Monday Musings #100 🤬

A hundred Mondays can't hold me back!

May 19, 2025

“There is but One way, and a hundred gods to light the path”
— G.B. Shaw, Monk

I cannot believe I’ve written 100 of these 👵🏽🦆 Monday Musings.

More than that — I can’t believe you’re still here, gamer friend. Reading, replying, playing games, clicking links, and chasing weird ideas with me every Monday.

Thank you. For real.

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🎯 Top 5 Musings

Turns out the most popular Monday Musings have something in common — they’re not about Do or Do not D&D.

Notice a trend? These are about games that want to be played. Games that haunt me. Systems that mess with structure, or demand exploration of the setting and lore, or build something out of just vibes and good dice.

No need to declare what I don’t play.
You already know what I do.

🥣 How the Soup Gets Made

Here’s the real secret recipe for Monday Musings:

I keep loose notes all week — game thoughts, adjacent stuff, passing comments, posts that grabbed me, other people’s games.
By Sunday, there’s a markdown mess of draft material. It’s fugly for sure—links, quotes, fragments, maybe a weird title.
Monday morning? Coffee + chaos magic.
That’s the stuff.

Then the momentum kicks in. I roll straight from writing into:

Work on Lifted Vol II
My Debt-Punk Kuiper Belt sci-fi game
Game prep for whatever I’m in that week.

That’s what Mondays are now.
Write → build → play.

🎙️ Diceology, Season III?

I’ve been thinking about the Diceology podcast.
I fell off right before the pandemic. I was planning a run of interviews — people I met at cons, designers, deep thinkers, the folks behind the games.

Then the world cracked open.

Solo talk felt strange.
And honestly... I just lost the thread.

But now? I feel like I’ve found my angle again.

What excites me is talking to gamer-designer-hobbyists about how they do the thing, what they discover, and whether they’re happy with the result. Not just creators, but humans in the hobby who tinker, build, question, obsess. I want to know how they do it — and what they’ve learned that surprised them. Then I’ll steal it all for my swing at my sci-fi game!

So yeah, maybe Season III is close. I’m building my list!

🎥 Return to Actual Play?

We never stopped playing; we just stopped streaming. I love that our group asks, "Should we stream this?" — instead of just doing it by default.

But now, I’m fired up again. Mad-Dice did that. I’ve been running CBR+PNK for the dogfooding campaign, and it’s been IGNITION fuel. It got the AP crew back together — and now we’re deep in a cyberpunk car heist across the BAMA, coming to you ASAP!

I’m also enjoying crafting software for my own hobby more than I ever expected. Mad-Dice is where I get to walk my talk, and it’s making me rethink everything from TinyCon to Throwing Pixels. For TinyCon, I think we’ll take a cue from 37Signals and put it out there. I’ve got — dev logs, design docs, to edit for Throwing Pixels.

And I’m pretty certain a Supers AP podcast is on the table.

🔥 IGNITION

My Black Sword Hack Bestiary post is the most-read thing I’ve ever put on Substack, followed by the Black Sword Hack posts. And I get it. I enjoyed learning and playing those sessions with the folks at the table and then sharing that experience with you

That’s me again, on the porch, in the heat of summer of 5th grade, running DIY D&D for Paul, Butch, Renard, and Half-Mike. That’s for all my games.