#maybe I just need to play a new RPG. maybe I just want to buy baldurs gate

[jutsuuu]

I am no longer experiencing

[insertdisc5]

🎮 HEY I WANNA MAKE A GAME! 🎮

Yeah I getcha. I was once like you. Pure and naive. Great news. I AM STILL PURE AND NAIVE, GAME DEV IS FUN! But where to start?

To start, here are a couple of entry level softwares you can use! source: I just made a game called In Stars and Time and people are asking me how to start making vidy gaems. Now, without further ado:

SOFTWARES AND ENGINES FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO CODE!!!

Ren'py (and also a link to it if you click here do it): THE visual novel software. Comic artists, look no further ✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It has great documentation! It has a bunch of plugins and UI stuff and assets for you to buy! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) You can also port your game to a BUNCH of consoles! ✨Cons: None really <3 Some games to look at: Doki Doki Literature Club, Bad End Theater, Butterfly Soup

Twine: Great for text-based games! GREAT FOR WRITERS WHO DONT WANNA DRAW!!!!!!!!! (but you can draw if you want) ✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's versatile! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! (You'll just need to read the doc a bunch) ✨Cons: You can add pictures, but it's a pain. Some games to look at: The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo, Queers In love At The End of The World, Escape Velocity

Bitsy: Little topdown games! ✨Pros: It's free! It's simple! It's (somewhat) intuitive! It has great documentation! It can be used even if you have LITERALLY no programming experience! You can make everything in it, from text to sprites to code! Those games sure are small! ✨Cons: Those games sure are small. This is to make THE simplest game. Barely any animation for your sprites, can barely fit a line of text in there. But honestly, the restrictions are refreshing! Some games to look at: honestly I haven't played that many bitsy games because i am a fake gamer. The picture above is from Under A Star Called Sun though and that looks so pretty

RPGMaker: To make RPGs! LIKE ME!!!!! NOTE: I recommend getting the latest version if you can, but all have their pros and cons. You can get a better idea by looking at this post. ✨Pros: Literally everything you need to make an RPG. Has a tutorial inside the software itself that will teach you the basics. Pretty simple to understand, even if you have no coding experience! Also I made a post helping you out with RPGMaker right here! ✨Cons: Some stuff can be hard to figure out. Also, the latest version is expensive. Get it on sale! Some games to look at: Yume Nikki, Hylics, In Stars and Time (hehe. I made it)

engine.lol: collage worlds! it is relatively new so I don't know much about it, but it seems fascinating. picture is from Garden! NOTE: There's a bunch of smaller engines to find out there. Just yesterday I found out there's an Idle Game Maker made by the Cookie Clicker creator. Isn't life wonderful?

✨more advice under the cut. this is Long ok✨

ENGINES I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT AND THEY SEEM HARD BUT ALSO GIVE IT A TRY I GUESS!!!! :

Unity and Unreal: I don't know anything about those! That looks hard to learn! But indie devs use them! It seems expensive! Follow your dreams though! Don't ask me how!

GameMaker: Wuh I just don't know anything about it either! I just know it's now free if your game is non-commercial (aka, you're not selling it), and Undertale was made on it! It seems good! You probably need some coding experience though!!!

Godot: Man I know even less about this one. Heard good things though!

BUNCHA RANDOM ADVICE!!!!

-Make something small first! Try making simple: a character is in a room, and exits the room. The character can look around, decide to take an item with them, can leave, and maybe the door is locked and you have to find the key. Figuring out how to code something like that, whether it is as a fully text-based game or as an RPGMaker map, should be a good start to figure out how your software of choice works!

-After that, if you have an idea, try first to make the simplest version of that idea. For my timeloop RPG, my simplest version was two rooms: first room you can walk in, second room with the King, where a cutscene automatically plays and the battle starts, you immediately die, and loop back to the first room, with the text from this point on reflecting this change. I think I also added a loop counter. This helped me figure out the most important thing: Can This Game Be Made? After that, the rest is just fun stuff. So if you want to make a dating sim, try and figure out how to add choices, and how to have affection points go up and down depending on your choices! If you want to make a platformer, figure out how to make your character move and jump and how to create a simple level! If you just want to make a kinetic visual novel with no choices, figure out how to add text, and how to add portraits! You'll be surprised at how powerful you'll feel after having figured even those simple things out.

-If you have a programming problem or just get confused, never underestimate the power of asking Google! You most likely won't be the only person asking this question, and you will learn some useful tips! If you are powerful enough, you can even… Ask people??? On forums??? Not me though.

-Yeah I know you probably want to make Your Big Idea RIGHT NOW but please. Make a smaller prototype first. You need to get that experience. Trust me.

-If you are not a womanthing of many skills like me, you might realize you need help. Maybe you need an artist, or a programmer. So! Game jams on itch.io are a great way to get to work and meet other game devs that have different strengths! Or ask around! Maybe your artist friend secretly always wanted to draw for a game. Ask! Collaborate! Have fun!!!

I hope that was useful! If it was. Maybe. You'd like to buy me a coffee. Or maybe you could check out my comics and games. Or just my new critically acclaimed game In Stars and Time. If you want. Ok bye

[indierpgnewsletter]

Traveller & Champions

What is your relationship with the characters you play in RPGs? What do you want it to be?

In Traveller (the classic version, I add, tipping my hat), you make a character through what is now called the “lifepath method”. That name is a bit misleading because in this game, it’s more of a career path. And maybe more specifically, your military career path. Traveller was a game of veterans and if you want to get complicated, that’s what we should talk about. But let’s keep it light and focus on this unassuming table:

Now honestly, this table is iconic but I couldn’t make sense of it without having read the rules of the game (twice). But to put it simply, you’re rolling dice to see which branch of the intergalactic military you joined (either enlisting in your first choice or being drafted by whoever would be willing to take you). Then, you roll to see if you survive your first term, whether you become a commissioned officer, whether you get promoted, and whether you’re allowed to re-enlist for the next term or forced into an early retirement. If do re-enlist, you repeat the process till you retire or die.

Apart from picking your first choice (which you might not get), there are no decisions made in this process (don’t disagree yet!). You roll the dice and whatever happens to your character, happens. You just find out. You might die – and if you’re serving in the Scouts, it’s very likely you do – and you just have to start again with a new character. I think consensus is that this method can be surprising but detached.

Let’s talk about Champions. Traveller came out in 1977 and was revised constantly over the next decade. Champions came out in 1980 and is remembered by many as the classic superhero RPG. In 1984, we got Champions 3e which I understand is what cemented it as a landmark in RPG history.

In Champions, you build your character. You get skills (Security Systems, Swinging), Special Effects (Extra Limb, Mind Control), Advantages (Useable at Range), and Disadvantages (Unusual Looks). You pick your skills, spend power points to buy your powers, balance your advantages and disadvantages, and come out the other end – sometimes hours later – with your character. It’s fair to say that Champions is only decisions – it’s nothing but decisions. And that feels different. I think consensus is that this method has lots of strategy and self-expression but is very involved.

At first, it feels like these two games are on opposite ends of a spectrum. But actually, there’s a contradictory impulse in both of them. When you play Traveller, it’s a step-by-step process of discovery. You roll the dice and learn something about the character and then you immediately contextualize it. With every fact you learn, you spin the fiction. If you needed to roll a 7 to not die and you roll exactly a 7, you think, “Wow, they must’ve had a near-death experience. What could it be?”. And these are decisions. Big, important, affecting decisions. Often Traveller‘s lifepath doesn’t spit out a random character, it spits out someone that you’ve closely watched struggle and live for years before they come to you. If that doesn’t make you care about them, what is? At the same time, when you play Champions, you can build and tinker and strategize and eventually make somebody who you might not actually enjoy playing. Sometimes, you get caught up in the general aura of optimization and make somebody effective but that isn’t the same as somebody fun. Or you build them “wrong” and you get a character that is out-of-step with the rest of the group in power, which ends up annoying in other ways.

To zoom out a little, this isn't a criticism of either game. The point is this spectrum of controlled character creation starts to look a little superficial. Reality is much more complicated. Random can become involved and self-expression can become detached. So then what about about these two different methods is actually the important part?

(This first appeared on the Indie RPG Newsletter.)

[ponett]

I see you cite Final Fantasy as one of SLARPG's inspirations, but I'm curious which FF games in specific you're referring to.

