lastyearswizard

[lastyearswizard]

i'm losing it

[lastyearswizard]

First Post!

I deleted my old tumblr because... man idk why it was covid-times and the prefrontal cortex was not in the room with us!! Anyways, I was reminded by my lovely friend @repecca that tumblr exists, and that some of my work has been going around on here, so I decided to post some of my work up officially! Starting off with my most notable (?) work to date, here's my LOTR: The Middle Kingdom Project. Now, it's been over a year since I posted this, and at the time I was... really searchingfor myself artistically, and I decided to go all in on something that I'd been ruminating on for a long time.

So, hello, again. I'm Leia. I do visual development/BG design, and I'm also a writer of things. I love fantasy and transformative work. It's nice to meet you.

[lastyearswizard]

Has enough time passed that I can say Halsin is the most bland bg3 party member on this website without getting beaten to death with hammers

[lastyearswizard]

can i get another big AWOOOOO for fromsoft's animations ? how are they making it so good

[lastyearswizard]

Night of the Demon

[lastyearswizard]

If you drink beer while gaming you have the Mirthful Gamer's Heart.

If you drink hard alcohol while gaming you have the Riotous Gamer's Spirit.

If you drink wine while gaming you have the Sensual Gamer's Soul.

[lastyearswizard]

This is coming from a queer person who genuinely enjoys rules light systems, but I’ve noticed a trend in indie/queer ttrpgs I don’t really like, where rules light ttrpgs are associated with the indie/queer space, and rules heavy games are associated with the white male toxic gamer space. Now this is not the reason for this trend, nor intentional on the indie space’s part, but sometimes I sense an underlying subtext of “the queers and the women and the poc players will go play their 2D6 make believe, while only the enlightened white male gamers can understand the vast and complex systems.” And I hate that.

Now my guess as to why this divide happened (totally anecdotally mind you) is that a lot of queer/indie ttrpgs formed in opposition to the toxic gamer ttrpg spaces, kind of using those spaces as a “how not to” guide. And from my experience, those spaces tend to use rules as a means of exclusion.

It’s not just the power gamers or the rules lawyers or the people who play to win combat and not to tell a story. It’s that these types of people will make rules the most important part of play, and then use their detailed understanding of a complex rules system to make sure you cannot interact with the game like they can. You cannot challenge them on rules, and you cannot argue when they say you’ve done something wrong. If you do, you will get into a multi hour debate which you will inevitably lose, because they’re just stating rules as written. And if you understand the rules just as well as them- if not better- they somehow make the threshold of knowledge higher. Because your identity is not one accepted in the space, you will never understand their rules well enough to play on their level.

And yeah, that sucks. I’ve been there, it fucking sucks. And I’ve definitely felt the urge to abandon caring about the rules entirely because of these bad experiences. But that bad behavior is not inherent to play groups that care about the rules, it’s only inherent to bad ones. Rules are what makes the game, they’re an extension of the story and of the role play, they’re the foundation around which the story grows. Not everyone has fun with rules heavy games, I understand that, but I caring about the rules and making really good plays with them is not the dominion of toxic white gamer men. That’s for everyone.

[lastyearswizard]

cleric buddies!!

[lastyearswizard]

[lastyearswizard]

WHAT ARE YALL READING RN you must tell me

[lastyearswizard]

i am OBSSESED with those animations and posings

[lastyearswizard]

To those of you judging us adults who exclusively watch children’s cartoons, what do YOU suggest we watch? The fact is, there's a severe lack of quality Western adult animation. And before you say 'live action movies'- seeing other people, even on screen, sets my social anxiety off the charts. And NO, I will NOT ‘just read a book’- committing to something as time consuming as a novel is a no-go when I can barely fit in my nightly re-watch of The Emoji Movie.

[lastyearswizard]

lord, we should quit but we love it too much

a little oc sketch thing bc i really wanted to draw some armor.... lyrics are from sedated by hozier

[lastyearswizard]

One thing I really truly love from the Aeor arc and the Tomb Takers as antagonist in general is just how shitty they are. The detail that they loot every body they pass and pick every valuable thing off of them is excellent. Opportunistic freaks!

[lastyearswizard]

Matt put so much work into that introductory narration to (a) portray every imagined criticism of Bell’s Hells as subjective, (b) push back against any possibility that there was objectively a correct option to take in their circumstances, and (c) repeat yet again that they’re really heroes and it’s just that no one has seen it yet.

Like, dude. Defensiveness while refusing to say things outright is not going to please anyone regardless of their opinion. It’s just inflammatory. People who liked how the story went will dislike the insinuation that there might have been better options. People who didn’t like how the story went will dislike that this is only being addressed after the story ended. People who are on the fence will dislike that this doesn’t have anything to do with why every PC here would have an interest in murdering the genocide-happy elf.

Regardless of Matt’s personal stance on C3’s ending, however nuanced it may be, he needs to just let people be wrong on the internet. Stop couching it. Make a decision and stick to it.

[lastyearswizard]

There's an evil twin to "has only ever played Dungeons & Dragons and thinks all tabletop RPGs are as complicated as Dungeons & Dragons" that lives somewhere in the vicinity of "went straight from Dungeons & Dragons to rules-light storygames and thinks Dungeons & Dragons represents the high end of tabletop RPG complexity". Like, buddy, you have no idea.

