frogmagog

[frogmagog]

New game I put out for a 36 word RPG jam, about heroes and the tales people weave around them.

[frogmagog]

Some Thoughts on Demonic Cults

I have a certain fascination with the ideology underpinning demonic cults in fantasy worlds. I won’t claim there’s any terribly profound reason - I don’t think imagining a cult of Juiblex really says something meaningful about the darkness in our souls or the underpinning psychology of real-life cults or anything like that. But I find it a very fun exercise, in the pure sense of fantasy imagination, to consider what circumstances, ideas, or experiences would drive someone to embrace values usually seen as perfectly evil.

It’s also just good game design. To illustrate why, I’m reminded of a campaign I played in sometime ago, running Out of the Abyss. We entered a city, and we were warned of The Pudding King - a gnomish acolyte of Juiblex who was threatening the city. I was playing a manipulative, cunning, and incredibly physically fragile (I had specifically taken lower Con than was usually allowed) Warlock. For several sessions after learning about our upcoming enemy, I worked to learn more about the man who became The Pudding King - his motives, his past, and his possible weaknesses. I was excited to take advantage of planning and manipulation to get the better of the enemy, where sheer force might put me in danger. But the Pudding King had no past. 

Now I don’t blame the GM for this really, it was their first campaign, and they simply ran it according to the book. And the book gave absolutely no reason behind The King’s turn to worship of ooze. He is simply insane (even listed as a feature in his statblock) and so he worships demons. My problem here is not that a demon worshipper needs complex, sympathetic, richly-realised motivations - it could be as simple as wanting power, or revenge, or wealth. But if you don’t give them something, then you totally cut off the potential for player interaction. If a cultist wants bloodshed, that informs what distractions, persuasive tactics or threats will or will not work against them. If a cultist wants nothing, then the cultist can only be overcome with bloodshed. To put it simply - this is boring.

Reading Against the Cult of the Reptile God, I was struck with how deep back this goes into D&D’s history. In this adventure, the Reptile God (a Spirit Naga named Explictica Defilus, which to be fair does rule as a name) is charming villagers into joining her cult. Through the device of supernatural charm, no other motive is necessary. This serves to keep the situation nice and tidy, more Invasion of the Body Snatchers than The Wicker Man - there are Good Villagers, and Evil Cultists. The former must be protected, and the latter must be defeated. This keeps the focus of the scenario straightforward, and avoids getting bogged down in the history of Orlane, the faith of Merikka, or any of the other things I’d probably spend far too many sessions on.

Still, I found throughout the whole module the only character who caught my attention in any real way was the one willing cultist: Derek Desleigh. He’s not the deepest character; he is evil, he is scarred, and he very much enjoys killing people. Despite this the very fact that he has chosen to work with the cultists makes him fascinating to me. His motive seems to just be hoarding embezzled funds from the town while he can, and getting out when the going gets tough. But it raises so many interesting possibilities - is he disgusted by Explictica? Respectful? Dismissive? Do any of the other cultists suspect his dubious motives? Could he be persuaded to aid the PCs, if convinced it was the safer bet? Even the sliver of a motive and a background adds so much potential intrigue. Its not about moral nuance - Desleigh is probably the most personally evil character in the village - but it provides texture, and I believe texture is the essence of good scenario design.

Even Explictica herself is given no real motive for her actions. She collects treasure, and feeds, and is growing her cult, but whether she collects treasure for hoarding or for use is unclear, as is her endgame once she owns all of Orlane. Again, this is fine, I don’t need her to be much more than a boss, and the simplicity of this kind of adventure can be pleasantly straightforward. Still, I find I wish we got just a little of what worship she demands.

[frogmagog]

The Veins of God Micro-Setting

For the Tiny World TTRPG Jam, I put together The Veins of God, a micro-setting designed for dark fantasy TTRPGs. Inspired by Souls games, Earthsea, old school dungeon crawling, and general metal fantasy moods, dive into The Temple of Narafel - a four page long guide to the largest, creepiest temple around.

[frogmagog]

you probably thought today was a normal Monday. nooooope. strong as fuck ice mummy again, sorry.

[frogmagog]

concept: guy who leaves a lot of comments in their code which should be good but the problem is they're all written like this

[frogmagog]

you’re fooling yourselves if you think halloween is over just because halloween is over

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[frogmagog]

HOGS will now trade with you

HOGS will now accept you into their guilds

HOGS will no longer be aggressive unless provoked

[frogmagog]

look! someone got hit in the boingloings

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[frogmagog]

while i tend to be uncharitable towards pale (seeing a story you really like go directions you don't want that you think actively hurt it while watching people uncritically praise every new development and meme character for three years tends to make you jaded!) i do think some people get a little silly about dissing a web serial they haven't read so like. to just put it down here.

i do think early pale is objectively one of wildbow's best works. like. the rotating three perspectives are used extremely well. the characters read as convincing and likable children, the cast is excellent, especially the starting Others. it's an alternate, lighter look at a dark setting and it works. the fact that the mystery isn't the premise so much as figuring out the problem of "how do we handle that some of these Others want to get rid of us". or later "how do we properly confront these people without being too cruel because society's already done that to them".

that's like. arcs 1-3. arcs 4-7 are also, i think, good, even if it's ultimately a diversion and some of the simplified messaging around Other treatment is a bit eh. alexander and bristow have a lot of character and while they're more straightforward pure antagonists it's fun to watch them be petty. the trio interacting with traditional practitioners is fun.

