lex1nat0r

[lex1nat0r]

a moth flies out of my wallet and I instantly kill it with my sword, awarding me the gold pieces necessary to make my purchase

[lex1nat0r]

New D&D errata just dropped: if a player argues that "BG3 let me do it that way," the DM is allowed to kill them.

[lex1nat0r]

the thing that gets me most about that insufferably bad orc city excerpt is the phrase "ruin overseen by the architect of its very destruction" implying an irony to the situation that simply isn't present. i've started applying that sentence construction to other activities. meal overseen by the chef of its very cooking. flowers overseen by the gardener of their very planting.

[lex1nat0r]

Oppositional sexism is a very useful term actually. Like, so much is better explained by the idea of “there’s a societal belief that men and women should remain opposites and should have no overlapping traits” than “this is homophobia/transphobia”. Why does society hate displays of femininity in men and masculinity in women? It’s oppositional sexism. They hate that you’re proof that masculinity and femininity aren’t inherently opposites. Thank you julia serano for another banger

[lex1nat0r]

[lex1nat0r]

SIGNALIS

A highly esteemed deed is commemorated here, or: on learning to walk

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that Dark Souls was kind of a watershed videogame for me. Actually it feels kind of weird to say that now, after over a decade of Dark Souls warping mainstream videogames around itself. But it took me one false start* and a handful of hours to really click with Dark Souls.** Signalis got me less than fifteen minutes in.

Heavy spoilers for Signalis and also Dead Space below.

*and putting my GPU in the right PCI slot

**It was the Gaping Dragon fight. If you're willing to put a boss design like that in front of me, you've got my attention.

That's maybe unfair to Dark Souls; I knew Signalis was going to get me before I'd even installed the game. Perhaps fittingly, I don't remember how I first became aware of Signalis, but a friend had picked it up right around when it released and she posted a screenshot of the game's King in Yellow to a Discord server I was in when she reached that point in the prologue. That guaranteed I'd have to get into Signalis eventually.

It was this screen. Note that it says 'pick up,' not 'read.'

And perhaps here is the first key to why Signalis affects me. If the King in Yellow shows up in a game set in Boston or Paris around 1890-1930, that's nothing. Fork spotted in kitchen. But in a game about cyborgs and spaceships, it at least shows the devs are putting some thought into it. At least including the King in Yellow shows some actual attention paid to what I will reluctantly call the cthulhu mythos. I'd also have been less impressed if rose-engine had gone whole hog and busted out the Necronomicon. It's too bombastic; someone reads the book and gnarliness ensues. The King in Yellow is subtler. Someone reads the book, and things become askew. In the original Robert W. Chambers stories about the King in Yellow, nothing as overt as any of Lovecraft's gribbliness happens. I fully believe rose-engine knew exactly what they were doing using the King in Yellow as the axis around which to blend Signalis' personal horror and cosmic horror (and let us not forget my beloved body horror).

Maybe it will be instructive to compare Signalis to my previous favorite survival horror game, Dead Space. We can argue about whether Dead Space truly counts as survival horror later.

The parallels are immediately obvious: someone with engineer training looking for a loved one battles body horror in space. Red and black are an important color pairing.

A spaceship is involved.

But the differences are also obvious once you get into it. The first is this: in Dead Space, the Ishimura would have found the red marker and all the horror would have happened without Nicole on board. In fact it's Nicole's presence on the Ishimura that allows Isaac Clarke to save the day. In contrast, the plot of Signalis would not happen without Ariane Yeong on Penrose-512. Probably. Would Ariane have fallen in love with any Elster unit? Would an Elster other than Elster-512 have fallen in love with Ariane? I don't know if we have enough data within the game to say. But what matters is that Ariane fell in love with Elster-512, that love was reciprocated, and from that flows the tragedy and horror of Signalis.

Perhaps the subtlest difference between Dead Space and Signalis is this: in Dead Space, Isaac is constantly running around fixing the ship. He gets it back into a stable orbit. He gets the ADS cannons working. He kills the thing that's poisoning the air. Isaac Clarke is constantly doing engineer things to patch up the Ishimura. Elster, on the other hand, doesn't seem to get much chance to put her engineering spec to use. Over the course of the game, she tapes up a keycard, fits two pieces of a key together, tapes up a cassette tape, unfloods an area, and gets a lift working again. You can count that on one hand. Elster doesn't get much chance to patch up S-23 Sierpinski because this is not a situation that can be fixed.

I cannot stress how much it kicks ass that the Rotfront section has a broken lift, the exact same kind you fixed earlier in the game. As if the tumors gradually closing off parts of the map weren't enough. Rotfront in general is just hands-down one of my favorite levels in videogames.

