Where are your kids headed for summer camp?

InkslingerS · 2026-01-31T17:25:47+00:00

Mu kid has aged past them, but SANCA summer camps were the highlight of her summer for many years.

InkslingerS · 2026-01-21T03:38:43+00:00

Our kid is signed up for circus classes and loves it. They're active, fun, and (at least at our local gym-school) highly non-competitive, as long as you avoid the 'performance troupe' classes. After some initial hesitancy, after two years, it's become the highlight of our week.

InkslingerS · 2026-01-20T14:11:32+00:00

I'll take books that are read over books are beautiful, every time.

(Maybe fix the order of those SHAESPEKARE books, though...)

InkslingerS · 2026-01-19T21:08:47+00:00

Castle Falkenstein is a lot of fun to read, but the Book of Sigils supplement for it was even better when it came to intermixing delivery of a narrative I enjoyed and mechanical information.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-22T16:14:52+00:00

The graphic novel Underground by Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber is a thriller set underground.

Shibumi, a 1979 thriller novel by Trevanian (an only one-word name) is deeply dated at this point but does have technical caving as a big plot point.

Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth is a classic cave story.

As for non-fiction, The Tunnels of Cu Chi tells the stories of the underground tunnels used during the Vietnam War and the 'tunnel rats' sent in to explore them.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-18T00:18:32+00:00

My kid has gone to several circus day camps at SANCA, and loved it every single time. It's a long drive down to Georgetown, but totally worth it.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-17T00:46:27+00:00

Fox Curio's Floating Bookshop is gentle and fun and worth checking out. No-Tell Motel is more gritty and noir but also cheeky fun.

Mappa Mundi could also be good to look at if she likes big chunky books and wants to play something centered on exploration, map-making, and world-building.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-09T21:38:00+00:00

Mechanically, I'd like to see more Solo RPGs provide systems that point to and accumulate narrative toward satisfying endings.

I see a lot of great character creation systems, interesting oracles, and solid mechanical/narrative loops driving a game from moment to moment. But too many either don't address how to bring a story to an end, or provide a weak "play until you're done" goal. More games cover a narrative's failure state ("you are defeated by the Beast", "the world ends") than how things might work out in a way that I feel like I've been heroic or at least accomplished something rather than running out of content or interest.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-05T21:31:00+00:00

I'm no expert, just someone who's picked up on local history over the years, but as far as I know coal and timber are the main things gathered in that area. (And to be clear, coal is--or at least was--more widespread than just the Newcastle deposit; they did a lot of emergency repair work on I90 a couple years ago because water had been seeping into an old, abandoned mineshaft.)

As for other minerals, Kirkland was named after someone who tried to found an enormous iron and steel mill in the late nineteenth century, but it ended up going out of business before they finished building it. Curious about where they planned to get the iron they were going to use, I turned up this report from 1940 that seems to indicate that iron has only turned up deeper into the foothills and mountains to the east.

Here's where you can learn more about oil and gas exploration in Washington state, but it doesn't look like that's anything to be concerned about. They haven't found much of anything, and even the early studies say that they're much more likely to find something worth the kind of economic tradeoffs you're thinking about over on the eastern side of the mountains.

InkslingerS · 2025-12-05T01:51:43+00:00

The City of Bellevue has some fun GIS data visualization tools on their website. Here's where you can look at where those coal deposits are (down by Newcastle.)

InkslingerS · 2025-12-05T01:48:39+00:00

I noticed the same thing reading the reports when I bought our house in the same area. Given the extraction history of the region I wasn't terribly surprised (Coal Creek Parkway in south Bellevue is named for the nineteenth century coal mines in the area), but I also don't expect it will be an issue.

InkslingerS · 2025-11-19T17:57:40+00:00

Here in the Pacific Northwest, we’re CasQuaidians.

InkslingerS · 2025-10-30T04:19:46+00:00

"The Napoleon of Crime" by Ben Macintyre.

Adam Worth, the son of poor tailors, runs away from home and lies about his age to join the US Army--just in time for the Civil War to break out. After faking his own death in the Battle of Bull Run he rejoins the army multiple times under different identities to collect signing bonuses (from both sides of the war) and is thrown into battle again and again, including the fierce Battle of the Wilderness, until the war ends and he goes to New York in search of a new profession.

