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The His Majesty the Worm Bundle presents His Majesty the Worm, a megadungeon-crawling fantasy roleplaying game from Josh McCrowell at Rise Up Comus, plus other material including a "cozy halfling-village game" Under Hill, By Water and its travel expansion Walking Holiday, which might possibly draw some inspiration from a well-known fantasy author.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/HisMajesty



Unfortunately I've received this on a day when I'm feeling seriously tired. I've taken a look and it seems to be well-presented and reasonably coherent, but the rule book alone  is more than 400 pages and I am not going to be able to give it more than a cursory look any time soon, and a game that starts out by wanting me to buy some tarot cards to play it does not automatically get my seal of approval - I suppose the cards aren't much more expensive than a few dice at current prices, but if I bought this, intended to run it immediately, then discovered I needed cards I didn't have I'd be a little peeved.

The halfling book is mostly about trying NOT to have adventures and firmly avoiding the sort of stress that comes with strange parties of dwarves and wizards on your doorstep, and looks to be a lot of fun. The supplement is about halflings that commit the serious mistake of going out to explore beyond their village, and how to create the surrounding area and have horrible things happen there, like running short of food. Seriously, go home and smoke some pipeweed instead, at least that stuff takes a few years to kill you...

Overall this looks to be reasonable value - I suspect that if I ever wanted to run a fantasy RPG I'd be more likely to go with the halflings than the Worm, but if either appeals it's probably worth a look.

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If there was a Time Lord called "The Lawyer" would they be good or evil? What would their TARDIS look like? And what would their reaction be to The Doctor, and vice versa?

Given some of the portrayals of the Time Lord idea of justice in e.g. Trial of a Time Lord I'm not convinced that their legal system is better than e.g. the wizarding world in the Harry Potter books, which is a frighteningly low bar to fail at. Any thoughts on this?

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This is a bundle of bestiaries and sourcebooks from Cawood Publishing containing hundreds of monsters for D&D 5E with conversion advice for Old-School Essentials, Dungeon Crawl Classics, and Pathfinder.

 

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/CawoodMonsters

 

This isn't something I would want to use - I don't run this type of game any more, and I'm not convinced that it makes sense for characters to keep encountering monsters that nobody has ever heard of before, and have to figure out how to defeat them by trial and error. Having said that, the price isn't too bad and you're getting a lot of weird stuff to throw at players. Whether they will thank you for it may be another matter...
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This is a bundle of material for Shadowlands Raven, a gothic horror RPG from Shadowlands Games inspired by Poe and other 19th authors in that vein:

 

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/RavenGothic

 

It looks interesting, it's cheap and I think it's the first RPG I've been offered that comes in multiple languages. And there are cats and ravens, of course...
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Another surreal RPG bundle for Troika!, the acid-fantasy RPG from Melsonian Arts Council; about half of it is new, the rest (rules etc.) has been in previous bundles.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/TroikaWarehouse



Troika is an interesting game with some very varied settings and ideas. I sometimes find the material a little difficult to read due to aggressively varied typography and violently coloured illos, but there are some fun ideas and if you're a fan of different and silly scenario ideas it's worth a look. But if you've bought any of this material before I recommend checking and deciding how much of it you want - cherry-picking may work out cheaper if you're only interested in a couple of the books.

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This is a bundle for "Coriolis - The Third Horizon" from Free League Publishing, an SF game using the Year Zero Engine rules featuring the epic three-part "Mercy of the Icons" campaign:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/CoriolisIcons




I remember this as an interesting SF setting that for once is not based exclusively on Western culture. Parts of this bundle have been in previous bundles and it may be worth checking how much you need - sometimes it can work out cheaper to cherry-pick and just buy the bits you need. I don't think that's true in this case, but I haven't checked.

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This is an offer of the 2nd edition of Green Ronin's Adventure Game Engine FRPG with supplements:

 https://bundleofholding.com/presents/FantasyAGE2E



This is a well-regarded system and the rules are easy to learn, mostly similar to the previous release and broadly compatible with other games from Green Ronin such as The Expanse. One of the supplements covers one a fun subgenre, technofantasy - adventures in a world where magic and forgotten technology are pretty much interchangeable. I'm probably not going to be playing it, since I OD'd on the genre in the seventies and eighties and got fed up with some aspects of fantasy adventuring, but it's relatively cheap and I think it's worth a look if you're interested.

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This is an offering of the game Inevitable, "doomed Arthurian Western RPG rulebook" from SoulMuppet Publishing, available for one week only.

https://bundleofholding.com/promo/list/key/KingMalavan


I'm not convinced that Arthurian mythic structures and the Wild West really go together - but there are a LOT of magical wild west game settings out there (I could mention my own Elvis: The Legendary Tours, for example) and it's probable that some people will find the idea interesting. I'll be honest, I tend to prefer something a little less doom-laden, so it probably isn't one for me. Presentation is pretty good, at a quick look I'm not sure that the rules are explained as well as I would like but I may be being unfair. It's pretty cheap and if you can avoid endless Monty Python jokes it could be worth a look.

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Just an update - it turns out that Omnipage Ultimate is now very cheap, under £10 for lifetime use if you buy it online and download the files etc. A bit of a pain to set up since it's a fair while since I've used Omnipage, it's a bit different to 15, and I'd forgotten some tricks, but I got it working in the end. You can get it here

https://www.softwarerepairworld.com/

They're also doing the 2021 release of Corel Draw pretty cheaply, under £20 and I have a 15% discount code because I bought Omnipage - while Libre Office has its own draw program, I think I might be better off using a program that I already know in its earlier incarnation, hopefully there will be a smaller learning curve. Too tired to make decisions tonight though...

