Tetsujin no Llama

Not quite a cat/bag situation, but I've gotten involved in writing some material around the edges of the new edition of Car Wars . My first piece for this came out today , a vignette about a biker queen in the wasteland that was once Nevada, with accompanying art by Brandon Moore . He nails it. Really, seriously nails it. I'm just sad that bit isn't part of the preview.

Recently, Blind Mapmaker put up a fair and thoughtful review of my most recent DF book. In it, he says: While the book is rules-oriented it is less so than you might expect from a DF book. This, I think, is true. A great deal of it is descriptive detail: coin shapes, largely mundane fabric types, a list of colors, and a big-ass table of decorative motifs. Very little of this gives us the pluses we so dearly love (as alluded to in the intro section, "What's The Bonus for Shiny?"). There's a reason for that, which gets into something which doesn't get discussed in much detail in places I frequent. One of the phrases which keeps coming up is "the Rule of Cool," the idea of conflating successful/effective with cool/awesome/impressive. I'm down with that, of course, but the question is, what's cool? How do we get there? How do we build cool? Consider this INCREDIBLY FREAKING AWESOME sequence which open's John Woo's Hard Boiled (go ah

A new book of mine came out today: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Treasures 1: Glittering Prizes . The genesis of this one is...well, not unusual. After DF8 came out, I'd had some ideas about things which it might have lacked, items I'd want to expand on, and the like, but I didn't have a format for it. I pitched one of those ideas, an extended treatment of money, as an article for Pyramid . My editor countered with the suggestion of turning it into a short PDF. After a bit of back and forth, I settled on a short PDF (shorter than DF8, anyway) about adding detail to treasures: more about money to make it more than just discrete bits of precious metal, more decorative motifs, more implausible materials, and so on, incorporating many, though not all, of the treasure-related ideas I'd had since DF8 was published. And now, the theme song for the book: