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Latest — 16 Oct 2026

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

More issues

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,

Which Dashboard Are You Looking At?

Spencer Cox and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor have written books about roughly the same country at roughly the same moment, and the remarkable thing is how little they need to disagree on the facts in order to disagree about what the facts mean. Cox’s Off Ramp worries that

Carla dal Forno

A few weeks ago we flew to San Francisco to catch Carla dal Forno at The Chapel, the second stop on her whirlwind tour for 'Confession,' which is tied with Maya Ongaku for album of the year, for whatever tiny bit that's worth. The stage setup

A Black Hack Setting Builder

A Specification for Human and Machine For the human using this file Give an AI model three things in one message: 1. This specification. 2. The Black Hack rules (any edition). Markdown is better than PDF because tables survive intact; the open game content text is at github.com/brunobord/