A lot of what I do with various team mates on these various projects, in this case Mustafa Bekir on a background for Goblin Mode is back & forths & discussing how certain things should be when they are still in the loose form & haven’t been locked down! The progress on these boxes is going smoothly! I’m stoked to see the final products!
2024-08-23 12:16:43 +0000 UTC View Post
A look at the initial go around concept for the factions mechanic for the Battle for Brüttelburg! A new snappier title is coming with the Battle for Brüttelburg being a sideline.
2024-08-23 11:40:19 +0000 UTC View Post
Almost six years ago I had a stroke. Being hospitalized for three months was life changing. Having the stroke brought me down to zero, I died, was resuscitated, had most of my bodily systems fail & be supported by machines & then things slowly got better. LIving in a hospital gave me a lot of time to think. I didn’t watch TV or do painkillers, I just thought & observed life. Listening to the clock & my life support machines. My main takeaway was that the normal people workin...
2024-08-22 17:24:18 +0000 UTC View Post
Role-Playing Games have been an integral part of my life ever since before I could actually read. I played Advanced Dungeons & Dragons in my older friend's living room. Not even the big Godzilla Shogun Warrior toy with flicking tongue & shooting fist he had could distract me from the mystery of this imagination game. I can remember wondering if the clear plastic polyhedral dice in the crown royal bag were gemstones to play with because they didn’t look like any dice I had seen up un...
2024-08-21 18:41:09 +0000 UTC View Post
The latest batch of GOBLINKO stickers! We're getting a bunch of new designs made so that we just have more stickers!
2024-08-20 22:27:41 +0000 UTC View Post
We watched the 1995 film La Haine (Hate) last night. La Haine follows a group of disaffected Parisian youths of various racial outsider statuses around on a day when they’re just screwing around & figuring out how to survive in the margins. They’re not doing well, they are totally agitated. It has a feeling similar to Trainspotting without the heroin & it made me flashback to living in Oakland & being a disaffected young man myself looking for trouble. I drank on the streets &...
2024-08-20 17:34:22 +0000 UTC View Post
A little sneak peek at the current model of the Moon map for Moon Madness!
2024-08-20 11:23:04 +0000 UTC View Post
I have a visceral attraction to sausages. There are many reasons why I love them. They all look similar but can taste wildly different, they sweat when they cook, they snap when you bite into them, every culture on Earth has sausages & everyone loves them. Something about the iconic representation of the sausage got to me at a young age. I remember back to the first time I read the comic of or saw the cartoon of the Egg & the Smurfs, where Hefty Smurf is turned into a sausage. (The Sm...
2024-08-19 17:38:53 +0000 UTC View Post
Someone asked me about influences a few days ago & I got to thinking about all of the things that go into making my flavor. When I was young & hadn’t put in my time these influences were more to the fore & less subtle. There were just also dramatically less things influencing my output. I always think of my stylistic base as one of those legendary ramen broths that a little hole in the wall spot in Japan has been making since they opened, so the broth is actually 40 years old, b...
2024-08-18 17:27:42 +0000 UTC View Post
These guys are by Mustafa Bekir! It’s fun to expand on the Schläger.
2024-08-17 23:58:52 +0000 UTC View Post
I saw this meme this morning that really ticked me off. It showed an innocent Hello Kitty labeled “my dreams” picking flowers, being menaced by a bigger guy who looks suspiciously like Robin Hood labeled “capitalism” with a knife. This juxtaposition of images was wrong in general given that Hello Kitty is a creation of pure capitalistic money making & Robin Hood redistributes wealth, but that wasn’t my complaint. Big economic systems aren’t ideologically run. They might ...
2024-08-17 00:51:07 +0000 UTC View Post
As a sort of last gasp of my childhood I got really into collecting Norfin Trolls. I was nine & still buying GI Joe figures but Garbage Pail Kids, MAD magazine, Monty Python & the Dr. Demento show had cracked open my world & pointed out that everything was worthy of ridicule. Somehow I mustered up the innocence to collect Trolls. Those are the wild haired, mongoloid faced Trolls that everyone knows. Their Danish name was Dam Trolls after their creator Thomas Dam & they were ma...
2024-08-17 00:45:25 +0000 UTC View Post
There’s currently 48 DUNGEON DEGENERATES characters! THE EXPANSIONING (ending today at 5 pm pacific) adds 12 more! We’re not slowing down! Pic by Buddy Love.
2024-08-16 12:45:23 +0000 UTC View Post
Another one of my favorite records, I feel like Focus invented the style that Camel ran with, but Focus only released two albums in this style. Plus a few songs on their debut record, but this & Moving Waves are the standouts. I wish the thing that created these bands was still in the water.
