The 46er - February 2026
It's been a great month for blogging! The Bloggies are in full swing, with voting about to begin. There's been many great posts - I've curated a selection of my favorites below. We're also in the middle of Zine Month 2026, so there's some great new zines crowdfunding.
Blog Posts and Other Gaming Reading
- Jay Dragon (& Friends) - THREE HOLE PUNCH (The Starting List) - An attempt to make an OSR system by collaging blog posts together. I find the idea of this project wildly entertaining and I'm looking forward to seeing what Jay comes up with.
- Brackish Draught - A Quick and Dirty Guide to Building a Local RPG Design Scene - I hope this blog post inspires more people to get more cool work out there. I'd certainly benefit from following it.
- Idle Cartulary - What to randomize when you're randomizing - a great look at how and when to use randomization in scenario design, along with the common mistakes that GMs and designers make.
- Explorer's Design - Against Dominant Mechanics - a look at how and why mechanics can interfere with fiction-first gameplay. It hasn't convinced me to abandon my current course with the Jewelsea RPG, but it is good food for thought.
- Valeria Loves - The Electrum Archive is Prescription Medication - A great look at what makes the Electrum Archive tick. I was only so-so on the first issue, but like Valeria, I was impressed overall by the second. I am a certified Morrowind lover, however.
- A shrike for my dreams - Overloading the Reaction Roll - how can the reaction roll be reworked to give us more information? Plus, an excuse to use more of nature's best Platonic solid, the dodecahedron.
- Tangent - Solar Dev Log 2 - I love looking at how to make orbits and moving between them gameable at the table without having to break out advanced math.
- Among Cats and Books - Common, Recalled, Obscure - an interesting take on how to handle knowledge recall in adventure gaming.
- Gordian Blade - If You Haven't Tried Group-Based Initiative, You're Missing Out - a good introduction to, and forceful argument for, side-based initiative.
- Afraid of Encounters - Afraid of Communities - a history of the roleplaying scene in Indonesia.
- Blog of Forlorn Encystment - Condensing the Palace of the Silver Princess Sandbox - this is a condensation more in the sense of the reduction of a sauce. All of the flavor has been concentrated along with even more additions into a powderkeg of a region.
- Rise Up Comus - Idle Musings: Balatro-style Deckbuilding for a Poker-based RPG - I love Balatro and this is a fun way to use its ideas for standard playing card-based resolution.
- A Knight at the Opera - Navigation Games - A great look at the hows and whys of mapping historically in dungeon games and Dwiz's strong opinions about how it should be done. I particularly like the idea of making players spend time and resources to get precise room dimensions.
- In the Company of Monsters - Trophic Encounters - a philosophy for generating encounter tables and a biology lesson!
- A shrike for my dreams - Landscapes of Fear; or, How to keep PCs afraid: Part 1 - a look at how people interact with monsters and the social organizations that builds.
- Failure Tolerated - Talking to the Dungeon - a great post about how players learn from and "talk to" dungeon environments.
- Goblin Punch - Be of Good Cheer - a system for replacing clerics in classic play that I find much more compelling that the typical healbot.
- Personable Thoughts - Human Centric Game Design: A Manifesto - a look at what analog games can do better than digital games and how to best use those attributes.
What I'm Reading
I got a lot of reading done this month!
- Block, Dodge, Parry - an expansion of Cairn that adds a lot of options you can use a la carte.
- The Labyrinth Index - the ninth entry in Charles Stross' Laundry Files. I'm a big Stross fan and this one did not disappoint, though I admit I did prefer the series when the stakes were a little smaller.
- A Land Once Magic - a fun little worldbuilding game
- Gormand's Larder - Evlyn Moreau's wordless adventure, with maps, tables, and setting conveyed entirely with illustrations.
- Feast for a Sphinx - A Mork Borg adventure set in a frozen tomb where things have gone horribly wrong.
- Cloud Empress - Almanac No. 1 - the collected Cloud Empress content from the first year of Watt's newsletter.
- Cloud Empress - Rivals Protocol - an expansion to the solo rules for Cloud Empress, including a pretty good generator for rivals.
- The Invisible Hook - The Economics of Pirates - a very libertarian-brained look at why Golden Age pirates operated the way they did.
- Let Us Build a Tower - a depthcrawl set in the Tower of Babel, including its own bespoke OSR system.
- Twelve Months - the latest entry in the Dresden Files. I liked it a lot better than the previous two.
- Retrograde Player's Manual - A retrofuturistic RPG in which ships travel interstellar distances by printing star charts using magical ink.
- Retrograde Librarian's Index - the GM's book for the above
- Retrograde - Overprint - an investigative adventure where the PCs are trying to discover what caused a disaster where two starships teleported on top of each other.
- Retrograde - The Bone Record - an adventure in which the PCs try to figure out what's gone wrong on a mining outpost.
What I'm Playing
- Sea of Stars - I wrapped this one up, including the expansion. Overall, I enjoyed it, but it was a bit of a letdown after the main game.
- D&D 5e - not much to report here, the game continues apace.
- Wrath & Glory - We only met once this month due to illnesses and business travel. We wrapped up our exploration of a Necron world and headed back to a meeting of various Rogue Traders, where we are now playing politics between rival factions.
- Under Fantastic Skies - my friend's in development game. We've made some changes as we explore the island where the game is set.
- Animal Well - a fun Metroidvania, though I would probably have enjoyed it a bit more if it explained itself at all.