Ian Cooper

Great Owlbear and Wizard’s Staff at the weekend. Thanks to all the organisers. I ran Stonetop and Legends in the Mist, both PbTA “local heroes” bit quite different (play to find out vs metaplot). Thanks to everyone who “played to learn” with me as it’s the first time I have run either.

Also, in play, not clear if there is a maximum number of tags that you can invoke. If not, it may suffer from QW “augment hunting” problem that made us switch to “one only and narratively interesting”.

Beautiful product though, and will play again despite any caveats from a first run.

Legends in the Mist has some parallels to QuestWorlds I could use to grok it. Themes and tags are similar to Keywords and Breakouts. Simple, Quick and Detailed contests are akin to Assured, Contest and Sequence.

Graham Spearing 🔜 Grogmeet Convention

Slightly wary that Mist may make early QW mistake of assuming a scene must be concluded with a Detailed contest over leaning more heavily into Quick to keep the narrative moving unless played are invested in detailed. Balancing encounters will require a little more experience from me.

Ian Cooper reposted

@firstage.bsky.social

Many thanks to @asako-soh.bsky.social for putting on the much beloved annual Owlbear and Wizard's Staff #ttrpg event! Played in @icooper.bsky.social Legend in the Mist and @burnafterrunning.bsky.social TOR2e. Great games. I ran a fun session of Zweihander Reforged. Looking forward to next year.

Ian Cooper reposted

jess

@jessfrom.online

22 Aug

optimist: the cup is half full pessimist: the cup is half empty ttrpg editor: here you refer to the cup as half full, but in the next chapter, you refer to it as half empty. for clarity, we should standardize on one of them in the rules text, even if players might use both descriptions at the tabl

IYKYK 🌮@handle.invalid

Optimist: The cup is half full Pessimist: The cup is half empty Epidemiologist: You guys didn't just both drink out of the same cup did you

Ian Cooper reposted

DriveThruRPG

@drivethrurpg.com

21 Aug

The Dying Earth RPG Quickstart Rules are available now from @pelgranepress.bsky.social Get it FREE here: tinyurl.com/ytbzjtea #TTRPG based on the fantasy fiction of Grand Master Nebula Prize-winning writer Jack Vance.

Ian Cooper reposted

Rachel Grant/R.S. Grant

@rachelgrant.bsky.social

22 Aug

Ancient Aliens & other pseudoarchaeology TV shows/podcasts are not harmless entertainment. The purpose is to separate Indigenous people from their cultural history to support white supremacy. We need our own art & entertainment to combat disinformation pseudoscience, which is why I wrote FALSE FLAG.

21 Aug

I’ve long been a subscriber to the @theguardian.com but its descent from decent journalism into sensationalism of late has me reconsidering that. I have a subscription to the excellent @bylinetimes.bsky.social and if the Guardian doesn’t mend its ways it’s time to say goodbye.

ndcoslo.comPractical Messaging | NDC Oslo 2026In this tutorial, we will look at distributed systems, and how we integrate them. We will understand why we would prefer to integrate via messaging, the fundamentals and key concepts of messaging and…

11 Aug

As developers shift left from coding to architecture, understanding how apps interoperate has never been more important. At NDC Oslo, I will be running my Practical Messaging Workshop, where you will learn the skills needed to design event-driven architectures at scale. ndcoslo.com/workshops/pr...

11 Aug

Day 1 focuses on how we connect applications via messaging, covering everything from streams vs. queues to message pumps, outbox and inbox, and API management. Day 2 takes that skill set and asks: how do we succeed at building a system that uses events to interoperate (instead of HTTP or gRPC)?

11 Aug

Hands-on examples will help you cement your knowledge throughout the workshop. This course runs less frequently now, so don't miss your chance to catch it in Oslo.

theguardian.comHarry Potter fans force relocation of £430m undersea cable to avoid Dobby’s ‘grave’Power cable linking UK and Ireland now passes near Bronze Age human burial remains instead of fictional grave on Welsh beach

10 Aug

WTF? We would rather desecrate a Bronze Age burial site than a movie filming location. I have no words for how dumb we have become…

Nic Wilkinson@nicwilkinson.bsky.social

This makes me so angry - and I'm a person who marks anniversaries of fictional events And look at the tat and rubbish left on the beach - despite it being an ecologically sensitive site. As if we needed yet another reason to loathe the badly written books, the creator and the fuckwit fans.

2 Aug

Going to call it. The makers of “He-Man and the Masters of the Universe” understood the assignment. Glorious cheese.

2 Aug

A particular favourite is actually capturing the look of the heroes of Eternia laughing. Glorious.

29 July

I feel that if you put your bag on the seat next to you on a train working the morning commute - it says an enormous amount about you as a person, with no other signal. Entitled, selfish, “I’ve got mine Jack.” Just that, all we need to know about you, whatever you tell yourself

Ian Cooper reposted

David Whitney

@davidwhitney.co.uk

28 July

It's no secret that I think JSX is the dominent form of web app markup today. But I've always wanted the framework and language smarts of C# when I've been doing web things - I'm putting together a new library called JsxCore, a JSX + TypeScript View Engine for ASP.NET Core.

20 July

Of course Agon by John Harper is the other obvious answer, a game about heroes travelling from island to island, trying to get home. As a Glorantha fan I always have to say, Glorantha does mythic Bronze Age too.

This post is unavailable.

19 July

I went to see The Odyssey with my wife last night. Overall, a very good movie. The xenia theme is a strong one, and it hits the key beats of the story well for three hours (cyclops, circe, calypso, scylla and charibdis, communing with the dead, and homecoming)

But I'm not sure how the imagery of Agamemnon, armored in black at the gates of Troy, was supposed to echo or inform the themes Nolan drew on elsewhere.