[lastyearswizard]

Thinking about the last episode I watched in Nein Again (2x15) and generally I feel like Campaign 2 especially, but also Campaign 1 did such a good job of showing small pieces of the history, and especially the pre-Calamity or early post-Divergence history, of the world of Exandria. And, as always, I am disappointed by Campaign 3 failing to keep up this high standard.

Campaign 1 had the task of building the world out from scratch. Obviously there’s the full history given from High Bearer Vord, but that comes after we learn of Sarenrae and see the ancient ziggurat beneath Whitestone - there is clearly a sense of an ancient lost world, and Vox Machina are given ample time to explore it in a way that is gracefully interwoven with their story. They explore the tomb of Purvan as part of a larger quest for the Vestiges of Divergence, and find not just more ziggurats dedicated to Vecna, but the lair of Opash, an ancient forge of the gods, and an entire city inside a titan. It is an outline, but a deeply compelling one, and the characters are inquisitive. Many end up with deep ties to these places and in several cases the deities associated - obviously Percy to the chambers beneath Whitestone and Pike to the ancient temple of Sarenrae/Raei, but also Vax to Purvan’s tomb. All of them wield these vestiges, even those with no ties to the gods (or who actively have reservations or a dislike for the gods); it is a very religiously based history, coming from a very specific perspective.

Campaign 2 expands upon that world and shows a more complex version of the other sides, after Campaign 1's heavy focus on the Prime Deities. My entry point here is of course the lab of Siff Duthar, a wizard during the Calamity, and the Folding Halls of Halas are further examples, but we also see a temple to the Betrayers in Bazzoxan, learn of the excavation of Luxon beacons in Pride's Call, uncover a fane shackling the Chained Oblivion, and see multiple references, including temples, to Uk'otoa, Desirat, and Quajath. Vokodo and Rumblecusp serve as a literal slice across the world and planes, including a piece of Blightshore's Calamity-era vaults. And then, of course, the final setpiece of Aeor provides far more insight into the Age of Arcanum, even connecting it to the Luxon. While the party of Campaign 2 has strong connections to several Prime Deities, the sites they visit are nearly all focused on alternative powers acting in the world - Betrayers, lesser deities associated with Betrayers, the Luxon, and the arcane. And, of course, as with Campaign 1, much of this holds great weight within the narrative as they learn the role of the Luxon within the war that serves as backdrop, broaden their own horizons and understanding of the continent on which they live, free Yasha from her past, and build to a finale of facing a threat from Aeor.

I think what is frustrating about Campaign 3 is not that some of these threads do not pay off - granted, that is a frustration, but the idea that the Chained Oblivion is an even longer-term existential threat isn't really something I'd blame a good story for, so I think it's unfair to blame a poor one, and Desirat does canonically come unsealed and the works of the Age of Arcanum do largely pay off. What frustrates me much more is the Tishtan and the Ossended Host settings ultimately being entirely set dressing with little to no exploration. In a story where multiple characters obsessed over the titans and took on their gifts, and in which an ongoing point of discussion was the destruction wrought by Calamity we spent almost no time learning of the (presumably) descendants of the handful of survivors from the original landmass of Domunas. The Tishtan Site is perhaps even more egregious - this nomadic culture seems incredibly important early on as a solstice-chasing society that entirely disappeared, and yet it too is simply a backdrop for the modern world - a place to seize control of and use, rather than an opportunity to gather information. And that remains consistent - of course all the locations in C1 and C2 also served as, mechanically speaking, loot drops or sites where you have to go to complete a task, but they also provided insight into the problems the party was dealing with, gave answers about the history of Exandria (and doing just that and not more was far more helpful earlier in Critical Role's run, when the map was less filled out - Bells Hells visited the Shattered Teeth after we knew exactly what had happened there), and felt...more real and complete. They had journals and notes! They set up new mysteries while still giving the party tools to solve existing ones. And it again feels especially egregious in a story that, as many have pointed out, used Marquet itself as a backdrop to the point that we didn't even learn about a villain-defining war two characters lived through the end of; Jrusar and Bassuras are the only locations for which we scratched more than simply the surface. Perhaps investigating the Tishtan or spending more time in the Shattered Teeth, both of which could quite organically have served as a point of insight into the pattern of solstices, would not only give insight into new people and unexplored parts of the world, but also have provided some guidance to Bells Hells.

I don't really have a post yet about some other things I've been thinking of re: video game/puzzle pacing and how to mete out information and how to handle people uncovering information very early (brought to you by Murph talking about Blue Prince and other puzzle games in light of Skaldova, which is in many ways a dungeon crawl with both an end quest and which serves as an opportunity to worldbuild - incidentally, if you are impatient for Age of Umbra and want a Soulsborne/Gods Have Left This Wretched Place) but I think that is part of the problem - it's okay to have hanging threads, and even a few dead ends or "to be continued" (and in an improvised game some will remain unexplored) but it feels like there were quite obvious entry points to provide significant information to a party that was constantly running around in circles with no idea what to do through these historical locations, and it's just yet another missed opportunity among many.