David Stark
I really enjoy looking at speculative xenobiology, which is to say made-up alien creatures. However, there's a number of things about the genre I find frustrating and samey. In this post, I want to look at how we can imagine aliens that are more interesting but still plausible. Now to be clear,...
David Stark
I've been ill over the last few days, probably as an inevitable consequence of doing so many events in January. So I've been playing a fair amount of Sunless Sea, a great game if you're ill, because it's quite soothing in a "dark sea filled with monsters" kind of way. And as always when I play...
David Stark
The last few years have seen a number of games attempting to reinvigorate the Space 4X game. They have all been disappointments. The trouble is that Master of Orion II still looms large. New games not only have to compete against it on their own merits. They have to be both better than MoO2 and at...
David Stark
I recently read A Mountain Walked, a compilation of modern writing based on HP Lovecraft. I quite enjoyed the stories. Then I read The Litany of Earth by Ruthanna Emrys, and re-evaluated the stories in the compilation: they were actually really, awfully shallow. Modern writing based on the...