The Grey Ledger Society

The Grey Ledger Society

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Latest — 09 Oct 2026

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

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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/

The Mountain Doesn’t Prove the Trail

A few weeks ago, David Yamane, a sociology professor at Wake Forest University, posted a slide he uses to introduce his classroom policy on generative AI. On one side were the things he wants to emphasize in class: questions, process, understanding, intention, originality, curiosity, humility, empathy. On the other were

The King's Own: Three Scenarios

Three scenarios for Hunters, Denizens, and other folk caught in the middle ONE: THE NEST IN THE HOLLOW The King's Champion is elsewhere. The nest is not. Ten Hunters, one nest, ten turns. The question is not whether the Crown spends the hunting party. It is whether the

The Ratchet and the Pendulum

A response to David Greene's "Yesterday is Today is Tomorrow" David's list got me. It was supposed to. Duck and cover. The Missile Crisis. Three assassinations. Gas lines. Watergate. He asks how much your heart rate went up reading it, and mine did, and

Kaiju!!!

A Team Bravo variant. One enormous creature. One city in the way. Requires the Team Bravo core rules; everything below is the difference. You will need a 24" table, dice, a tape, one appropriately threatening object, counters for the defenders, and 8–12 Post-It notes. A plastic dinosaur

Mance Lipscomb: An Appreciation

Or, Notes From Someone Who Just Got Here Credit where it's due: Nancy found him. Earlier this year she came home from Goodwill with a copy of Mance Lipscomb, Volume 5 on Arhoolie, five bucks or thereabouts. She has the ears in our house. I first heard the