19 July

By contrast, I loved Travis Scott as Phemius the bard. I'm a sucker for oral storytelling, and it was a great demonstration of how great storytellers hold a space. When he struck the table with his stick, it reminded me of watching a performance at the Crick-Crack Club.

Even at three hours, it is a large epic to compress into a single movie, but by keeping to his theme (the rights of host and obligations of guest, and the coming dark age being because people have abused it) he manages to weave an episodic story into a whole.

19 July

It's churlish, perhaps, to point out bum notes. I'm still unsure what Nolan was trying to say with his Agamemnon as Batman schtick. Agamemnon's story is an important part of the myth, and the part about homecoming echoes Odysseus's own story.

Matt Damon has the gravity these days to pull off the old, wily, hero, but the strongest performances for me are Robert Pattinson's Antinous, Anne Hathaway's Penelope, and John Leguizamo as Eumaeus) Though, as a book reader, I always thought Homecoming was the strongest part, so that may show.

12 July

The wind here is making it 5 degrees cooler, and much less humid, so the heat is pleasant today and you can sleep at night. But oh how it howls, the moaning of angry lost souls.

Ian Cooper reposted

Tore

@torenielsen.bsky.social

11 July

@cultistofsooty.bsky.social , @draugmith.bsky.social I caved. Like a souffle.

Ian Cooper reposted

mogsymakes

@mogsymakes.bsky.social

Excellent day out at the Joy of Six show in Sheffield today running our Midgard Heroic Battles Glorantha game. The Battle of Grizzly Peak was hard-fought with the Lunars emerging victorious by a whisker in Turn 5. #miniatures #wargaming #spreadthelard #nerdlings #midgardheroicbattles

There is a tendency in modern shows to end a season prior to the big moment that the whole season has been building up to. House of the Dragon S2 is the last, but Walking Dead S4, and others all adopt this approach.

You can only have a cliff hanger in season, when I need to wait a week or I am binging. Not across seasons. GoT used to get this right. Big payoff in E9, set up he next season in the wrap up of consequences to that in E10.

The E9 denouement left me wanting more. Modern cliffhangers with a two year wait time are just, meh!

The writers think of this as a cliff hanger, but by the time the new season drops two years later, all emotional build up to this moment is lost. Two years later I can often barely remember why I cared about this moment. Or who all the characters are.

So House of the Dragon’s S3 opening was visually impressive, but in storytelling terms, I didn’t care. Two years on, I had all but forgotten some of the key characters in the battle and their fate had little emotional resonance for me. Ultimately, these moments are robbed because the payoff.

27 June

I saw Supergirl in the cinema last night. Look, I’ll be honest, I am a DC fan, but primarily the cinema had, sweet, sweet air conditioning. But… it’s a good, fun supers movie. Supergirl is flawed enough to be relatable, her backstory is woven through flashbacks that provide pathos not exposition.

@jordansorcery.bsky.social

27 June

Millie Alcock is a delight to watch, much as she was during House of the Dragon. And Krypto is much less annoying than I expected him to be. I would go see it. Its poor box office had far more to do with terrible marketing than anything else.

Ian Cooper reposted

Jordan Sorcery

16 June

The annual Warhammer Conference will be held in Frankfurt & online this September; it’s a fascinating academic event. I presented last year on some horror roots of 40K and have now submitted my proposal for 2026. There’s still time if you want to submit a paper too! warhammer-conference.com

@bethanyblack.bsky.social

15 June

Apropos of nothing, recommendations for good VPNs, usable from phones, to avoid overbearing governments?

Ian Cooper reposted

Bethany Black

I now find myself in the position of agreeing with Restore Britain on a policy, over social media. That is what it has come to: a Labor policy so ill-thought-out that I end up agreeing with the far right. So my kids can watch Netflix and HBO with me, but not YouTube. FFS Labour you numpties.

theguardian.comUK to ban under-16s from ‘high risk’ social media appsMeasures to include restrictions on ‘safe’ social media apps, with some fearing banning some platforms and not others will lead to legal challenges

13 June

Labour deciding to act without reading the evidence (Starmer already reached a conclusion) is typical of the poor thinking from this government. Abstinence does not work. Education works. www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026...

There is nothing more dangerous that a government with “nanny state” instincts, who are suffering in the polls, and believe that a cheap measure will boost their support. I imagine the newly minted 16-year old voters will punish them at the next election.

13 June

Jonathan Haidt’s book is correlation over causation. What’s next the government issuing letters of marque because they learn about the correlation between global warming and a decline in Caribbean pirates?

A plurality of parents who responded to the survey wanting a ban is confirmation bias. We need a government that is smarter than this. Of course campaigning groups will have called on their supporters to flood the survey. It’s not representative of how people feel.

9 June

It looks like Labour can’t be bothered to even read the evidence on mobile phones. Starmer thinks a “moral panic” will make him popular so he’s invoking Mary Whitehouse. Education not abstinence. It’s not hard. Time to give my kids VPNs

28 May

When it gets hot in the UK, Brits have to figure out what from their wardrobe - generally built around its rainy - will work. Enter “holiday clothes” where Brits pull out the clothes we normally wear on our Mediterranean holiday and deploy them as we go about our daily lives. Often…interesting

26 May

Labour seems to be resorting to the worst of its Blairite "nanny state" tendencies over mobile phones. Populist vote-grabbing. Abstinence programs never work. "Just Say No," as a policy on mobile phones, will fail. Education, education, education! Teach kids how to be safe. At school.