Book of Destiny Preview: Cover Art

See the really spectacular picture above that I commissioned for the cover of The Book of Destiny! It features three of the many awesome characters that you'll find in the story.

The main characters mostly fall into three groups, so I thought it was important that the cover represent one from each. Going from left to right, you have the following:

Book of Destiny Preview: Teaser

“Your world is so much more fragile than humanity knows.”

The worlds of the multiverse are in chaos.

A group known as 'wolves' has made a mission of destroying smaller worlds.

The void pours through rips in the Essence of varying worlds, and it tears apart the order that it finds so offensive.

Rumors circle about the return of mankind's greatest threat: dragons.



It's time to fight back. Hunt down the wolves. Patch up the rips. Stop the return of the dragons. Bring order to the world.

But can it all be done?

Find out in:

The Book of Destiny

Value of Fiction: Hope

Artist Matthew Inman of The Oatmeal

An important role that fiction sometimes plays is to give people hope. I know many people who have particular books that they turn to when things feel down or overwhelming in their own lives. In many cases, it's the Harry Potter series.

Everyone has moments that seem dark to them individually-the death of a loved one, financial ruin, the loss of a friendship, medical depression, etc. For all these things, there are stories, fictional or not, that have people overcoming the same challenges-or symbolically similar ones. When executed well and with consideration paid to those suffering, this can be reassuring to an individual that is going through suffering, even if the story is wholly fictional.

Descent into Laughter

I have very clear goals for what I need to focus on completing this month...

So, of course, I've gotten distracted by a smaller more personal project.

I recently tried to run a Numenera game for new players, mostly unfamiliar with tabletop RPGs or the setting of the Ninth World. I was using one of the adventures from Weird Discoveries. These adventures are designed to be run with little to no prep and sort of be the sort of thing one could recommend in the place of a board game. My experience running some of these with my regular players is that they have taken roughly 1.5-2 hours. We spent 3+ hours playing and didn't finish the adventure.

Which is fine. And I think that the players mostly had a good time, which is good. That's the objective.

But I was a bit surprised by how...slowly things seemed to go. Which isn't my normal experience with Numenera/Cypher System. Especially since I had chosen something I thought would be fast/exciting for my new players. I don't think either my players or I did anything wrong, and, as I said, it wasn't a bad experience. It just wasn't the experience I'd expected to have.

I spent a lot of time questioning if there was something that I could have run which would have been more in line with my objectives.

My objective was this: to find something that could introduce new players to roleplaying games with a simple system and fast-paced/exciting adventure.

Thus began my Descent.

Ruins & Robots Announcement

Humanity is gone. In their absence, robot-kind has grown and raised up its own civilization. 

I recently posted on my Facebook page about some of my upcoming projects, including (but not limited to Ruins & Robots. So, for those of you wondering, here's a little more about what that's all about.

Ruins and Robots is an upcoming series of books that I am working on. Like Heroism and Other Lies, these will be shorter books (between 15,000 and 30,000 words).

The Last Jedi: Lies and Heroism

Perhaps you've heard, a new Star Wars movie was released last week. I had a lot of different thoughts on it, so I figured I would share them with you, whoever you are.

I liked the movie overall. I accept that it had some flaws, but most/many of them I can justify and understand. The only thing that I can't really justify is the amount of attempted humor throughout the movie. I didn't think it was anywhere near as excessive as Thor: Ragnarok, but I also think it feels a bit more out of place when it does show up. I didn't really have a problem with it, since I felt like they placed it in okay places, but I know people who really did.

It's impossible to share the rest of my thoughts without spoilers, so consider this your SPOILER WARNING

If you do not want to see spoilers for The Last Jedi (and potentially other Star Wars movies), read no further. Bookmark or save this page, and come back when you have seen the movie. Seriously. I am going to spoil almost every major point or twist.

The Wrong Wolf

Image Copyright Disney 2015

I recently re-watched the movie Tomorrowland. Released in 2015, Disney's Tomorrowland is a very thematic movie that has a good message and, like most science fiction movies that aren't already a part of a major franchise, it was not a financial success.


I don't blame this entirely on the movie being science fiction. I liked it a lot, but I also accept that it's not a great movie. And while I like the theme and the message it's trying to send, I think it raises a very valid problem while its solution is somewhere in between too general and too implausible to be useful.


But that's only sort of tangential to the point. In the movie, the characters reference a "story" about two wolves. In real life, it's actually an old Cherokee Legend.