I would specifically cite:

FF1 - The GBA version was the first RPG i really sunk my teeth into as a kid, so this is basically my Rosetta Stone for What A Turn-Based RPG Is. Arriving in a new town and buying new gear and spells so you can go back out and fight monsters better. That sort of thing. As I explained in a Patreon post a while back, a certain character is also partially an homage to Bahamut's role in this first game

FF5 - The job system here very heavily influenced the direction I went in with the Spellbook system. Spellbooks were initially envisioned as premade "decks" with different combinations of spells, sort of like the premade chip folders you sometimes receive in Mega Man Battle Network, but playing FF5 inspired me to make all of the Spellbooks more thematically distinct and treat them as a subclass system

FF3 - On a completely different note, I can't stand how FF3 handles its job system, which also influenced Spellbooks. I hate how certain bosses all but require certain jobs, and if you don't have that job leveled up already then you just have to stop and grind. So I made it so that Spellbooks have all of their abilities unlocked by default with no need to level them up, and no point in the game explicitly requires the use of any one Spellbook. Your build is up to you

FF6 - Pretty foundational to my understanding of how to tell a story in a top-down 16-bit RPG, with the little sprites all running around and emoting for the audience sort of like it's a stage play, and the battle system often being used as a storytelling device. I'd also cite the relics (along with Paper Mario's badges) as the inspiration for SLARPG's Charms, and there's probably a little Kefka in Javis

FF7 - Again, this is just a foundational game to my understanding of JRPG storytelling. I might point to FF7 as the first RPG I played growing up that was focused on the dramatic arc of a single predetermined main character who already has relationships with most of the other main characters when the story begins, as opposed to either a silent protagonist, a customizable character, or a protagonist who isn't particularly supposed to stand out among the ensemble cast. (FF4 also did this with Cecil, but I haven't played as much of FF4.) A lot of things in FF7's story remain kind of the gold standard for me, like how the bombing mission is still one of the best intro sequences to any game ever, so I refer back to it a decent amount. You can definitely see some influence from Cloud's story in Melody. And Anthony and I also compared a certain set of optional bosses to the Ruby and Emerald Weapons when we were planning them out

FF9 - Maybe some broad aesthetic influence. I haven't played as much of 9 as you'd probably assume

FF14 - I had yet to make it all the way through ARR before SLARPG came out, but I'd tried making a White Mage multiple times, which led to Gridania being an early influence on what I wanted Greenridge to look like. I don't think the influence is that recognizable in the final product, but you can kiiiiiiiiiinda see it in some of the architecture if you squint

[canmom]

what's the book for? part 1

[here's an intro where I talk about the three hour video essay that inspired me to do this]

This is a part of a series about TTRPGs! I'm looking at the relationship between the book and the thing you do, the play.

That forum, the 'Forge', was founded on the premise that, in Edwards's pithy slogan, 'System Does Matter' - which is to say Edwards believed that the formal and, perhaps especially, informal procedures you follow when you play a roleplaying game have a large effect on what kind of experiences you can have there. Kind of tautological, but I'll let him have that. It is true that there are many different activities that fall under the heading of 'tabletop roleplaying'.

Edwards and his pals wanted to have a more explicit and intentional 'creative agenda' when playing a game. In general this is something that the players were supposed to get on the same page about when they sit down to play a game. To the Forge mindset, the ideal is for everyone to be pushing harmoniously to the same thing; the root of 'dysfunction' in TTRPGs was seen as arising from an unacknowledged clash of these agendas.

The solution found by the Forge was to design new game systems which put their preferred agenda, 'narrativism', front and centre.

Many more words could be written about the Forge, a lot of them quite mean, but let's bring this back to game design. What is it good for?

Why do we buy all these books anyway?

What is 'an RPG'? On the shelf to my right are... hold on let me count... some 27 different D&D books, mostly from 3.5e. Also a couple other TTRPG books (including Apocalypse World). On my hard drive are... some 94+ other games accumulated from various Humble Bundles and similar. I have played only a small fraction, and honestly, read only a slightly larger fraction.

What is a 'game' in this context? Generally speaking there's a book, and maybe some other tools like character sheets, which theoretically provide what you need to get together with some friends and do an activity that it defines. Sort of like a recipe. But the book itself is not the game; the book anchors the game, which is something rather nebulous, into a thing that can be bought and sold. The game is an activity, which 'exists' when it gets played. However, consulting the book is (usually) part of the game!

I rather vaguely say 'what you need', because it's more than just 'rules'. Lancer, for example, is full of colourful, vivid pictures of giant robots; these pictures do a lot to get players' imaginations thinking about what sort of giant robot they might pilot - how cool it would look and what sort of sicknasty shit it would do. I doubt Lancer would be even a fraction as popular if it didn't have these artworks to get you on board with its fantasy. The pictures are a very load-bearing part of creating the 'game' here.

We could say the aim of the TTRPG book is to convince you that the game "exists" in a concrete enough way that you can actually play it. Much like the Golden Witch, BEATRICE. Then you can gather your friends and say, 'hey, do you want to play Sagas of the Icelanders', and they will say 'yeah, what's that?', and you'll show them the book and sit down and attempt to follow whatever idea the book has imparted of 'how to play Sagas of the Icelanders'.

So, the relationship between TTRPG book and play is rather nebulous. This is something of a problem if you are an aspiring auteur designer who would like to impart something specific to players. Who knows what they're going to do with that book?

let's talk D&D - on the 'proper' way of playing the game

D&D is the oldest roleplaying game, and still by far the biggest. Many TTRPG players will only ever play D&D. Many others will play games derived from some version of D&D, like all the different games belonging to the 'OSR'. It's a point of endless frustration for indie game players, who have to deal with being a satellite to this juggernaut, which they see as poorly designed. If only these players would recognise how could they could have it!

But the interesting thing about D&D - and TTRPGs in general, really - to me is that it's folklore. It's not a product you buy.

How do you learn to play D&D? You could go and buy the 'core set': the famous Player's Handbook, Monster Manual and Dungeon Master's Guide, a tripartite division that has existed since the days of AD&D. However, for all their glossy art and flavour text, these books still do a pretty dire job of actually getting you up to speed on how the game is played, especially for the Dungeon Master.

No, what you actually do is: you join an existing D&D group. Or, in the modern day, maybe you listen to an 'actual play' podcast such as Critical Role. This furnishes you with a direct example of what D&D players say and how that results in a story, far more vividly and concretely than you'd ever get from looking at a book.

Once you're convinced that you wanna join this weird little subculture, then perhaps you go and grab some books, run a published module, create a character, whatever. Maybe you go on D&D forums and read endless arguments about the best way to play the game, which all the while serve to define what that game actually is in your head.

A lot of critics of D&D complain that the rules of D&D as written do a pretty terrible job of facilitating many of the purposes that D&D is put towards. They tend to argue that there are games better suited to it, often from the story-games milieu. If people say 'sure, but we change the games in x, y and z way', this is seen as a bit of a joke - "well you're not really playing D&D at that point, are you?"

If you view 'D&D' as defined by what's printed in the books printed by Hasbro, sure. However, D&D is not really that. D&D is the label we apply to a huge nebulous body of lore, from the Dread Gazebo and Tucker's Kobolds to weirdly endearing monsters derived from knockoff tokusatsu figurines. It is all the ideas you've received about what it looks like to play D&D from listening to a podcast. It's arguing about what Chaotic Neutral means. It is 50 years of material - of frequently dubious quality, mind you! - that exploded out from that time some nerds in the States decided to explore a dungeon in their wargame.

If whoever had the rights to use the Dungeons & Dragons trademark never printed another book, that would not kill D&D. In fact, there's even a condescending nickname, courtesy of Edwards, for people who cook up their own slightly-different spin on D&D and try to sell it - the 'fantasy heartbreaker'. The concept of D&D has considerable inertia.

It's pretty, but is it D&D?

In this perspective, defining what D&D 'is' with a strict demarcation is kinda impossible. Gygax himself was very inconsistent on this front, favouring strict adherence to rules at times (declaring of houseruled games that 'such games are not D&D or AD&D games - they are something else'), and encouraging changing them at others - rather depending on whether he had the rights at the time, and his conflict with Dave Arneson.

"Since the game is the sole property of TSR and its designer, what is official and what is not has meaning if one plays the game. Serious players will only accept official material, for they play the game rather than playing at it, as do those who enjoy "house rules" poker, or who push pawns around the chess board. No power on earth can dictate that gamers not add spurious rules and material to either the D&D or AD&D game systems, but likewise no claim to playing either game can then be made. Such games are not D&D or AD&D games- they are something else, classifiable only under the generic "FRPG" catch all"

In this he sounds rather a lot like Ron Edwards declaring that only his perfect design is the true and correct version of Sorcerer! And to both these fellows, we should say, who gives a shit.

