Ley Lines, Definitive Games, and Schrödinger's Aspects

I saw a few things this week that resonated with me. I post so I can find them again, and you may find them interesting as well.

Ley Lines
Kobold Press wants your short fiction about Midgard in a contest called Ley Lines. The judging panel includes Wolfgang Baur and Ed Greenwood. The judges' top 5 stories get voted on publicly and the top vote-getter wins a paid writing commission. You've got until March 14, 2014 to submit your best 2000 word Midgard story, so get cracking.

Definitive Games
Daniel Solis blogs about game design, and this week he gave us his 5 picks for genre-definitive games. I've never played Chronicle, but now I'm interested to try the "ultimate" trick-taking game. As a free bonus, he gives us 4 ways to subvert and hack these games into something new and interesting. This is well worth the read.

Double bonus: Glitter Meeples!

Schrödinger's Aspects

OPEN IT! I DARE YOU!

This morning I checked G+ and found this gem by Teo Tayobobayo in the Fate Core community explaining Fate Aspects using Schrödinger's Cat. This explanation really brings Aspects home for me. My series on Schrödinger's Gun GMing uses a very similar technique with the story line of a more traditional "game rules are objective reality" RPG system, so connecting the dots this way for Fate made me internalize the Aspect mechanism in Fate. I think I'm ready to GM a game now - I'll pick up dice when I can. Thanks, Teo!

Business Status Reports
I saw a few posts go by, and anything about the business side of the game industry is always interesting to me...

• State of the Hat March 2014 covers where Evil Hat stands currently.
• Infinity Loop Feb 2014 Report gives a look behind the curtain at Moebius Adventures.

Quick Hits

A few other things caught my eye recently...

• Download free public domain scans of golden age comics. I can hear them screaming to be included in a pulp game.
• A note on roads and cities reminds us that cities don't exist in a vacuum, even in a high-fantasy world.
• Two Queries, Deconstructed walks through a couple of query letters following the loving caress of John Adamus's red pen.
• Crone seeks adventure and fiction writers to pitch short works for their Kickstarter at 5 cents a word for 1500 or 2500 words.

And that's all I've got for you this week.

On Sharing and Thanks

I feel like we're living in a golden age, where so much good content comes out every day. Part of me still wants to capture that as I did with the Weekly Assembly, but I know I'll go mad trying to keep up.

So here's what we do: take a blog post once in a while and either do a straight signal boost as above, or write a riff on it. Take the bounty of online ideas in public spaces and write a few words to say thanks to the authors. We're a community with rampant subcommunities and ragged edges. Take a few minutes once in a while and tip your hat to those who've touched your mind in some way. You may just make someone's day.

Thanks for reading!