Dan Sumption's Blog

The Final Blog Post?

I’m about to radically overhaul the Peakrill website, and as a result this blog, and its RSS feed, will probably cease to exist in their current form. Please sign up to my mailing list if you want to be kept informed about Peakrill Press, and/or sign up to my Substack if you want to hear my wider ramblings.

Meanwhile… it’s been a long time since I shared any news, but I have plenty of news to share:

I’m about to return to my roleplaying roots by launching an adventure as part of ZineQuest....

Clownstarter & trolling spammers

Peakrill’s next publication will be True Clown Stories, by James Burt and others. James writes:

My clown stories are about people who want to be entertaining. They want to bring people some innocent joy, but reality has thwarted them. These are stories about people who’ve devoted themselves to red noses and giant shoes but struggle to survive.

Why clowns?

They’re supposed to be having fun all the time, so if a clown is unhappy, you have a question to answer. A clown, sitting at the s...

Clownstarter & 5318008

Peakrill’s next publication will be True Clown Stories, by James Burt and others. James writes:

My clown stories are about people who want to be entertaining. They want to bring people some innocent joy, but reality has thwarted them. These are stories about people who’ve devoted themselves to red noses and giant shoes but struggle to survive.

Why clowns?

They’re supposed to be having fun all the time, so if a clown is unhappy, you have a question to answer. A clown, sitting at the s...

Ludonarrative Dissidents

I rarely listen to gaming podcasts, but the one which I always find time for is Ludonarrative Dissidents, in which industry veterans Ross Payton, Greg Stolze, and James Wallis deep-dive into various gaming systems. The podcast is a must-listen for anyone who writes games or gaming content.

More than just a reviews show, the presenters go into a lot of detail about why certain mechanics (and design choices) do and don’t work. And they really know their stuff – between them, these three must ha...

Deathstar Express by Chris Barker

The next publication from Peakrill Press will be Deathstar Express by Chris Barker, a collection of Chris’s satirical newspaper covers set in the Star Wars universe.

We will only be printing 50 copies of Deathstar Express, each one signed and numbered. At the time of writing, 29 of them are already spoken for. So hurry on over to Kickstarter and reserve your copy.

Chris writes:

This project combines three of my hobbies: parodying the state of modern politics, science fiction and stayin...

Books of the Year 2023

According to Goodreads, I read 80 books in 2023. I was also given a wonderful bedside revolving-bookshelf-cabinet, shown above, as my birthday present from Gill. It fits the best part of 100 books. I have a shelf full of poetry books to dip into, another full of books of short stories and essays, again for random dives, another shelf of “in progress” reads, and the rest is “to read”. Or sometimes I just gaze at she shelves contentedly.

In recent years I have tended to read far more non-fictio...

New Books from Peakrill

It’s been a crazy month, and I’m not sure whether I’m coming or going… but somehow I’ve managed to publish 2 new hardback books and a zine (and, more exhausting than that, I’ve posted out hundreds of copies worldwide). I’m thinking of spending January in a bothy, communing with rocks.

King Arthur vs Devil Kitty should need no introduction to anyone who’s followed this blog. Two years in gestation, I’ve only gone and released it into the world. A beautiful, fully-illustrated retelling of an i...

The Lost Doctor Annual

Some time ago, I wrote about The Lost Doctor project – a series of audio adventures based on the premise “what if, in 1987, Ken Campbell had landed the role of the Seventh Doctor Who”. (This very nearly happened, but the BBC thought Ken a little too scary, and instead gave the job to Ken’s protegee Sylvester McCoy).

The amazing team of enthusiasts and actors behind The Lost Doctor are now putting together a book, in the style of classic 1960s/70s/80s Christmas annuals, packed with Lost Doctor...

Postal Prices

If you have recently received a package from Peakrill and have had to pay extra postage when it arrived, please email us and we’ll sort something out for you.

As a “small business owner” who posts out a lot of stuff, I really ought to keep up-to-date on changes in postal rates.

I was aware that 1st class stamps went up on 2nd October, but 2nd class stayed the same, and as all of my stuff goes out 2nd class, I’d assumed that was that. Except… it appears that “large letter” rates have change...

A Kitten & A Dead God

I recently had the pleasure of being interviewed by Logar the Barbarian and The Blue Wizard for the Hobos Collective podcast (which evolved out of the Wobblies & Wizards podcast). It was lovely to be interviewed alongside Eduardo Carabaño, whose Settlers of a Dead God I love (it’s a “dark fantasy setting for role-playing games” where you “play as insects with human features exploring the mysterious corpse of an immense God of hundreds of kilometers”).

You can listen to the episode here and l...