I’ve been thinking a lot about book formats recently. For many, many years, I’ve been wanting to scale down, and do something smaller. I even made a video about it 10 years ago (back before the rebrand and with the old logo).  There was something about those first Traveller ‘little black books’ - the simplicity of design, and how you could afford to get a new book on what was basically ‘pocket money’ costs. And they were just cool. Probably more complicated rules-wise than I’m used to now, but Traveller has always stuck with me. It was the first RPG I ever playe ..read more

[Warning: This post is about grief, so if you’d rather not read it, please just delete this from your inbox. I know this is a tough topic.] This week, we said our farewells to Alex Guttridge. I know a lot of you won’t know who I mean, but that’s what this post is about - at his ‘Celebration of Life’ this week, as we said our final farewells, the subject of keeping his memory alive came up multiple times. And, if you know me, or the stuff I’ve worked on, you probably know a little of Alex just by association. So this is me, spreading the word of Alex Guttridge. I met Alex when I started my day ..read more

#3 - 2000AD Summer Special Supercomic 1977 We’ve already established that I’ve always been a nerd. My mother had me watching James Bond movies on TV, and introduced me to Doctor Who because she liked Jon Pertwee, and my dad had been buying me a weekly comic, which (up until this point) had been either Look-In - due to my obsession with cool stuff on TV - or the aforementioned Super Spider-man and the Titans (see previous post). I was watching all of the genre TV I could, The New Avengers, Fantastic Journey, Space 1999, I, and The ..read more

  Portrait of David Lynch by Debs (2025) I’ve always loved movies and TV. Always. From a kid, those first trips to the cinema, or my parents introducing me to movies and series on the TV. I love them. I used to keep a list taped to my wardrobe door of movies I’d seen and even started ticking off how many times I’d seen Star Wars or Tron. Friday nights we’d rent movies from local video store and a group of friends would come ‘round and we’d watch the latest releases.  One week we rented DUNE (yes, I’m using all-caps, it seems more apt). It was awesom ..read more

The Traditional End of the Arbitrary Calendar Year Roundup At the end of each year, I look back on my blog post about the end of the previous year and see what I hoped would come to pass in the future… and most of the time it’s me saying “Next year, things are gonna happen, and it’ll be great!”. (Narrator: “It wasn’t.”) This year, I look back on last year's “end of the year” post which I wrote on Christmas Eve 2023, and see I was (as usual) disappointed with the way the year had turned out. 2023 wasn’t bad, but I was hoping for bigger and better things in 2024. Of course, that didn’t happen ei ..read more

#2: Super Spider-Man and the Titans, Issue 203 (1976)  When I mentioned last time (for object #1, the Corgi James Bond Lotus Esprit) that my parents were ‘enablers’ of my nerdy life, I’d almost forgotten an even earlier moment.  Set the wayback machine to the mid-1970s. Living in my favourite home in my small coastal town with my parents, I was about 7 years old and one Saturday morning my went with my dad to the local newsagents (one that is still there today!). I have a strange memory that the shopkeeper was someone called Mr. Jenner, and it was at this newsagents that my dad had a ..read more

 One Week... ...to Dragonmeet that is! Just a quick post this time, don’t worry. This time next week it’ll be Dragonmeet, the UK’s second largest tabletop convention and it’ll be the first one I’ve been to since the pandemic.  Dragonmeet was always one of those cool conventions where I get to chat with loads of really cool creators and publishers. See what amazing new games have been released. And also wish I had more cash to buy all those cool games…  I won’t be on a table.  I did that once before for Cubicle 7, signing copies of Doctor Who… well, signing one copy of Doct ..read more

I listened to a rather enlightening theory recently known as the “Dead Internet Theory”. In it, it discusses the fact that the ‘content’ we put online, is lost in a sea of replicated and AI generated crap, designed to tick boxes that are read by other bots and AI routines. It speculates that over half of the users and activity on the internet these days is automatically created or tailored nonsense designed to appease algorithms to get it promoted. That means less than half of the world’s users of the internet are actually people. What does that mean for artists and creators?  It’s a dang ..read more

  For Day Twenty-Nine of #RPGaDAY2024 we're looking at 'awesome apps' and there's only really one I've used (which is pretty cool), and that's the dice rolling app created for use with FFG's Star Wars RPG (and X-Wing, etc.)  Not only does it look cool, but you can change the background of the dice tray, and it makes Star Wars noises when you roll!  ..read more

 Last weekend we ventured north, stayed with friends, and experienced the wonders of Tabletop Scotland. It has been a while since I’ve crossed the border into Scotland. As a kid, my parents loved Scotland, and one of my happiest memories of my entire childhood was a quiet little self-catering cottage in the middle of a forest in the Borders. I hadn’t been to Scotland for over twenty years, but Stoo from we-evolve invited us to join their table at Scotland’s largest tabletop gaming convention, so that I could help sell copies of WILD, and Debs could sell her Goth-gaming w ..read more