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I’d like to think of the spring of 2016 as the end of my larval stage. Much like the humble caterpillar, I too experienced my insides turning to mush as a hard chrysalis formed around my juvenile exterior. Would love to get out of here someday. Without going into too much extraneous detail, I’ll cover…
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February 22, 2026 Sunday mornings last until sunset. By the time heartburn and tree pollen rouse me, it’s 10 o’clock in the morning. I shake off the lingering haze of 1000 different dreams of vice and missed appointments. The latter I can do without, but the farewell of the former leaves a blue ache. I…
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In reference to Walden, E.B. White wrote, “A man reads one book in his life, and this one is mine.” I hope he doesn’t mind me riding on his shoulders when I say a man watches one movie in his life, and this one is mine. When I watched it for the first time nearly a decade ago,…
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I got hit hard by the Quinns Quest sales pitch on Public Access. Hard enough to back the Kickstarter and get a PDF of the original game, despite never having played a system primarily geared towards the “storytelling” and “Play to Find Out” style of play. Lately, I tend towards the OSR scene. My current Shadowdark campaign is on hiatus…
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Steel Forests becomes more real by the day. Once upon a time, I imagined four books: the Scavenger’s Survival Guide (Player), Referee Handbook, Monster Manual (it would’ve had a better name), and some kind of starting adventure. But, my producer (myself) said, “Buddy, quit dreaming. One book. A5 digest. Less than 400 pages. Fit it…
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Wow! It’s been a while since I last made a post about tabletop. Since last year I’ve made a lot of progress on the game, which is now officially (for now) known as Steel Forests. There’s been a TON of cutting. I’m hacking through overgrown jungles of text with my trusty ctrl + x machete.…
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Hi again! I’m Blake Barton, and I’m still working on this post-apocalyptic roleplaying game with no name. I missed posting last week due to an episode of mold, sweat, illness, and a predisposition for apathy, and I was about to miss today as well, but I wrote up a task in my Trello board tonight…
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Hello! I’m Blake Barton. Welcome back to Monster of the Week, a look into the development of my post-apocalyptic TTRPG through the lens of NPC stat blocks. I’ve been moving all week, so my development has stagnated somewhat, but I’ve built up a sizeable backlog to dive into. I’m writing this with 98 minutes left…
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Hi! I’m Blake Barton. Welcome back to Monster of the Week, my blog/devlog/word-vomit dive into how I’m building NPC stat blocks for my in-development post-apocalyptic TTRPG and weak attempt at proving that I exist. Feels like punching in a dream. Last week I introduced some of the fundamental concepts of the game, the stat block…
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Hi! I’m Blake Barton. I develop games that no one will ever play. This is the first entry in a series of posts I’m calling Monster of the Week, which isn’t about the Powered by the Apocalypse game, nor is it a dissection of my favorite X-Files episodes (if I only had the time and…