Dan Sumption's Blog, page 3

Dregs of Rudetown comic by Chris Barker

The next publication from Peakrill Press (after this one) will be the comic Dregs of Rudetown by Chris Barker. We're making copies of the comic ridiculously cheap on Kickstarter - £5 including postage for a 40-page comic.

The comic covers the everyday exploits of nineties folk – featuring everything from landlines to indie discos, fruit machines to smoking in pubs. More on that below, but first a little on the comic's author and illustrator, Chris Barker.

You may not have heard of Chris, but there...

GPT-4: give up, go home

 

"Generate an artpunk OSR scenario"

The players are members of an underground art collective known as the Velvet Revolution. They've just landed a commission from the wealthy and eccentric art patron, Baroness de Vries, to create a masterpiece that will shock the city to its core. The catch? The Baroness has given them just three days to complete the work, and the clock is ticking.

As the players set out to create their magnum opus, they soon find themselves embroiled in a web of intrigue and dang...

Postal Diplomacy

A recent post by Solomon VK reminded me of the existence of the board game Diplomacy - a game in which, from what I can remember (it's been over 30 years), players took on roles as the major European powers of the 19th Century (Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans, et al), then negotiated and battled their way to European domination. The negotiation part of the process, which gave the game its name, set it apart from other board games: Diplomacy's outcome was arrived at by players making and breaking tr...

Terry Howard and the Inner City Round Walk of Sheffield

I met my father-in-law, Terry Howard, two years before I met his daughter, my wife. Terry led me and a group of other teenagers on a hike up a mountain in Snowdonia. There, we all slept overnight in the rain with only plastic bivvy-bags to keep us dry. It was brilliant!

Terry's gentle wisdom and enthusiasm for the great outdoors, and for the prehistory of the British Isles, inspired me, as they have inspired many others over the last 50 years or more.

Terry has recently been the subject of a docum...

The Subtle Art of Not Being a Cult [misprint]

Please stick on this song by my fucking mates Danny, Dave and Ian before reading this post. 

Today my mobile phone kept correcting the word "comes" to "cunts". Patrick Stuart remarked that "Yours must be the only phone I know of that not only recognises 'cunts' but actually adjusts towards it".

It's true. I have trained my phone, and I've trained it well. Obviously I'm going to write "cunts" more than "comes".

I increasingly dictate to my phone rather than giving myself RSI. The voice recognisifier...

Molemen & Mammoth-flu

You're going to have to take my word for this but today I did a great hour long interview with noisms of Monsters & Manuals fame. We talked about many & varied topics, including his Kickstarter for the second edition of Yoon-Suin: The Purple Land, which ends in less than a day.

We also covered late 19th Century adventure fiction, Bishop Porkland & the Land of the Prince Bishops (and other English regions ripe for conversion into D&D settings), viruses locked in permafrost, the Butterfly Ball (and...

Kickstarter delivery charges

 

Art by The Mycoleum

This is a controversial take, so bear with me; games publishers: please include up-front delivery costs with your Kickstarter campaigns.

That's the way Kickstarters always used to work, but in recent years most campaigns have switched to third-party services like Backerkit. When using Backerkit, delivery costs are not factored in when someone backs a campaign; backers are told that they'll be charged some unspecified amount at some point in the future, once the product is read...

Becoming Borg

The kind of elf you'll find in any Wizards of the Coast book, but AI-generatedOnce again a post from Monsters and Manuals about AI has prompted... thoughts.
I agree entirely with this statement:

The real 'threat' posed by AI is not that it will replace us, but that we will come more closely to resemble robots in our thoughts, behaviours, and opinions.

You can already see similar transformations play out in the worlds of pop music and movies: the ability to (relatively) simply produce anything withi...

Favourite books of 2022

 

some good booksThis is just a blog post to send you to another blog post. I have a personal blog which I post to roughly once per year (it's been running for nearly 22 years now, so is older than some of the readers of this blog).

Over on t'other place I've just posted a list of my favourite books of 2022.

Cadero 002: West Plaza

 (Yesterday's post, and today's, may have given the impression that I'll be posting these daily on my blog; I won't).

Here's today's entry - you'll have to read my scrawl as I've not time to type it up (actually, typing it up is the easy part, it's the temptation to edit that is the real time-killer):

And here's the spark table for LICENSED PICKPOCKETS in the Cadero mall:

1Urchin (£ d4)"Oh look! Over there!"2Shellsuiter (£ d10)Bumps into you and bellows "OOPS! SORRY" in a deranged voice3Monstrosity...