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[prokopetz]

I've just about got the various clock-related rules sorted out, so all that's really standing in the way of a feature-complete release at this point is one Rebellious Art and six Traits. I'll keep y'all posted!

Added entries for "clockwork innards", "geometric markings", "noisy metabolism", "plated or segmented", "unusual skin temperature" and "wisps of smoke or vapour" to round out Eat God's features table based on reader feedback. The existing entry "radial symmetry" has also been replaced with "lopsided anatomy", because a. the latter is more common among fantasy creatures, and b. based on reader responses, 75% of players didn't know what the former meant.

[prokopetz]

The other fun thing about this particular pedantic rabbit hole is that if you're really determined you can drag both the Jackson 5 and the 1983 Saturday morning cartoon adaptation of The Coneheads into it.

The fun thing about how American fandom culture seems to have settled the perennial What Is Anime debate by deciding in favour of "anything that was physically animated in Japan is anime, regardless of any other dimensions of its production" is how it interacts with all those American/Japanese and Canadian/Japanese co-productions from the 1970s and 1980s. If applied with an even hand, this rule would oblige us to conclude that the 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit is anime, which is both ridiculous and objectively correct.

[prokopetz]

The fun thing about how American fandom culture seems to have settled the perennial What Is Anime debate by deciding in favour of "anything that was physically animated in Japan is anime, regardless of any other dimensions of its production" is how it interacts with all those American/Japanese and Canadian/Japanese co-productions from the 1970s and 1980s. If applied with an even hand, this rule would oblige us to conclude that the 1977 Rankin/Bass adaptation of The Hobbit is anime, which is both ridiculous and objectively correct.

[prokopetz]

Police officers could solve real problems. They could be out there feeding hot soup to the unhoused, making sure that hazardous garbage is kept away from daycares, or doing something about all these birds that keep shitting on my car. Instead of those productive things, Officer Bringdown is here, on the side of the road, spending my tax money to hand me a ticket for more of my money.

Or at least he would be, if he could figure out how to work his dorky little ticket printer. You see, I have an ace up my sleeve. Not only is my car old, and difficult to place, but I’ve made certain modifications to the vehicle that render its legal state “complicated.” My shark of an attorney, Max, brags about the bear trap of intermingled kit-car laws and year-of-manufacture exclusions that have led to this vehicle being one hundred percent approved-of by the government, in any condition I dictate, whether they meant to or not.

“Uhh, how do you spell ‘Duesenberg’ again?” the cop asks, betraying his lack of education in the classics. I spell it out for him, and explain again that the replica registration exception of December 1986 means that a 1921 Model J does not need to have operational turn signals or a functional speedometer.

“How is this a replica of a 1921 car? It says Plymouth on the hood.” he asks me suspiciously, behind mirrored aviator shades. I am familiar with this shift in conversation. I see now that he has fallen into the first legal pit without complaint. I was hoping for a more worthy opponent.

“Officer, has the state rendered upon you an encyclopedic knowledge and unimpeachable legal authority of what a 1921 Duesenberg Model J consists and does not consist of?” I ask him, reading off a sheet that has been provided by my attorney, who would really rather that I shut the fuck up entirely, but who I know secretly thrills at the chance to end another state trooper’s career in the court of law in which he is akin to a walking god. Dude has groupies.

The cop demurs, tries to change the subject, save some face. “What’s that smell?” he asks.

“Hydrazine.”

[prokopetz]

Added entries for "clockwork innards", "geometric markings", "noisy metabolism", "plated or segmented", "unusual skin temperature" and "wisps of smoke or vapour" to round out Eat God's features table based on reader feedback. The existing entry "radial symmetry" has also been replaced with "lopsided anatomy", because a. the latter is more common among fantasy creatures, and b. based on reader responses, 75% of players didn't know what the former meant.

[prokopetz]

Today's aesthetic: morally grey character in a serialised work of media whose arc was essentially complete after the first couple of instalments, but the media they're in keeps getting sequels and they're the most popular character, so the writers have to constantly invent increasingly esoteric moral dilemmas to which none of the lessons they've learned in any prior instalment are applicable so they can continue being conflicted about shit.

[prokopetz]

Artist with a Subscribestar page that's like "ooh, welcome to the darkest dungeon, dare you enter my magical realm", and then you subscribe and it's just page after page of illustrated D&D scenarios.

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Level 1: character gets a redemption arc for something that's not really that bad because the writers are cowards and don't want to risk making them truly unsympathetic.

Level 2: character gets a redemption arc and the text just straight up refuses to specify what they actually did, but trust us, it was really bad. (AKA Schrödinger's war crime)

Level 3: character gets a redemption arc for something the writers clearly think is really bad, but it's... kind of not? (Bonus points if it's a weird gender role thing.)

Level 4: character gets a redemption arc for something that genuinely warrants it, but the writers seem to have very strange ideas about why it was bad.

[prokopetz]

So far the names of the Rebellious Arts break down to nine "-ion"s, four "-y"s, three "-ing"s, and an "-ance". I'm kind of tempted to figure out a way for the eighteenth and final Art to be a second "-ance" just for the admittedly purely meaningless symmetry of it.

[prokopetz]

I feel like the one art missing is something that directly interacts with the GM, like in Duck Amuck, or any of the numerous times that cartoon characters talk to the audience and just decide to step away from the plot for a little while. In the GMless version, I suppose it could interact with another player, bypassing the player character. Reject the lie of agency? Or reject the lie of reality, perhaps?