So at this point, beyond the (so far) 11 'official' versions of the books published by TSR and later Hasbro, there are hundreds of offshoots that bear a heavy amount of D&D in their lineage and function almost identically even if they don't bear the trademark... and an uncountable number of small variants, whether explicitly houseruled or just different habits forming from 'who speaks when' or 'what rules we ignore' to the focus of the game.

So. Imagine a person who was inspired by the D&D milieu, gradually figured out their own taste of what they like to see in a TTRPG over many games of 'D&D', and is now having a good time playing a game of 'D&D' about tense feudal politicking, even though they almost never look at a D&D sourcebook and frequently defy the rules printed in there. Is this person 'playing D&D'?

How about someone playing an OSR game derived from early D&D, that can't legally use the D&D trademark, but still uses THAC0 and maybe the occasional Mind Flayer(R)?

Now let's try someone who read Apocalypse World sometime and got inspired to try DMing in its style - asking players leading questions, acting to separate them, applying a cost to a desired thing or rearranging things behind the scenes when a roll goes bad... but they still consider what they're doing to be D&D, and they're strictly speaking playing by the book? After all, D&D doesn't say a thing about whether you should do that stuff or not.

Bit of a tough question imo! Maybe we should call Wittgenstein.

the scope of the book

There are so many different kinds of TTRPG book.

Some are very specific - a game like Lady Blackbird, The King is Dead or Hot Guys Making Out overlaps heavily with something like an adventure, giving you just one very tightly defined scenario and mechanics that only make sense in that context. This isn't a new thing, either - a game like Paranoia (1984-) is designed with a specific game structure in mind, where the characters each have a variety of explicit and secret objectives that are all at odds with each other.

D&D was originally a game like this, though it didn't last long. The earliest editions of the rules instruct the referee to draw out 'at least half a dozen maps of his "underworld"' filled with monsters and treasure, representing a "huge ruined pile, a vast castle built by generations of mad wizards and insane geniuses". As far as I understand the history of the hobby, though, people almost immediately started getting into character and using the game for other things than exploring a dungeon.

Other game-products leave larger gaps to be filled in by the player...

a game like Shadowrun or Eclipse Phase, or D&D settings like Dark Sun or Eberron, will give you huge amounts of information about its setting, but leave 'what you do it in' to the GM's discretion.

a game like D&D gives you various setting elements, and there are many adventures and modules you can elect to 'run', but it is the GM's task to pick and choose some subset of those pieces and build them into a custom setting for that game.

a game like Apocalypse World gives you quite explicit instructions for how to set up a first session, and works very hard to set a vibe with the many examples and general style of its rules, but it tells you next to nothing about a predefined setting.

a game like Fiasco or Microscope offers only a loose structure, that your job is to fill with content over the course of the game.

All of these games market themselves with the same type of promise: with our book, you will be able to have this kind of experience. Like all marketing, they will tend to overpromise! But the marketing is, vexingly, itself part of what makes 'the game' happen.

In the video, Vi Huntsman roughly argues that this marketing is the core of what Root: The RPG is actually doing, trying to sell you on Forge ideology rather than provide anything helpful for running a tabletop game; and that the way it attempts to provide this experience is through crude 'buttons' which are inherently limiting, belonging more to the mechanistic worlds of computer games or board games than TTRPGs.

I kind of agree, but the problem is that... to some extent every game does this exact kind of marketing. For example, here's the Bubblegum Crisis RPG (yes, there was a Bubblegum Crisis RPG, published by Mike Pondsmith's company R Talsorian Games in 1996) which announces:

Those words are lyrics from several songs from the Bubblegum Crisis soundtracks, and they encapsulate the kind of action and drama you'll find in the Bubblegum Crisis Boleplaying Game. With this book, you'll enter the world of MegaTokyo and the oppressive megacorporation Genom—a world where monstrous Boomers, desperate AD Police and the mysterious Knight Sabers battle for the future of civilization.

This copy serves as a promise of what the game will bring, but also a prompt that tells you what kind of game you should use its tools to make. It's attached to exactly the sort of licensed game that Vi Huntsman criticises, applying an existing framework to a licensed RP as if to imply you need this book in order to tell a Bubblegum Crisis-inspired story.

Why? Huntsman called it 'reproducibility'. If every game that ever runs is a uniquely circumstantial snowflake, there is nothing to sell. But if you can offer someone the tools that they surely need to do that thing they heard about...

The problem is that what makes an RPG memorable is something that arises when you get a group of friends (or strangers!) to sit down together and make up a story, and that kind of definitionally can't be reduced to instructions in a book - it's too personal, too specific to the people involved. But we live in the era of capitalism, so... RPG companies and independent designers alike need to have a product to sell to this 'RPG player' subculture-identity.

The drive to somehow make reproducible experiences dates back all the way to the very first time people heard about that crazy game that Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson were doing at their wargames club and Gygax and Arneson decided to print a book to help people do that at home.

And with many RPGs on the market, they need further to differentiate themselves: to tell you that they're offering something you can't get elsewhere.

So what is that something? In the next post I'll get into that!

[sovonight]

I've been considering playing Baldur's Gate because of you. Do you recommend it What is a good order to play the games in??

absolutely i recommend it!

first off, it's important to know that bg1 & bg2 are their own story, and bg3 is practically separate from them. bg3 is set a century after the events of bg1/bg2, and just has a few character cameos and references from bg1/bg2 (though from what i've heard some of the cameos aren't very good interpretations of the original characters). bg3 doesn't enhance the bg1/bg2 story in any way, and knowledge of bg1/bg2 doesn't matter when playing bg3.

i'd suggest starting with bg3 if you:

are used to modern rpg games, and 3d visuals are particularly important to you

know you don't/won't like infinity engine games (for a spoiler-free preview, look up walkthroughs of icewind dale 1 or 2 and watch a couple minutes of travel, dialogue, and combat gameplay)

i'd suggest starting with bg1/bg2 if you:

don't have a strong preference for starting with bg3 instead

enjoy the potential for mods to expand the game--not just in terms of gameplay, but in story/quest additions and companions, too

are interested in knowing the story that i'm drawing all my fanart of

have a limited budget (you can get these games for very cheap, they frequently go on sale)

if you want to start with bg3, you're all set! go ahead and get started. if you want to start with bg1/bg2, i have a bit more to add:

if you've looked into buying these games, you may have noticed that there's bg1/bg2, and then there's bgee/bg2ee (ee meaning "enhanced edition"). there's also a new dlc that's ee-only. so here's the original playing order:

baldur's gate (bg1)

baldur's gate: tales of the sword coast (tosc): bg1 expansion, adds new side quests and areas to explore during bg1

baldur's gate ii: shadows of amn (bg2, sometimes abbreviated soa to distinguish from tob below)

baldur's gate ii: throne of bhaal (tob): bg2 expansion, directly continues the story from soa and officially ends the series

and here's the enhanced edition order:

baldur's gate: enhanced edition (bgee): contains bg1 and tosc

baldur's gate: seige of dragonspear (sod): bg1 expansion released in 2016 to bridge the gap between bg1 and bg2 (i haven't played it yet, but if you're just testing out the series i'd say don't bother getting it yet, it was released 15 years after the story concluded so how necessary can it really be)

baldur's gate ii: enhanced edition (bg2ee): contains soa and tob

the enhanced edition also adds 4 new companions, an arena side adventure, and overall provides a lot of fixes/improvements/updates on the original games. obviously, considering all these additions and the ee mods that have come out since the ee series release, the ee series is where you should start.

side note--if you buy the ee series on gog (maybe on steam too, but i've only checked it on gog) you'll actually get downloads for the original, non-ee games as well. if you enjoy playing old games for the feeling of time-traveling into the past a bit, and you have the patience to fuss around with troubleshooting and mods, they're a perfectly fine place to start as well! (i personally am still playing the non-ee trilogy even now, but that's for a whole mix of reasons, including that i like using the physical cd's i bought them on lmao)

now finally, if you got this far and are thinking "okay, i'm cautiously interested in bg1/bg2, but which one of the two should i start with???"

start with bg2 if you:

just want to jump in and see what all the fuss is about

don't care about having context in the beginning (you'll gain some context as you play, though not all)

want vampires, technology, and more sewers in your d&d experience

prefer a story with darker tones and a lot of driving urgency

start with bg1 if you:

like starting at the beginning to have context for everything that happens

want a standard, classic adventure with camps, forests, and bustling cities

don't need the plot to engage you if your companions are there with conversations, commentary, and banter

are willing to install at least one mod, BG1NPC

i found bg1 to be kind of a slog to get through on my very first playthrough, but adding in character interactions via BG1NPC really livened the game up for me and made it my favorite game out of the series. (imo this works best if you're willing to do a romance though, bc unfortunately romanced companions tend to get the most interactions & care put into their conversations.)

you don't strictly need BG1NPC on bgee bc the ee adds those aforementioned companions who do have conversations with you, but iirc they don't talk as much or provide as many opportunities for interaction as some of the modded companions do. (for context, in the original bg1, companions don't talk to you or comment on events at all; that only became a thing in bg2.) playing bgee without BG1NPC means you'll have to get at least 1 of the 3 ee companions to hear any conversations at all.

anyway, hopefully this wasn't too long or confusing. i hope you try the games out!

