Steve Jackson's Blog, page 20
April 16, 2025
April 16, 2025: Game Recommendation: Pilfer
Did you know that there is a fantastic little collection of word games on the Merriam-Webster website? I only stumbled onto them recently! But before you go explore, let me tell you about one in particular that I just can't get enough of.
Pilfer is a quick multiplayer anagram game that you can play against a bot, with friends, or with other online players. Create words from a common pool of letter tiles, or alter existing words by adding more letters – rearranging as much as you'd like! If you steal a word, it's yours until someone adds another letter to it. Everyone's score is the total number of letters in their words at the end of the game.
This was a massive hit on a recent family Zoom call; we ended up playing several rounds because it's just so fast! If you enjoy Bananagrams, Boggle, Scrabble Slam, or any other real-time word games, it's a must-try.
– Irene Zielinski
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
Pilfer is a quick multiplayer anagram game that you can play against a bot, with friends, or with other online players. Create words from a common pool of letter tiles, or alter existing words by adding more letters – rearranging as much as you'd like! If you steal a word, it's yours until someone adds another letter to it. Everyone's score is the total number of letters in their words at the end of the game.
This was a massive hit on a recent family Zoom call; we ended up playing several rounds because it's just so fast! If you enjoy Bananagrams, Boggle, Scrabble Slam, or any other real-time word games, it's a must-try.
– Irene Zielinski
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 15, 2025
April 15, 2025: I Respond To All My Texts With A Unicorn Sloth
I'm not going to say I've wasted far too many hours on the Emoji Mixer, but I don't think I'd be able to deny it in a court of law, either. The premise is simple: Take one of a number of emojis and combine it with another. Voila! You can then download the combined emoji.
Personally, the bulk of my time has been spent mixing the "rabbit" emoji with others, to often hilarious results. ("Rabbit" + "Burning heart" just looks like the cutest pyromaniac imaginable.) Oh, and it is possible to "combine" an emoji with itself. And, yes, "rabbit + rabbit" yields predicable-but-adorable results.
For those looking for tabletop-gaming utility, this is a real quick-and-easy way to generate an "icon" idea for any appropriate NPCs. "The secret coordinates to find A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. are being held by . . . the Strawberry Nerd?!"
– Steven Marsh
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
Personally, the bulk of my time has been spent mixing the "rabbit" emoji with others, to often hilarious results. ("Rabbit" + "Burning heart" just looks like the cutest pyromaniac imaginable.) Oh, and it is possible to "combine" an emoji with itself. And, yes, "rabbit + rabbit" yields predicable-but-adorable results.
For those looking for tabletop-gaming utility, this is a real quick-and-easy way to generate an "icon" idea for any appropriate NPCs. "The secret coordinates to find A.C.R.O.N.Y.M. are being held by . . . the Strawberry Nerd?!"
– Steven Marsh
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 14, 2025
April 14, 2025: Triangle Agency Is Anti-Trad
Have you heard about
Triangle Agency
? This fascinating TTRPG riffs on
Control
,
Paranoia
, and
The SCP Foundation
to make an urban fantasy RPG about working for a mysterious organization which captures and destroys anomalies that threaten existence. The game is brilliantly written, with a cheeky corporate wit à la
Severance
throughout the text, and multiple argumentative narrative voices that present different visions of the same world. The game is also, in a way I find really fascinating, anti-trad.
For those who aren't familiar, a "trad" game is a TTRPG like GURPS , Call of Cthulhu , or Dungeons & Dragons . It tends to be a big book with lots of stats, a traditional GM/player dynamic, and a design approach for long-term campaigns sculpted to the whims of the GM.
I come from a "story game" background, which has a very different approach to what a TTRPG looks like. This isn't good or bad, but neutral – different games for different folks. I'm used to seeing games that are extremely uninterested in trad-style designs (stat-less, GM-less, built for one-shots, etc.), but I don't think I've ever seen a game that actively works against the core assumptions of trad design.
Triangle Agency is a big book with a lot of stats. I think some people approached it looking for Delta Green and were surprised when they realized it actually gives the GM very little power. It has no "rolling for stats," and characters will by default fail at anything risky without the intervention of a special power. It's built for long campaigns, but those campaigns twist and weave as different perspectives vie for control of the game. It's a fascinating object!
I don't want to make anti-trad games, but I think one of the best ways to learn how to design something in the trad mindset is to learn from how others reject it. If you like GURPS , you'll probably dislike Triangle Agency a lot, but as a game designer it helps me grow my craft by learning how to hold love in my heart for both.
– Jay Dragon
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
For those who aren't familiar, a "trad" game is a TTRPG like GURPS , Call of Cthulhu , or Dungeons & Dragons . It tends to be a big book with lots of stats, a traditional GM/player dynamic, and a design approach for long-term campaigns sculpted to the whims of the GM.
I come from a "story game" background, which has a very different approach to what a TTRPG looks like. This isn't good or bad, but neutral – different games for different folks. I'm used to seeing games that are extremely uninterested in trad-style designs (stat-less, GM-less, built for one-shots, etc.), but I don't think I've ever seen a game that actively works against the core assumptions of trad design.
Triangle Agency is a big book with a lot of stats. I think some people approached it looking for Delta Green and were surprised when they realized it actually gives the GM very little power. It has no "rolling for stats," and characters will by default fail at anything risky without the intervention of a special power. It's built for long campaigns, but those campaigns twist and weave as different perspectives vie for control of the game. It's a fascinating object!
I don't want to make anti-trad games, but I think one of the best ways to learn how to design something in the trad mindset is to learn from how others reject it. If you like GURPS , you'll probably dislike Triangle Agency a lot, but as a game designer it helps me grow my craft by learning how to hold love in my heart for both.
– Jay Dragon
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 13, 2025
April 13, 2025: He Who Fears Being Conquered Is Sure Of Defeat
If you haven't figured it out yet, I watch a lot of nerdy YouTube videos. My latest find is a significant investment in time, clocking in at more than 90 minutes, but it is totally worth it. Super Bunnyhop is an eclectic channel with videos about history and the video game industry. The video that caught my eye is a deep dive into the history of strategy games that focuses heavily on Kriegsspiel and how Napoleon might be the originator of the hobby that so many of us love.
– Will Schoonover
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
– Will Schoonover
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 12, 2025
April 12, 2025: Save The World, Or Play Pixelated Golf?
I love the idea of hiding information in a tabletop RPG world in new and interesting ways, and I just stumbled across one I'd never thought of: putting it on an Atari 2600 cartridge.
This hacker programmed the Atari 2600 as a digital photo frame and shared details on the project, including how images are limited to 64×84 pixels, black and white. If you don't want to program the actual hardware to make it happen (although it'd be really cool!), the article provides enough information so that you can describe it vividly in a game or create a visual aid. The link even offers instructions on how to turn your own pictures into the suitable format!
If you want to amp up the challenges for the players even more, maybe make the heroes have to track down the cartridge buried among thousands of others in a New Mexico landfill . . .
– Steven Marsh
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
This hacker programmed the Atari 2600 as a digital photo frame and shared details on the project, including how images are limited to 64×84 pixels, black and white. If you don't want to program the actual hardware to make it happen (although it'd be really cool!), the article provides enough information so that you can describe it vividly in a game or create a visual aid. The link even offers instructions on how to turn your own pictures into the suitable format!
If you want to amp up the challenges for the players even more, maybe make the heroes have to track down the cartridge buried among thousands of others in a New Mexico landfill . . .
– Steven Marsh
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 11, 2025
April 11, 2025: Thinking About The Iliad
My mind has been on ancient Greece a lot lately. It started with the Emily Wilson translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad (both truly phenomenal and powerful reads), followed by the novels Song of Achilles and Wrath Goddess Sing, along with a valiant attempt to enjoy the Percy Jackson TV Show (before being put off by how it fumbles the last episode's pacing).
Ancient Greece is a fascinating historical period, and an even more fascinating mythological period. It's been valorized in western society for hundreds of years, from Raphael to the founding fathers. It contains echoes of many of our greatest triumphs and our primordial sins, all wrapped up in a culture that is now so distant from our own that we cannot help but project our own values back in time. Some TTRPGs touch on this period ( GURPS , of course, has some fantastic rules for historical gaming, and Agon is an indie game from Evil Hat that hits some of those same notes).