The most important difference between Dead Space and Signalis, of course, is that Signalis is queer.

There's three layers to this. Firstly, Ariane and Elster are both women who are in a relationship with each other. This too is yuri, simple as.

Are sapphic relationships frowned on in-universe? I don't think we have enough to say but given that Falke is based off of the High Revolutionary and her Daughter and then made propaganda posters based on her, perhaps everyone in Eusa is attracted to her regardless of gender.

Second, Elster is a Replika and Ariane is a Gestalt. We don't hear of any other Replika-Gestalt relationships, and given that the dictionary entry for Gestalt defines it in opposition to Replika, I think it's safe to say that's at least a little bit taboo.

And finally, the Nation of Eusa does not want the specific individuals Ariane Yeong and Elster-512 to get together, insisting that they should not even be friends with each other. I may be wildly off-base here but it seems like it's hard to get more queer than the government reaching its big hand out from the capitol to hand you a letter specifically telling you not to fall in love with someone.

Please do not have cute little space dates with your cyborg girlfriend.

There's a bad faith argument you could make here that maybe the horror and tragedy of Signalis wouldn't have happened if Ariane had just read her mail. But I don't think Ariane and Elster could have been cooped up on Penrose-512 for as long as they were without getting into some kind of relationship. You want to talk about what could have prevented the events of Signalis the game? Let's talk about the kind of society that shoots people off on cheap spaceships without telling them that those ships are probably going to kill them.

And then has the audacity to advertise the program on public transit.

"Bad luck sport! Best ask your cyborg coworker to kill you now so you don't have suffer radiation poisoning!" is not the tone I would expect this message to take if the Penrose pilots were briefed that this was a likely outcome from the start.

I also don't think Ariane would have been so chipper about their 3000 cycle anniversary if she'd known the reactor was about to start flooding the ship with deadly radiation. - editing Lex popping in here to say that during the endgame you find a diary page dated cycle 2503 mentioning that Ariane has already started experiencing the symptoms of radiation sickness, so the shielding doesn't even last that long.

In another cool move, we don't actually learn anything about the Empire. We're focused on Eusa's faults here, trying to go into the Empire would just distract the player.

Signalis isn't terribly explicit about this, but between the documents and conversations there's enough details scattered about that if you're paying attention, you notice that if the game can be said to have a villain, it's the Nation of Eusa.

It's the petty things that really get under your skin.

"Children should try to grow up around cops with easy access to submachineguns" - things the average usamerican says

It's a masterclass in the subtler side of worldbuilding, really.

I can't think of anywhere else to put this but the fact that Adler has a poster of Falke above his bed is my favorite bit of environmental storytelling in videogames.

When I first fired up Signalis myself, the King in Yellow wasn't the first thing to really hook me. On the settings screen you're brought to when you first boot up the game (and I don't have a screenshot of this. Fittingly, I can't be sure it really happened.), there's some not-so-hidden text with the "things have learned to walk that ought to crawl" quote. And that's what got me - it's one of my favorite Lovecraft quotes. It's delightfully ominous, and it comes up a couple of times through the game. The fuller quote, shown during the post-prologue cutscene, mentions "great holes" that have been dug. In the context of Signalis this is most obviously referencing the excavation of the red gate on Leng.

But you may have already noticed that there's something problematic about the quote. Unsurprising, given pretty much everything about HP Lovecraft as a person. "Ought to crawl" implies some kind of natural order that must not be violated. Ought to crawl. Ought to follow orders. Ought not to fall in love.

From the perspective of Eusa, perhaps, this whole incident happens because "things" that ought to crawl instead learn to walk.

And I suppose that after learning to walk, the next step is learning to dance.

[lex1nat0r]

White Elephant: Business As Usual

AAR #25 & #26

Session reports from my ongoing Lancer game.

Characters (LL 4):

Raiju (They/Them, Hacker 2/Heavy Gunner 2/Nuclear Cavalier 3, Barbarossa 3/Monarch 1) - HA Barbarossa “Counterproposal”

Sunshine (They/Them, Grease Monkey 3/Technophile 2/Engineer 1/Gunslinger 1, Pegasus 3, Black Witch 1) - HORUS Pegasus “Exchange of Affection”

Rook (He/Him, Walking Armory 1/Brutal 3/Leader 3, Balor 3/Gorgon 1) - HORUS Balor “Your Burden” (player not present for session #26)

Daylight (She/Her, Technophile 2/Engineer 3/Ace 2, Vlad 3/Nelson 1) - IPS-N Vlad “Look What You Made Me Do”