[yungvenuz]

Game of the Year List 2023

Honorable Mentions: Touhou: Artificial Dream in Arcadia: I love the oddball mashup of shmup and dungeon crawler mechanics, but I ended up losing interest before the end of the game. In Stars and Time: Still playing this game. I like it so far, but I didn't want to rush it through to get it on this list. It'll go on next year's list if I like it enough. Stuffo the Puzzle Bot: Really great soundtrack. Still on regular rotation.

10. Super Snail (IOS and Android)

This is a difficult inclusion. Super Snail is an Evil game. It's the most monetized game I've ever played. Every screen you can visit can trigger a special offer for a pile of goodies you don't need that you can buy with real money. It's a mobile gacha game, through and through, designed to eat up time and attention and offer back a distant illusion of progress that you could surely expedite, if you were just willing to kick in ten bucks for one of its dozens of customized season passes…. So, why is this game on this list?

Developer QCPlay was already on my radar from previous release Gumball and Dungeons, a similarly high effort mobile game (amusingly originally intended as a Dragon Quest game, until they failed to secure the license and were forced to sand all the iconic teardrops off their slimes and call them gumballs instead). Despite their willingness to indulge in all the awful trends of mobile game markets, these are real, proper game designers, who have buried a real, actual game under all of Super Snail's idle timers and base management bullshit.

Super Snail is constantly shifting, adding new layers of complexity and shaking up existing mechanics. It's the only gacha game I'm aware of in which your gacha machine can be stolen from you temporarily if you use it too much, forcing you to wait on spending tickets until the thief decides its rates are too shit to bother with and returns it to you. There's a dating sim mechanic in which various characters met in your travels (male, female, or both) will find out about your secret base and decide to mooch off you, which is some of the funniest writing in the game.

On that note, the writing is weirdly good for a game that's approximately 80% random pop culture references. The eight demon lords you've been tasked with defeating by the mysterious god "Earth's Will" all have detailed and consistent backstories. There are a few honest-to-god effective twists in the plot, and a lingering question about how shady the god you've signed your life to actually is.

A predatory mobile game shouldn't deserve one minute of my attention, let alone one of the coveted slots on my illustrious top ten list, but Super Snail spits in the face of all that, and god. I can't stop thinking about it, about how many interesting game design lessons are nestled within its strange and evil exterior. So, by compromise, it's grudgingly earned my #10. Just, for god's sake, if any of this backhanded review piques your interest, set a budget for yourself and don't exceed it for any reason.

9. BOSSGAME: The Final Boss is Your Heart (Steam)

BOSSGAME is an action rpg about two dirtbag lesbians, Sophie and Anna, trying to earn rent money by taking random mercenary work in the big city. The story is low pressure fun, with a little melodrama mixed in to spice things up. The plot is needs-suiting, even maybe good, but the reason this game is on the list is the gameplay.

BOSSGAME is really, really fun to play. It uses a combat system reminiscent of the Mario and Luigi rpgs in which both party members are controlled simultaneously. Enemies telegraph attacks that need to be blocked using the left or right side of the gamepad based on character, draining stamina. Attacking also drains stamina, so a careful balance of offense and defense needs to be maintained to survive. Most interestingly, there's no turns: enemies repeat attack patterns usually without waiting for a counterattack, so combat becomes a brain-bending routine of multitasking, with one character needing to block attacks while the other sneaks in some damage. A combo system encourages keeping up constant pressure, with the reward being increased progress toward a super attack that can briefly stun bosses and allow some easy hits before returning to defensive play. The end result is fast paced, engaging, and totally unique combat that was fun to learn for each of the dozens of boss fights in the game.

I'm glad this game ended up being good enough to recommend here, not just because I, too, am lesbian, but because I love designers that are willing to take a chance on unique control schemes. Part of the fun of playing BOSSGAME was getting to learn how to play without being able to rely on any of the muscle memory I've accrued over years of playing other action games. I only wish it weren't so short. Of all the games on this list, this is the one I would most want to see expanded into a full 40-60 hour RPG epic.

8. Slay the Princess (Steam)

A Myers-Briggs test for fetishes. Keep that in mind whenever anybody who tries to talk to you about their favorite "route". Great writing though

7. EDF 5 (Steam)

My official Multiplayer Game Experience of the Year. The EDF (EDF! EDF! EDF!) series is an alien invasion resistance simulator that exists somewhere between Dynasty Warriors and Monster Hunter in gameplay. I've known about the series for a long time, and I had assumed it was the kind of loud dumb fun that makes for punchy clips but wears out its welcome quickly. To be clear, it definitely is loud, and dumb, and fun, but it also has significantly more mechanical depth and complexity than I expected, which kept it fresh and engaging for as long as I played it.

Mechanics like building destruction and corpse hitboxes looks like they're just they're there for spectacle at first, but as levels progress and more and more aggressive enemy types are introduced, these seemingly incidental details take on more and more importance as you need to manage cover and enemy sight lines more effectively. This is the game's most potent tool, I think: everything that makes it great as a ridiculous carnage sandbox has been meticulously designed to also work in the higher difficulty levels to deliver a genuinely tense and highly mobile shooter.

6. Slayers X: Terminal Aftermath: Vengeance of the Slayers (Steam)

A boomer shooter in the same canon as Hypnospace Outlaw, partially developed by troubled teen ZANE_ROCKS_14 and polished up for release 22 years later. For an elaborate shitpost, it's very well made, but what most interests me about it is its contradictory nature. Outwardly, it's completely juvenile and silly about everything it does, filled with poop jokes and mouthy rats and evil stepdads. Underneath that, there's the deep melancholy of a 36 year old desperately trying to relive the last time in his life that he felt cool.

all the levels in the game faithfully recreate scenes of Zane's Idaho childhood, from ritzy suburban neighborhoods to car parks to the local fair, but they're all just a little bit too eerily empty for the settings they're trying to evoke. The protagonist's sincere love for his mother completely clashes with the badass attitude he brings to every other scene. Zane put his all into voice acting the protagonist's lines, while every other character sounds like they're reciting lines into their phone in a bathroom. The end result is a masterpiece in immersive game design, meticulously arranged to feel like it came from a very specific time and place in a fictional alternate universe. It's so effective that even the parts that don't work can be argued as a deliberate part of the overall period piece, like the confusingly short penultimate level or unnecessarily annoying final boss.

5. Cobalt Core (Steam)

A card battler built around spaceship combat. It should be immediately apparent to anybody who's played a lot of Slay-The-Spire-likes that Cobalt Core is on the easier side, but that's a deliberate choice here, in an effort to create an engaging narrative experience rather than a perfectly tuned progression treadmill. While Inscryption (another narrative card battler) managed its story by bringing the player away from the cards for cutscenes or escape room sequences, Cobalt Core delivers everything within its roguelike framework, even going as far as coming up with a time loop justification for why the player is repeating runs to progress the story.

In that regard it compares more closely to Hades than other card battlers, and I also think that's a good comparison because I really like the characters and character interactions in Cobalt Core. Each round starts with the selection of three of the (after finishing a short period of unlocks) 7 crewmates available to play with, and every combination of characters has interesting discussions and interactions between them. Characters also have lines to acknowledge specific artifacts, cards, or game states (like big damage or status effects) that offers a level of reactivity to make each run that much more unique. Also like Hades, there's a concrete ending sequence. Backstory for each crewmate is delivered piecemeal throughout the game, and while there aren't any earthshattering twists or revelations, the ending does a good job of tying everything together for a proper sendoff.

