Rended Press

Hey. There's been nothing but static on the radio here. I think I heard something in the noise of the void. So here's another pitiful issue of my worthless little zine: Toss Off Issue 9

I've been avoiding writing other things to write this, another issue of my worthless little zine: Toss Off Issue 8

Why looky here! It's another issue of my worthless little zine: Toss Off Issue 7

So I made this janky hack of Grant Howitt 's one-page rpg GOAT CRASHERS . I've released it as PWYW on itch.io. You can check it out here: SHIT DAWGS

It's been a hot & lazy summer. Here's another issue of my worthless little zine: Toss Off Issue 6

Dropbox has recently made changes to their app & free-tier service offerings which make it unusable for me to reliably sync files I offer on this blog. I no longer recommend Dropbox as a folder-syncing & file-sharing service for individual users, as their focus is shifting to aggressively pursue business clients. I will be moving to another file-syncing and link-sharing service soon. In the meantime, download links on this blog will be broken. I'm seriously looking at both Google Backup & Sync (which uses Google Drive) & pCloud.com as replacements for the Dropbox service.

Here's a little random table I created for one section of the final exam in my Digital Narratives class. The students had fun with it. Roll 3d6 on the table below to create a strange magic item. Describe the item’s power(s) & lore in under 250 words. First Part Second Part Third Part 1. The Spoon 1. of Magnanimous 1. Bubbles 2. The Breadcrust       2. of Unceasing 2. Fire 3. The Wand 3. of Temperamental       3. Flavor 4. The Jar 4. of Most Excellent 4. Goblins 5. The Spear 5. of Prismatic 5. Bees 6. The Helm 6. of Soggy 6. Spoons released under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license

Want a gonzo village with a lot of plot hooks & 38 low-level NPCs/meatshields? I got you covered. Grab the new issue of my worthless little zine here:  Toss Off Issue 5

So if you haven't seen it yet, there is a website called This Person Does Not Exist which uses deep learning and AI to generate fairly realistic selfies of non-existent people. It's great for generating NPCs. But did you also know there is a website called This Cat Does Not Exist ? Its results are . . . pretty unsuccessful in most cases. Cats are evidently more difficult for an AI to fake at this point. Most of the results are very unsettling. But they make great mutant creatures: Wha-uh? I mean . . . I . . . I can't even. With that in mind, I present the next issue of my worthless little zine. This issue is dedicated to wizard cat experiments that went wrong. Grab the new issue here: Toss Off Issue 4

For this installment of my worthless little zine, I took inspiration from Dan Felder's reddit post One-Page-Setting: The Echoing Woods , which presents setting information in a slick systemless format.

Here's another installment of my totally worthless zine. You can also find the first issue over here .

Using the term "OSR" as shorthand for the style of games I like to play isn't doing it for me anymore. There is too much baggage associated with "OSR," too much arguing about minutiae of the game, too much drama, too many bad actors, too many folks who say "I'm just here for the elf games" as an excuse to ignore and/or enable the bad actors, too many people who think just because we have a shared enjoyment of a certain style of retro gaming that we should share the retro attitudes, too. I think I'm done with that for now. Let other folks "reclaim" the label if they want, but it's time for me to move on. I like to play tabletop RPGs fast & loose. I like fast-paced adventure games. I like to play the character, not the character sheet. I like high stakes where there's a good chance my character sheet will have to be crumpled up & a new character rolled. I like vanilla fudge fantasy rolled in gonzo sprinkles. I

After a short period of rumination & preparation, I'm happy to introduce  Toss Off , a totally unnecessary, irregularly scheduled, systemless 2-page RPG zine. I'll throw ideas into a 2-page format and post them here. You can download them and use them as you see fit, even if that's to line the bottom of your hamster cage. I'm using Google Docs and public domain images to put these together and then exporting them as PDFs. I'm releasing the zines under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License . This means you are free to use the ideas in your own projects, even copying & pasting my words verbatim, as long as you: give me credit indicate any changes you made give your project away for free You can find the first issue here . All issues will be archived on this page over here.

Do I miss Google+? No. I was late to the party anyway, having only joined in mid-2015 (I can peg the date I joined to the immediate lack of posts to this blog). Since deleting my Google+ account at the beginning of December 2018, I've been more creative than I have in the past few years. It's amazing what a life away from social media will do for you. I no longer feel the need to check in on my phone every day, trying to keep up with the latest & greatest in the never-ending stream of RPG chit-chat. Instead, I've moved on. I allot about forty-five minutes a day to checking up on the news, which includes scanning my RSS feeds. Thanks to the great  OSR OPML file over at Save vs. Party Kill , I added over 250 RPG blogs to Feedly  & I can quickly scan titles to see if anything whets my interest. I follow lots of other sites this way, too--mostly online magazines & a few writers ( Chuck Wendig is hilarious, y'all). Although I have Twitter & Reddit acco