#I don't want to have to figure out difficult gameplay mechanics

[emperorsfoot]

What's frustrating about video games as opposed to other media is that you have to actually play them in other to fully grasp the story and characters.

Unlike other media like movies and shows where you can just sit passively and watch, games you must actively participate in, in order to further the plot and reach a conclusion. The story cannot and will not progress if you do not play.

(Books and media that must be read have a similar problem, but at least with a book you have the option of just flipping to the end and getting the conclusion without going through the journey.)

Multi-player games are even worse because not only do you need to actively participate, but other people have to actively participate with you. Or else no one gets to see the conclusion.

So, if you're just bad at video games, you don't get to experience all their compelling stories or fun characters.

[fuckyeahdwarffortress]

Can you tell me how to get started with dorf fortress? Like, how to get into it. I am thinking to try it but. I am bad at video games and i am worried it may be overwhelming given its complexity.

This ask came in on August the 8th, 2022, and I would first and foremost like to humbly and deeply apologise for my tardiness in getting around to answering you.

I've been asked this question a lot over the years. I had been going back and forward and umm-ing and ahh-ing at a few details - generating a brand new world, taking screenshots, being as to-the-point as I could. What you see above is about the tenth iteration of the work, and this will probably be the twelfth or so.

Here is the general setup for a successful Fortress:

Create a Small to Medium World.

Select Very Short to Short History.

High Civilizations are a must.

High to Very High Sites to keep things interesting.

Medium Number of Beasts so you won't starve.

Low to Very Low Natural Savagery so you don't get killed by Elephants.

Frequent to Everywhere Mineral Occurrence so you're never short on metals.

Settle in a Mountain tile.

In the preview, make sure you're next to a river.

Make sure when you examine the area, there's no Aquifier.

Check the Temperature, and make sure it's either "Warm" or "Hot".

[e]mbark!

Make sure you [d]esignate some Dwarfs to cu[t] down some trees.

[b]uild [w]orkshop fis[h]ery, two of them, next to your river.

[d]esignate a Dwarf to [d]ig up the stone to lay your foundations.

Every step I just listed is the quintessential "How to play Dwarf Fortress". In fact, if anybody wants to play Dwarf Fortress, this is all you need to follow - this, and the Wiki. You can reach it by going to the official Dwarf Fortress wiki, or use the In-Game Help menu by pressing [?] at any time during your gameplay to figure out the basics.

After writing all of this, I asked the community - mostly because I felt it was far too dry. This was pretty rough content, not at all interesting, and while helpful to most, it can be difficult to go into DF by rote instruction. Amongst them was my original suggestion: Watching Vargskelethor's Dwarf Fortress playthrough.

Some other suggestions from the wonderful community:

Use a "Lazy Newb" pack, such as PeridexisErrant's DF Starter Pack. These packs are tailor-made for newcomers into Dwarf Fortress, allowing for quick setup, texture packs, and a great deal of utilities.

Use the Dwarf Fortress Wiki's "Quickstart Guide". In fact, just use the Dwarf Fortress wiki in general! The whole wiki is tied to the game itself, so you can find it via the [?] Help! menu.

Use DFHack. DFHack, or Dwarf Fortress Hack, provides you with a console that runs detached from Dwarf Fotress, one that allows you to input commands to modify the game. It automates quite a fair few features for you, making the gameplay far easier.

Watch Let's Play's, Let's Learn's, or read some Dwarf Fortress stories. They're all excellent ways to learn the game - as mentioned previously, I personally figured it out watching Vargskelethor's Dwarf Fortress playthrough.

This covers basically everything you need to know. Everything relevant ends roughly here. This is the definitive, mechanical guide of starting Dwarf Fortress.

If you would not mind, however, I ask you to not leave yet. I have a story to tell you.

This is how to play Dwarf Fortress.

If you've made it to the end, this work was heavily inspired by what initially caused me to be interested in Dwarf Fortress: the Quantum Artefact known as Planepacked.

I came across this whilst looking for video game glitches to laugh at during a moment of deep depression in 2012. Shortly after reading about this ludicrous artefact, and all it's unique, inter-locking, self-referential stacks of history, I found the story of Boatmurdered, which made me laugh myself deep into the school nights.

This year marks my 10th year of playing Dwarf Fortress, and it also coincides with the premium release of Dwarf Fortress on Steam. I joined this little page after my endeavours with speedrunning Dwarf Fortress in 2016 came to a crashing halt after my ambitions got the better of me, and I wrongfully stepped out of line with another member in the speedrunning community.

I only contributed little commentary, but have been continually impressed and proud of the tumblr Dwarf Fortress community - from its incredible artworks I've always wanted to join in on, to the sheer volume of incredible Fortress Stories, to trying to help with complex and complicated problems I felt only I could solve.

This answer has taken a colossally long time to complete as I could not answer it with good faith until I felt all grounds had been absolutely covered, and all possibilities explored - not because Dwarf Fortress is a hard game to play, but it is very, very hard to get into, and get people into.

Thank you, if you've made it this far, for reading over my story, and checking out my guide.

Love, always,

Mod %

[canmom]

The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere: 013-032

Previously: 000-012, spinoff post about entropy [all Flower posts]

Time for more flower...

...no, not that flower!

Unless...?

Welcome back to my liveblog of sorts for web novel The Flower That Bloomed Nowhere by @lurinatftbn! Shout out to the Flower discord for giving me such a kind welcome. You're making me want to go all out on this liveblog, but, I musn't...! So I'm going to try to just comment on things that jumped out as especially noteworthy rather than write down everything that went down.

Especially since... a lot happened in these chapters. We have a perfect androgyne tree thing! Magical duels! Questionable student/teacher relationships! Steamed hams! Intense political arguments at dinner! Metafictional assurance of fair play! Prosognostic events! Transgender AIs! And of course........

a murder!!!!!

...ok that one was kinda obvious. But the first body has hit the floor! I don't feel like I have nearly enough information yet to start speculating about who might have dunnit.

That's a lie. It was definitely Kinzo Ushiromiya. That bastard.

So, from the top!

We're introduced to a few of the members of the Order, with by far the most screen time going to Su's mentor and ah, kinda-girlfriend? Neferuaten. And like, damn, lot going on there!

Before I get into the meat of that - first the bit where I search a character's name on Wikipedia. Neferuaten's name is most likely a reference to an Egyptian female king/pharaoh (a rank that's apparently distinct, conceptually, from a queen) variously called Ankhkheperure-Merit-Neferkheperure, Waenre, and Aten Neferneferuaten. Most often shortened to just Neferneferuaten.

Her exact historical identity seems to be a little unclear - she may or may not be the same person as Nefertiti for example. Whoever she was, she apparently reigned for a couple of years around 1334–1332 BCE, and was then succeeded by the famous child king Tutankhamun. Or maybe Smenkhkare came in between them? Seems to be a matter of some debate. Girl really needed to leave a few more vast and trunkless legs of stone so we can figure this stuff out.

In any case, this version of Neferuaten goes way back with Su. Her introduction is to launch a magical attack on our poor girl while she's contemplating the 'everblossom'. One of those classic 'master surprise attacks the student to see how much they've learned' deals. This servers as a fine exposition for the exact mechanics of magical duels.

Zettai! Ummei! Mokushiroku!

Let's briefly note how magical duels and magic works here, since it seems like it will be very relevant later.

The more we learn about magic, the more explicit is that this system is not some natural property of the universe, but something that's designed by the mysterious Ironworkers. It seems like it's kind of an API to the Ironworker admin console. The Ironworkers wanted to make it difficult to do magic on human bodies, and therefore they designed a system for detecting what is 'human', based on three heuristics - anatomical, motion and neurological.

Humans, being the freaky little hackers that we are, of course set about figuring out how to bypass this system, and created standardised means, consisting of three spells, termed [x]-beguiling arcana. In a sense the three criteria are something like three 'hitpoints': the primary way to win a duel is to get all three spells off, thus making your opponent vulnerable to magic.

To achieve this, you can either speak the words of a spell or sign them by drawing them with your fingers - i.e. one way or the other express the appropriate string of symbols. This is risky because if you're interrupted at the wrong time, your spell can backfire and blow up, and getting a spell right requires precise pronunciation and also rapid mental maths. So the general 'gameplay' of magical duels involves attempting to disrupt the opponent's focus and aim, while fast-casting the spells that are most familiar to you.

We're introduced to a few spells that could be useful in battle, such as

Matter-Shifting (telekinesis spell with a geometric bent, used to move a cube of dirt to act as a smokescreen),

Matter-Annihilating (deletes stuff),

Entropy-Denying (essentially a shield that freezes objects and fluids in relative motion),

Air-Thrusting (creates a shockwave air blast),

Light-Warping (fucks up the light for visual cover),

World-Deafening (mutes all sound, which can interrupt casts)

Entropy-Accelerating (disrupts coherency, causing rapid aging-like effects - can be used on a 'higher plane' to disrupt all magic in an area)

Entropy-Reversing (rewinds matter along its path of motion - reference to entropy here seems a tad dubious but w/e)

It's clearly a pretty carefully thought out system - I appreciate that it's approached from the point of view of someone trying to exploit the shit out of the system and figure out what the real meta would be. It does kinda seem like if you got the drop on a wizard and shot them with a sniper rifle they'd be toast, but we'll see later that much more powerful weapons than mere chemical firearms exist in this world, and presumably in a combat situation everyone would have entropy-denying (or equivalent) shields up, so maybe that's a moot point.

Anyway, we are later informed by the closest thing to authorial voice that everything we're told here about magic can be assumed to be axiomatically true, similar to the red text in Umineko. Which pretty heavily foreshadows that this is going to be on the test, if you like!

the magical metaphysics

With apologies to Neferuaten, who will get more detailed comments shortly, there are some other big revelations about magic and the nature of this world that I should talk about while we're on the subject of magic!

In the last post I wondered whether casting magic is an innate quality or a 'skill issue' situation. It turns out the answer is sorta 'neither'. In fact, it's something that has to be unlocked, using special equipment and a particular ritual. The cost of this ritual is not yet entirely spelled out, but we definitely get an inkling. It's rather ominously implied by this exchange in chapter 22:

"We're supposed to want to save people, to make the world better. To defend a bunch of people who practically committed murder--" "You're a murderer too, dour girl." I stopped, and blinked. It took me some moments to process the words. They'd come from Lilith, who now seemed to have finished with her dessert. Now she was just slowly swirling her spoon around in the last remnants of the chocolate sludge on the plate and, occasionally, dipping a finger into her cream bowl and licking little bits of it up. Her expression was irritated, but disconnected. "All arcanists are," she said. "It's how it happens. So having fights over moral high ground like this is very stupid and annoying. Please stop."

In the same chapter, Su uses something called an 'acclimation log', in which she records her 'association' with a series of diary entries from her childhood self. It all suggests that Su's present consciousness has somehow taken over the body of another character, who we could maybe call original!Su.