Shoutout to Riggs. Best possum in the galaxy.

!Great Soundtrack Alert!

4. Going Down (2014 Doom wad) (Doomworld File Depot)

This year, I played MyHouse.wad. More and more people were talking about it, and I wanted to give it a try myself before someone randomly spoiled it for me. I didn't end up caring for it much! It did some interesting things, and it was definitely well made, but I'm not that interested in the creepypasta style it was going for.

It did pique my interest in the rich ecosystem of Doom modding that's been quietly trucking along for 30 years before myhouse ever released, though. A friend recommended Going Down, which I found to be terrific, and then I spent the rest of the year playing random wads (level packs) whenever I didn't have anything else to do. Doom has become invaluable to me as a podcast game, especially as I've only just been able to extract myself from Tactical Nexus's cunning grasp this year.

So, without further ado: The Official Doom Wads of the Year Minilist:

10 Struggle: Antaresian Legacy - Most of the levels in this wad focus on low-pressure exploration, but my favorites were the wide-open chaotic battles. I especially like the capstone levels of the first two chapters (maps 11 and 20), which both feature massive arenas with hundreds of enemies active at once. 9 Ancient Aliens - A collab megawad with great aesthetic and theming. Level quality is inconsistent, which makes sense given how many authors were involved, but the best levels in the wad are excellent. 8 Dust Devil - A short campaign of two interconnected levels with a bunch of interesting custom content. The use of grenade launchers and shielded enemies was especially cool, and not something I expected the doom engine to be able to do. 7 Lullaby - A stylish single-map wad in a decidedly undoomlike blue dreamland. There's only five or so major setpiece encounters, but they're all very memorable. 6 Doom 2 - I love how experimental the design in Doom 2 is, especially given that the entire genre of fps was brand new at this point in history. there's abstract levels, puzzle levels, diagetic cityscapes, and more. It's easy to see its influence in every fps to ever follow in its wake. 5 Overboard - A newer wad by the same author of Going Down with a great gimmick- the first five levels are followed by a set of hard mode remixes that use the same maps with more aggressive enemy arrangements. I particularly liked the last map of hard mode, which is identical to its normal mode variant except that it spawns all 500 enemies in the moment the level starts instead of deploying in piecemeal waves as it does in the original. 4 The Thing You Can't Defeat - An experimental remix of the first chapter of Doom 1. Very interesting premise and punchline. If you liked MyHouse.wad, I'd highly recommend checking it out. 3 Tarnsman's Projectile Hell - This is the first touhou game I've played, technically. Deviously difficult design with an emphasis on long distance hitscan enemies that would be extremely annoying in the hands of a level designer any less obviously talented than Tarnsman. 2 Unloved - An ambitious continuous campaign that takes place in a Silent Hill-esque house with several portals to distorted nightmare realms. I like that small amounts of progress are made in each level at a time with frequent revisits to the main hub, and I love the dark atmosphere. Very creepy. Also insanely difficult. 1 Going Down - My favorite by a long shot. The amount of variety in level and encounter design is incredible on its own, but I particularly like the care that went into giving each level a unique identity that still makes sense in the context of the wad's premise (taking an elevator floor by floor down into the depths of hell). Every level is meticulously designed to use the entire space, usually multiple times as later encounters in each level usually reuse the same arenas with additional twists on the layout and enemy deployments.

3. Pizza Tower (Steam)

A fluid platformer heavily inspired by the Wario Land games. Its most notable design choice is the lack of fail state when exploring levels. There's no health bar, and falling into pits only resets the room, so there's no significant pressure until the timed escape sequence at the end of each level. That's not to say the game lacks challenge, though. Far from it- the challenge comes not from reaching the end of each room, but in doing so as efficiently as possible. Pizza Tower's principle antagonist is the 5 second combo timer in the top right, forcing a constant stream of action. Every level has just enough stuff in each room to allow a single combo to be carried from start to level finish, which confers the coveted P Rank medal on level completion.

Full P Rank completion is what I spent three months obsessively chasing at the start of this year. Movement in Pizza Tower is so fluid, and so satisfying to learn how to fully utilize, that I couldn't resist going for it. I got so far into it that after finishing the game, I went back in immediately for an optional challenge that requires full P rank completion of the game in less than 4 hours, which required being able to clear each level with perfect consistency.

!Great Soundtrack Alert! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWoTeTZL-C8

2. Beton Brutal (Steam)

The trailer for Beton Brutal immediately spoke to me. I've been a fan of persistent-state platforming games for ages, and it's a sorely underserved genre (mostly lurking in MMOs and player-made levels for games like Mario Maker). I like the emphasis on meditative upward progress, and I especially like the increasing pressure that builds as each subsequent jump risks losing more progress than the previous. Beton Brutal's developer was able to deliver this perfectly while also maintaining a consistent and interesting visual style (a stark contrast to the dreadful nft tie-in climbing game Only Up, which also released this year).

For weeks, I opened Beton Brutal after work and played for thirty minutes to an hour, usually seeing some small amount of new progress before inevitably taking a long fall and rage quitting for the day. I don't think I can call this the hardest game I've ever played, given that there's an entire community of people that can complete the entire climb in less than ten minutes, but I do think I'm uniquely poorly suited for games like this, given the extreme precision required. Still, that made it all the more satisfying to finally complete the game after almost exactly 20 hours of effort.

Three months later the DLC "Beton Bath", with another 500 meter tower with new obstacles, mechanics, and visual aesthetic (themed after public pool equipment, which honestly looks great decorating the tower), released. This dlc had mixed reviews, but it cemented this game as a whole as a favorite for me. The new tower has a very different design approach, with more focus on interpreting strange geometry, seeking out aggressive shortcuts, and taking giant leaps of faith. The last 100 meters particularly impressed me, with numerous falls onto trampolines 80 meters below to stride the entire tower in one jump and reach new ladders, before climbing just a few meters higher and repeating the process back to the opposite side.

trying to settle on which screenshot to include with the entry was agonizing, so I'm going to post a bunch more here. I love how this game looks.

Don't worry about the vertigo meter in the bottom left. It's probably nothing to worry about.

Void Stranger (Steam)

Void Stranger is a tile-based puzzle game featuring a magic wand that can pick tiles up and place them elsewhere. Help the noble handmaiden Gray delve into the 256th floor of the mysterious Void to fulfill her heart's desire, learning more about her past by peeking into her memories as she rests at checkpoints along the way.

…But that's not sufficient to describe it, really. The best way I can come up with to describe what Void Stranger actually is, is as a seemingly normal block-pushing puzzle game that's had an entire additional Myst-like adventure game layered over it. The puzzle game is real, and it can be engaged with honestly from start to finish, but the true fun of the game (and several of its many, many possible endings) comes from interpreting obscure clues in the lore and interface to dive deeper.

The more that's learned, the easier it is to navigate the underlying puzzle game. Almost every object in the game has hidden mechanics related to it, opening up easier routes through initially difficult puzzles or allowing the use of shortcuts to skip floors entirely. Once these tricks are mastered, only thirty or so of the game's 256 floors even need to be visited to complete a run, and most of them can be cleared in seconds.

That's a good thing, too, because there's a lot of travel to specific floors needed to find all the secrets in the game. This is a game that thrives on friction in its play experience, which means it's definitely not going to be a game for everybody. If clues regarding certain shortcuts or secrets are missed, it can add a lot of unnecessary work to completing the game. But I personally love that kind of obscurity in games, and I really appreciate that the developer System Erasure (who made the similarly excellent ZeroRanger) was willing to take a chance on a niche-of-a-niche genre that could really speak to its core demographic: me specifically.

I'm not going to talk much about the plot, because most of it is deeply tangled with the Void Stranger's deepest secrets. That said, I appreciate that every route through the game, even the ones that don't engage with all the secret hunting, have been given fully fledged stories. Even the bad ending has a fucking awesome finale, to the extent that I would recommend seeking it out before engaging with the rest of the game's content (if you get offered a fruit, go ahead and eat it!)

Void Stranger is good enough to make it onto my top ten list of games of all time. I've put it at #6, just behind Iji and just ahead of Full Bore. Everything about it is fucking awesome. Check it out!

!Great Soundtrack Alert!

