While we're here, let's give a little plug to Neocities.

https://neocities.org

The mission statement for the company is to restore some individuality to the web. The internet used to be clunky and inconsistent, but it was also fun and expressive.

The move to corporately controlled closed platforms and homogenous content management systems has made things easier to find, but it's taken the soul away from the web.

If you're a big corporate then yes, your message probably needs to go through big corporate channels and have the quirkiness stripped out of it.

But if you're a person starting a blog about your niche-within-a-niche interest, that maybe half a dozen people will ever read, do you really need that? Within half an hour of browsing through the sites on Neocities I knew I'd be building one of my own.

If you learned a bit of html back in the day, or would like to try your hand at building a website that doesn't need you to learn three frameworks and a server-side programming language, definitely check them out. I haven't had this much fun on the internet in years.

#neocities

Promised myself no more Kickstarters this year, but then I saw the Notorious card game. I LOVED the solo TTRPG, and at £37 a box this was well inside 'take my money' territory. And that art style is gorgeous.

Anyway, if you enjoyed Notorious and/or Outsiders and didn't know about the new solo card game, I hope this excites you as much as it does me.
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/alwayscheckers/notorious-tales-of-hardscrabble-bounty-hunting

Just finished my first game of Solo TTRPG "Notorious". Some thoughts.

First and most importantly, it was a lot of fun. I have the Outsiders expansion and plan on continuing with Trilogy mode for the next game.

I have struggled a little in the past with journaling games that steer too far into the 'journaling' and not enough into the 'games'. This is just personal preference - I don't need crunch, but I like some direction in my prompting.

Notorious rides the line for me - any less guidance and I think I'd struggle, but there's just enough there. And in this playthrough I had plenty of those magical solo TTRPG moments where the nonsense you've been pouring forth in response to prompts all comes together in some unforeseeable way so a bunch of dice rolls suddenly look like a plotted story with references and callbacks.

This is not a coincidence - behind those broad prompts is a pretty tight script that pushes you to refer back to established plot and characters and to reintegrate your story beats with what has come before. The outcome is a rewarding play experience with a coherent story arc and a sense of character growth.

I do think replayability might suffer, some of the tables have the potential to get repetitive if you play too many games back to back, but the expansion will help greatly.

Also a quick thanks to @beyondcataclysm for selling it to me. Everyone take a moment to support your small TTRPG and publishing businesses - if you don't use them you lose them.

Ok tabletop Mastodon/Pixelfed, recent events have tipped me over the edge. I am deleting Instagram (which, for all its faults as a platform, had an excellent mini painting community) and recreating my mini painting bubble here.

Let us begin with the last picture I posted over on the other place.

This Orc is the culmination of a long-term goal to get to grips with a sketchier more cartoony style. I used to look at models painted in this style and say "I wish I could paint like that." I just really love it as an aesthetic. And it suits these Warmonger Orcs especially well.

First proper run through of 'Be Like A Crow'. First impressions: Could be a lot of fun. I need to get better at working with the prompts, and I think I might enjoy trying one of the other settings (I started with Fantasy Crow). But mechanically I was surprised how well the deck of cards worked as a dice substitute.

However, am glad I had already got into Ironsworn as a first solo RPG. There's a lot of good advice on solo narrative building in the rulebook and a lot of third party online resources giving fantastic examples of how this looks in play, that are very transferable to other solo games. I don't think my 'Be Like A Crow' experience would have been as fruitful without that experience.