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Latest — 21 Oct 2026

Rasputin, the Chatbot, and the Dog Who Got Away

People prefer a figure. A dynasty is hard to inspect. A monk is easy to point at. Antony Beevor’s account of the last Romanovs is, among other things, a warning about that preference. The empire he describes is already a suspension bridge in disrepair: an unreformed autocracy, a war

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The Roused

A Mörk Borg calendar for the membrane The apocalypse is not a dragon. It is a filing error that becomes true. Britain looted haunting and could not contain it. R Unit wrote the dead onto a duty roster. The Unit died. The shop bought the roster. The membrane between the

Ten Sides to This Tale

Once upon a time. It was close to two in the morning at a club I won’t name, and the man on the bandstand had three horns in his mouth at once. The fellow next to me — a serious type, the kind who reads the personnel listings before he

Catastrophe As a Play Stage

The other day, while reading Antony Beevor’s Rasputin, I had the thought that the last days of Imperial Russia would make an excellent MÖRK BORG setting. This is, admittedly, not the most dignified response to civilizational collapse. There was something immediately legible about it, though. The weak autocrat. The

After the Frontier

Friction and the Populated World I detest surveys. I go out of my way to avoid them, and the last one I completed had an Amazon gift card attached to it. So when a popup from Claude last night asked if I would be interested in sharing my thoughts with

Scary Black Guns

Minimum rules for firearms in The Black Hack A firearm is a ranged weapon with a range band and an ammunition die. Everything else comes from rules The Black Hack already has: DEX tests, class and HD damage, Advantage and Disadvantage, Armor Points, Usage dice and Powerful Opponents. Shooting A

"Containment" and a Two Minute Pop Song

I was recently introduced to Nancy’s favorite episode of the classic sitcom Bewitched, in which Samantha’s cousin Serena drops a Boyce & Hart-penned pop bomb, which launched me on a quest chain to learn and record a version of said tune, “Blow You a Kiss in the

The Black Waterside

A setting for use with The Black Hack (v1.2) A near-future coast after an arrival nobody can agree happened. The tide leaves salvage; inland still buys it; institutions keep calendars and lose continents. Play is taking a thing off the beach and finding that explanations fail in public.

Skid Marks Around the Curve

Sometimes I see skid marks on the highway, usually somewhere around a curve, and wonder what happened there. You don't get the accident, the near miss, or the driver explaining what they were thinking. You get evidence that something was moving quickly, encountered a constraint, and changed direction

The Queen's Right Hand

A setting for use with The Black Hack (v1.2) The Brief A kingdom keeps a small royal institution — the Queen's Right Hand — mandated to keep monsters and other dangers away from ordinary subjects. It is a decent employer with a real hierarchy: work is assigned by rank,