A few chapters later, we find out what's the deal with prosognostic events. In fact we get a pretty extensive exposition. It turns out that iron is magical in this universe, providing access to higher dimensions, FTL and all sorts of shit. However, because the Mimikos and other worlds are running on a 'substrate' of iron - sort of like a simulation - we are told this is why they can't recursively include iron within. And since the human body includes a certain amount of iron (most notably, in the haemoglobin protein in red blood cells), it is not possible to fully realise the human body inside these artificial worlds.

a self-referential quibble

Here's how Su puts it:

A substrate cannot exist within itself. That sounds awkward when I put it so directly, but it's not too hard to understand if you think about it in abstract-- A foundation obviously can't support another foundation of equal weight and nature, because… Well, it would make nonsense of the whole premise. A book is a device for storing information, but it cannot contain within its letters everything about itself and what it contains, because that is already more than it contains. A box cannot hold another box of equal size, unless it is bent or otherwise changed. A mind cannot hold another mind…

On the face of it, this seems on the face of it... not entirely true, at least in some domains? You can run a virtual machine program on a computer, representing any particular combination of hardware and software, which is from the perspective of software 'on the inside', essentially indistinguishable from a computer running on 'bare metal' hardware. The only real difference is that operating the virtual machine has some computational overhead, so it will be slower. The more virtual machines you nest, the slower it gets.

But 'from the inside', the only way to tell which layer of virtual machine you're on would be to refer to some kind of external clock signal (which can trivially be spoofed) and notice that it's running slower than it should!

We could also mention here the subject of quines, which are programs which print their own source code.

Let's consider Su's examples. The book that completely describes its contents might be able to get around this problem in a similar fashion to a quine, by exploiting redundancy and self-reference.

For example, let's try creating a string that completely describes its own content, using a quine-style technique.

This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: "This string begins with a sentence followed by its quotation, and then 100 letter ws; the sentence is: " wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww

In fact the '100 letter ws' could literally be the entire string that follows. Suppose the length of the 'real content' of the book is S, and the length of the rest of the 'metadata sentence' describing properties of the book is M; then the total length of the book is 2M+3S.

You can add as much additional information to the 'metadata' string as you like, provided you quote it again afterwards. If you don't like having a book be three times the length it needs to be, you could compress the 'real content' string using an algorithm like DEFLATE, and include instructions in the 'metadata' on how to decompress it. (Text tends to compress really well.) This is where we run up into notions probably all too familiar to rats, or indeed anyone who recently read Seth Dickinson's new novel Exordia, such as Kolmogorov complexity.

But... I think this might well be intentional. Given how common notions like 'stacks of simulations' and 'self-reference' are in rat space, I suspect we may be being misled! The 'rules' of the game - more on that in a moment - say that Su won't deliberately lie to us, and won't withold information without saying so, but her perceptions could be mistaken. Maybe she's been given a false explanation of why the world works the way it does.

It's also totally possible that while the general point (you can't contain a thing in itself) may have some edge cases, the specific instance - you can't build a universe on a giant higher-dimensional iron spike and still have that universe contain iron - may still be true. We don't know the first thing about building universes using magic iron after all.

anyway... the Deal with Prosognisia!

The Ironworkers had a hacky workaround to the 'no iron' rule: they had a few tens of thousands of preserved human bodies on board their Tower of Asphodel. Asphodel, incidentally, is a genus of flower, said to carpet the Asphodel Meadows, one of the three divisions of the realm of Hades. (In their game, Supergiant decided to convert it into a lava zone.) It looks rather pretty actually!

So, they were able to instantiate these bodies in their rebuilt worlds by sort of making them into a reference to one of these stored human bodies. Here's Su again, chapter 26:

Some human bodies, or at least the impression of them and the iron within, had been preserved as part of the Tower, frozen in a timeless place. And because of that, it was eventually discovered it was possible for them to exist in the artificed planes as a sort of stable paradox. After all, while a book can't exist within itself, it can still reference other stuff it does contain internally, even if it makes for somewhat awkward reading. A few tweaks and workarounds solved the problem of the iron associated with that human body staying a part of it, and just like that, human beings were walking something at least akin to the earth once again. However, this only permitted replicas of those bodies within the Tower to exist. The creation of new ones remained impossible, and births not incubated by anima taken by the same mechanism would inevitably fail. And there were far fewer preserved bodies than minds; scarcely more than ten thousand or so for each party.

So every human born in the Mimikos is forked from one of these human bodies. For... mysterious reasons, if you recognise that someone nearby is forked from the same body as you, you both straight up die. If you touch such a person (a 'contact paradox') it's even worse, and all the iron in your body disappears, leaving behind a 'greenish sludge', which seems to be a severe enough disaster to cause deaths of nearby people as well.

(This is a little surprising given that the iron in the human body is only about 60 parts per million by mass, but it would kinda destroy your blood's ability to carry oxygen, so it would definitely be pretty fatal.)

The 'distinction treatment' we heard about is able to mitigate the risks somewhat - with quick medical intervention and time magic, it's possible to allow the people involved to make a full recovery. An interesting wrinkle is that it's implied either Ophelia or new character Balthazar is trans, because normally people of the same gender can't share an upstream body.

That definitely leads to a very fascinating fucked up medical emergency scene, but the reason I'm discussing it now is because it's got bearing on this big-deal question of 'what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway'...

so what's so fucked up about arcanists anyway?

Having finally answered one of the major questions, we can start zeroing in on another. In a flashback scene in chapter 30, we learn that the 'original' bodies have innate access to the magic API, but when you're given a distinct identity at birth you quickly lose it. To have your sv_cheats 1 restored, you have to go through a process that, it would seem, downloads a new mind into your head from one of those original bodies...

The man sat back a little in his chair, crossing his legs idly. "It's intimidating in concept, but please do understand that, in the overwhelming majority of cases, there are no observable effects whatsoever. Around half of the individuals who go through it don't even lose consciousness, and of the other, four out of five don't report any abnormalities when they reawaken. And even of the remaining 10%, the symptoms are negligible for nine out of ten-- Fleeting false memories, minor alterations in temperament that self correct, usually in under a day..." "And the others?" I inquired. "The remaining one percent." He considered this question for a few moments, obviously choosing his words carefully. "The technical term for the rare cases where confusion persists in the longer term is pneumaic assimilation failure. We have a program for treatment, using a combination of various phychological and medical means. It's time-tested. It brings people back to themselves quickly, usually within only only a few months at most." 'Confusion.' 'Brings people back to themselves.' I wasn't feeling fond of the way he couched everything in euphemism. It wasn't helping. "What do you mean by 'it brings people back to themselves'..?" I furrowed my brow. "They just... Forget everything?" "Not immediately," he said. "But they lose a sense of association with... Well, with anything that shouldn't be there, and that leads those memories and feelings to fade over time." He smiled. "The human mind is very adept at excising anything it judges to be out of place. All it needs is a push in the right direction."

The new mind tends to rapidly adjust to its new context, connecting to the memories stored in the body and assuming continuity of identity. But in rare cases it fails! Nuts! And we can infer poor Su appears to be one such case.

Presumably this is what Lilith is referring to when she says that all arcanists are murderers. It's not clear if there is continuity of consciousness when you get /mode +o'd - since you (usually) inherit the memories it is perhaps hard to say whether such a thing is meaningful.

In any case, Su's mega-guilt complex, the reason she seems to want to visit the mysterious egomancer Samium, seems to be at least partly that she's evicted the previous consciousness to inhabit this body. I don't think that's the whole story though! Her grandad seems to be involved somehow too. I don't think Su is literally the reincarnation of her grandad, because it seems unlikely that he'd be motivated to carry out ego suicide like this.

introducing teacher mommy

All those major revelations aside, let's get back to the subject of Neferuaten, aka 'Grandmaster', Su's old mentor in entropic thanatomancy. She quickly establishes herself as one of the most likeable of the inner circle of the Order - she's funny, understanding, generally affable and a little self-effacing. Su definitely puts her on a massive pedestal - though other characters such as Ran find her a little more sussy.

I gotta say, the author is really good at writing old academics. Each one of them comes across as strongly believable, distinctive, motivated and flawed characters. I'll talk a bit about the others in a bit but first let's talk age gap yuri! lmao

Anyway, at the end of chapter 20 we get this:

Then she leaned over and, in an impulsive, almost casual gesture, kissed me on the lips. Before turning, heading to the exit.

'Huh!' thinks the reader. 'That sure is an unusual thing for someone's teacher to do.'

It is quite a few chapters later before Su gets round to telling us a bit more about what's going on...

After that, we met outside of the university more and more often, her becoming sort of a source of emotional support. At some point, I became aware that what was happening was probably quite inappropriate. It's not like I was underage, having turned 25 two years prior, but she was my professor. But I'd been bad at making friends in both of... Well, in both my past contexts, and I'd felt so lonely living in Tem-Aphat, away from Ran and any reminders of the resolutions we'd made. And it all somehow felt so natural. Things got out of hand. One day, I'd had a fight with my father over the logic bridge, and had got a little drunk when I was due to see her. I don't know exactly what I was thinking, but I did something uncharacteristic of me. Inappropriate. But she didn't respond in the way I'd expected. To my shock, she didn't act like it was inappropriate at all. It wasn't as if we ended up dating. That would never have worked, and I was pretty sure she was past wanting that sort of thing anyway. On some levels, she always kept her distance. But it became something we did together, an avenue of private expression that became part of her support for me - and mine, eventually for her.

Su then expresses a bunch of guilt over the whole thing. (Not least because it's a 'selfish' thing she's doing in a body that, implicitly, she doesn't think of as hers.)

The issue of age here is interesting lol. Definitely my gut reaction, and probably the one the story is aiming to elicit, is to be a bit 'wuh oh' by all this, maybe think of Makima wrapping Denji round her finger. That said, by vastly expanding the range of human ages, it's definitely poking pretty hard at our intuitions about what's 'appropriate'. The vibes are like... the students are constantly referred to as 'the kids' by the hundreds-year-old wizards. I don't think we're told Su's current age, but if she was 27 in this flashback, and in the present she says a 29 year old computer is close in age to her, so I would guess currently early 30s. Neferuaten's age is not stated at this point but given her position she's def a few hundred years up there.

The vibe though is that Su is infatuated with someone who has vastly more emotional maturity and experience of the world, not to mention social power over her, and that person is all too happy to encourage it.

The way Su tells it, it sounds like this fling went pretty ok for them? But I definitely feel like things are probably not gonna stay ok, given how clearly the 'inappropriate' nature of this relationship has been foregrounded!

Dark yuri is literally one of the things I'm here for, so I'm looking forward to the fireworks lmao.

Anyway, besides that, we get a bit of a sense of Neferuaten's ideology. She actually shares a lot of Su's skepticism about the viability of the whole immortality project. She makes a big point of making sure the gang get a sense of the order's culture and rituals, apparently viewing this as a chance for their project to be judged by outsiders for the first time. On a personal level, she raises the issue of if the project might be able to save only the young - whether they might be the last humans to not become immortal. Nef's attitude seems to be that she'd be good with that - something she clashes with Kam over.

Otherwise, she's kinda... world-weary, I suppose you could say. She seems to look at the firey youngsters with an attitude along the lines of 'wish I still had that'. She does love to perform to an audience, asking leading questions to set up some lesson or another.

She's a fun character, I enjoy reading her a lot.