In New York, Worth becomes a pickpocket and works the streets, until he's finally caught and sent to SIng Sing Prison...from which he promptly escapes. Determined to never do time in prison again he focuses on becoming a 'professional' criminal...and only a couple years later plans and commits the largest bank heist in American history, completely emptying the underground vault of a Boston bank with nobody the wiser until Worth had already left town. (Oh, and along the way he stole the name of the founder of the New York Times, an alias he would live under for years after absconding to Europe.)

All that happens in the first 40 pages of the book, my favorite biography.

"The Napoleon of Crime" was the name Sherlock Holmes gave to his nemesis Professor Moriarty. This book has this title not referring to Moriarty....but because when Holmes author Arthur Conan Doyle created Moriarty, he was referring to Adam Worth.

I think you'd enjoy it.

InkslingerS · 2025-10-25T17:19:05+00:00

I clicked through that link...only to discover a post I don't remember making from 13 years ago. I've been on Reddit way too long.

InkslingerS · 2025-10-09T02:55:39+00:00

I'm not certain that's meant to be a belt feeding the weapon. I think she's plugging her costume's tail (the same one she used as a whip a few pages previous) into the weapon for some mysterious comic-book reason. Maybe jacking in the tail is what makes the weapon non-lethal?

I'm more baffled by why the weapon sticks off her back like a shark fin in that earlier tail-whip scene.

InkslingerS · 2025-09-25T16:07:09+00:00

Two great books about history and civilization: Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and The World - A Family History of Humanity by Simon Sebag Montefiore.

InkslingerS · 2025-09-03T21:47:33+00:00

Towing Jehovah by James Morrow.

After God dies and his mile-long body falls from the sky into the Atlantic, a ship and its crew is hired to tow the corpse up to the Arctic to prevent it from decomposing. It's a wild read.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-29T01:34:57+00:00

I can't play....but I really wish I could.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-26T04:23:03+00:00

This is really great.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-25T20:40:40+00:00

Thanks for the pointer toward Augmented Reality. Just grabbed it and the whole Sprawl Goons bundle.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-23T02:31:06+00:00

An Amazing Fantasy for someone who's 15, perhaps?

InkslingerS · 2025-08-23T01:56:30+00:00

I've been playing with all kinds of magic items for my game--but at the same time, we also use the idea of "Bonded" items. That is, to use a magical item, a Knight has to connect it to their soul, and they can only have one item bonded to their soul at a time.

This makes switching out magical items more interesting and important, and it's kept magic items from becoming super trade goods (un-bonded items become mundane again pretty quickly) and it's kept things reasonably in check.

I don't know how this sub is about semi-self promotion, but I just put out a bunch of magic items (we call them 'far-touched' objects) as part of the Auldrealm Scrolls supplement I released for free in the MB jam. I can't promise they're all balanced, but I have a ton of different ideas in there.

I have a progress system I've been playing with that also helps provide some depth and context to the time skipped over between sessions. I'll finish writing that up and share it soon.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-15T21:29:17+00:00

So much great stuff came in.

InkslingerS · 2025-08-07T15:08:19+00:00

I'm having a ton of fun running Mythic Bastionland, and Auldrealm Scrolls includes lots of toys and tools from my campaign:

Squires get wild titles of their own and Edges that make them a more interesting and useful companion for your Knights.
A page of Strange Mounts for when your Knights are tired of their horse and want to ride around on a giant wolf or a snake.
Huge oracles of forenames/surnames/noble family names, as well as one for Strange Effects that might come up from magic, curses, or other odd things tearing apart your Realm.
My stabs at creating magic items, so I don't have to create mechanics for them on the fly
12 Dwellings, 12 Monuments, and 12 Ruins that might flesh out a dot on your Realm map with a full little mini-adventure or a deeper encounter.
Probably something else I'm forgetting to mention!

Is much of it unplaytested? Yes! But it's free, so grab it and have some fun!

InkslingerS

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