Mac versions are cheaper for some reason, but I prefer a bigger screen than my laptop.
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A bundle of role-playing games on LGBTQ+ themes to celebrate Pride Month

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/PrideGames




I think I remember a couple of these as being in a charity bundle in support of transexual rights in Florida a couple of years ago - I'm not 100% sure since that was a very large bundle. If you bought that you may want to check before buying this one.

Doctor Who

May. 31st, 2025 10:34 pm
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OK - did not see most of that coming...

Really not sure about the New Doctor or how they'll explain it, but good fun anyway. Goodish explanation for the bone monsters, a good resolution for the babies, and leaves me wanting more.
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Solved my initial lot of worries, as mentioned in last night's post:

Word processing etc - Libre Office seems to meet my needs well enough

Corel Draw replacement - Again, Libre Office seems to work well enough

Adobe Acrobat - Installed without problems and hopefully will work

Scanner - Also installed without problems, if anything seems better than it was on Windows 10

Now the exciting new problem... My Omnipage Pro 15 OCR software install couldn't happen, because I've lost the install serial number somewhere in the last decade or so. Also, I wasn't a huge fan of its user interface. Can anyone point me at a good alternative that won't break the bank? SimpleOCR is apparently free but has a clunky user interface, anyone got any good alternatives?

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AKA the problem with photos...

....is that I'm now backing up 64,366 of them to a USB drive. A LOT of those are pictures from eBay listings which I intermittently try to delete once the items have been sold - I think the last time I did this I was up to roughly the 400th directory out of nearly 3000. I can't just delete the lot because there are family photos in there too, and other pictures that I want to keep, while selective deletion takes a lot of time. It's easier just to copy the lot and putting them onto the new computer. I am, in other words, solving this problem by not solving it, and postponing the next round of deletion indefinitely.

Good thing the new computer has a 1TB SSD and 2TB HD!


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Gradually sorting out the transfer to Windows 11 and facing the fact that a lot of my old software is VERY old now.

In particular, I think that it is probably time for me to replace Office 2003 with something a little more recent, but I really prefer something a lot more minimalist than later versions of Office - I really hate the way the menus occupy such a big part of the screen - is Open Office Libre Office a bit more user friendly than it used to be? And is it fully compatible with older Word, Excel, etc. files? I'm downloading it anyway, but if there are alternatives I should look at please let me know.
- Later: I think Libre Office should be OK for my purposes.

I also need something like Adobe Acrobat pro for PDF file creation - previously using Acrobat X from 2010 - you can create PDFs by printing from a lot of applications, but if you want to replace pages etc. or make the  table of contents link to the relevant page etc. or get rid of all the non-displayed bloat that finds its way into documents you need something better. Given the price of later versions I would appreciate suggestions on alternates.
- Update, I may have been panicking over noting - when I summoned up the nerve to try it, Acrobat installed without problems - haven't tried any big documents yet, but it's a good start.

Finally, I gather that Coreldraw 12 is not going to work - it was badly unstable on Windows 10 so I'm not surprised. Inkscape seems to be the recommended alternative and is free, any good alternatives?
- Later: looks like Libre Office is pretty good for this too.

Also, it looks like my scanner is not supported at all - any suggestions for a basic flatbed scanner that isn't hideously expensive?
Sorted; on a hunch I tried installing the last version, for Windows 7, and it works perfectly - in fact I think it was easier than when I installed it on windows 7...

ffutures: steapunk dalek (dalek)
Anyone else suspect that the Doctor's canonical ability to speak Baby will be an important plot point in Saturday's episode?
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This is a bundle of "system-agnostic" material for RPGs in a wide variety of genres from Sine Nomine Publishing:

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Sine2025



Last time I said "There's some good stuff in here, but a lot of it has been in previous bundles - if you've bought many of them it may be a good idea to cost out whether it will be cheaper to buy the remaining things that you want piecemeal, rather than getting the whole bundle." That still applies, but if you bought this bundle in 2023 there's no need to look, you've already got all of it.
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This is an offer of Grim Hollow from Ghostfire Gaming, a "grimdark fantasy Fifth Edition setting"

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/GrimHollow



Really not my sort of thing at all, but possibly of interest to some of you.

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Still trying to decide if the plot owes more to It's A Good Life, Those Who Walk Away From Omelas, or A Wrinkle in Time. Too much bloody CGI anyway...
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This is an offer of the Awfully Cheerful Engine RPG from EN Publishing, described as a cinematic pop-culture action-comedy RPG.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/Cheerful



This one is interesting - the rules system is deliberately kept simple and easy to understand, using mechanics seen previously in games like the Ghostbusters RPG, and the book contains eight fairly detailed settings with adventures. Inspiration for the settings/adventures includes big city ghost-chasing, archeological adventuring, a "high school with weird science" setting, teenage mutant thingies, and so forth. It's fun and cheap, and definitely well worth a look if you like its freewheeling style of play, and it should be easy to adapt the adventures to any RPG that isn't too rules-heavy, or import adventures for other system-light games to this one. Recommended!
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This is another offer for the Old School Essentials RPG which was offered yesterday - a collection of third party adventures from other publishers, also compatible with Basic / Expert D&D.

https://bundleofholding.com/presents/OSETreasures2



Lots of stuff here for old-school dungeon bashing, and if that's your style of play it may be worth a look.

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