Also she seems to have made a sapient AI in the basement! Only everyone says it's definitely not sapient - it is in some sense not agentic, it can't change its motivation, allegedly. Still, it definitely has a 'passing the Turing test' sorta vibe.

don't mention the war

Besides Nef, we get introduced to a few of the remaining members of the class, and also the masters of the Order. Of note is Bardiya, the former revolutionary. He's a very 'speak his mind without preamble' sort of character, which can land him in hot water.

So, returning to Chapter 22, we have a really juicy scene in which a dinner conversation gets very heated after Bardiya mentions his role in the war, provoking a political row with Durvasa, a member of the order. It's a really well observed social dynamics scene - the characters dancing around the topic and the way a row is almost avoided, and then it isn't - Bard's determination, Kam's brown-nosing, Su getting drawn in against her better judgement in a deeply relatable way.

Thanks to this convo, we get a sense of the events of the revolution! So, as @nightpool helpfully informed me, I actually got things a bit mixed up in my rough timeline last time. The 'gerontocrats' were not a feature of the distant-past imperial era - rather it's a figure identified as an oppressor class by a very recent movement, still within living memory for even the youngsters.

The events broadly seem to reflect something like the Paris Commune. There was a famine under the hand of a 'Meritist' city council, killing thousands, which led to a popular uprising let by a 'paritist' movement. The paritists executed a handful of people and redistributed property based primarily on age, intending to break the power of the 'gerontocrats' who had neglected the 'younger generations' by hoarding resources. The Administration overseeing the whole world alliance then cracked down hard - deploying a poison gas that, though it was intended to be nonlethal, turned out to have unexpected lethal side effects.

In the aftermath of the revolution, it seems many reforms were made - besides relaxing the rules on what magic is banned, they changed the equation of scarcity so that food could be replicated more readily? Little unclear on this part. Su mentions that the situation is different now than it was when the Alliance was built, with the material scarcity mostly gone, but clearly there was a famine in recent memory.

Anyway, there is naturally a big generational divide over this. The older generations lived through some pretty fucked-up sounding wars, called things like the 'Great Interplanar War', and in the aftermath built a political system that was supposed to secure peace. (c.f. League of Nations, UN). Although she broadly sympathises with the revolutionaries, Su seems to extends the older generation a fair bit of understanding for having built this system and fearing what would happen if it were destroyed. Though the most relativist view comes from the mouth of Neferuaten:

"I think a common problem with inter-generational communication is an inability to really convey context and scope," Neferuaten said. I noted she didn't actually convey if Kam's understanding of what her point had been was correct or not. "Someone who lived through the Interluminary Strife might tell a young person from the modern day that they have no understanding of hunger, only for the latter to stubbornly retort that they lived through that Ikaryonic famine that preluded the civil dispute… Except that one was a catastrophe that lasted decades and killed tens of millions, while the other slew less than a thousand." She sighed. "People try to relate the experiences of others to their own lives in order to contextualize their understanding of the world and how it might be bettered, but those second-hand experiences inevitably become caricatures, conveying no useful truths. It makes me wonder if human beings, both young and old, are capable of learning from history at all."

Around here is raised the question of a person's political development - the arc from a young person's anger at the state of the world and determination to tear it aside for something better, against the resignation of an older person who fears losing what is already there, however flawed. (We might note of course that there exist young conservatives and old radicals. Circumstances have a lot to do with it.)

Of course, with this whole 'gerontocrat' business at stake already, the mission of the Order hoping to achieve immortality is naturally cast in a dubious light. Fun conflict. On the one hand we have 'can immortality be achieved, and what will it cost', on the other 'who will benefit from it, if it is'! So much narrative force is obtained by politicising this, attaching it to characters with personal motivations and histories, instead of leaving it up to an abstract 'living forever good/bad'.

But it's not all political debates and shagging your teacher...

Over the course of these chapters we get a sense of what the order's been up to!

Let's talk flowers. Just prior to the meeting with Nef, Su comes across an enormous freaky plantlike thing. This turns out to be an experiment to create a being that can survive in even the most extreme environments, like the bottom of the ocean - an attempt to demonstrate that immortality is possible at least in principle. This lifeform is termed the Nittaimalaru or 'Everblossom'. It seems like a pretty good candidate for being the story's eponymous Flower - symbolically, the underwater immortality-granting plant that appears in the Epic of Gilgamesh.

It's worth noting here that 'indefinite lifespan' is actually not entirely impossible in our natural world. I was talking about this with a friend who raised some interesting points:

reading the first post i wanna bring up that while the concept of cancer is fundamental to any multicellular organism the presence of cancer as a problem is actually pretty niche. same with telomere degradation, which is a purposeful anti-cancer measurement. like pretty much all perennial plant life is capable of absolute immortality. while the lobster grows forever until it can no longer use its legs to push its great weight along the sand towards food, if a tree overshoots its growth it's more than happy to break off its unnecessaries, though with both of them at a certain point it's always good to have help after a while. as mammals we're very obsessed with the concept of like ending death as this sort of ultimate goal, prime directive, whatever, when that shit was deliberately turned on in the first place (assigning intent to evolution sue me), because in terms of cost benefit it gave us something in return that we as students of medicine or biology are still not fully grasping.

After a little more discussion:

@play-now-my-lord wrote:

even if humans weren't causing climate change, climactic fluctuations over centuries upend a lot of what is normal in specific areas. if the people on a farmstead in bronze age sweden lived 500 years, the methods and habits they internalized when they were young would habitually be incorrect for the conditions as they existed, the weather, the soil

other friend:

that's how most trees die in the end the root system operates as a weak parallel to the tree's neurons, with a more physiological bent than say our chemical one. patterns around balance, nutrient access, hydrology, and wind are ingrained and learned over centuries and the more regular/consistent that cycle is the more a root will grow. if a tree's roots are built around buttressing from a wind tunnel due to forest conditions and the trees around it fall for whatever reason, it has to relearn what used to be a hundred year old certainty that it needs to lean against the westerly gale every winter, etc. - this is generally a pretty brittle process altogether when it comes to the base of the plant n stuff

some caveats:

should be noted i overlooked a lot of nuance about perennial mortality, like, some plants are more used to investing into survival than others i'm thinking of like how beech bark disease doesn't affect the roots of the beech, so the trunk dies but new shoots continue to grow out and eventually catch the disease and repeat, so the plant is essentially still immortal but forced into a perpetual state of adolescence. but i think for a great number of trees if the tree falls it just goes "eh the rot consumes us all " and dies

Among mammals, we could also note the cancer resistance of the naked mole rat, which loves to defy all sorts of generalisations (also one of the only non-arthropod eusocial animals). They're not exactly immortal, living around 37 years on average, but their chance of dying at any given year is pretty much flat rather than increasing with age.

Of course, longevity and resilience are different things. Nef mentions the resilience of tardigrades as an inspiration. As far as their experiment goes, the 'everblossom' is not an entirely successful experiment, requiring twice-yearly maintenance to address an imbalance.

Given how prominently it features, and the invocation of Gilgamesh, it seems pretty damn likely that the everblossom will in fact be a key to immortality, or something like it.

Religion exists after all!

Other parts of the facility are also pretty funky. We learn that it was patterned after the old headquarters of the Order, which was destroyed when they got found out; that headquarters was built in an old church compound. What sort of thing does a church worship in this world? Actually it's kinda goffic as fuck. Makes Catholicism look downright tame. It's a polytheistic religion and the deities involved are figures like this...

In the center of the circle was a statue, about 8 feet high, and of the kind of ornate-but-formulaic design that characterized art from the Second Resurrection. It depicted a tall, skinny woman, though her two sides, left and right, were very different in nature. The left was beautiful and youthful in a generic, almost ethnicity-less way, dressed in the most delicate of silk peploi, with long and unrealistically tidy curls falling elegantly over her shoulders. Her lip was curled into a gentle half-smile, kind but slightly mysterious, teasing. Her right... Well, her right, to say the least, was very different. On that side, she appeared to be skinless, although it was hard to tell with a statue; I recalled it being a matter of hot debate among the boys in my class back in secondary school. It was possible she was simply incredibly emaciated, or that there were supposed to be growths - like scales - erupting from her flesh. Her hair was made up of hateful, eyeless wyrms, biting and hissing at each other, and her flesh, which was naked save for a tasteful rag covering one area in particular, was covered in numerous stab wounds, bleeding openly. As for her face, it was grim and wide eyed. Mournful and contemptful both. I recognized the figure depicted at once; I passed one of her temples whenever I went to the distribution hall to pick up groceries. This was Phui, Dying Goddess of Love Given Way To Anguish, one of the eleven deities of the now largely defunct Ysaran-Inotian Pantheon.

In the stories, Phui was the third-to-last of the gods to fall during the end of the world, who attempted to take her own life after the death of her lover. But the breaking of the heavens had left her unable to die, meaning that no matter how she much she cut into her flesh, how much she starved herself of food and drink, reprieve would never come. Only relentless, unceasing pain, and grief for that which she had lost.

Metal album cover ass-religion, I'm into it.

The mysterious Ironworkers seem to have really drummed into the population of their new Mimikos that there was a very nice world once, and they'd better be damn sad about what happened to it. However, religion has waned in the present day, and it seems most characters are atheists of some sort.

What did happen to it, anyway? It's referred to as 'the collapse' with a lowercase c; I noticed an author's comment where the author says it's not a case of just a name for the apocalypse. A few people in the comments started speculating about false vacuum collapse. This is a physics thing. Basically, a remote possibility exists in the standard model of particle physics that the existence of matter in our universe could be in a kind of local energy minimum, but it would be possible for it to locally fall into a true minimum, creating a kind of bubble that expands at the speed of light and just deletes everything. We're pretty sure that isn't true though. If it did happen we literally would not be able to do anything... at least in a universe without FTL.

(Curiously, Su mentions special relativity at one point. With all the funky cosmology stuff I kinda wondered if special relativity is still real, but apparently it is! Electromagnetism has been mentioned as still being a thing a couple of times now, so rather than being totally absent it seems like the physics is a bit different, with an electric shock being sufficient to cause radiation poisoning.)

The fair play interlude

In between chapters 22 and 24 we get a curious little interlude called Intermission ∞ 1. The introduction presents it as something that is happening on one of the 'higher planes', translated into terms we can understand, which is grounds for it to get metafictional.

Two entities, calling themselves the Playwright and the Director, discuss the direction of the story so far before laying out the version of fair-play mystery rules this story will be operating under. They are as follows:

THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE PROTAGONIST IS ALWAYS TRUTHFUL

ALL EVENTS FOLLOW THE RULES OF CONVENTIONAL REALITY, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

ALL SYSTEMS INTRODUCED CANNOT BREAK THEIR OWN RULES AS DEFINED WITHIN THE NARRATIVE, UNLESS INDICATED OTHERWISE

I made them red because it feels like they would be red in Umineko.

Further clarifications and caveats allow that Su can withold information (for dramatic tension or whatever I guess) but she'll always tell us when she does, and an example of 'system introduced' is the magic duel sequence: the characters know accurately how magic duels work.

The two entities are performing this story for some sort of audience, and during their double-act credit themselves with control over the direction of the scenario, sometimes disagreeing. (Another one, the chorus, enters at the end.) Probably best not to think too hard about what that implies for our characters on the 'main' level of the story being 'real', it's probably just a cute bit to take the audience aside without completely breaking the fourth wall. Then again... who knows!