2024-08-15 23:59:45 +0000 UTC View Post
This is the fiftieth Goblin Newsletter! It has been good to write this much, I haven’t written like this for a long time, decades. I used to write like this, more personally, more off the cuff, more frequently, all the time, when I was young. I’d write to process & express my existence, & now I do this again. It feels good, natural. So I recently decided to change up what I was being fed on various platforms via their various algorithms. I was just tired of being fed stuff that sa...
2024-08-15 23:52:34 +0000 UTC View Post
The Moon Madness box is going to introduce a new mechanic! You’re seeing it here first!
2024-08-15 01:56:55 +0000 UTC View Post
I have been thinking alot about character & eccentricity & just being an interesting person versus the bland syrup of moral conformity that people want to pour over everything. There is a switch that needs to be made, people should view themselves & others as individuals who they don;t get to interfere with. Morality has nothing to do with it. It’s about being left alone. I’ve seen this historically come from the right but the baton was passed to the left in the late 90s. It...
2024-08-13 00:01:11 +0000 UTC View Post
Some DUNGEON DEGENERATES miniatures painted up by super-fan Larve! It’s so cool to see these characters in people’s lives in so many forms, makes me proud. We’re currently running THE EXPANSIONING Kickstarter & will run an all miniatures kickstarter in the fall - stay tuned!
2024-08-12 12:18:21 +0000 UTC View Post
Showing the expanded Wurstreich made me want to flesh out the map more, to correspond with ideas I already had. Lots of DUNGEON DEGENERATES stuff cooking, an RPG, a Skirmish Game, a Battling Cards game & a Collectible Card Series.
2024-08-11 18:17:42 +0000 UTC View Post
Imagination has brought mankind through the dark ages to its present state of civilization.
- L. Frank Baum
One of my biggest influences is L. Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz book series. They are a fantastic delving into an American fantasy conjured straight out of the Belle Époque, complete with that sort of romantic view of civilization & perfumed flourish. I read all of these books when I was a kid & started to mix Oz stuff with the grit & grime of Warhammer when I w...
2024-08-11 17:06:44 +0000 UTC View Post
This is my favorite song this weekend, I loved it when it came out but only figured out the title & who it’s by on Friday.
2024-08-11 12:59:31 +0000 UTC View Post
I’m getting some graphics together for the next Rulesmonger Writes update for The EXPANSIONING Kickstarter. I’m going to pull together a Goblin adventurer as well, he’s not done yet.
2024-08-11 02:34:22 +0000 UTC View Post
If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it's the best possible substitute for it.
- James Garfield
One of the great things about being at Ground Zero is that I can bring attention to primal things that need to be focused on. For those of us that didn’t grow up at Ground Zero it seems overly basic & boring, but these things need to be done. One of the things that I keep hearing is people saying that hard work isn’t necessary or that work is below them. This is the tox...
2024-08-09 18:02:38 +0000 UTC View Post
So much appears to be seen in 360 degrees of 3 dimensions with the advent of social media & the insane level of surveillance but being able to think, really think about things from a different angle seems far less prevalent to me. Even when it was a rarity before. True alternative thought that isn’t just aping someone else’s line is painfully small. Part of it is that our society doesn’t advocate critical thinking or independent thought, part of it is that social media just encourag...
2024-08-09 17:08:59 +0000 UTC View Post
One of my favorite artists is the Czech film-maker Jan Svanjkmajer. He captures a visceral disgust & love for material reality that really brings out a specific, contradictory way of viewing the world. He transfers the ordinary disgust we feel towards things like snails, to common everyday things like eating, sex, animals & mouths. He makes me feel like a pervert with ordinary things, with soup. Jan Svanjkmajer also directed my favorite movie Faust. I love Goethe, but Jan Svankmajer l...
2024-08-09 00:14:33 +0000 UTC View Post
I’m working with Mustafa Bekir & Alex Hagen to art direct the new pieces for the new DUNGEON DEGENERATES expansion boxes (kickstarter live now) & it’s going great. Here are Mustafa’s takes on pieces I did back in 1996!
2024-08-08 19:29:23 +0000 UTC View Post
I just had a big shift in my view of managerial culture. Managerial culture is a company's leadership practice that defines & maintains its work culture. It's made up of the values, norms, practices & behaviors that leaders embrace & it shapes many aspects of the company, including decision-making, employee management & its identity. Managerial Culture has bled into the broader culture for a while. Just because that’s the nature of culture, it mixes upon contact. I’ve oppo...
2024-08-07 16:11:18 +0000 UTC View Post
