Ben Rosenbloom's Boring Machine

Adventure Calls took a break for April, so I thought I'd fill the time with another Archive Delve. Today I'll be talking about the Mystery Flesh Pit National Park rpg supplement!

I've been continuing to mess around writing for Heart (in fact, you can read some more of my design work in the 70-page fanzine , recently published, which includes really fun writing from a plethora of others), so today I'm back with a review of Bloodthirsty , by E.R.F. Jordan! 

For February, the Adventure Calls reading club read 50 Fathoms , a pulpy pirate-y pointcrawl / campaign setting for Savage Worlds. It's a big one! I wound up thinking a lot about the social fabric the text imagines.

For January (a month which, you might note, has already passed us by), the Adventure Calls reading club read Against the Cult of the Reptile God . I read it too! You can read other readers' thoughts here . Spoilers for the adventure follow! Content warnings for the module include mind control and sexual assault.

Welcome back to another archive delve! Today I'm reading Sigmata: This Signal Kills Fascists .

Another day, another delve into the archive. Today I'm taking a look at Dokayt, an anthology of jewish ttrpgs.

Welcome back to another Archive Delve! Today I'm looking at Boletus , a weird fantasy adventure / setting rpg, by Andrew of  Prey Species  ( who also runs a cool blog )!

Today, I'm playing  Toilet Skeleton by slasherepoch ! It's a little solo game about being a piece of environmental storytelling. The explicit reference is to the Fallout games (which I've mostly absorbed through my brothers), but I'm sure we all can imagine lots of funny and quirky examples from any number of games. I'm excited to try it out!

I'm working my way through more games of crowdfunds past. Today, I'm looking at Venture & Dungeon (which are  technically two different games, but bundled together).

I'm back to take a look at another game that's been sitting on my shelf for years and years! Today I'll be reading through World Champ Game Co.'s A Guide To Casting Phantoms In The Revolution .

Work on NEW BLOOD continues! While I'm thinking about designing for Heart, I've been wanting to read as much as I can. Today, I'm looking at a cool little supplement, a collection of a bunch of character options, including what are called "Extra Advances," which were in Spire but not Heart  (or the core book at least). It's called ARCANA, and it's by Eric Scott!

Welcome back to another archive delve! Well, kind of - the text I'm reading today is close to the top of my pile! After securing my personal pan pizza, I think I want to shake up the format a little bit, and mix in some recent releases with the older stuff, maybe meet in the middle kind of Memento-style. I might switch up the title scheme! But for now Archive Delve will be specifically for stuff I crowdfunded, and hopefully I'll publish some other reviews of other stuff I'm reading, just for fun.  Today, we're reading Inscrutable Cities , by Julian K. Jarboe, and published by Possum Creek Games! I'm a fan of PCG's other stuff, like  Wanderhome  and Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast (they have a bigger, cool catalogue, but those two are the standouts to me). Inscrutable  is obviously riffing off of Calvino's Invisible Cities , which I also  quite enjoy, so I have high hopes. Let's delve!

I've been plugging away at NEW BLOOD , my supplement for HEART: The City Beneath , and running some play-by-post games, and recently there was even a video review, so I think it's safe to say I'm a little heart pilled right now. Ah, sorry, I'm getting word that that's a different thing. Anyway, it's been a kind of busy month, actually, between updates. I've been really enjoying my time in Heart's system and setting! But I missed reading and writing about reading - so I thought I would take a look at some of the other stuff that's come out for Heart recently. Today, I'm taking a look through Misha Handman's Called to the Heart !

This past week featured some classic TTRPG discourse - notable not just for the eternal recurrence of topic, but that the leading luminary in the actual play/streaming space (Brennan Lee Mulligan) seemed to be wading in. I've largely stopped paying as much attention to this debate (in no small part because it's usually localized to Twitter, which I don't enjoy being on) but I do think it's fun to think, read, and talk about. I'm inching closer to writing the first part of that manifesto I've been threatening, and even if I recover my faculties and divert from that  particular madness, I think it would at least be fun to write something about it. At the very least, I think it would be fun to make my friends read it. Anyway, that's part of why I missed my usual window for a weekly delve, and why I think I'm reaching for something that advertises itself as philosophical. Today I'm reading Jesse Burneko's Dungeons & Dilemmas !

Another week, another archive delve! Today I'm taking a look at The Curse of the House of Rookwood  by Brian Bình and Michael Addison.

I'm nearing the end of the zines I'd highlighted for this first round of archive delving! Right now my plan is to finish up a few more, and then get to other blogging. Today, I'm reading Terror of the Stratosfiend #1 .

I'm back with another quick delve into the archive! More of a heroic jaunt, really. Today I'm reading through Our Queen Crumbles , by Jason Brown.

I'm back for another delve into the archive! I've been wrapped up with writing for NEW BLOOD and Daybreak on the Battlefield, as well as scheduling playtests, which has been eating up my ttrpg energy. But I've saved up enough to do a quick little read-through of Moonsailors , an offering from ZineQuest 2.

My weekly cycle was broken by illness, but I'm back at it again! This week I'm reading Barrow Keep: Den of Spies , an OSR-ish module from 2020. I read this a while back, but bounced off of it - in the intervening years, I've read, listened to, and played a lot more games and modules, including in the OSR vein, so I want to see if I can make better progress. Plus, it's got a Bathtub Review , which I put off reading because I didn't want it to influence my own, and I want to finally get to read it (Nova's reviews are fun and insightful, and one of the blogs that inspired me to start my own).

This time, I'm taking a look at Salt in Wounds , which is very nearly the first tabletop related thing I ever crowdfunded. I'm gearing up to run a fantasy module which is entirely different and not at all related, but it got me in the mood to read some more fantasy stuff. I tried breaking my once-a-week pattern, but it wound up being way too long. Skip to the end if you want just the tl;dr review.