A trader selling herbal medicine, her beautiful children, and a trail of empty cribs. +++ A DAY FROM TOWN, BY A MUDDY BANK Auntie Sa is breaking camp. Her four daughters douse the fire pit; her two sons load fist-sized jars and child-sized urns onto handcarts. Her youngest boy sits on a log. Auntie Sa towels his head dry. He sits hunched, staring into space, arms pressed to his chest like a rat, like an insect. + AUNTIE SA’S MIRACLE MIX Auntie Sa sells medicine, not pottery—jars of paste ...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
Names of places come difficult for me, too! I wrote Lorn Song as being suitable for slotting into any "peripheral" territory---ie: any region outside a metropole / imperial core. When I write places like this I tend to think in my mind that they are part of an upland, or the uplands. I like this generic name; it feels real, true to the area's relationships. Locals would call their homes by affectionate, descriptive names, things close to them. It is mainly cartographers and conquerors (and of...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
rovee-eats-art: Made this for the crocodile, thought they deserved some fanart cause I love them so much and I couldn’t stop thinking about them. ^———^ ( Ó w Ò) Hi @zedecksiew ( 👉🏻👈🏻) V——-V !!! Somebody made fan art of my crocodile! Ahhh!!!| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
LIFE CYCLE A seed from a divine source, the tree it grows into, and the demon that follows. +++ THIRTY YEARS AGO, AS THE SUN SET Prau Sa Pritiya danced. Her chest shivered, her hips swayed—she so stirred the god of hunters that he shook his house of sky. That night there was a meteor shower: the stars fell, and set the forest afire. That night the god of hunters fell in love with Prau Sa Pritiya. + STAR SEED Divine milt. Freshly spilt, it burns hot as a furnace. Any tool forged in its heat ...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
(Photos: Patrick Stuart, Scrap) Attention As Devotion In Nottingham we visited the Museum Of Curiosities. It boasts “haunted items from around the world”, gathered via its owner’s “paranormal investigations and his contacts within the world of the macabre”. Mummies, tools from Victorian morgues, dybbuk boxes. Basically: goth Halloween kitsch. Besides a shelf of “spell kits”, I took no photographs, inside. I have to admit I was unnerved. Back home, a collection claiming to exhibi...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
(Photo by Shuyi) A CROCODILE, EATING is an installation work, ritual performance, and shrine. It is part of WEIRD HOPE ENGINES, a contemporary visual art exhibition about tabletop roleplaying games, running at Bonington Gallery, Nottingham, UK from now until 10 May 2025. If you ask me to build a world, I will build a crocodile. On linoleum flooring, stones are arranged into the shape of a saltwater crocodile. Embedded in the stones, on the crocodile’s back, are bowls, jars and platters of a...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
JUDGEMENT IS A BLADE She is a good sorcerer, but a poor disciple. She finds it difficult to concentrate. When she arrives the bell has been struck—the lesson has already started. The teacher looks at her sideways. The teacher sighs, closes his eyes, and continues. “Judgement is a blade,” he says. “When you judge another,” the teacher says, “you thrust a dagger at their chest. It may be that you cause a wound.” She sits on her meditation cushion, and tries to settle. “When you ...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
Last weekend, 7-9 March, Sharon and I hosted a party. Because: It was my birthday the week before; Sharon’s “Portal” work, which began on our local beach, then travelled to the 9th Asian Art Biennial in Taiwan, needed to come home again; Sharon had to film a short educational documentary about her practice with the National Gallery Singapore; We made ShrineShare last year, but had yet to show the project in our hometown; It is always fun to give our friends a holiday, especially during ...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
THE PONTIANAK, IN FICTION The following is one of a pairs of essays I wrote as a Stretch Goal for A PERFECT WIFE. Pretty basic stuff for hantu aficionados, of course. But it is designed as orientation for GMs / players who are unfamiliar with the Malaysian context—a primer of the pontianak’s pop-cultural significance; an author’s note for why I wanted to treat her story the way I did. This essay—alongside another essay titled “The Supernatural, in Southeast Asia—will appear as app...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
What happens when a toxic man forcibly marries a murderous vampiress? A PERFECT WIFE is an adventure of contemporary supernatural horror, featuring the Malaysian pontianak, set in modern-day Kuala...| Tumblr
On 31 January 2024, the tabletop-roleplaying-game community voted for the Best Blog Post Of 2023. Contenders were drawn from the winners of four categories. Links, as well as their very excellent...| Tumblr