[kikiskitchenwitchery]

Happy whenever this finds you. I had said months ago that as I rebuilt the way I interact with the internet I would be changing and growing this blog to include ways I use magic, or live my pagan life. This little read (344 pages, all of it pretty light easy reading) is "Dreadful" by Caitlin Rozakis. It was published by Titan Books in 2024. Now that the business part is all out of the way... let's talk about the book. I picked it up at Barnes and Noble. It was a buy one get one deal and so I will admit that the cover was what got me. I also appreciated the title. Now, the back cover claims this to be trope breaking. And that also got me. Because while I do adore a classic trope well done, I also really enjoy watching them get turned on their heads. I don't feel this book upended the tropes. Not in a way that felt earth shattering. It isn't the first time I have encountered a wizard who is just not great at being a wizard, nor is it the first time I have encountered goblins who are clever. But in this case, it was fun. I appreciated the feeling that the book was written by someone who probably has played an RPG or two. There was delightful chaos in a scene or two that really felt like something that my group would do. I am not a reviewer. I don't know if people want the plot laid out or how to do so without spoiling the story. So I am really just out here sharing my thoughts . You would think that a book about evil wizards and missing memories would be heavier, more dramatic, maybe. More heavy velvet wall coverings. But in truth this really read to me as a cozy sort of mystery. There was a lot of homemaking scenes. And it was never foreboding. Yes, we do need to know why our protagonist has no memory, but his journey to finding it is whimsical. I would not say I was in love with any of the characters, but I certainly could empathize with most of them. I could clearly see what their motivations may be. So while there were amusing twists, nothing was shocking or surprising or out of character. I would rate this a 7.5 out of ten. Not spectacular, but amusing. Worthy of being finished (which lately... is a big deal for me). The characters could have been a little more developed, but for a sitcom type setting, they were well done. The story itself was amusing but not particularly new to me. And the writing was good. The author does a lovely job of drawing me in and keeping me there. She also danced around that delightful British humor that I love so much. If you would like more reviews, let me know...

[illogarithmil]

Warning: some unmarked spoilers for most official 5e campaigns below. Also, long post written over several days with resultant tonal shifts.

If, like me, you find yourself terminally dissatisfied by D&D 5e (and horrified by OneD&D or whatever they're calling it now) but still wanting to run its major published adventures because otherwise what did you *buy them all for*, here are some suggestions! I'm going to steer away from stuff that's too straightforwardly a retroclone or "D&D but with X rule changed," because that's boring. For each adventure, I will explain what I think a good adaptation needs, provide a "played-straight option" which is a system to pretty much directly port the adventure into, only requiring some rules conversion and maybe minor setting flavour, and an "offbeat option," which is going to require major narrative changes and often shift the entire genre. With two exceptions I'm going to recommend games I've played or at least read many times over; if you know of other things that would work then feel free to comment or reblog with them!

So, in chronological order of the adventures I own...

Lost Mines of Phandelver

The important thing about LMoP is that it's a starter adventure, taking characters who start off as basically nobodies but who have either personal connections or moral ties that draw them into a pretty morally straightforward conflict with several groups of bad people working on behalf of a single villain. In the process, it shows off a bit of travel and exploration, a bit of social activity in phandelver itself (mainly of the obtain-quest-hooks variety) and a lot of combat, easing people into the game.

Played-Straight: 24BLUE

A solid but simple old-school fantasy-oriented but setting-agnostic hack of 2400 with light, intuitive but flavourful rules for creating characters and monsters and good guidance on how to convert over from other systems. It's also cheap as chips ($3) and 4 pages long, meaning it puts very little work on a new gm. Frankly, I think flexible and rules-lite systems are the best way to get people into rpgs, so this is ideal. Also, it has something of a tendency to depower more powerful monsters in conversion which might be an issue with larger-scale games but really isn't with the 1-5 scale of Phandelver. Just maybe fudge a bit to preserve the sense of threat with the dragon.

https://deep-light-games.itch.io/24blue

Offbeat: All that I Am

So Phandelver's a game about good-hearted nobodies rising to defeat evil, right? But they're good-hearted nobodies with magic and sword-skills. What if they kept the drive but lost the power? What terrible price might ordinary folks pay to defeat an evil which they are unequipped to face? Also cheap (PWYW, $11.36 recommended) and also simple (albeit less so,) All That I Am is a game about people who have made a pact with a demon and slowly realize that this was Probably A Mistake. It has a really cool basic mechanic based on tossing coins into a magic circle - not one for online play! - and a very flavourful list of demons to mess about with. It's naturally darker in tone than D&D, which is going to affect your story through play, but the setting could honestly probably go unchanged and the only plot alteration you might want to make is reshuffling the adventure so that it starts in Phandalin and goes 1. Get bothered by Redbrands; 2. MAKE PACT TO DEFEAT THEM (going into wilderness to conduct the ritual in secret); 3. Get ambushed by Goblins on way back from wilderness; 4. Return to phandalin and go from there, rather than the standard goblin lead-in. If you wanted to change the setting to the more Renaissance Europe default assumption of ATIA, you could easily enough make the Goblins into bandits or wicked faeries and Nezznar into a human schemer.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/271265

Honourable Mentions: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, Burning Wheel if that's your thing

Princes of the Apocalypse

I know a lot of people don't like PotA. Cards on the table: it's my favourite 5e adventure, and I've run it once already. It is, to me, the archetypal D&D story, which made it really hard to pick alternatives which aren't just branches of D&D. It's got a fairly balanced mix of combat, social and exploration/investigation elements through which the characters uncover the works of four tactically diverse elemental cults which are often remarkably subversive of typical expectations of their element, led by well-realized and psychologically interesting villains, all of which both tie together into a single core and branch out into loads of loosely related side quests and plot threads.

Played-Straight: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Four divine cults tied to a single powerful evil force, you say? Warhammer's Moorcockian forces of Chaos fit pretty much perfectly. You could keep the elemental theming, even, with the cults venerating the Four Gods in elemental aspect, or switch elementals for daemons and just retain the front organisations. I recommend associating Tzeentch (god of change and magic) with the fire druids, Khorne (god of honour and violence) with the earth monks, Slaanesh (god of pride and excess) with the air knights and Nurgle (god of health and sickness, who already has a substantial maritime followinh) with the water bandits. True, the game might be a bit more gory and lethal thanks to random injury tables and lower power levels, but if you're playing the 4th edition by the book it probably won't be enough to shift the tone of the adventure especially if you're generous with the Fate and Resilience points. It supports social play, particularly player character psychology, very well, and has some simple but workable exploration rules on a similar level to D&D's (but with a better, more narrative-focussed random encounter table!) Additionally, the adventure doesn't have any major "pay X gold to get some benefit" moments, meaning that warhammer characters (who might well start play as a poor refuse collector or peasant farmer due to random character generation) won't find they're gated out of elements by different expectations of character wealth compared to D&D.

https://cubicle7games.com/our-games/warhammer-fantasy-roleplay

Offbeat: Avatar Legends

OK, so this is one of the ones I haven't played, though I hear good things. I'm recommending it on the strength of the setting, because get this: elements.

More seriously, a major theme in the original AtLA (haven't watched Korra) is "the gang show up somewhere where people have some cool powers/tech/fighting style but there's also Something Creepy and Bad Going On. You could bring the elemental powers of the cults more into the foreground, making them organisations of highly trained benders dominating an isolated region and connected - this being the element that remains a secret - via their mutual corruption by a powerful, trapped dark spirit (replacing the Elder Elemental Eye). The fact that there's an air cult means you'd probably need to set it before the Air Nomad Genocide unless the air knights being a special unique school of different airbenders was a plot point.

https://magpiegames.com/pages/avatarrpg

Honourable Mentions: Worlds Without Number, Burning Wheel, Pendragon, Rennaissance

Out of the Abyss

My favourite adventure that I've never run, Out of the Abyss' key feature is survival and exploration, followed by power scaling. The characters are going to start off nearly naked in an alien environment and end up killing several demon lords, if they don't starve or go mad first, and it's important that a game be able to capture that.

