Shrine Mother

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Latest — 10 Jun 2026

A Queer Milieu

Beginning again requires working outside a ready framework or canon. Beginning again requires sinking back into more inchoate feelings and sentiments, looser and less organized concepts, and galvanizing hopes and values. Beginning again, I experimented with some new and playful ways of divining, sometimes using spark tables and sometimes turning

More issues

Art Before Game

I spent a good bit of time running in the wrong direction here. I kept trying to make a role playing game that looked like the games I had when I was young but which were transplanted and nourished by different roots—osr by way of a new appendix n.

Appendix February 2026

Evil: a study of lost techniques (Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh) I stumbled across this title while trying to look up another book's citation (Artaud and the Gnostic Drama by [not-that-Jane-Goodall] Jane Goodall) for a friend. I almost didn't pick it up, but I could

Appendix January 2026

Perhaps an odd thing to do at the monthly level? This month has been useful for digging down into the sort of work I want to undergird my game. This game is meant to develop within an alternate autobiography and history, one in which my sense of what role playing

Procedural Loops for Vulnerability

Warning, abstract game design discussion ahead. As I have been thinking about the sort of dice rolls that I want my game to use, I have been thinking about the core loops of play that will define it. By "loop," I mean the sort of actions that the

Appendix 2025

The last few months have been a slow churn of design thinking on my part, and I figured it wouldn't hurt to identify the folks whose ideas have been feeding that in one way or the other. It serves as a touchstone for me that I can revisit

Shared Fantasies

The game for my queer little girl can't ignore the act of fantasy. Fantasy defined so much of her unfulfilled relationship to Dungeons & Dragons. But for all the common sense discussions of role playing games having their roots in "let's pretend" play, there

Revisiting the Underworld

Pages and pages of old D&D material available, paths crisscrossing the landscape of my childhood memories lined with images and flashes of text that reveal vibrant and squirming emotions and fantasies still lingering beneath them. Those little dreamy ecosystems often hide behind creatures, objects, and places that infest,

Zoa Tan, turning the kaleidoscope

Zoa Tan turns out to be more dreamlike and childlike fantasy than I first thought. The first vision I had for it gives way to another, and I suspect that over the course of this project it will turn (and return) to other visions. My first impulse was to hold

The Three Integrities

[Octavia] Butler asks us to consider . . . how might we parse what is harmful transmutation versus what is merely different or unrecognizable or strips one of a certain phantasy of mastery and control?—Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (132) Cairn's simple attribute

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Shrine Mother

the past carries a secret index by which it is referred to redemption

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