A PERFECT WIFE (It is Vampire Weekend! Have a pontianak-themed urban-horror investigative adventure. I wrote it with Kuala Lumpur in mind, but it should work for any big city just fine.) +++ DISAPPEARANCES An inner-city neighbourhood, too ugly for gentrification. Refugees have settled here. They fled war in their own country. But they have not escaped violence. People work basement sweatshops, or clean toilets in nightclubs. They stumble home in the morning dark. At dawn, their neighbours fin...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
EDIT: Freddie Foulds over on Bluesky found the post for me! It was a Chris McDowall post: Alien Dojos. This is now a fan post about the genius that is Alien Dojos. Every martial art described there (for use with Into The Odd) has a resolution mechanic that involves doing something tactile with dice, beyond just rolling. For “Bafistan Fist Fighting” each punch is a d6, “rolled” by “throwing them into the air and punching them”—but you have to punch them in such a way they still l...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
This post is a brain-fart—me trying to jot a thought, lurking and seeing TTRPG folks react to GNS Theory for the upteenth time. + Context: GNS Theory seeks to frame, understand, categorise, and model tabletop roleplay—and, via this framework, suggest solutions and improvements to the craft of TTRPG design as a whole. Understanding GNS Theory, it is asserted, will allow you to create better-designed (“more coherent”) games. Edwards compares the utility of understanding GNS to that of u...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
At her funeral Silver’s children did not cry. Their grief was dry as pyre kindling. They said: “We will sail east past the border. We will search for our mother in the shoals of the dead. We will bring her home to the warmth of the sun. We will see her smile again.” They were Samry the brother, older and bolder; and Sellie his sister, smaller and smarter. They spoke such words, such oaths against nature. Their kinfolk shushed them quick. “Fool children! Do not blaspheme,” their kinf...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
The opening of my soon-to-be-real Cairn RPG adventure, The Tide Returning, is a crime scene. The king of Zum and his sceptre has gone missing in the night. Hired to find him, you are allowed a tour of the royal bedchambers, to find clues to where he’s gone. Design objectives for this opening: Give players an idea of who and where their quarry is. Who did the king prefer spending time with? Why did he write a letter to the governor of a nearby town? Why was he swimming the span of the canal?...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
David Blandy + Daniel Locke’s post-apocalyptic hopepunk TTRPG ECO MOFOS is back from the printers. Meaning it will soon be in our hands. Am fairly hyped for it, because I wrote an adventure! To Put Away A Sword is about the woes of building a home on poisoned earth. The terrible powers that hurtled us to the end of the world continue to bear bitter fruit in your garden. You are villagers living under the shadow of a fallen giant mecha. Its reactors and warheads leak into your groundwater, p...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
Neon Genesis Evangelion was my whole identity, when I was fifteen. I was an angsty boy from a small town. I longed to have a fiery redhead be mean to me (or to just meet one); to be part of world-ending events (or to be part of a clique that mattered); to pilot a god (or to just feel powerful in my own body). As I grew up I’ve managed to sublimate those longings, I guess? All my middle-age aches tell me my body is friend who cannot be taken for granted; their are not a flesh-tool. On good w...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
Ngeng ap Ten was no grandaunt then—her breasts stood high, her arms were masts, her hair flowed like the night breeze freely. And like all young chieftesses she was quick to folly. She would not flee from a fight. She looked at the Zum King, saw his soft belly, his pale lips. She judged that she could not lose. She would have been right. She kissed her spear and said: “I accept your challenge, o king. Should I win you will never seek me again, and live in peace always.” He pointed his s...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
So: I do not like the idea of TTRPGs making formal mechanics designed to incentivise ethical play. But, to be honest, I do not like the idea of any single game pushing any particular formal mechanics about ethical play at all. So here I am, trying to think through the reasons why, and proposing a solution. (Sort of. A procedure, really.) + Assumptions: 1. Some genres of game resist ethical play. A grand strategy game dehumanises people into census data. The fun of a shooter is violence. This ...| Zedeck Siew's Writing Hours
