Monday Musings #137 🤬
Muses, and Zines, and Games, Oh My!
Good Monday, Gamer!
“Honey, you mean ‘Hunk-ules’!” — Thalia
This is one of those weeks where a bunch of small, separate things quietly click into place.
A project we’ve been working on for months finally ships. A monster at the table reveals itself…to me the Keeper. A bunch of notes becomes an actual Kickstarter project. And a game I’ve been meaning to read for years shows up in my email box.
None of it is flashy on its own. Taken together, though, it feels like momentum—and I’ll take that kind of Monday every Monday.
Muses of Play is officially out in the world.
This is a limited-series podcast I’ve been developing with Sarah Doom, centered on the creative forces that shape how we play, design, and think about games. It’s not advice. Not how-to content. It’s more like sitting at the corner of the table while designers talk through the why behind their work. Try the interesting bits. Keep what works for you.
The first episode is live on Patreon:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/muses-of-play-149521286
Sarah has been a steady, thoughtful, and Metal presence in the indie RPG space for years—someone who brings strong premises without sanding off the weird edges. She’s also active on Patreon, where she shares writing, design reflections, and work-in-progress thinking that reads more like studio notes than finished essays. Take a gander.
This series is intentionally small and focused. Six episodes. Three guests. That’s the season.
Field Notes from the Table: Bye Week Blues
The Curse of the Frogmen took out two players this week for our Sunday Monster of the Week sessions, making it a bye week.
When a session goes down like that, I usually spend part of the scheduled time prepping around the event instead of past it. That means tightening the next mystery, fleshing out the Siren NPC, expanding a Kansas City location list, and working out introducing the Arc and Team mechanics to the table. I feel like this sort of prep, adding depth, lets me foreshadow strong, have answers for those 7-9: ‘Yes, but’ calls - and pull the rug like a bandit on those misses.
The Play Fearless Greatest Crits Zine!
Zine Month is here, and with it, The Play Fearless Greatest Crits Zine — a curated collection of the most shared, commented, viewed, and insightful critical hits of this newsletter!
I’ve been writing Play Fearless for a long time now, since 2020. Long enough that some ideas keep resurfacing. This zine is me paying attention to those pieces.
The Play Fearless Greatest Crits isn’t everything I’ve written. It’s the stuff I still stand by. Essays, tools, and table truths about running games, trusting players, and making space for outsiders and underdogs at the table. Inside you’ll find reflections on GMing, play culture, trust at the table, and practical stuff you can use immediately. Some of it you’ve read before. A few pieces are new. All of it has been edited with distance and care, how you do when you want something to last longer than a scroll. I wanted this to exist as a physical thing.
And if I get my druthers, it’ll also feature a couple of brand-new pieces from friends whose work I deeply respect.
The Kickstarter is queued up and launching soon:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/madjay/the-play-fearless-greatest-crits-zine
Cold City, Hot War
Also worth your attention this week: Handiwork Games has released the PDF of Hot War, and I started reading it over the weekend.
I’ve played both editions of Cold City, but never Hot War, and I’m curious to see how it reframes ideology, paranoia, and consequence when the Cold War turns into an inferno!
ICYMI
That one time I got hardwired with Mike Pondsmith
A wide-ranging Diceology conversation about cyberpunk, systems thinking, and what actually lasts.
https://www.diceology.com/posts/episode-13-getting-hardwired-with-mike-pondsmith/Shakespeare in Love is about to leave Netflix.
The movie about process, impostor syndrome, and creativity under pressure. Fight me.The Art of Keith Senkowski
One of the most distinctive visual voices in tabletop art right now— I like what he’s saying about Agency. https://keithsenkowski.com/agencyOn Twitch/Actual Play: Catching up with Judith Becker playing The Bureau, a Liminal Horror RPG**
https://githyankidiaspora.com/2026/01/31/liminal-horror-the-bureau-catch-up-with-judith-becker-in-a-dozen-or-so-minutes/