What this means is that my concerns about professed liar Su being an unreliable narrator are unfounded. It's still a limited POV, so Su could fail to notice things or be deceived, but she's not trying to pull one over on us.

I bring this up because...

There's been a mordah!

So, in the last chapter I read - strictly the beginning of a new arc - we find someone dead!

Well, this was kinda foreshadowed earlier. The chef disappeared, the assistant chef was knocked out by magic, and some kinda crazy time magic happened in the pantry - with the heavy implication that someone was trapped in some kinda hyperbolic time pantry for many years. At least they'd have plenty to eat..? The characters don't pick up on the implication of the tally marks and write it off as a stasis field malfunction.

So, it was natural to suspect the cook is dead. Indeed they are: Su finds a mysterious note in the book given to her by an academic at the school as a parting gift, warning her not to trust the inner council - inexplicably written two years prior and warning her to check the archive in a certain position. Investigating this, she and Kam find a secret armoury room. In there is a tunnel, and at the bottom, the cook appears to have committed suicide, leaving a suicide note vaguely implying the Order is up to some seriously sussy shit.

Of course, Kam and Su immediately suspect foul play. But they also both have ulterior motives for coming to this conference, so they agree to keep it hush-hush. This is definitely a great idea that won't get everyone killed by Beatrice... I mean uh. Whoever the murderer is.

The obvious question is, who dunnit? And why? Unfortunately, we don't really have alibis for most of the characters. Many of the inner circle haven't even shown up on screen yet. So there's a lot of people who it might have been.

More suspects! More suspects!

I haven't even mentioned several of the characters. We also have Sacnicte, steward of the house - she's an arcanist, and Su is kinda insanely horny for her aesthetically appreciative, in a way that the other characters notice and are literally like 'I don't see it'... which makes me wonder if we have a situation where someone has fucked with her perceptions. She's very down to earth and casual.

Her name is probably a reference to the Maya princess Sac Nicté, meaning 'white flower', who according to legend was involved in the migration of the Itza people from the Chichen Itza. Mind you the article I'm getting this from is kinda horrendous; the sole source is in Spanish and appears to be some random website from 2004.

Among the older generation, we have Theo's dad, Linos. He is a generally affable chap, kinda socially awkward (he's responsible for prolonging the political discussion by a botched apology) but otherwise not particularly standing out among the Order members.

Linos or Linus is another Greek name with a few referents.

The Order member who really does stand out is Anna, or in full, Amtu-hedu-anna. She's the one who's properly old, having dodged many of the 'kills people around 500' bullets of this setting, and not especially inclined to make nice. Very 'straight to the point' kinda lady. We meet her fairly briefly - Ran seems to have landed in her good books.

This one really took some digging! It seems to be based on Enheduanna, who was a Sumerian high priestess of Nanna and the oldest named author in history, credited for tablets like The Exaltation of Inanna, although it seems there's some debate over whether she definitely wrote them. Her rank in Sumerian was Entu, and I could fully believe 'amtu hedu anna' is a different transliteration of 'Entu Hedu Anna'.

As mentioned above, we're introduced to two logic engines, Sekhmet and Eshmun, built respectively by Neferuaten and (the as yet unseen) Hamilcar. Sekhmet has more biological components and wants to be a human. She wants to be human, and she's also expressed a distinct pronoun preference and gender id, which I suppose makes her trans. Eshmun is a more traditional logic engine with a lot of cogs; Sekhmet calls him 'big brother', so I guess he gets he pronouns from that.

Sekhmet is of course named for the Egyptian lion-headed warrior/medicine goddess. Eshmun is a Phoenician god of healing. Hamilcar was a name used by a number of Carthaginians, mostly generals.

Ezekiel is another one of the student gang. We haven't seen much of him yet, so I don't have a lot to say about him. Abrahamic prophet.

Balthazar is a student from another school - another thanatomancer in fact. He's something like the protégé of Zeno, and his presence is Zeno's condition for having this whole affair go ahead. He's got the same eyes as Ophelia, and Zeno failing to do his paperwork and allowing to happen is a big deal. But Zeno's kind of a bigshot so it might not come to anything. Anyway, Su is kind of suspicious towards Balthazar, but he takes it all in good humour.

Balthazar was one of the three magi in Christian mythology. There were a few Zenos, but the best known is surely Zeno of Elea, who came up with his famous "we need to invent calculus to solve this" paradoxes around infinite sums.

Yantho is a member of the Order staff, who was cooking when whoever did shenanigans in the kitchen... did shenanigans in the kitchen. His roast was ruined, but sadly he was too unconscious to order fast food and pass it off as his cooking. He can't speak and communicates by writing on his tablet.

The name crops up as an obscure Maya deity, part of a trio of brothers with Usukun and Uyitzin, but I can't find any source that seems particularly definitive.

Samium is an old egomancer, whose presence is a secret that only Su and Ran are in on. Su wants to speak to him, for reasons that are probably to do with finding out if he can restore 'original!Su' into her body, or maybe resurrecting her grandfather, or something?

...is that everyone? I think that's everyone. At some point I probably need to make an Umineko-style character screen lol.

can we solve anything yet?

Since this chapter is the beginning of the arc, I suspect there's more info to divulge before we can think about trying to solve this one. And, given the Umineko inspo, the problem to solve probably isn't simply 'whodunnit' but something more fundamental to the nature of this world.

Still, it seems all but spelled out explicitly that current!Su failed to properly assimilate into her body after she became an arcanist. Her grandfather's final 'kindness' is less clear. Her intentions with Samium... I've mentioned the obvious theories about already. She's mega guilty about overwriting this poor girl and has decided the only course of action is to try and restore the mind that inhabited her body originally. But I don't think we have the whole picture just yet, because I still can't figure out what her granddad did.

Given her discussion of 'dragon' vs 'phoenix' resurrection, and of how her meeting with Samium might change the order, I also theorised - before I really twigged the arcanist thing - that she was here to resurrect her grandfather in her own body. Body-hopping is like, the classic immortality strat after all. But... I'm less convinced of that one now? It doesn't seem like Su particularly liked the old man, she definitely doesn't want to follow in his footsteps, and 'saw him die unexpectedly during the revolution' does not seem like it would inspire the same sort of guilt.

Still, he surely did something to her, she's definitely cryptically alluded to that enough times.

Besides that?

Obviously really digging this story! Honestly, this one rules. It helps that the author is clearly into a lot of the same shit I am. All the long discussions and beat by beat narration could potentially feel a little dry, but honestly, I'm pretty hooked, it's definitely pulling me forwards. It's a fascinating, conflict-rich setting, that raises all sorts of interesting concepts. It's confident in knowing what it wants to be. Umineko is a hell of a tough act to follow, but this one has a distinct identity of its own. Can't wait to see what happens now the mystery seems to be about to kick off for real.

With that in mind, I'm sure it won't be long until the next one of these. I may have to dial back the detail a bit, this is kinda having a bad effect on my work right now. There's just so many fascinating corners to follow up ^^'

Anyway, I realise these posts are kinda massive for tumblr, so I'm gonna start copying them over to canmom.art soon. <See you next time>.

[elftwink]

been learning to play ironsworn (gritty fantasy ttrpg which you can play with a gm but is mostly suited for solo or small group co-op gmless play) after having the rulebook pdf for several years (stars finally aligned to remove invisible thing blocking me from reading it idk) because i'm on another solo ttrpg kick & i don't know what took me so long to get around to this game because it genuinely is exactly what i was looking for. years ago when i was playing through solo 5e modules i should have just been playing ironsworn (believe it or not, 5e isn't very suited to solo play and is extremely clunky when you try lol).

also though i have dabbled in some other solo ttrpgs, a considerable amount of them are journaling games which is fun but imo considerably more work (usually by the time i'm a quarter of the way through the journal entry, i know how to entire scene played out and i want to move on to the next gameplay thing, so i get frustrated and bored quickly. it feels like when you solve a level in a video game but don't have the coordination to pull off the necessary move so you have to spend 20 extra minutes doing something you already figured out), so i really appreciate like not needing to write something for the game to progress (ive been taking notes for my own record since im playing solo and thus am not really out loud roleplaying the way you do in a group, but i definitely could do that instead and not take notes and the game would still function perfectly)

& ive been playing by myself but also in the past ive played a lot of ttrpgs in very small groups which has been other games but is mostly dnd and like. we also should have been playing ironsworn so that having a gm was not necessary. have definitely played games where we had to adapt the rules soooo much to do something that is just base game included in ironsworn. plus it's rules-light enough to do pretty complex moves that pose difficulties in bulkier games (ever introduced someone to dnd and they tell you they want to do a sick backflip and catch something and then attack and you have to tell them that will require several different consecutive rolls and some creative liberties with how the rules are 'supposed' to let you move? you can just Do That in ironsworn. use the strike move and describe it. done!)

the one thing is that although it's rules-light enough to theoretically play any setting or genre (some with more difficulty than others), ive found so far that like... the grittiness and sense of threat is very built into the mechanics so that would be sort of difficult to work around or change (but i think it's great from a game design perspective). what i mean is like, okay: you start with 5 max hp. there isn't really a way to raise this max hp, you just slowly gain abilities (assets) that make you less likely to have to lose the hp in the first place, or that make it easier to recover. when you encounter foes, you rank them on a scale of 1 -5, and enemies on the lowest side of this scale do one harm to you, while enemies on the highest side do five harm to you. so even though encountering an epic enemy won't always be deadly due to the assets you have, they are ALWAYS capable of taking you down to 0 hp with one good hit. so the feeling of threat is much more present compared to games where your character starts to be able to just tank and push through a failure or huge threat.

admittedly also i'm playing solo, im still learning how to balance combat, and also i built a character who has NO combat talents and iron (the close quarters fighting stat) is one of my lowest stats so i personally am under much more threat than if you built a character who knew how to fight or who could do deadly harm. but also the other thing about combat is it's extremely difficult to maintain control of the fight; you have to score a strong hit to do it on basically all moves, and there's a really limited pool of moves available when you don't have the initiative, and obviously none of them really favour you. i don't know that this makes combat genuinely more difficult, but it does make you feel like the fight is always about to spiral out of your control. every second you let it drag without decisive action feels like it brings you closer to dying. like i said, this is a feature of the game design and not a problem in any way. just thinking about it because when i was initially learning i was going to try to supplant it into a homebrew fantasy world of my own but the tone just wouldn't be right. and that it is somewhat difficult to replicate the kind of worlds that i typically play or run for dnd, which tend to lean somewhat sillier and definitely much higher fantasy

but i like to try new things and tbh especially in dnd i find that i very rarely feel that sense of threat and when i do feel it, it has nothing at all to do with the actual mechanics and reality of the combat and everything to do with how well the dm sells it to me and makes it sound and feel scary and dangerous. which is a testament to what a good gm can do for you but i do appreciate the threat feeling more built-in and also being actually real.

[skqw]

Heyo! I've just released a triple feature of maps. These ones are either me messing around for fun or old work-in-progress maps that I figured deserved the light of day. I'll be moving on to other Celeste projects now; it's always exciting to start something new.

The first map is chill, an old project from over a year and a half ago. It's techless with jump refills and move blocks, with people placing it between intermediate and advanced. (Maybe I'm just not cut out for beginner gameplay.) It leans into the colorgrade quite a bit with a blue-green heavy color palette. Length is a modest single checkpoint, with maybe a dozen rooms. This was intended to have several checkpoints, with the introduction of a new mechanic after where the map currently ends, but I lost steam in the project.

The second map is goose!'s green facing blocks, a map idea which came from beloved Celeste modder @goose-exclamation-point. Facing blocks are the star of the show, and as it currently stands there is a noticeable lack of other mods which use the mechanic. The unique movement and oddly specific inputs push the map to high expert. Out of the three maps I have today, this easily is the best gameplay-wise. Additional thanks to @abuffzucchinisvariousposts for decoration and music choice. Vine room forever.

The third and final map for today is iota, a compact grandmaster map. The smaller something is, the better it is. This applies to many things, such as celeste rooms, cats, and debt. Rather than use traditionally sized 40x23 rooms, I challenged myself to make short, difficult screens in a 21x21 tile play area. It's got some wacky tech, including corner tech, spiked wallbounces, a reverse cornerboost, and even a dashbounce (these are real words with meaning I promise). For grandmaster players who enjoy the precision kind of stuff, this is a sort of diet-precision map that shouldn't be as much of an ordeal as the heavy stuff.

I've got clear videos for these maps on my YouTube channel if you're interested in them but don't want to play. As always, remember to leave a like on the GameBanana page if you enjoyed! It really, really helps.

[kafus]

i'm really glad that i started with pokemon at the time and age that i did. there's a lot of reasons for this but i'm thinking about two in particular atm:

i was precocious with academics as a child and constantly felt bored by stuff that was considered to be for my age range. playing pokemon leafgreen for the first time on my 5th birthday required me to read dialogue/signs/etc, do some basic number processing, and use logical thinking to get to the end in ways that other games i had tried did not, and it gave me the freedom to do so at my own pace without having a cartoon character in annoying voice ask me if i can do XYZ like most edutainment games at the time lol

pokemon was easy to pick up in terms of controls, 99% of it is moving on a grid and navigating menus, which once their UI was learned, were incredibly easy to control. there is no need to have fast reaction time or the ability to do complex controller input. so long as i was willing to engage with the rpg mechanics i felt confident as a 5 year old with some motor skill issues with navigating the game

it's interesting to me because a lot of people don't like RPGs and even if they play pokemon, they may not like the RPG aspects of them, which is fine. but for me all of the RPG mechanics of pokemon slotted perfectly into my child brain that craved Brain Stimulation and only had a history of edutainment games prior. it really showed too because as i got older i did shit like discovering that IVs/EVs existed before they were ever so much as mentioned to me, of course i didn't have the name for them but just for fun i experimented with raising two of the same pokemon species to the same level after hatching them from eggs (level 20 or something) and noticed that despite being the same species and level, they had different stats, which must have meant pokemon were genetically different from each other. i found the math-y stuff genuinely interesting before i had any context for competitive etc later in life

additionally even now i sometimes struggle with more complex controls, like i love legends arceus but i think it took me longer to figure out navigating that game than most people and games that are more difficult or require more complex inputs or better reaction time tend to be really inaccessible for me. i'm very happy to just interact with a menu, i love turn based battles and the notion that they are objectively outdated when i find them genuinely engaging is so annoying

i started thinking about this because i tried to get my mom to play let's go eevee a while back since it's a pokemon game made for beginners basically, but i did not anticipate just how difficult she would find basic navigation using the controller - catching pokemon, the main part of the game, was incredibly frustrating for her, but she could do the battles alright. with pokemon moving in an open world, 3D direction, it requires you to get used to the controller if you don't want to be falling off stuff and running into pokemon constantly. and while SV isn't particularly hard to navigate or anything, and kids are getting into tech earlier and earlier than they ever were when i was little, i still really appreciate the simplicity of control when i was younger and i think it's interesting how much other people hate the relative slowness of RPGs and value freedom of movement and action a lot to the point of considering turn based gameplay really outdated while it's still my preferred way to play video games lol

[k1spiegel]

hi. here is that list of games i've enjoyed this year that i talked abt making, now under a read more for your viewing pleasure. not in any order besides the order i remember them

links will be to steam store pages if applicable, if not general home pages, though some of these will be available on multiple consoles

Inkbound - an isometric turn-based roguelike game in mid-beta where you play as a Needless, a blank, "generic" character with no supposed imagination or will, accompanied by a Kwill, a ball of light that helps you along. i'll be honest and say i haven't paid much attention to the story but i don't think i have to when the gameplay is so good. i love roguelikes and turn-based combat both, and the amount of customization you can get from random items and abilities during runs makes the game difficult but not soul-crushing. eventually you Will figure out how to make urself almost unkillable. no premium store or pay currency, just unlocking and in-game currency.

Cassette Beasts - a 3D environment-2D sprite creature capture game with a nostalgia theme (made in Godot!). i played(/replayed) a lot of creature captures this year, with cassette beasts probably being the earliest and one of the most memorable. there are some parts of the game i'm iffy on (the music, some of the companion quests compared to others), but the creature design and element mechanics in the fight make up for it by leaps and bounds. i've got a lotta favorite beasts in this one. suggested esp if you like 2v2 fights.

Palia - if you've hung around the "cozy games" scene at all, You Know This One. palia is a casual mmo currently in open beta that focuses mainly around farming, questing, and integrating yourself into a new community (though that's not All you can do.) by "casual" and "cozy" i mean that there's no real rush to do anything, your crops won't grow without you there and there's no friendship(/romantic) relationship deterioration. play as you want when you want. also it's free lol

Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince (no link available; currently only on switch) - i have never played a dragon quest game before. i think this was the funniest way i could've gotten into it. a creature capture-creature combiner game in the dragon quest monsters series where you play as a young Psaro, The Dark Prince, The Manslayer, the future King of Monsters, and go through different echelons of nadiria(/the area where monsters rule) beating ass and taking names. i probably don't have to sell this to DQ fans so much but the monster designs are fun, the story is funny to me whether on purpose or not, and i like either using the auto battle for quick levelling Or giving commands directly to my beasts. good stuff.

Lies of P - do you remember a few years back when everyone saw the pinocchio soulslike and went No Fucking Way and then forgot about it? lies of p is the pinocchio soulslike (though it's much more obviously a bloodborne-like, or to be even more specific, a code:vein-like). i love it. the setting and characters is kind of insane when you think about how it's All based on pinocchio, but it takes itself seriously enough to where you just go with it and enjoy your time with P and the npcs. the gameplay is fast and fun, with a pretty extreme amount of customization (swappable and upgradeable robot arm, usual soulslike Put Points Into Skills stuff, weapons with switchable parts that can be upgraded or change their scaling, etc.) i'm just having a really great time with it and want other people to too.

Risk of Rain Returns - an incredibly polished remake of the original Risk of Rain, a 2d side-scrolling roguelike where you play as a survivor on an alien planet full of things that want to kill you. i have almost 200 hours on the original ror and the remake has earned At Minimum 200 hours more - not only do the original characters and stages feel refreshed, but there's now new areas to visit, new survivors to unlock, and fun challenges to beat to try and get new items or abilities. plus chris christodoulou's soundtrack is, as always, The Best. if you didn't play the original RoR, i'd really recommend giving this a shot instead.

SPECIAL MENTIONS (no links. im lazy.)

Guilty Gear: Strive - tim managed to get me into fighting games this year and ggst was probably the best introduction i could've gotten. classic weird as fuck characters and story + an insane soundtrack.

Lethal Company - you've seen someone playing this, somewhere or somehow. funniest game to play if you and your friends are wussies. now has arachnophobia mode (<- is an arachnophobe, so i like it.)

Fortnite - sorry

[woethehero]

Wyrd RPG Blog Post #2 - Combat Discussion

Hey Hero! Check out the much improved lettering of the name lmao.

Welcome back! This time were discussing the Combat mechanics and what has been worked on so far. Some things are in better spots than others, but everything is open to criticism. Everything is subject to changing as review and testing occurs.

We're going to be covering a lot, prepare! Just as a reference for what I'm going to be talking about today:

Asymmetrical Combat (PvE, PvP, GM and Players)

Health Systems (Core, Health, Armor, and Magic Protection)

Defining Enemies (Minion, Elite, Champion, Boss)

Phases of Combat (Move!, Fire!, Fight!, Plan!)

Grouping (For Friend and Foe, Individuals or Squads)

Player and Foe Actions

Combat for this system has a very large amount of influences, but you can expect turn orders to play like a war game may. This has been a very interesting thing to try and adapt to a TTRPG combat system, as I quickly figured out why you don't often see tactical/squad based gameplay in RPGs. Regardless, we're going to try our best anyways.

Asymmetrical Combat

It's important to understand right away that the design behind the combat is that GM's take on a largely different role in play than the players do. Players control their Champions in a much more specific and detailed way than most creatures the GM is responsible for, specifically in PvE, which will be the intended way to play.

Player Characters have access to Effort, a plethora of abilities and items, and a custom understanding of how to operate their character. At the head of the table, the GM has a much more simple task in playing the monsters. I wanted the GM side to foundationally be scalable from small encounters to massive battles without much change required in how things are played. As anyone who has played more than a couple sessions of any TTRPG with combat in it, it can be really slow.

I don't want to rush the players, but I do want most of the time to be spent on their decision making and thoughtfulness. The game is aimed to be a little more difficult than others and discourage direct fighting all the time, not without tipping the scales first anyways, so naturally the players are encouraged to be genuinely thoughtful.

As for PvP, I currently don't have the desire to incorporate PvP into the balancing process of enemy types, champion abilities and equipment, etc. This is an RPG first and foremost with war game style combat that's focused on the players. I don't see myself ever wanting this to be a competitively viable project, but a cooperative one most definitely. Doesn't mean I won't change my mind later though!

Health, for Friends and Foe

For Player Characters, Health has a bit more going on and is broken into 3 distinct categories, Armor, Health, and Core.

Armor Pips (AP): Like a standard Health Pip, but it has it's own armor save of at least Armor 2, up to Armor 5, determined by the equipment of the character. Once they run out of Armor Pips, damage defaults to Health Pips.

Health Pips (HP): Your flesh and blood, typically takes damage directly without intervention. If unarmored, be very careful! Once you run out of Health Pips, any damage goes to Core.

Core Health Pips (CHP): A small number representing your resistance to fatal damage. When taking damage at Core, all incoming damage is reduced to 1. This represents great injury or mental anguish. Healing Core Wounds takes a long time, and when you run out of Core, you die. Most characters have at a minimum 2. Protect it well!

There was originally an idea for another layer of armor called Magic Armor Pips, but after further ideation were later moved, as Armor Pips had changed quite a lot from first conception. Now Magic Protection is going to be a type of spell ability to allow different types of mechanical advantages to occur that deny damage from going through. Armor Pips were originally going to work the same for Foes as well, but when testing on a larger scale, it got to be way too difficult to determine how groups take damage where and when, so a more simplistic design was created in attempt to remedy this. This actually has worked out so far, because Asymmetrical Combat and GM ease of management are big goals of the design.

For Foes, it depends on how they're defined.