8-10 is like. pretty good. but some of the cracks start to show with arcs 9-10 dragging on a bit (it has melissa though so thats good). the new cast members are fun and interesting and tie into the conspirator plot. 9.9 is excellent if a hard read.

11-13 is like. where the dragging on elements intensify. a lot of Diversions happen that kind of get in the way of the trio Solving The Mystery(tm) and while a lot of those diversions are chocked down to one conspirator's work it feels more like it takes screentime away from the main plot and core cast which you're Really invested in. 12.z and about half of arc 13's chapters including the Break interludes are really good though, bringing a kind of like. pact-y vibe and atmosphere to the story which was sorely missed.

after arc 13 though its like. at this point it's less three rotating perspectives that each lay their eyes on the main plot at specific points with an intent to highlight certain aspects of the story (avery focused on connections, lucy focused directly on the mystery, verona focused on the Others). and more three separate web serial protagonists with their own plotlines loosely connected. and things get bloated. and start escalating beyond reason (70+ practitioners attacking kennet???). and the Practitioner = evil colonialist oppressor stuff gets silly. but i think like. at least the story still cohered. musser still continued the trend of jerk practitioners who abuse the system even if he's just a TwitchPlaysPractitioner stream that does things arbitrarily like a ghost or a dog. the founding sequence towards the end of arc 17 was cool even if i was a bit disappointed with how kennet found turned out.

i think if you were really invested in the trio and their story you could probably stop sometime around there and be satisfied. not a good or a clean ending, and you probably were better off stopping at arc 13, but it works.

but then pale keeps going and does a complete paradigm shift to make the literal Red Menace Revolutionary the antagonist. and has to justify the also purportedly revolutionary kennet opposing that antagonist and shit just goes sideways. and by now you start running into the more ridiculous stuff like "avery compares goblins to human minorities" (yes. i know the intent of her statement. it was still silly).

like. it just stopped cohering or being consistent or anything. plots and characters get introduced and discarded just as quickly and have little to no impact despite how hyped up they are initially. it's not good, and it actively hurts the material that came before it (retroactively making charles worse, for example).

even the setting stuff is like. early pale had some silly things like a technomancer being able to set up a worldwide magic jstor or this one glamour-drowned dude being wayyy too powerful with glamour for someone who wasn't even a fae or practitioner. but it was like. you could excuse or justify or ignore it if it didn't agree with you because at least the rest of pale was good. but then every Path turned into a whimsical video game level (among many other less ignorable things) and pale stopped being good.

and like. man. even despite that i still think about the carmine alcazar chapters and the story of a Beast who lived in a world that had long left her behind. and the trio in the back of a truck practicing runes with their magic hat. pale was good. it was good! but then it had to keep going.

[frogmagog]

The fact that Furio Tigre could use a cardboard badge and a vague resemblance as means to represent someone in court is enough to convince me that Godot was not legally a prosecutor at any point in time. I’m dead convinced he just walked into the court because he heard Phoenix would be there and told the prosecutor that he was now in charge of the case, banking entirely on the fact that no one would call his bluff. They didn’t.

Edgeworth becomes chief prosecutor and finds that those cases’ court records are a disaster because Diego never filled out any of the paperwork and no one could find him to follow up because Godot isn’t his real name. He just Rasputin’d the entire court system for 6 months because no one had the courage to call him out on his bullshit

[frogmagog]

Bloodborne Lore Theory About The Tonitrus

Bolt damage was developed into hunting weapons by a hunter researcher named Archibald, who was studying darkbeasts

What are darkbeasts? Why can they shoot lightning?

Darkbeasts are given precious little explanation, but they are described as being some of the oldest, most ancient beasts.

We know the beast blood is able to keep the body moving well past the point where it should be alive

Darkbeast Paarl is literally just bones and hair

Blood, in the human body, is produced in the bone marrow.

What happens when a beast exists for so long that it effectively rots away? Animated only by insatiable bloodlust?

THEORY: Darkbeasts are effectively undead. They are beast that have existed for so long that everything but their skeleton has rotted away. EXCEPT:

Paarl does appear to have an intact brainpan.

It's possible his brain is still in there

We know that brains are supernaturally significant in bloodborne

The ordinary functioning of the body relies on electrical impulses from the brain

THEORY: The bolts of lightning are actually the force animating Paarls skeleton, the leftover neurological impulses from a body keeping itself alive through sheer bloodlust.

