Rabid Sharks
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Prison Blog

In which Possum recounts his experiences as an offender in the system.

Possum Bones is autistic. He has identified as a dirty kid in the past, and he’s attended multiple rainbow gatherings. He has several years left to serve in the Washington Correctional system.

He has been making art since he could sit up. He communicates better in writing than speech. If you are interested in the experience of an autistic person doing prison time, check out his Prison Blog. If you are a fan of comic art, underground/outsider music, Lovecraft, Clarke Ashton Smith, Murakami, Cixui Liu, etc.

Monte Cook's high concept GM quackery

Im reading the DND 3.5 DMG campaign section, the part about cosmology, for ideas for my game, and I can just tell since i read numenera that this is a part that was written by Monte Cook. Man, he is such a hack. Its one of the cooler chapters of the DMG , and part of what made 3.5 good, but on the other hand, its such high concept GM quackery. Its written with such little awareness of the rules that have been set in place already and how much they prevent any of this from being useful without an unreasonable amount of work on the GM ( the readers' ! ) part. Plus there's sections where you can tell its in Monte cooks voice and its like , " Monte you are a nerd/fag/fagnerd " ... Like " A campaign set in a bronze age world where weapons are more crude and armor is less advanced, or even an ice age/stone age world where metal is barely available (if at all), can be very interesting. In such a campaign, survival often becomes blablabla ... " Its like , OK Monte , that's so cute. As a tween I ate this chapter up. But the thing is, Monte always does this. This system lacks the "infrastructure " for lack of a better word, to support this kind of GM choice in a meaningful way. Its kind of like a tech executive talking about ai and how great it is , but its like " What does it actually do that's useful at all ? " ... Monte Cook did the same thing in numenera. He talks all this creative, high concept flavor , but its just filler because in numenera, there are so few rules that its basically the same game either way, and there's no way to meaningfully represent those creative choices as a part of the actual game in practice. In a real game session for a real gm who does the average amount of work to run the game. In 3.5 it was the opposite : there was a staggering hurdle to represent anything in the game, you could practically code an NPC into an oblivion module in the time it takes to write an NPC for DND 3.5 by hand ( could be hours if you do it by the book ).

Elisa Carlson