How Foes are Defined

Minion / Grunt / Gribbly - The "Bandit Sniper" "Skeleton Swordsman" "Gob Thug", the nameless guys who populate dungeons and typically exist more in numbers. They can have specializations, but are ultimately disposable. Typically with limited action choices, d6 table outcomes, and basic fighting styles. They don't worry about managing Effort (just get exhausted after some time).

✴ no Effort maintenance, no Core, base Armor #.

Elite - A step up above, often found as particularly capable leadership for Minions, but also in small groups to form dangerous Elite squads. They have a broader selection of abilities usually requiring some strategizing from the GM. Actions are more advanced and may involve more GM focus, but doesn't require managing Effort. Elites have Core HP and can React.

✴ no Effort maintenance, but wider range of actions, and they do have Core, still Armor #. (Armor # doesn't apply to Core)

Champion - Equal complexity to the players in some regard. Player Characters may face opponent Champions. Not frequent in a fight and can be viewed as a "mini-boss" of sorts. Effort will need to be managed by the GM and Health will behave the same as players. (Core HP, HP, Armor)

✴ very similar to Player Characters in complexity, same Health system AND Effort maintenance.

Hero/Boss - Behave in rules beyond what's available to players. The scale of them varies, but their defining factors are usually unique abilities not seen elsewhere in the game specific to the unit. Some abilities or actions stretch beyond what is otherwise mechanically possible within the game, primarily for fun, lore flavoring, or to express otherworldly power. Huge BBEGs or characters "Achieving Daemonhood" type stuff, so special occasion things.

✴ a step beyond normal design, allowed to break some rules to provide unique challenge and/or flavor.

Combat Battle Phases:

Alright! This is the more War-Gamey part of the combat system. Fans of Warhammer will likely notice similarities. There are currently 4 Distinct Phases for Combat:

Move! (positioning, determining engagements)

Fire! (ranged abilities and attacks)

Fight! (melee abilities and attacks)

Plan! (time for decision making, grouping, or bailing)

A turn begins at Move!, which is Regen applies. Effort must be carefully maintained through each round. At the beginning of each phase, participating group of combatants must Roll Off to see who has priority.

Roll Offs

Each acting unit rolls a d12 to determine turn order for each phase to determine in what order things happen. For all phases, the lower number goes first, then the next, and so on until the lowest.

Winning a Roll Off means you have Priority, which looks a little different each Phase.

Move!: When you have Priority on Moving, it means you as a Player can elect to Move or React. If you end your movement in proximity to a Foe, you are considered to be Engaged, where neither can leave without first attempting to Disengage. If you want to lock someone up in a fight where they are, that's the time to Go. If you want to wait and React to what a Foe does before you Move, you can put yourself behind them in turn order so you can Move afterwards.

- If you're the target of a React, you cannot React and must Move! (I don't love this one, but I don't want players to feel punished by moving first, then another enemy moves out of range) - Minions cannot React, but Elites and up can. - Critical 1's on Move! Roll Offs grant extra movement. 12's cannot React, even to other 12's.

Fire!: Having Priority on Fire! means your ranged attack goes off before someone else's. In a shootout with multiple combatants, this could mean your shot interrupts or takes out a Foe before they can Fire their attack.

- Unique to Fire! is the Cover mechanic. Cover utilizes terrain pieces of different sizes, determined by the GM of giving Cover 1-4, acting as a secondary armor save. Fire! targets that decided to Hunker Down get an additional Cover 1. - Critical 1's on Fire! give you an auto-success on your next action.

Fight!: Units Engaged in a Fight! roll for Priority to see who gets to hit first and who defends, followed by a reversal.

- Previously, the Fight! System was the Roll Off determines who is on the offensive and who is on the defensive, meaning there was an Attacker and Defender and that was it. This lead to cool interactions of one party being on the defensive or have dramatic back and forth, but quickly fell apart in encounters where multiple combatants were fighting, so a more traditional wargame "my turn your turn" is something I'm going to try for now. It currently forces a lot more energy usage from the champions than the previous iteration, but I don't hate that.a - Critical 1's on Fight! Give you an auto-success on your next action.

Plan! doesn't Roll Off, this is just time for thinking and changing things up. Namely, reconfiguring grouping or bailing on the fight.

When you decide to Bail!, you and your party escape the encounter. I currently haven't set up any mechanics for how this works, as it's yet to be something people wanna do in basic testing. I'm currently debating between letting it be an easy out but with immediate penalties, or setting up a more complex mini game of trying to escape that may lend to a chase. Regardless, I don't want players to ever feel trapped in an encounter they know they don't wanna do anymore. It's purely unfun.

Last note on Roll Offs, I'm currently experimenting with an character mechanic called Speed, which would affect Roll Off successes. I'm either going to make it a Stat for characters to build or not, or make it a property of actions/weapons/traits, or a third option I haven't thought of yet.

Character and Unit Grouping

As combat is designed to be scalable with the size of the engagement, the grouping of enemies may change. In the beginning of a character's career, it may be common for the Party to fight a number of opponents approximate to their party total. For contained instances like this, having each unit act independently or maybe in pairs is fine.

However, enemies may appear in larger numbers or be working together more strategically. Player Characters may also have their own minions or companions to manage and running them all separately is just too much slog. Before any encounter or during Plan!, you can revisit squad configurations and Group Up or Split Up as makes sense to the table, as long as units are able to make the changes happen, such as being in relative proximity or have some form of communication from distance.

In cases like these, say you have 4 town guard under the command of a character, you'd roll them together as a single acting unit. 1 Roll Off die for all 4 as they act cohesively, Move or React all together, 4d6 to determine attacks and defenses, etc.

During Plan!, you could decide to split up those guard and give two to an ally. Or regain control of all 4 again. You could pair up with another Champion to ensure you act together at the same time during your phases if you have something planned.

Foe Actions

Minions and Elites, the bulk of what Player's may encounter, play very simply. Champions and Bosses are more related to players actions, but will be explored further on in a future post.

On a Minion and Elite level, their Attacks and Defenses are prepared on a d6 table for each action that the GM simply has to pop a d6 on to see how they behave.

Let's look at this Gob Thug. Whenever it's their time to Fight!, the GM will roll a d6 to determine their outcome depending on if they're in Defense or Offensive stances. If there are multiple of the same unit in the group, you can roll multiple d6 to determine them all. Here are examples of some abilities minions may have.

For Attacking, Spiked Mace:

1 - 1 Damage w Crush 1

2-3 - 1 Damage

4-6 - Miss

Short Bow:

1 - 2 Damage

2-3 - 1 Damage

4-6 - Miss

For Defending, Wooden Shield:

1 - Block 2

2-3 - Block 1

4-6 - Fail to Block

Basic Weapon Block:

1-2 Block 1

3-6 Fail to Block

Player Actions

An Action on the Player side requires Effort to complete to determine how well the task is performed, unlike a simple pop of a d6. Primarily, this is for things that require some Skill or Attribute to perform, like making an attack with a particular weapon, disengaging from a fight, performing an ability, etc.

The inspiration behind this system is Pathfinder 2E's Degrees of Success, of Critical Fail, Fail, Success, Critical Success. However in this, there isn't critical failure, and the highest success result written is considered the best or "critical" success.

By default, totaling below the minimum successes needed on a roll means total failure, you did not do what you intended. It simply fails. Some actions can specifically mention consequences of failure or change the cost of success around depending on the nature of the action. Some actions could even include failure as one of the lower results or as a result of overshooting.

Additionally, so far in the default, we've been doing 3 basic degrees.

For example, a plain Short Sword may look like this:

Slash

1 Success: 1 Damage

2-3 Successes: 2 Damage

4+ Successes: 3

Damage

Pommel Strike

0-1: Miss, Trigger Target Riposte

2: 1 Damage, Crush 1 (Reduce Target Armor)

3+: 2 Damage, Crush 1

Weapons as a basis are currently thought having some basic actions that come with it with fixed outcomes. They're not restricted to this, think of them more as a template. You can alter the success requirements, add more outcomes, add new attack types for the weapon, give it custom properties, and so on.

There is still a strong spirit of "can I do this?" available in the game. My partner is a fan of flipping or throwing furniture on enemies during testing, which grants them cover or improvisational damage. For these instances, I've just been asking for "Toughness Checks, 1-3 successes" depending on what they're trying to move.

Wrap Up

This is everything done for Combat so far, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

I know it was a lot so I appreciate you reading up, just a lot to get caught up on as I'm starting this documentation process a bit after the fact.

The next post is going to cover Character Creation, attributes, skills, and current stat ideas I'm playing with. Moving forward from this post, things will have a much more exploratory and uncertain tone as I'm sharing more so my less polished ideas, which I hope encourages more discussion in the future from anyone with their own ideas or concerns!

Thanks for reading Hero (:

See you in the next one!

Woe <3

[pennydoe]

Is fear and hunger worth getting into? I don't really like watching gameplay videos or anything and I'd rather not go in completely blind, but what I've seen from your art and the things you've liked looks really dope and kinda up my alley.

Ok so brief explanation and I'll tell u some like.. trigger warnings so! (TLDR at the bottom if u don't wanna read my ramble)

Ok so basically O think it's rlly worth it because it has a rlly flushed out world building, plots, and other stuff and The religious system is extremely interesting how the gods work and their relation with humans are extremely fun to learn about just by reading the skin bibles.

It's a really fucking here game and you see.. a lot of not good stuff sometimes like, for example, (TRIGGER WARNING FOR RAPE, SEXUAL ASSAULT, DRUG ABUSE, AND MORE.) In the first game there is these Guard enemies and their dick is so big it literally drags on the floor. And it you lose their insta kill attack, you get raped and stuck with the 'Severe Anal Bleeding' status effect. The game has rlly dark settings and plots like there's a whole ass character who was a child soldier and had a heroine addiction and gets withdraw symptoms if you don't constantly give him heroine.

The game is also just... very fun.. It's very difficult and not very rewarding, but the rewards you do get are just like.. chefs kiss.. It's just extremely fun and the gameplay is very very interesting since the main combat mechanic is Dismemberment. You can lose limbs and so can your enemy, so you gotta figure out what limbs to focus such as sharp limbs or their torso/head. Pretty strategic..

The games definitely dark, but it's not like.. dark just to be shocking, it's actually used in a way for world building and genuine character development. The plot can be extremely sad such and i've genuinely cried to certain endings, and you you're not exactly gurateed s good ending, ever.

Basically, I think it's very worth it due to the interesting world building and the addictive art style and gameplay, as the arts gorgeous. If you ever want to I can stream a playthrough on discord if u want! I can give better explanations and I actually have both games ! (my discord is pennydoe if u wanna friend me)

[corpsephage]

Sonic Frontiers Post-DLC-Three Whinefest Redux (Final Horizon Review)

After feeling left out in the cold with my divergent opinion on vanilla Frontiers, it feels good to finally share an opinion with the rest of the fanbase again. Spoilers below, but the skinny is that it's just like normal Frontiers except a lot more difficult.

I forgot to mention one thing that put me off Frontiers in my pre-DLC review: I just couldn’t handle the controls very well. I think this is just a skill issue, because I did eventually get used to them. It took my ten attempts to beat the first boss, but only one attempt to beat the last one.

