This is Monday Musings #150. There will be six more after this one. Then I’m wrapping the series. Three years of Mondays. Six more, and out. A complete campaign arc with a proper ending.

When I started Monday Musings back in June 2023, I didn’t have a plan. I had Cortex Prime in front of me, Lifted: Indomitable in pieces on my desktop, and the suspicion that if I didn’t write something every Monday I’d never write anything at all. 149 issues later, the discipline did its job. The work got made. The space got found — you showed up. I built habits I didn’t have. I learned to articulate what I actually think about prep, about player agency, about the difference between running a game and steering one. I didn’t learn those things by sitting and thinking. I learned them by writing to you on Mondays, deconstructing the tables and social gatherings of the previous week.

That’s the thing about a weekly newsletter — it’s not really for the reader. Or it isn’t only for the reader. It’s a forcing function. A weekly Monday is a writer holding their own feet to the fire and saying: something has to ship today, even if it’s a scatter of notes after a tornado week. And some weeks it was a scatter of notes.

Because the thing that made Monday Musings useful is also what’s holding me back from making the next thing. When you commit to Mondays, you start optimizing for Mondays. You write what fits a Monday. You think in 800-word-ish increments because that’s what a Monday holds. You start three deeper essays and finish none of them, because Monday can hold them.

I’ve got pieces I want to write that don’t fit a Monday. Played: It reviews that need a month of actual play under their belt. Tools and resources that take real cooking time. The Back Room posts I want to send to paying readers about things actually in process, not packaged after the fact. A zine. A move off Substack. An actual publishing rhythm built around depth instead of frequency.So I’m choosing the other work.

I’m not going to drag this out. The runway is short and intentional:

That’s the plan. I’ll change it if something better shows up, but that’s the shape today.

This isn’t burnout. I’m not running on empty. I’m running on the opposite — there’s more work I want to do than I have hours, and Monday Musings has become the thing I do instead of the thing I want to do next. I gotta switch that up.

This isn’t goodbye. I’m not going anywhere. The newsletter continues — the format changes. Play Fearless is the body of work, the thing. Monday Musings was a chapter inside it. A long, useful, formative chapter. But a chapter.

What’s coming instead: A monthly-ish Played It review with a real month of table time behind it. Tools and resources I’ve been wanting to make for a while now. The Back Room becoming a regular thing for paid readers, where the in-process work lives. And the occasional standalone musing when something needs to be said. Roughly thirty-eight posts a year instead of fifty-two — closer to one a week, with breathing room baked in. The whole rhythm built around depth instead of frequency. Issue #156 will lay out the full schedule, including where the newsletter is moving and how to come along.

Stick around for the next six. They’re going to be the best of the series, because I know they’re the last ones. The pressure of “must ship Mondays” gets replaced with “make these count.”

If you’ve got a Musing that hit you — early or recent, doesn’t matter — reply and tell me which one. I’m building the Greatest Crits zine right now, and reader picks carry weight that the open-rate data doesn’t capture.

Six more Mondays.

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