Played-Straight: 18XX Dreams

Sort of played straight. Another 2400 hack, this one works if you accept that the underdark of OotA was set up as a dreamlike space inspired by Alice in Wonderland, because it's a setting built entirely around the dreamworld. Who trapped the characters in the shadowy world of nightmare which is our underdark here? Drawing on Lovecraft's Dreamlands, maybe it was the slaving Men of Leng rather than the original module's drow, or maybe some wicked drowesque fairies will do. At any rate, from there you can pretty much run the thing straight from the module, just with a bit more creative license. The game's player powers might seem excessive at first, but they're really just exploration-oriented where D&D's are often combat-oriented; you'll quickly get used to working around them and if you don't it's an easy game and easily hacked. (Incidentally, Dreams requires a 'waking world character' as a bass for which I recommend you use the compatible 24BLUE system mentioned above. You could also pull advancement from that system, which you'll want to do if you aren't going to emphasise the final ritual as the only way to defeat the demons).

https://deep-light-games.itch.io/18xx-dreams

Offbeat: FIST

Kidnapped by esoteric Nazi explorers, our band of late-80s urban fantasy action hero mercs are now trapped in the Hollow Earth! Will their scavenged gear and hard-won skills be sufficient to allow them to escape and/or best both the pursuing fash and the terrible cthonic deities they have unleashed in their excavations?

FIST is a fast-paced near-modern setting game with one of the most enjoyable and simple combat systems I've seen, which should make the near-endless random encounters a bit more breezy. It's core ethos is that the characters are an overmatched A-team style force (often with surprisingly little gear) who are going to have to lie, cheat, steal and McGyver their way to survival let alone victory, which fits *perfectly* with early OOtA. The alternating zaniness and horror also mesh really well, though you might need to port madness mechanics over. And yes, it already has basic stats for demons of various degrees of power!

https://claymorerpgs.itch.io/fist

Honourable Mention: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Curse of Strahd

Curse of Strahd is a game that I've run twice,neither by the book, and my key takeaway is that it really feels like it should never have been made in 5e. A great, interesting horror story is just broken up by having to have a set-piece fight with a monster every half an hour. That said, what's important to adapt is clearly the sense of dread and the social webs between characters, as well as the power differential between heroes and villains that makes the latter scary.

Played-Straight: Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Strahd is an abusive, manipulative prick who wants to toy with the PCs' emotions more than kill them. Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a game where emotional breakdowns generally replace death (which makes it feel a lot less like the GM is just playing the genius villain as an idiot) and defeating abusive pricks is a big part of the power fantasy. Even if it doesn't initially sound like your thing - it didn't to me - I *seriously* recommend giving it a look. It's an awesome game. No setting or adventure change is really required, but the focus on having action and fights be less a constant than something that happens when and where it's emotionally impactful gives you permission to cut some of the needless violence in favour of more creeping gothic horror if you want to. Also, it has to be said that having rules around romance and relationships is probably a good thing for the game sometimes affectionately known as "5e's dating sim".

https://evilhat.com/product/thirsty-sword-lesbians/

Offbeat: Old World of Darkness (Hunters Hunted+Sorcerer+Ghost Hunters+Mage: Victorian Age)

This was the idea that made me write this post: a Victorian factory town in the hills outside Manchester where the characters become trapped, not by the physical bounds of mist (or not *only* by them) but by ties of class and social obligation, forcing them to remain in the twisted demesne of the local industrialist, a man who is more than he seems (a vampire? An utterly corrupt and evil mage called a Nephandus? World of Darkness has lots of options.) Barovia is shrunk in scale to the town of Barrowdale and its immediate rural environs, creating claustrophobia without breaching the lower-fantasy constraints by having the Strahd equivalent hop on his magic horse. World of Darkness has a modestly complex system, but it's a little lighter than D&D especially for the relatively normal mortals the characters will be playing. They might have a spiritualist medium, a Sorcerer or Psychic capable of a couple of tricks or perhaps somebody whose True Faith in God can protect against the unholy, but for the most part they'll be relying on mundane skills as they uncover the town's shadowier side. I love the idea of the Keepers of the Feather as a group of socialist agitators, the Baron's Vallaki as a disjointed and ineffectual trade union or Argynvostholt as the cellar network left behind by the families whose estates were cleared to build the new rows of red-brick tenements. Just one thing: please don't have Strahd be Eastern European in this set-up, the vampiric foreigner invading British soil is an unpleasant trope.

Rules for vampire powers so you don't have to buy a whole vampire book as well are to be found here:https://saligia.fandom.com/wiki/Saligia_Wikia - use the White Wolf Wiki for guidance on what you're looking for.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/401413

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/114261

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/368774

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/412531

Honourable Mentions: Dread, Dark Age Cthulhu

Storm King's Thunder

SKT is another story reliant on power scaling to make its premise work. It has a massive, almost sandbox-y setting in which the characters gradually pick up plot threads explaining why bad things are happening around them, fight their way through one of several dungeons and then use their trophy from that to unlock the finale in which they go head-to-head with giants, a kraken and a dragon in pretty short order. Honestly, I don't like it as an adventure, but if you're wanting to run it you're going to want at least some support for interesting travel and a solid power scale that will allow some pretty big fights at the high end.

Played-Straight: Worlds Without Number

It may only have 10 levels (sort of), but its lack of bounded accuracy means this fantasy game of wandering experts, mages, warriors and adventurers scales impressively into the higher of those. It's travel rules maintain the interesting elements of resource management whilst being more streamlined than 5e's. Also, and this is a side-note, characters are very customizable with everybody getting a couple of free feat-equivalents. It's very solid and entirely system-agnostic, meaning you can use the great big highly-detailed map and chapter of encounters which are without a doubt the best part of SKT.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/348809

Offbeat: Traveller

Of course if you *wanted* to adapt the map...

Traveller is a sci-fi game, known for extensive and random character generation but which also likes big hex grids! Seriously, look at this thing.

It is pretty setting-agnostic, meaning you can create your own sci-fi setting (and map!) that fits in equivalents to the adventure elements (some people have even made historical or fantasy hacks, for which check out Mercator or Halberts). It has extensive rules for travel, of course, and also modular rules for just about everything else so that whether your characters want to be merchants or mercenaries you can patch in more complex rules to serve that need. In what is essentially a massive sandbox with loose themes that coalesce into a plot at the end, that works really well, and you can still have the big threats that the adventure relies on in the form of enormous alien battleships. I think I'd be using the K'Kree, murderous centaur like vegetarian absolutists, as my giants if running in the official Traveller setting of the Third Imperium golden age, but honestly any of humaniti's alien neighbours could work if they turned hostile.

There are a lot of editions of traveller, but the 2nd edition book by Mongoose is a great modern entry point.

https://www.mongoosepublishing.com/collections/traveller-rpgs

Honourable Mention: Forbidden Lands

Tomb of Annihilation

ToA, the last of these I've run, is to my mind a much better hexcrawler than SKT and indeed 5e's best pure exploration adventure. The PCs have a goal, a timer, and an immense, confusing, murderous obstacle in the way in the form of the jungles of Chult. Once they beat that, it's time for a different sort of crawl as they explore massive puzzle dungeons. A game that works for this needs to be good at both map-scale and site-scale exploration, not just in the evocation of travel in the narrative but also the nitty-gritty survival details of whether you contracted throat leeches today. Oh, and it needs to be a setting that allows for big powerful mass-influence magic or something and for resurrection so the death curse plot point can be set up.

Played-Straight: Forbidden Lands

A game *about* exploring a hex map, with a die-based supply system that reduces bookkeeping to a minimum whilst keeping resource tracking central, detailed travel and camp actions and a slightly low-fantasy tone that fits well with how I conceive ToA. Nothing here would stop you using the official setting, though some of the assumptions about D&D magic it makes might need tweaking.

https://freeleaguepublishing.com/en/games/forbidden-lands/

Offbeat: Eclipse Phase

In the mid-distance future, the shock of an AI uprising that decimated humanity has led us to flee earth, embrace transhumanism and conquer death through the practice of resleeving into new bodies. 10 years after "the Fall," sapients - humans, uplifted animals and limited AIs - live throughout the solar system and, via a series of weird teleport gates, beyond. But now (this plot proposes) something in the outer reaches of the solar system is broadcasting a rare strain of the ai-created Exsurgent Virus, which twists its sufferers into monsters - this one affecting not active sleeves, but backups. Whenever somebody resleeves- like, say, if they broadcast their mind into a new body on the edge of the solar system to find out what's going on - they have limited time left before they become an abomination. EP has pretty solid survival rules, greatly expedited by sci-fi technology, and a system of mental stress that'd fit ToA's horror elements well, but I won't pretend it wouldn't be a faff to convert. It doesn't have much support for something like hexcrawl, though it'd be easy enough to set up a map of outer system habs in a given area of space, and its characters tend to be hypercompetent in a way that could reduce the sense of threat. With the themes of death and resurrection, terrible elder entities and horror embedded in a way that not many sci-fi rpgs do, though, I think it'd be worth it if you're willing to deal with some crunch. All of the big books for it are also available for FREE from the publishers, though I recommend supporting them - they're awesome people doing good work.

https://robboyle.info/#eclipse-phase-pdfs

Honourable Mention: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Ghosts of Saltmarsh

Other than OotA, this is probably the adventure (I mean, anthology I guess but it's an anthology with some very strong connective tissue) that I'd most like to run some day. The thing Saltmarsh needs most is of course good sailing rules or the ability to adapt the ones in the book naturally, but a functioning mass combat system for the attack on the sahaguin lair would also be helpful, as would anything making it easier to run a horror game.