So, when I fell right off the first platform of the first trial tower for the seventieth time, after spending time maxing out all of Sonic’s capabilities no less, I assumed that the problem was with me, and the game just did not cater to my ability or taste. But when I checked out Twitter – everyone else was talking about how hard it was! They were going so far as to compare it to Dark Souls. It made me feel so relieved. And a little bit of schadenfreude.

At this point I was about to turn it off and just watch a playthrough of it on YouTube to see how it ended. I’ve only rage-quitted a game like that once before with Drawn to Life: Two Realms, which is a whole other story.

But friends, thank God for easy mode. I switched the difficulty and it was smooth sailing. I don’t think there’s any shame in playing easy mode – you bought the game, play it how you want – but I had it on normal mode from when I first got Frontiers up until this stupid tower. It makes me wonder if I’d have been nicer about Frontiers as a whole if I played easy mode from the beginning.

But yes, going through the rest of the game on easy mode was a lot more manageable, except for that one part where you have to defeat those shell enemies in a certain amount of time with nothing but the cyloop. If there's a way of doing it, I don't know what it is, and I only got past it when the game took pity on me and offered to lower the trial's difficulty to something easier than easy.

But other than that, no major complaints. All my problems with the empty open world and weird plot still stand, but gameplay-wise everything was just fine. Then this prick shows up:

- and makes you fight all three non-final bosses from the base game in a row with only 400 rings to spare between them, bearing in mind your rings are constantly draining while you're fighting them, can't be restored, and if you run out it's an instant loss. Also, parries don't work unless they're bang-on perfect.

And I really struggled with the first boss in the base game! And yes, most of that was my fault, because I didn't bother to parry his attacks, and parrying is like the main mechanic that all the bosses are centered around. But I was also cocky: I thought that if Sonic ran out of rings by timeout, his super form would go away and he'd fall back to the ground along with the emeralds, and you'd have to run around the arena to pick them up again quickly before Giganto had time to heal or something. So when I ran out of rings and Giganto straight-up ate Sonic I was surprised. And I admit I got quite frustrated having to start over from the beginning every time until I slowly figured out what the boss wanted me to do.

So I beat Giganto again in this rematch, and I thought at first that was the end of it and I'd just have to fight the one boss, which was a natural step up from the other koco's challenges. But then Wyvern showed up, and it suddenly dawned on me that not only would I have to fight all of them, and my rings didn't refill between fights so I had only like seventy left, but also that if I lost, the game wouldn't start me over from the boss I was on, it would kick me back to Giganto and make me do it all again.

Obviously, there was no way I was beating Wyvern with only seventy rings, and I don't think I was quick enough to even parry it once. So I made a deal with the game and said “If I die here and the next thing I see when I respawn is Giganto, I’m turning the game off.” You can’t say I didn’t warn it.

So, yes, I actually did end up rage-quitting Sonic Frontiers: The Final Horizon, and I just watched how it all ends online. I didn't stick around to see if the game would make itself easier if you failed the bosses enough times. Maybe I would've been able to pass it if I kept trying, but since I wasn't wild on the whole game to begin with I didn't feel like it.

Turns out if you somehow finish the boss rush, the endgame comes straight after. And I wasn’t really missing much, by the look of it – first half of the final boss is the same as in the original game. It’s Giganto, except he’s got a gun. The second half is a bit different – it’s Giganto, except he’s got a big brain-drainer/puppet-string coming out of his head and several arms coming out his back. The big purple rock is hovering in the sky, but rather than QTE-ing it, Eggman fires Super Sonic clean through it after Giganto is beaten the second (third? Fourth? However freaking much) time. It’s got a lot of visual flair, but I really wish you could play as the other characters as well, so that the final fight feels more fully absorbed.

The ending sequence is the same too, except Sage doesn't sacrifice herself this time, and she and Eggman get their happy ending instead of a post-credits sequel hook. But while it might make Sage fans sleep a little easier, I think SEGA might have written themselves into a corner with her. The whole thrust of her character was a mopey AI that just wanted to be loved, and now she has it... what are SEGA going to do with her if they bring her back?

If she comes back evil, and joins Eggman in raining merry hell on Sonic and his friends, won't that contradict the canon of Frontiers, where Sonic taught her hope and heroism? And if she comes back good and on Sonic's side, won't that also contradict Frontiers and her loyalty to her father?

Would she go join all the other Sonic antiheroes on Team Dark? But even they have their motivations - Shadow started off a villain but realized he was being a jerk and tries to uphold world order. And while Rouge is a master criminal, she's not mean-spirited - she might rob you or cheat you out of money, but she'd never want to hurt you. What's Sage's motivation? She doesn't really get to develop a personality of her own by the end of Frontiers.

Imagine after the final boss, Sage comes up to Sonic and says she’s been thinking about her place in the world. Sonic asks her what she wants out of life, only for Sage to suddenly flash him the most deliciously evil grin an AI can muster and tell him what she wants most is to use his skin as a fur coat. Eggman comes up behind on his egg-mobile, gleeful that his daughter has finally come round, and the post-final boss is a blow-off match between Sage and Sonic, plus the other playable characters joining in on the fun. And behind the keyboard, I stand up and applaud. Maybe that would clash with Frontier's tone, but then at least Sage would come into her own and indicate her appearance in future games.

So, yeah - The Final Horizon - really didn't dig it. If the original Frontiers didn't interest you, this won't change your mind. However, there is one good thing I want to bring up that I hope Sega explores in the future: the other playable characters.

I really enjoyed playing as Tails, Amy and Knuckles. Each of them has Sonic's basic moveset, but also their own powers and abilities on top of that. Knuckles has the most familiar of movement, with his gliding, wall-climbing and seven different ways of punching people. His gliding controls take some getting used to, since it's more like wingsuit-gliding with wind resistance blowing you about the place than the simple jump-and-go Spyro-style gliding from the Adventure games.

Amy's moveset is centered around a deck of tarot cards she was mentioned to have been using in, like... one very early manual for Sonic CD. But still, I think the idea of her using magic cards has a lot of potential. Maybe different cards do different things in battle? Kill the enemy by changing their very future? Maybe it could be something like Kingdom Hearts: Chain of Memories, where the cards are all shuffled up and you have to pick which card to play at which time. There's a whole unique aspect of gameplay available to her there. Sadly, Final Horizon sticks to standard things like throwing them at people or slapping them, and doesn't take advantage of their clairvoyant or paranormal themes. Ah, well, maybe next game.

But Tails deserves special mention, because he has the most varied abilities that make use of his wacky inventions. He can launch a laser cannon at his enemies, or failing that hurl an endless supply of wrenches at them. But you know what my favourite was? His airplane. One of Tails’ abilities he can access at any time is to just hop on his plane and go off into the blue yonder. The speed and simplicity with which he could do this at the press of a button is intoxicating. I was furiously humming Ride of the Valkyries as I cruised around Uranus Island wishing it was a livelier open world. If these are the abilities we can expect from Sonic's friends, the next game could be very exciting if the level design matches up with it.

If vanilla Frontiers showed me that Sonic can work in an open world, Final Horizon showed me that his friends can too. And it's something I really hope SEGA picks up on in the future, because they really do have the bones of a great Sonic game in here, it just needs more time to cook (and a saner difficulty level).

[risu5waffles]

TEN Levels Enter

TEN levels also leave, after having their fill of tea and cakes. C'mon, we're not running the Thunderdome over he-ah.

b-coli's a creator i knew way in the back-and-back, and when he dropped a comment on one of my episodes, it was, like, "oh, yeah! b-coli! Gotta grab one of his." This might not have been the best of the lot, but it was his first, and that's kind of special, isn't it? It's clearly designed for multiplayer, wiv one player handling the driving, and one the shooting, and two sleds for teams. Unfortunately, that does make for a bit more of a slog going through solo. Still, it's got that first level enthusiasm, and i always love to see that.

Talked about this one a little when we talked about Platforming Perils, but it is really, really good. Just enough of a challenge to make you sweat a bit, but not really anything that's going to stress a player out. Like in PP, there are a number of classic, HARD(tm) obstacles in a much more forgiving form, and i could see it being good as learner level for that kind of play.

i don't really get all that invested in how many views any of my episodes get. i've been doing this long enough that if that was a driving force for me, i'd have given up long ago. That being said, sometimes you run into a level that you really want to get eyes on, and the video sits at, like, 4 views forever. i just want to be, like, don't watch it for me, this is actually really cool, you gotta check it out! This is one of those kinds of levels. i was only really familiar wiv yomi-yomi through their association wiv Japan Music Collabo (who you should really check out, they did very solid music in LBP), and one level i played for the old series called "Cooking With Clumsiness." It was, if i may be perfectly honest, kind of shit. Imagine a level completely built wiv no glue, so everything is stacked together like Jenga. It was deeply, deeply frustrating. This one, tho'. It's a bit confusing at the beginning, figuring out just what yomi'd wanted me to do; but once i got the ball rolling, it was hella neat. Tons of little mechanical interactions, which always make my day. There are a few bits where some of the hiragana characters didn't load in, but otherwise, everything seemed to be working no problem. It's all just deeply cool.

i wish so hard that Zookey had set these up to be rideable wiv one player. i can see how that might have been difficult in LBP1, but still. As it is, they look neat, and i'm sure they're fun, but as a gallery level, it winds up feeling a bit lacklustre. At least they made a The Zipper. i used to love The Zipper when i was younger, and sometimes i have a hard time convincing people who've never experienced one that they actually really do (did? are they all gone now?) exist. i swear they're, like, specifically designed to sound like they're going to come unbolted at any second and kill everyone on board. Fucking loved these babies.

Eh. We talked about Rock Fire last Friday, and it continues to be Rock Fire today. Shame that.

i suppose i didn't have to play the full slate of these, but the servers were being a bitch, and i really needed to balance the playlist numbers, and, honestly, i was having a good time wiv them. i really liked the conceit of setting up a discrete set of levels that would all teach one particular gameplay bit, that would all tie together in a final level. The elemental theming was an obvious one to go wiv, and i think the levels pull off the presentation side of that quite well. That being said, i do think actual gameplay side of things wound up a bit lacking, and that was a shame. Like, it would have been easy to string together a number of different sections for each level, and really get the player cozy wiv what you were doing, and also just give a more robust experience to a player who might only bop into one of the levels by chance. As it is, unless you were set from the outset on playing the lot, i don't feel like any of the learning temples really sells the rest of the set. Still, it's interesting to see a creator grasping towards a concept that Sumo would eventually make good on wiv the Adventure Maps in LBP3.

--------------------------------------------- So that's our TEN this go about. i've really enjoyed spending some solid time wiv the real old school stuff these last few weeks. As much as i love LBP1, i probably spent the least time wiv its community levels, so this has been an experience. Once we finally pass episode 300, we'll probably starting seeing TENs weigh more heavily on LBP2 and 3 again. Gonna have to put a sticky note on the telly not to give LBP1 too short a shrift. The levels just get banged so hard by translation, and wiv the servers being a whole thing recently... i really, really hope Sumo gets its shite together, 'cause none of this bodes well.

[jamsofdeath0]

Sonic Frontiers looks 𝘧𝘪𝘯𝘦 but it's still disappointing. Without even looking into gameplay the world itself is just boring. It looks like every other botw wanna be and it doesn't have to be.