(With reference to this post here.)

I feel like the problem with having a special ability with a cost that explicitly grants permission to break the fourth wall is it creates an implicit obligation to avoid doing so at other times, which is going to clash with a lot of groups' play styles – particularly the sorts of groups who are likely to be interested in playing Eat God in the first place.

[prokopetz]

One of the central dilemmas of my media consumption is that on the one hand, I have serious objections to how bisexual men in popular media are almost invariably depicted as emotionally dysfunctional sleazeballs, but on the other hand, whenever I see an absolute fucking disaster of a human being who isn't bisexual all I can see is all the perfect opportunities for him to fuck things up that the narrative is obliged let pass because he doesn't swing the right way.

[prokopetz]

One of the central dilemmas of my media consumption is that on the one hand, I have serious objections to how bisexual men in popular media are almost invariably depicted as emotionally dysfunctional sleazeballs, but on the other hand, whenever I see an absolute fucking disaster of a human being who isn't bisexual all I can see is all the perfect opportunities for him to fuck things up that the narrative is obliged let pass because he doesn't swing the right way.

[prokopetz]

A small rewrite to simplify and clarify some stuff after taking a few days to think about it (thanks @dizzyhslightlyvoided for suggesting the missing part of the name):

The Art of Exposition: You refute the lie of omission. When you activate this Art, in no more than seven words, describe a physical feature of your current location. This feature must fit within Near range of you, may not contradict any fact about your location that's already been established, and may not place any character in immediate danger unless they have no Stress Limit or are currently Stressed Out; apart from these restrictions, the feature's presence need not be plausible. The described feature proves to be present, as though it had simply gone unmentioned until that moment. It persists for as as long as you sustain this Art; afterward, it's liable to quietly vanish when no-one is looking. The precise timing of its disappearance is, however, entirely at the GM's discretion, and so cannot be relied upon for tactical effect.

Also, another one freely adapted from a suggestion by @pomrania:

The Art of Miscellany: You refute the lie of possession. When you activate this Art, choose any item which would qualify as a valid inventory item for you that's been within Near range and line of sight of you in the past day. That item appears in one of your open inventory slots. This Art cannot target items that are being held by another character (unless that character has no Stress Limit or is currently Stressed Out), but items which are merely worn or carried are fair game. If it's unclear whether a desired item has been within range in the past day or not, apply the rules for choosing one's starting inventory to determine whether it's a valid choice. This Art need not be sustained.

That's two open slots down – one to go!

Now that the latest draft of Eat God has been out for a few days (here, for reference), you may have noticed that several of the d66 tables used during character creation have deliberately left entries 61–66 blank. The idea is that these would be filled in based on playtester feedback to plug any conceptual gaps identified in testing, and I thought I'd give this blog's readership a crack at it as well.

So: if you've given random character creation a spin, is there any sort of character that it feels to you like the game's randomiser ought to be able to spit out, but none of the existing Traits, features, or Rebellious Arts are a good fit for it?

For this purpose, two guidelines should be borne in mind:

Traits are framed in functional terms and don't make many specific assumptions about what a character is shaped like, so there's a lot latitude for reskinning there; we're looking for stuff that can't be achieved by reskinning an existing Trait or combination of Traits.

Pseudo-gnostic flavour text aside, Rebellious Arts are mainly based on classic Looney Tunes gags; this can flex, but in principle they should be something you can picture a cartoon character from the Golden Age of Animation (i.e., roughly 1930–1970) doing.

[prokopetz]

(To be clear, I acknowledge that matters have improved. When I first got into serious tabletop RPG publishing a decade ago, your average EPUB reader couldn't be counted on to correctly handle tables. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write tabletop RPGs for a platform that can't be trusted to correctly lay out a table? Still.)

My commitment to accessible design in tabletop RPGs remains sincere, but the fact that most popular EPUB readers still don't support CSS variables is truly testing me.

[prokopetz]

My commitment to accessible design in tabletop RPGs remains sincere, but the fact that most popular EPUB readers still don't support CSS variables is truly testing me.

[prokopetz]

Honestly, the reason I post as much as I do about RPGMaker horror games in spite of not particularly enjoying playing them myself is that I love how the fandom engages with them. Like, okay, so there are these two characters who only interact with each other in a storyline branch that can't actually be reached in normal play because the dev fucked up the event flags in a path-critical conversation and patching is for weaklings, we only know about it at all because a community wiki user who may or may not be three separate people data-mined the scripts, and somehow they're the most popular ship by several orders of magnitude and all the fanart of them references the events of the inaccessible branch. It's like if the Necronomicon had a fandom.

[prokopetz]

Every time I shitpost about janky indie horror RPGMaker games I get a bunch of notes lamenting how nostalgic it all is and how it's too bad they don't make games like that anymore, and... they do? 2022 was one of the best years on record for the genre, and 2023 is shaping up to be much the same. At no point have janky indie horror RPGMaker games even remotely stopped being a thing.

Like, even restricting our consideration to stuff that's come out in the past 12 months, play Fear & Hunger 2. Play Pocket Mirror. Play The Coffin of Andy and Leyley. I'm just throwing them out off the top of my head here, and I don't even particularly like the genre – I know a lot of this blog's followers are super into it, and I'm betting they have great recs for recent stuff I've never even heard of. Check the notes!