Gabriel is stocking up for an increasingly elaborate Stream Excursion, having recently found the serrated edge where streaming from the same box you're playing on ceases to be an authentic option. What's more, he'd been using the Very Small Stream Deck from El Gato, which I think they officially call the Stream Deck Mini, and determined that once he was trying to run a stream with multiple overlays designed to incorporate the whole family Six Buttons was perilously close to No Buttons. I suggested that perhaps the Stream Deck Mobile app might give him some breathing room, creating a kind of virtual configurable deck, but I knew deep down that this rhetoric was not a good time investment. Eric Benson, brewmaster for Acquisitions Intoxicated, put forward that you can make nested menus on the Deck itself, virtually extending its payload, but I have spent enough time with Gruber to know that only a larger deck with more buttons would be acceptable. He currently has the one with fifteen buttons. I'll let you know if he jumps to the thirty-two.

You can preorder the Sea of Thieves RPG, which is a real thing, from Mongoose right here if you think that might be something you're interested in; such preorders come with access to a PDF of the same content so we had a chance to dig around in there.

It’s true that I’ve done a lot of work trying to incorporate Sea of Thieves into D&D. Unlike the comic, however I’m not mad that there is an actual SoT role playing game on the way. There are a lot of reasons to sit around a table with your family and tell stories together. I will tell you that one of the reasons I did it is to help my son Noah who has struggled (like his Dad) with math. D&D has a lot of numbers in it and you're often being asked to quickly add, subtract and even multiply. These are all things that Noah really needed help with but the normal methods of practicing these skills, like flash cards and pages of number problems were not working for him. His test scores were getting very low and Kara and I were not sure what to do next. We decided to try and use D&D to see if that could help Noah focus and work on his numbers.

We have I guess what is called an "integration" or, legally, a "sponsorship" with Idle Champions Of The Forgotten Realms from Codename Entertainment. Essentially people can complete Omin's quests in Idle Champs, and they can shift events in the stream game. If I was gonna do something like this, I wanted it (a) to matter and (b) not be too unctuous; I think we managed to chart a good course.

I've been playing a ton of Dauntless recently. It's a monster hunting game and when someone finds the behemoth they fire a flare up into the sky to alert the other slayers. The Dauntless folks have been coming to PAX for a few years and giving out these cool PAX flares that you can equip in game. Essentially it launches a big firework into the sky that spells out PAX. It will work on any platform but the steps to redeem the code are a little convoluted. I'm going to post them here just to I have a place to point people towards. If you want to snag a code you can keep an eye on my Twitter and watch our streams whenever we play Dauntless.

Gabriel has described Sea of Thiefs as a "costume trunk," which I think is apt, but it's also a kind of free-range madhouse where ravening packs of youths can be teens without the justice their wayward acts should rightly accrue. Just so it's clear: I bear no authentic ill-will against teens. I have one of your number in my home and I'm quite fond of him.

As we suggest in the strip, bad contracts and professional myopia are phenomena we know something about. Let me start with the first part, which is to say that you straight up, flat-out don't know how to read contracts. This is just what I was thinking about when it comes to something like the Tfue stuff, but he's already a multimillionaire and this was all pretext anyway. Social media enables a kind of mystical, extrajudicial space and there's no guarantee that's going to be extended to you in any way you're gonna like. Better to make sure your wards are in place ahead of time.

I can remember when Gabe was telling me about Dauntless, a game we'd never heard of in a booth we'd never seen before at PAX South. Gabe spent most of his time there, and the promise seemed to be a free to play Monster Hunter. And that's more or less what they did.

Gabriel and I tend to approach things so differently that we can often accurately predict how the other will feel about something, simply by modeling our own position at a high level of detail and then inverting it. One thing we do agree on is that, if we are really enjoying a game, we will often stop somewhere near the end.

I was all kindsa ready to get down on this Rage 2 stuff, the id Software/Avalanche combo has the texture of a summer mixtape, and every video up until now was deeply weird in a way that made me appreciate whoever had decided to pay for all this - a sequel to something that felt more like Engine than Game, for which I bear them no ill will. Why you would do it, and then how it could then manifest this kind of manic energy, is the kind of impossible horseshit that I naturally gravitate toward. It had that indie, auteur patina. We loved Mad Max, even when stupid people said it was bad.

I'm typing this on Thursday because I am getting up at eff o'clock on Friday to pick up Amy and go the Airport so I go down - literally down, on a map - to The Descent. Which is a D&D Event celebrating the new campaign stuff! Our own book comes out next month (!!!), June 18th, but the Multiverse has continued to spin in the meantime, and down seems like a scary direction. Let's see where they end up taking us.

I disagree man.

Giving Star Wars to the Game Of Thrones people is a fascinating choice, particularly as these creators grow more spent and villainous in perception with every passing episode. I would have given it to Deadwood's David Milch, but that's just me. As Star Wars is largely about Lineage, of course, Carnivale's Daniel Knauf would also work. I mean, while we're giving it to HBO people. What we need in truth is an HBO Star Wars series, not another Trilogy. But anyway.

There's an article on Venture Beat, which is a website, about how a proposed anti-loot box bill has zero chance of passing. It wouldn't surprise me at all if it didn't pass. Like most legislation, I suspect it constitutes a kind of opportunistic fan-fiction. Also, nobody has any idea what they're fucking talking about.

My version of hell is one where my mind operates incorrectly. It's one thing to just be more "enthusiastic" than usual about adjectives; for me, any increase over my already taut baseline shoves the whole operation into space. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a fever-borne state of mind where every physical act is coupled with an imaginary purpose in a dreamscape based on rural Oregon, such that needing to cough correlates to placing a fencepost and actually coughing is digging a hole. It went on like this for ten sleepless hours, and I say ten hours because that is what the clock told me, for that evil place had no relationship to time. I sweated through three pillows. Even under the best circumstances, this is not the body you would choose. Being super wet does not elevate its virtues.

I have been seized by a terrible illness, unfortunately not the kind of illness that would lend vigor to my upcoming mixtape. No, it's more the kind of illness associated with disease. You might note that at the bottom of the strip, in the lower right hand corner, the name Amy is visible - this is a reference to Amy T Falcone, Strip Search alum and repper of the natural world, but also our good friend. So good a friend, in fact, that she colored the strip on stream while Gabriel stuffed his mouth with hot chicken. Thus was the credit earned.