To me, the greatest appeal of ancient Greece is that alien quality – though we can equivocate and debate endlessly about which parts of Greece are virtuous and which are monstrous, it is ultimately a different society and a different world, with a fundamentally different relationship to what it means to be alive.
– Jay Dragon
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
Ancient Greece is a fascinating historical period, and an even more fascinating mythological period. It's been valorized in western society for hundreds of years, from Raphael to the founding fathers. It contains echoes of many of our greatest triumphs and our primordial sins, all wrapped up in a culture that is now so distant from our own that we cannot help but project our own values back in time. Some TTRPGs touch on this period ( GURPS , of course, has some fantastic rules for historical gaming, and Agon is an indie game from Evil Hat that hits some of those same notes).
To me, the greatest appeal of ancient Greece is that alien quality – though we can equivocate and debate endlessly about which parts of Greece are virtuous and which are monstrous, it is ultimately a different society and a different world, with a fundamentally different relationship to what it means to be alive.
– Jay Dragon
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 10, 2025
April 10, 2025: Stakeholder Report For 2024
The 2024 report is here. I am already nostalgic for that relatively benign time . . .
– Steve Jackson
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
– Steve Jackson
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 9, 2025
April 9, 2025: Dodecadonuts
What do you do when you're a roleplaying fan obsessed with donuts?
Other than "play RPGs and eat donuts," of course.
The answer is here.
Dodecadonuts is a completely demented project – and I mean that in the most admiring way – that combines artisanry and wit to generate T-shirts you will want to wear, stickers you will want to stick to things, and donuts that you had better NOT eat.
Click the link.
– Steve Jackson
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
Other than "play RPGs and eat donuts," of course.
The answer is here.
Dodecadonuts is a completely demented project – and I mean that in the most admiring way – that combines artisanry and wit to generate T-shirts you will want to wear, stickers you will want to stick to things, and donuts that you had better NOT eat.
Click the link.
– Steve Jackson
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 8, 2025
April 8, 2025: Can Ghosts Help Me File A Home Owner's Insurance Claim?
I recently learned that many so-called haunted houses may, in fact, be attributable to carbon monoxide poisoning, as noted by (picked almost at random from online) NPR and the American Lung Association.
However, I've done additional research, and I'm still not finding any conclusive evidence as to why ghosts would be so cruel as to release dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in the first place . . .
Anyway, I feel like I have a great hook or red herring for a future GURPS Horror game.
– Steven Marsh
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
However, I've done additional research, and I'm still not finding any conclusive evidence as to why ghosts would be so cruel as to release dangerous levels of carbon monoxide in the first place . . .
Anyway, I feel like I have a great hook or red herring for a future GURPS Horror game.
– Steven Marsh
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
April 7, 2025
April 7, 2025: Playing With Reality
I'm currently not-quite-halfway through
Playing with Reality
by Kelly Clancy. Now, one would typically wait until they've finished the book to write a review, so this isn't that, but it is a "hey I am currently reading this book and quite enjoying it" kind of post. Clancy's neuroscience background and historical perspective have been both fun and engaging for me – though with my own background, the opening chapters did leave me wanting a little more neuroscience. Don't get me wrong, her overview was masterful; I'm just a big ol' nerd.I'm learning new things about history and greatly enjoying the retellings of stories I already knew from classes on computer science or cognitive psychology, and I'm looking forward to a (sure to come soon . . .) quiet afternoon where I can sit down and actually finish this book. If you're interested in how human and machine decision making are influenced by our understanding of games, then maybe check it out!
– Irene Zielinski
Warehouse 23 News: The City Never Sleeps Because Of All The Action
There are a million stories in the city, and they're all exciting! GURPS Action 9: The City shows how you can add GURPS City Stats to your GURPS Action campaigns. It also features six sample cities to use with your own action-packed adventures. Download it today from Warehouse 23!
Steve Jackson's Blog
- Steve Jackson's profile
- 70 followers
Steve Jackson isn't a Goodreads Author
(yet),
but they
do have a blog,
so here are some recent posts imported from
their feed.