Archibald developed the Tonitrus and Bolt Paper after studying Paarl

The hunters, for some reason, didn't take to the Tonitrus.

CONCLUSION: The Tonitrus has a brain inside it.

[frogmagog]

*shoots up from bed* HOLD UP!

So. Okay. Monstrous regiment, after climax. Polly is meeting with Vimes and he’s giving her the vibes of this chill, not particularly noble dude who actually cares about human lives and stuff. It was a great conversation and one of my fave moments from the book, as a certified Vimes lover. But.

There’s one thing I JUST NOW realised happened in it. When Polly’s worried about all the ‘people in the other room’ (Rust and such), Vimes gives her a smile and says to not be worried because ‘I was once a seargant too’. This is obviously hillarious and it implies that Vimes knows how to manipulate the people in power to do what he wants them to, which we already knew, he is a nuisance to the nobs. But.

This book is set AFTER NIGHT WATCH. He was a SEARGANT TOO. Seargant in a special, almost military-esque rank during a really shitty situation. And it wasn’t that long ago. Or was it thirty years ago? Does it matter if the memory is still fresh in his mind?

HE’S TALKING ABOUT KEEL. HE’S TALKING ABOUT BEING JOHN KEEL. I AM GOING TO GO INSANE OVER HERE. FUCK THAT’S A GOOD DETAIL TO INCLUDE.

I am once again tipping my hat to Sir Pratchett for his writing. Fuck these books. How am I supposed to ever think about anything ELSE?!?!

[frogmagog]

OneD&D playtest grumble - Force damage

Anyone else following the playtest getting a bit annoyed how the design team has decided to suddenly make Force energy damage the default for all untyped "magic damage"?

I think the largest issue I have is they are being half-assed about it. Which is my uncharitable way of saying they think simply changing things to Force damage is fixing an issue and calling it a day, but then not accounting for the availability of its resistance/immunity options, or how Force was previously established as a "very rare" energy type.

This is no more obvious in how it changes the interaction with the Wildheart barbarian's resistance ability (formerly the Bear totem from the Totem Barbarian subclass). Originally, Bear gave the ability to resist all energy types by Psychic, which when added to the innate rage benefit of resistance to normal physical damage forms, gave the barbarian resistance to virtually all damage in the game. Now, in addition to the Bear spirit only giving 2 energy types chosen per rage (not a huge drawback most times), but Force joined Psychic in the exclusion list.

Another point of consideration is the brooch of shielding, a relatively niche item for anti-magic missile protection, it's ability to deal with Force damage makes it a lot more important. And the whole situation makes the rider on the Shield spell (perhaps the most unbalanced of the level 1 spells) about magic missiles even more nonsensical. Why are magic missiles (Force damage) treated differently from other sources of Force damage?

It just makes me seriously wonder what is happening at Hasbro - either they are accounting for this but haven't shown us how yet (making evaluating the change impossible), or they didn't think about it or didn't think it was worth accounting for (which is poor game design or an error in judgement that should have been caught by senior designers).

The larger issue is of course, that in producing the new revision, they could simply have addressed the damage types and ... maybe tweaked them a bit? I mean everyone else is doing it - Kobold Press has had Void damage forever, Pathfinder is doing a lot of damage recategorization, and they could even go back to 4e or even 3e which had different variations of damage types to work with.

There are a lot of issues that could be addressed in energy damage - like how "low tier" poison damage is given how widely it is resisted. I've mentioned this before - by introducing poison and disease but then giving a lot of options to ignore them in game just undersells them as threats while simultaneously ruining their potential.

The issue with elemental energies could be addressed (a lot of people are upset that a spell that hurls elemental energy just does Blunt damage, or Slashing, or why Water gets to choose between Acid or Cold neither of which are really appropriate most of the time). Or why Necrotic is somehow the default 'evil'/unholy damage AND represents time/entropic effects as well while fiends are themselves not necessarily associated with ageing.

[frogmagog]

This is an interesting point to me, cos it pretty perfectly sums up my feelings on PF2e. I enjoy dnd style fantasy, I enjoy tactical combat and build planning, the design seems well considered and I like a lot of the ideas. Yet somehow, at least in my somewhat limited play, it very rarely really excites me.

I love talking about Game Feel in ttrpgs because

what even is Game Feel in ttrpgs.

Like, in video games game feel is a thing and you can point to specific elements of the animation, or feedback, or musical cues, etc etc.

But it is much more, amorphous, in ttrpgs because every table is going to be different. I can point to a mechanic and say it doesn't have enough chew or texture or that Game Feel is off, and just kind of shrug wildly when trying to pinpoint why lol.

Regardless, I think you gotta think about Game Feel in your games lmaoo.

[frogmagog]

partner’s having trouble with pikmin 4