Magpie (They/Them, Hacker 3/Technophile 3/Drone Commander 1, Goblin 3/Hydra 1) - HORUS Goblin “Destructive Interference”

NHPs:

Molotov - Via Sunshine’s Technophile talent - Projects as a small velociraptor - unshackled

Willow - Via Daylight’s Technophile talent - Projects as 1-2 squid - unshackled

Murgatroid - Via Magpie’s Technophile talent - Projects as a wizard? - shackled

Prometheus Antichiral - fork of a cascaded NHP from the Sanctuary Blue cloning facility - projects as a wizened old man - unshackled

Alex - library administrator, rescued from the RimTech corporate archive - projects as a librarian - shackled, currently in low power mode

Sisyphus - Via Sunshine’s Pegasus 3 - no known projection habits [ha ha ha you can’t see me] - shackled

Osiris - Via Magpie’s Goblin 3 - projects to seemingly puppet around Destructive Interference - shackled

Prev session writeup

A few days after the destruction of the Argo the lancers meet with Stefan at MilAgro corporate headquarters to pick up the blinkspace data they were after. Rebuilding around Angelus Prime is underway and with MilAgro now mostly under the control of Stefan's faction the megacorp is gearing up to resist the Guardian Fleet. Lucien Trulock and most of the other Shield Frontier-aligned MilAgro upper management managed to escape and are probably looking for supporters but they're currently low priority. On their way out of the HQ the lancers are ambushed by Lottie Wisely, the reporter from Argus Syndicated Networks who covered their battle with the Argo, asking who these mysterious heroes are. Sunshine does the talking but Magpie steps in to end the interview when Sunshine almost reveals that the Eye of the Tiger has a blinkdrive.

Possible targets for next steps.

Back on board the battleship, the group discusses what to do next. They now have the complete set of blinkspace data but that will take time to interpret. The Tiger's systems can do it, but it will take time. The lancers decline to meet back up with the Horizon Collective or make contact with HORUS on Metahome, and after some debate decide not to take the data to Union on Cold Comfort. The question of how much to trust Union is still up in the air. From the data on the Argo they know the Guardian Fleet's next targets, but the Tiger sustained some damage in the fighting above Angelus Prime and while it's still fully functional it will be in real danger if it has to get into another space battle. The lancers decide to transmit the intelligence from the Argo to their allies in the sector and blink to Smogless for repairs.

Approaching the Rimtech shipyards above Smogless the lancers find ex-Director now Senior Administrator Prinzivalli running the dock they've been assigned to. After catching up with what she's been doing since getting her off of Sanctuary Blue the lancers finally defrost the refugees from Angelus Landing and take some R&R planetside.

(It is only writing this up now that I realize I have forgotten to determine if the NHP Alex wants to be dropped off as well or is willing to stay on board the Eye of the Tiger. For next time.)

During their planetside stay Daylight notices a Neuropa drone keeping tabs on her and Rook. Prinzivalli gets in touch, letting the lancers know that she has an urgent mission for them: the Rimtech shipyards are under widespread attack by Blackspine terrorists and Rimtech security can't protect them all. So she needs the lancers to come help. They scramble into orbit and get filled in: all the other strikes by Blackspine look like they're causing damage at all the other sites, but here they're trying to get into Rimtech's deep omninet.

Combat 5.1: Script Kiddie Showdown

Sitrep: Control + Terminals (from Enhanced Combat)

OPFOR:

Shattering Disease (T1 Veteran Witch, Hacker/Chain)

T2 Aegis x1 (Ring of Fire)

T2 Spacer Mirage x2 (Metafold Shove)

T2 Spacer Scourer (Supercharged) x3

T1 Witch (Chain) x1

(Tokens by Retrograde Minis (on the basic blank hex tokens that come with Lancer so they show up well), map by Interpoint Station’s Lancer sprites, VTT is Roll20)

Outcome: PC victory, 8 to 7 + terminals activated

Analysis:

Maybe this one was a little mean but Exchange of Affection only exploded after the sitrep was completed so it's all good.

The PCs took a lot of Stress and will probably go into the next combat with some lingering Stress, but Lancer giving characters two separate HP pools kicks ass because it allows a GM to mix up heat-focused and damage-focused sitreps without worrying about being too harsh.

Running a sitrep with no grunts physically pained me and these are going to be rare.

Because they activated the terminals (blinkspace monitoring devices to verify the integrity of Rimtech's omninet) the lancers are able to figure out what Blackspine was after - the location of a Rimtech deep space shipyard where they are in the process of building a battleship. What the lancers do with this information remains to be seen.

