). He hits a point when he needs money after tragedy hits his family and is frustrated by the market and writes a book about a young man in the hood full of stereotypes that he intends as a scathing parody of other books that are selling well. Minor spoilers, people love the book and take it as an authentic look at the African-American experience. This was more experimental than I was expecting—the entirety of the terrible book the character writes is in this novel—but I found it really compelling. The tension in the last scene had my heart hammering.

Why Fish Don’t Exist by Lulu Miller Another book that landed on my list by way of podcast a long time ago, this book is part biography of ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, part memoir, and part critical examination of taxonomy, eugenics, and the western obsession with classification and hierarchy. It’s a pretty beautiful work that I find myself thinking about and referencing quite often.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch Want a fantasy book that’s about all rogues? This is that book. It’s a crime/heist thriller in a really well-built world. There’s a great mix of high highs and low lows in this book (warning, it gets dark), and it uses tension really well. The heisting and scheming is all really fun, the magic and monsters of the world are really cool balancing an overall pretty harrowing story.

Raw Dog by Jamie Loftus OK, like most of these I heard about on a podcast. Jamie Loftus has been one of the most common voices coming through my speakers/headphones this year and she narrates the audiobook for her book. This book is about hot dogs, told through a cross country hotdog tour. It’s also about the meat industry, COVID, a relationship at its end, and America’s relationship with consumption. It’s very well written and a good encapsulation of what I love about Jamie’s brand of journalism and storytelling.

Escape from Incel Island by Margaret Killjoy Margaret Killjoy is another favorite person to listen to/read. This book is a pretty short, pulpy romp about a future where all of the incels get tricked by the government into getting trapped on an island and a woman and a non-binary mercenary who are sent to the island and then have to escape. It’s violent, sometimes scary, but doesn’t take that side of itself too seriously. Woven through are some really compassionate and poignant examinations of gender, masculinity, and the complexity of people.

Reading Now/On the Shelf I’m currently reading Lessons in Birdwatching by Honey Watson and loving it. It’s a really cool far-future sci-fi book about research students stationed on a planet where the residents appear to experience time nonlinearly. It will probably be the first book I finish in 2025 and will show up on this list next year.

Also on the shelf are The Sapling Cage by Margaret Killjoy which is marketed as a young adult fantasy novel and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, the author of A Psalm for the Wild-Built which I read last year. I’m really looking forward to both!

[mitchelldailygames]

I submit to you that the most iconic feature of any animal is either unlikely or impossible to fossilize.

If all we had of wolves were their bones we would never guess that they howl.

If all we had of elephants were fossils with no living related species, we might infer some kind of proboscis but we’d never come up with those ears.

If all we had of chickens were bones, we wouldn’t know about their combs and wattles, or that roosters crow.

We wouldn’t know that lions have manes, or that zebras have stripes, or that peacocks have trains, that howler monkeys yell, that cats purr, that deer shed the velvet from their antlers, that caterpillars become butterflies, that spiders make webs, that chickadees say their name, that Canada geese are assholes, that orangutans are ginger, that dolphins echolocate, or that squid even existed.

My point here is that we don’t know anything about dinosaurs. If we saw one we would not recognize it. As my evidence I submit the above, along with the fact that it took us two centuries to realize they’d been all around us the whole time.

[mitchelldailygames]

[mitchelldailygames]

pinpanar9 is a pillar of the Itchio rpg community

just noticed the funniest review of one of my games. Thank you for your succinct summary

[mitchelldailygames]

Since the holiday toy drive post is circulating again, I figured this would also be helpful! Food insecurity is such a massive problem in America, in general, and if you have the means to help feed others, I think you should take that opportunity. Here are some other tips:

1. If you’re planning on donating items from your own pantry, please check the expiration dates on the packaging. Think of your donations as gifts to bestow, not castoffs to be rid of. It’s awful to think of people feeling like they got scraps someone else just didn’t want. Everyone deserves dignity with their meals.

2. If you’d rather give money to a food bank, that’s also great since they buy food in bulk and know what items are most wanted/needed!

3. Not everyone has access to appliances like stoves or microwaves or hot plates so if you can donate items that don’t need to be heated up, that would also be greatly appreciated!

🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽🫶🏽