The world of sonic is SO interesting. They couldve disregarded all the previous game "lore" and went for a SatAm style world, or more current comic style world, or kept the game lore and made a more modern but fantasy like world. Even adding old locations like Station square, the mystic ruins, metropolis zone, San Francisco. Maybe have Angle Island actually floating about hard to find but so mystical, or Chao gardens.

I think the "Sonic SatAm" world would have been the most interesting bc nothing like it's been done in a game.

Going through a destroyed world trying to free city's with beloved Sonic characters as you get stronger to be able to finally defeat Eggman would have been dope.

And even if they did beat eggman at the end there would still be sequel room or even a whole separate story for a second game.

And not another character has been shown.(Amy's been mentioned) Sonic has a massive cast. I can probably name 30 off the top of my head so there's little excuse to have such lifeless world. I'm not asking for all of them to be playable but imagine having Amy, cream and her mom's, or even shadow's homes as locations with them there (or not depending). Sa1 did something similar, Tails' work shop was a a location you could enter and it was mentioned that Amy had an apartment. Wouldnt it be fun to just explore Sonic's would? No, instead we get "an island he washed up in".

The most dissatisfying thing about this game is definitely there lack of creativity, but sadly that isn't a shock Sega hasn't had the balls to do anything interesting with sonic in years. They somehow manage to be the most reckless with their property while never stepping outside the box labeled safe. Maybe the final game will be more interesting than whats been shown but I don't have my hopes up.

Now talking on gameplay, I think I would have gone the original Sonic Adventure hub world approach with maybe some Sonic 06 hub world mixed in. An open area where doing certain things unlocks others and with power-ups hidden about. I also think most of the adventure moveset would have been fine especially early game but other stuff might have made the game play more varied later. Like having the spindash from the start as you unlock later things.

The other a abilities could be anything from the standard light speed dash to magic hands.

Given a wide enough or even just a fun enough moveset whether the game felt small or not because Sonic was faster wouldn't matter because doing stuff again and again different ways would be fun. Say you want to get up a mountain. With a good move set there would likely be several ways to do it and part of the fun would be figuring out which one to use.

I'd also have momentum based controls instead of boost. I think, and this one is probably the most personal preference in this little rant, having him be able to spin dash like an adventure, Adventure 2, and even Sonic the Hedgehog is better than when he dashes like in heroes, unleashed, or Lost world. The the dash mechanic works pretty well with a long straight pathways but open pathways I find spin dashing more fun especially when you can move around after spinning. I feel like I have more control.

Having multiple characters especially when the first alternative would be able to fly would be quite difficult so I understand if they didn't. And I would they didn't because if tails IS a playable character they should be yelling that from a rooftop.

I can't tell enough about how's the game actually controls by just watching so I can't say whether they will be fun or not.

[wanderingjournalofshadows]

principium

This journal is a remnant of a wanderer, an adventurer of sorts.

More precisely a solo RPG journal for me, traveling through the mists, and exploring the wonderful and horrifying place that is the home setting of Ravenloft.

The Hickman couple created something in 1983 that captured the fans of gothic horror and at the time emerging Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts - it became a cult setting for many alike.

My personal experience with the world of Ravenloft runs back to 2017 when I first started to run Curse of Strahd, the 5th edition variant of the classic module I6 - Ravenloft. I was just starting college and gathered a new group of friends to guide them into the mists of Barovia.

Since then I ran the campaign two more times, with more or less success, but I knew that it is the perfect setting for me if I ever wanted to play D&D.

So what is the premise of this blog?

I intend to delve deep into the lore of the setting and explore it through the lenses of a character who travels through the mists and gets to know the colorful (albeit desaturated) Domains of Dread.

I'll write about my adventures, as I slowly slip into the role of this character, and hopefully enjoy my time over the weekly sessions of a couple of hours, and leave behind something that is enjoyable to read as well, since I do have my aspirations of creative writing.

It is also a practice of writing and my (non-existent) English skills, since I'm not a native speaker of the language, but if I'm to write, I need to hone the skill well enough to create something that captivates the readers' curiosity.

So expect grammatical issues, or sometimes errors in semantics, as I power through descriptions and ways to express my experiences during play.

Aesthetics? Format?

I also try to leave behind sketches, and make it pleasing to read this journal. I'm already thinking about the formatting of the text so one can separate the narrative from the game mechanics, and only read the fiction emerging from my dice rolling and decisions. Solo Roleplaying is a very interesting concept in itself, that deserves a dedicated post later on.

I think my time with Play-By-Post (pbp) games gave me a certain standard when it comes to "written play" and how certain things should be presented.

Writing in first person or third person will be always one of the difficult decisions when it comes to the tone of fiction. For the setting the first person perspective offers a certain kind of intimacy, especially to convey the character's emotions, that might be a better option to convey a personal experience. Bram Stoker's Dracula (Read it if you have the time) was also an inspiration for this choice, since the plot is told through letters, written from the perspective of the characters.

And while reading I will listen to music that inspires me, I'll most likely leave a Spotify/Youtube link at the beginning of each post to have an audio ambience for the entry.

In the coming weeks I'll figure out the blog aesthetics as well, refreshing my CSS skills and/or looking for a suitable template.

So who will be the Wanderer?

I don't know at the moment, but I need to find first where I should start. There are many wonderful resources online that can help me choose the first Domain of Dread to venture to. What I also need to choose is the rules themselves. Since the first Ravenloft was written for AD&D 1E - I might opt for using an older version of the traditional formula. There are some pros for it:

It's OSR compatible. I have a truckload of OSR resources, that can be fairly easily adapted to it, thus giving me more creative and gameplay freedom.

Lots of compatible Ravenloft materials. Lots of resources exist for AD&D 2E which also has an easy conversion backwards, if I would ever need to have that, but again the difference between 1E and 2E are minor.

It's simpler. While it's obscure in nature, it is less complicated, and less restrictive with certain aspects of the game, compared to 3E/3.5.

It's crunchy enough. 5E is nice, but lacks a certain kind of crunch that I liked about the older editions. AD&D 1E might have just enough that will be still simple enough for solo play, that I don't have to spend too much time figuring out the system while playing.

In the next post I'll be exploring my options for the character and the first Domain of Dread.

But I think it's good to write down the foundation of the thought process, and I hope it gave perspective for you as a reader on what the hell I'm doing here.

Cheers,

Mythwriter

[kiqilinn]

You know I didn't filter your tag because I still don't know wtf homestuck is really and thought, great maybe I will get a better idea maybe?

Except now I'm even more confused. So nvm lol.

homestuck is a multi media sort of webcomic that used to run on adobe flash in mspaint adventures ! after flash was shut down there appeared two ways to read it, the official homestuck collection a website made by people who didn’t care much about homestuck most videos of the animations and music are links from youtube and the gameplay is often just play-throughs it works on any device but is generally not that well regarded, and the unofficial homestuck collection made mostly by fans, you have to download it and it works online, sadly it isn’t an option for mobile users, it is the best way to read homestuck as intended and the way i do!

it has great animations and the music is created by a lot of people including toby fox, where i am there weren’t many games yet but people say they’re good and some are very complicated, early in the comic the readers could give prompts and interact with the story but later it’s creator decided they wanted to have more control of the story

i can’t say what it’s about exactly since it’s very difficult to summarize(1.2 million words) and i’m trying to avoid spoilers, but currently it’s about four 13 year olds who destroy the world by playing a game

it has very complicated lore and mechanics which i have a loose grasp on right now(i finally figured out all the sylladex terms yay) i’d say it’s a very fun read especially when the characters interact, the variety between pages is also huge some could be just one image others are complicated long videos with a couple of sentences below and some contain huge chunks of formal and flowery text(im looking at you rose lalonde)

it has the most realistic depiction of teenagers i’ve ever seen their conversations seem like actual nonsensical rambles you’d find in someone’s dms

it was created in 2009 by andrew hussie and is still kind of going with the development of separate games that i’m not planning to even touch, it has many queer fun stories there i’d recommend it, and it’s certainly very bizarre but you will definitely find a character you can relate to!

[georgewfmpyear2]

Problems with the core gameplay.

After spending the majority of the day tinkering out with the core gameplay systems, trying out different ways to make it more engaging, I've narrowed the reason its currently not working as well as I'd like it too down to three problems.

The first and simplest of these problems is that it currently just lacks game juice, the actually direct act of using the spells and hitting the enemies with spells just doesn't feel as fun as it could do at the moment. Creating game juice and making those sorts of things fun is something that I have a lot of experience doing so this problem I don't think will be too difficult for me to figure out.

The second problem, also relating to the spells is that they are all too similar at the moment, theirs currently no reason to use one over the over which also means that the core gameplay just isn't at all mechanically where I wanted it to end up yet, with each spell have a completely different use to the other outside of just doing different passive effects like fire burning and ice slowing enemies down. This problem is made harder to solve due to the fact that its very closely related to the next problem.

The third problem, which I think is the biggest cause of the gameplay not yet being engaging enough is the simplicity of the enemies. At the moment the AI simply moves to a random point near the player and then fires a few projectiles at them and then moves on. I want each of the spells to have different contextual uses within combat and thats not possible if all the enemies always behave in the same way since that means that all combat encounters will be very similar and therefore one spell will be the best for all situations. What I think I need to do is find a way to create varying behaviour within AI and also create several completely different types of AI that behave differently such as small enemies that huddle together, a large, health and aggressive melee character or a sniper like character that keeps their distance. All of which I think I'm capable of making mechanically but the difficulty comes on a design level of how can I make each type of AI so fundamentally different to each other than the player will need to think about which spell to use and how to use it against them.

At the moment I think the best way to fix these problems is to create the varying enemies first and then create the spells around those enemy types and then once all that is in place, begin making those spells fun and juicy to use, solving the issues I've listed in a backwards order.

[kafus]

Another ask to kinda-piggyback on an earlier one! A gripe of mine recently has been how overall easy most pokemon games are, and how little they make use of the actually complicated battle mechanics the game has. Outside of replaying Colo/XD, which main-line titles have good post-game content to start digging into the mechanics and learning strategies and all that?

tbh any pokemon game (other than colo/xd LMAO) is easy if you don't put arbitrary restrictions on yourself and use pokemon that aren't complete garbage in the stats department, even older ones! they are kids games after all. some modern pokemon games are definitely easier than they used to be but i think they're finally starting to figure out how to balance the new exp-all and rotating pokemon team gameplay that's been around since gen 6, but it feels like they're only just starting to perfect it (SV was not over the top easy by any means!)

that being said if you want some challenge and depth in a pokemon game, despite gen 5 not having any ribbons (it would be the perfect gen if it did) i definitely think gen 5 is the best for that? the main campaign is decently difficult in both bw and bw2 and both games but ESPECIALLY bw2 have a massive postgame with so much to do. i have a white 2 postgame playthrough going and i have nearly 100 hours and i've barely even scratched the surface of the battle subway, i'm still working on the pokedex!! lmao

all that being said whatever competitive strategies and stuff you learn in old games might be completely irrelevant to modern day pokemon so if you go into like. pokemon black expecting the skills you learn there to apply to scarlet/violet you're probably looking in the wrong place (of course some stuff is the same at its core like IVs/EVs but still)