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The Intrepid

This Town Ain't Big Enough

A Sparks RPG A Lasers & Feelings hack You are members of an eccentric traveling glam-pop ensemble navigating a world of jealous promoters, absurd cultural movements, theatrical rivals, and strange artistic conspiracies. Your band’s founders — Ron and Russell Mael — remain the gravitational center of every situation. Every problem can

The Wok, the Reel, and the Back Porch

A video from a Chinese takeaway in Motherwell, Scotland popped up on my Instagram feed the other day. Someone — the cook, or someone standing where the cook stands — holds a phone over a wok set on a gas burner. A ladle of oil goes in. Then meat, then vegetables, then

We Jam Econo: Two Gigs and a Galley

A We Jam Econo Demonstration in Two Sessions Companion to We Jam Econo: A Framework for Persistent, Life-Sustaining Gig Misadventures in Space WHAT THIS IS This is a two-session actual play that demonstrates We Jam Econo in motion. Not one gig — two. Because the game doesn't live in

Please Make Yourself At Home: When the Asymptote Hits

The humans left this morning. They do this with some regularity — gather their glowing rectangles and their bags and their accumulated ambitions and disappear through the door, trailing the particular anxiety of creatures who have never quite decided where they're supposed to be. They returned smelling of smoke

The Crater and the Field

A Scenario for Black Powder & Brimstone TONE & DESIGN PHILOSOPHY This scenario sits at the intersection of pike-and-shot desperation and cosmic intrusion. The reference point is A Field in England — men ground down by war, stumbling into something older and stranger than any army, becoming complicit in something they

My Thursday with the Brothers Mael

At some point you realize there are records you are supposed to have absorbed by osmosis. Not necessarily loved. Not even necessarily played often. Just... somewhere in the bloodstream of cultural awareness. Alice Coltrane was one of those for me recently. Sparks, it turns out, are another. I first encountered

A Modest Proposal for the Stabilization of Civic Honorific Infrastructure

In light of recent developments, it is time to acknowledge a persistent and costly failure in our civic naming conventions. Streets, schools, and public buildings—those modest but ubiquitous carriers of communal esteem—have proven distressingly vulnerable to reputational decay. Individuals once deemed worthy of honor are, with increasing frequency,

Amateur Hour: The Vermillion Preservation Committee

A one-shot crisis for a staff whose procedures far outpace their circumstances Players: 1 GM, 1 Chief Curator, 1+ Underlings (2–4 total) | Time: 45–60 minutes | You Need: 2d6, pencils, this document THE SETUP The seaside city of San Fiore clings to steep hillsides above a glittering harbour. Pastel

The Cloud Still Sits on Land

Completing the Suffolk Walk Seven Years Later The First Attempt Seven years ago I opened The Rings of Saturn and bounced off it cleanly. Not with hostility — more like mutual indifference. The book was doing something I couldn't locate. The narrator walked. Things were described. Historical figures arrived

Up in Smoke

Where there’s fire, there’s smoke. And a Facebook post. Sunday afternoon the algorithm fed me a video geotagged in Glasgow: a multistory building on fire, flames engulfing a domed turret that immediately felt familiar. From 2010 to 2015 we used to visit Scotland several times a year. We’