dormouse1953

This is the a repeat offer of the Fellowship Bundle which presents (for a third time!) the Liberi Gothica Games FRPG of heroism against world-shattering odds, Fellowship.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Fellow2026

The first time this was offered I said: "I have to be honest here - I've been "off" fantasy RPGs for a long time, and am not a huge fan of the Apocalypse Engine rules set. And the subject matter doesn't really appeal much, in my experience the most epic thing about most epic quests is how badly they get screwed up once the players are in the mix. Having looked at some of this material, I don't feel that it is especially well presented - the overwhelming impression I got from some of it was clutter, too much crammed into too small a space. Admittedly one of my recent reviews complained about another bundle where it seemed that there was not enough content per page, but there needs to be a balance, and I'm not sure it's been achieved here. This isn't really something I want. But if you've been thinking of running a huge epic quest campaign it's possible that this is exactly what you need, so don't let me stop you!

Unfortunately my opinion hasn't changed much. More books were added when this was last offered in 2023 (if you previously bought the first version of the full bundle you should have got the new books free) which extends the possibilities of this series, but I'm still not very interested.

ffutures

This is a bundle of "system-neutral" material for SF RPGs, consisting mostly of percentage tables for generating planets, alien races, etc. etc., by Jason Lutes and published by Lampblack & Brimstone. There's also an adventure with setting etc. designed using the tables

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/PerilousVoid

This is cheap and has a lot of useful ideas if you want to create an adventure background in a hurry. Like most random generation systems the results will probably need some tweaking, and adaption for the rules in use, but it's cheap and ought to be useful. And it's time I posted my occasional reminder that I get to look at this stuff free - if you have to pay for it your mileage may vary.

denise posting in

dw_maintenance

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

history_monk

I've mentioned Ed Zitron's writing on "Artificial Intelligence" before. He's a good counter to all the hype, which isn't based on much that's measurable, and seem to be based on the desperation of Software-as-a-Service companies to have something new to sell. Personally, my bullshit meter is hair-trigger. It may mean I miss out on some things, but I've found that anything being promoted really hard is of more benefit to the vendor than it is to me.

Yesterday he posted a piece ("AI Is Really Weird") on the bizarre economics of LLM promotion, which now has Silicon Valley companies such as Meta (aka Facebook) pushing software developers to use as much "AI" computation power as possible, even if it's being used inefficiently. Meta is running a leader-board and making it an explicit competition. There's a definite pattern of CEOs getting their brains twisted by successful demonstrations and wanting "All AI, all the time." They also hope to get rid of lots of expensive staff and make the jobs of the retained staff less secure.

But the motives of the "AI" companies in burning so much money subsidising their users were a bit less obvious. Until you get cynical.

Loss-leading to get customers locked in makes good sense, if your lock-in is solid.
If customers get rid of staff under the impression they can replace them with "AI" then they're stuck with the "AI" in the short term.
Hiring and training staff is expensive, and modern managers hate admitting they're wrong.
It's much easier to carry on doing a poor job and being fashionable.
So the "AI" vendors are letting their customers impale themselves firmly on the hook before starting to wind up the pricing.
That means that most of the datacentres that were announced but don't seem to be being built are part of the hype. When prices rise, usage will inevitably fall somewhat, so the existing datacentres will probably do the job.

Current Mood: cynical
Current Location: Mum's flat

ffutures

This is a bundle of material for Runecairn from By Odin's Beard, a one player / one GM game system based on Norse legend, plus We Deal in Lead, a weird west gunfighter RPG based on the same rules-set, and a quickstart primer for their new game of serial killer investigation, Midnight of the Century.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Runecairn

Due to travelling over the weekend and losing all my passwords and email access (thanks, Apple and Google), I have to apologise for the delay in posting this one. I've still got 80+ emails to deal with and lots of other things to sort out so I haven't really looked at this in any detail. It looks pretty cheap and is probably worth a look if you like one on one play.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
	1	2	3	4	5	6
7	8	9	10	11	12	13
14	15	16	17	18	19	20
21	22	23	24	25	26	27
28	29	30

Reading

Another repeat Bundle - Fellowship

Another SF Bundle - Perilous Void

The case of the missing notifications

Trying for addiction to Artificial Stupidity

Another Fantasy Bundle - Runecairn

Profile

September 2025

Most Popular Tags

Page Summary

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags