The post schedule around this blog hasn’t been the smoothest as of late. Between life’s pressures and unexpected tragedies such as rock legends (and personal heros) dying , it's not hard to imagine how that would impact a regular day. Unfortunately for our dear readers, one of the things that has kept me from writing over the past few weeks is vacation. Though, while one might expect they'd get more writing done on a vacation, the fact of the matter is that taking your whole family on a trip, even limited to those living in your own household, is something of a job in itself. Vacation is what I want to talk about this week, though, so perhaps it works out after all. While I may have previously talked about gaming while on vacation and finding inspirations in your trips , or even taking a vacation from your weekly gam e,  this week I want to look at something a bit different: giving the characters a vacation.  Time to Party Our characters in tabletop roleplaying ga...

There's something seriously, seriously wrong. You know it, I know it... but more than that, we all can  feel  it.  Anybody who consumes media, especially narrative media, feels it. Every round of layoffs, every cowardly kowtowing to censorious bigots, every work suddenly made unavailable, every creator screwed over... there's a  lot  and it's happening so constantly that it's easy to forget that  it didn't use to be like this . And it ain't like capitalism is anything new, but the system's never been so dead-set on eating itself like it has been the past few... I was going to say "years," but really, it's accelerated to an unfathomable degree over the past few  months . We're going to need to stop and take stock of what's going on and what we need to prepare for, as both consumers and creators. Did this whirlwind have a starting point, the flap of a butterfly's wing or the the first tightness in a coalmine canary's tiny chest? C...