Next time: sabotage?

[lex1nat0r]

It’s about castles and wizards ✨

[lex1nat0r]

I don't think I can overstate the depth of impact trans women have had on indie ttrpgs.

[lex1nat0r]

So in that one post I mentioned that the idea of defining roleplaying as a set of specific behavioral and gameplay goals (which generally amount to a strong character stance and a focus on narration over procedure) can actually lead to bad game design. By this I don't mean "any game that tries to build mechanics into it that encourage that type of roleplaying will be bad;" instead that this type of idea of roleplaying has developed almost independent of the actual gameplay and rules structure of roleplaying games and is thus a bad fit for most roleplaying games. And as such, simply plugging "rules that encourage roleplaying" without consideration as to what the game's built-in incentives are into a very traditional RPG structure can lead to unfocused design.

Most RPG designers end up, for better and for worse, replicating extremely traditional roleplaying game structures. This is something of a case of fish not being able to recognize they're in water: the most common type of RPG on the market is a challenge-based adventure game. Games where the main language is challenge and with incentive structures built in such a way that the gameplay pretty much should look like "a party of adventurers going into places to solve problems" are so common that people don't really stop to even think about it. (This relates to one of my gripes with many PbtA games: I have often praised both Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts for not being structured like traditional adventure type games, only to then have to lament that most games built on the PbtA framework end up being traditional adventure type games that end up using parts of the technology created by AW)

People end up, essentially, making adventure games because that's most of what they know, and then plugging in "rules to encourage roleplay" onto them. But like, without looking at the gameplay structures and incentives built into a game you might actually end up creating sources of tension. These may not always be bad: sometimes a tension between "what is strictly optimal" and "what is fun" can be fruitful.

As said, most games end up copying the gameplay structure of very traditional RPGs where challenge is the main form of gameplay. These types of games also tend to accept the loss of characters as a valid consequence of play. This is already somewhat unacceptable to many people operating from an understanding of roleplaying as primarily a dramatic exercise. Lack of character continuity can be disruptive to long-form narratives and characters with deep internal narratives. Also, the singular focus on external rewards can also be detrimental to dramatic story-driven play.

But the issue isn't that these games are bad for roleplaying: they're bad for a specific type of roleplaying, but not all roleplaying games share the same creative agenda. This becomes an issue when game designers take what is, at its heart, a game whose primary language is challenge and then try to modify that gameplay structure to "support roleplaying."

D&D is, at its heart, a challenge game, even in our current year of 2025. But largely because the D&D-playing community has rejected a game focused primarily on challenge as being dissatisfactory the result is, at the end of the day, a weird chimera of challenge game with rules that are supposed to weigh the game towards "roleplaying."

Like, the issue isn't that there's anything inherently wrong with D&D's structure. It's just that D&D has adapted to a changing, capricious definition of "roleplaying," and in doing so it has introduced ideas into its system that contradict its challenge game DNA.

None of that is to say that D&D used to be good and then it was failed by its designers. Even as a fan of older editions of D&D I can recognize that even my favorite editions of D&D kind of suck in subtle ways. Part of the challenge of D&D as a challenge game is trying to navigate the challenge of the game itself being kind of bad. You know those types of video games which are kind of buggy but fun so part of the challenge is knowing to play around the unfun and janky parts? That's how playing B/X feels like to me sometimes.

But what I do think is that a D&D that had embraced it being a game that is primarily about would probably be cool as hell. But you know I can only be so salty about modern D&D following a direction where, while still at heart a game about overcoming challenges, D&D has kind of also developed these ideas of being "more than" a challenge game, when there are thousands upon thousands of beautiful trans women (and some other people as well) writing hacks of B/X that make that game even more playable.

Anyway I don't remember what the original point was. Oh, right! You can't just take a challenge game formula and try to plug "mechanics that improve roleplaying" on top of them. If you want to make a game that doesn't want characters to express themselves primarily through overcoming adversity you are better off just starting with a clean slate. What the fuck is this post even about

[lex1nat0r]

theyve got dark souls boss insects in new jersey

[lex1nat0r]

FUCK ICE

[lex1nat0r]

[lex1nat0r]

God gives his hardest battles to his strongest soldiers and I'm dodging the draft

[lex1nat0r]

What’s going on in horses

[lex1nat0r]

A perfect videogame. I am screaming and yelling and crying about how good Signalis is.

[lex1nat0r]

Essential OD&D/OSR experiences #137: generating encounter rewards exclusively via the random treasure tables and seeing which equipment slot the fighter thinks a "periapt" goes in.