Played-Straight: Cthulhu Dark Ages+Corsairs of Cthulhu

One of them's set in the 1000s, the other in the 1700s, but between them that basically averages out to the medieval mishmash that is D&D and provides rules for anything you might want. The dark, gritty human-scale tone (well-suited to Greyhawk) can be made low fantasy by using some of the 'folk' - read non-sanity-blasting - magic found in Dark Ages and from there you can pretty much run the setting straight, either in the original setting (you'll need to homebrew some rules for nonhuman species) or in our own (removing non-monstrous nonhumans altogether). Call of Cthulhu's rules in general bring in a system for character sanity that's very well suited to the frequent horror of Saltmarsh - there's even an asylum already in one of the adventures should your character go mad! - whilst Dark Ages brings some detailed, brutal rules for combat with armour and swords and Corsairs, in addition to ships, adds the blackpowder weaponry that always felt it was missing from Saltmarsh. You should probably keep using the random ship events and Encounters in the 5e book, but if you just keep a comparative list of dice difficulties in the two games they won't be hard to convert even on the fly. Honestly, the big issue here is price, because you're going to need the core rules and two supplements to get started. If that's unfeasible, grab the quick-start or starter set rules and corsairs and then send me a message; I'll give you the relevant extracts from the dark ages rules that I think would help. You can find rules for converting between D20 and CoC's D100 systems online, but honestly the game's standard array of monsters should be fine for representing most stuff in Saltmarsh.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/388056

https://www.chaosium.com/cthulhu-dark-ages-3rd-edition-hardcover/

https://www.chaosium.com/call-of-cthulhu-keeper-rulebook-hardcover/

Offbeat: Exalted

OK, hear me out: exalted is a game (d10 system similar to world of darkness but, weirdly, much better social interaction rules) about being reborn, hunted godlings in an almost ridiculously high-fantasy setting, doing incredible things with an array of powers and skills that take competence porn to and beyond the levels of epic D&D 3.5. The world they live in, however, can be as dark and desperate as it is strange and wonderful, and does have a fair number of Normal People who would live in a place like Saltmarsh. That setting also makes the appearance of random island encounters and magical storms popping up out of nowhere feel a lot more natural than it does in Greyhawk. Most importantly, the core game has not only rules for mass combat and sailing, but specific powers to make specialist characters supernaturally good at those things - six pages of options for sailing alone. It might lose some of the classic Saltmarsh horror, and you might want to raise the crew of the first pirate ship to more reasonable levels because even starting exalted will punch through 13 minor enemies with ease, but trust me: it's worth it for how cool it will make your pcs feel and how many rich exploration opportunities will open up to them with increased resilience to harm.

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/162759

Descent into Avernus

Most noted for a wide gap between character level and apparent threat, though that's really just illustrative of 5e's design philosophy, for me DiA's main 'deal' is tonal diversity, sometimes to the point of whiplash. You go from morally-ambiguous intrigue in a dark den of crime and iniquity to similar except now in hell and with cultists to Brütäl Mäd Mäx Räcës, aided by a flying golden elephant on a quest to redeem a fallen angel. At the same time, the story isn't really meant to be zany in the same way as something like OotA, so the key is probably finding a system that doesn't enforce any particular tone rather than one that enforces tonal dissonance within scenes like Dreams. Given the critical choices between fighting and negotiating the module presents at points, it's also important that the system chosen not make one of those dramatically better than the other.

Played-Straight: Between the Skies

Using a very loose, modular system - it literally lets you choose your dice system! - Between the Skies is basically a collection of systems for inspiration generation to service a plane- or world-hopping campaign. It makes characters varying from the mundane to the weird (should you want to run DiA as the planescape game it cries out to be) interesting through a lifepath generation system which is a bit more than the usual; how often do you find the option to die in character generation *but keep playing that character?* Then it provides guidance for travel, vessels (in a way that'd work quite neatly with the Infernal war machines) and adventure across the planes with a philosophy of maximising the role of the GM as opposed to the system. Its combat system works mostly narratively rather than relying on dice, but still allows a good deal of complexity where needed: you can zoom into or out of combat scenes according to how necessary they are to the plot, either resolving them quickly without losing danger, useful for many of Descent's random encounters, or running more detailed fights. It is ultimately a toolbox game, and will reward a gm who's also willing to be a bit of a designer.

Offbeat: Dark Heresy

A story in which characters begin investigating corruption amongst mortal powers and then delve into literal hell might be an excellent fit for a mid-high level game of the classic Warhammer 40k game of inquisitorial agents rooting out heresy in the grim dark future. Baldur's gate can easily be a significant garrison world, Elturel its Daemon World neighbour from which the characters venture into the Eye of Terror or Great Rift in search of a rumoured way to "redeem" (read: bring back to the Imperium, itself a theofascist nightmare state) a Daemon Primarch, one of the lost children of the Emperor. Given this is 40k, and that Dark Heresy is full of rules for corruption and horrible death, it's likely to end less hopefully than DiA typically does, but you never know!

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/m/product/65872

Honourable Mentions: Exalted, Thirsty Sword Lesbians

Rime of the Frostmaiden

It has been well-noted by now that RotF is quite a good horror story and quite a poor D&D adventure. Honestly, I think even as horror it's a bit of a tonal mess, but it definitely has some strong elements there which are weakened by the characters throwing around resurrection magic and fireballs as the solution to all of their problems. This isn't to say they aren't allowed fireballs - it's pretty solidly a fantasy story - but that the game needs to be about problem solving and fear first and foremost, with of course the ever-present threat of the elements.

Played-Straight: Dread

One for the confident improvisers, dread has a single mechanic: if a character does something they aren't confidently capable of, they pull from a Jenga tower. If they make the pull, they succeed or avoid a threat; if they chicken out, something bad happens; if the tower topples, something very bad happens. Normally this removes them from play; for a longer campaign I might have the first topple lead to the character's secret (a very fun part of RotF is that every character is hiding something, often something nightmarish like an alien parasite growing inside them) being revealed and the second killing them/driving them mad/leading them to flee Icewind Dale and return home. Other than this, the major adaptation would be working out how to narratively implement PC archetypes. I think you can be generous with this - for a barbarian PC, they might be able to crush obstacles or slaughter minor foes without a pull, for example, whilst a water wizard could melt large areas of ice or breathe below the surface of a frozen lake. In short, step away from 5e's highly-defined abilities, let PCs do anything that makes sense and focus on threatening them with the things they *can't* control, which is likely to be a lot. When fights, the weather, stress and magic all threaten a single, communal resource, you'll find the kind of tension and caution the module seems to expect much easier to evoke.

https://dreadthegame.wordpress.com/about-dread-the-game/

Offbeat: Doctor Who: Adventures in Space

This is the other game I've not played (though it's designed by Cubicle 7, whose work I trust implicitly). I'm recommending it mostly for the narrative, because it seems to lend itself so well: the doctor and companions find themselves drawn to an 18th-19th century Russian arctic Island/planetary colony where a powerful cosmic being has brought down eternal winter, the cybermen are building a new cyber-king and an ancient alien city lies frozen in ice. You probably need to think of an actual reason why Auril's frozen Ten Towns, possibly something to do with the fallen city, because your resolution is going to be a result of investigation and clever plans rather than fighting, so be willing to put in the work there. On the easier side, the time travel element that can appear at the end won't be as sudden and jarring in a setting predicated on it!

Quickfire Round of Books I Don't Own

Dragon Heist: Dusk City Outlaws/Fiasco/Royal Blood

Dungeon of the Mad Mage: Advanced Fighting Fantasy

Wild Beyond the Witchlight: Changeling the Dreaming

Tyranny of Dragons: HârnMaster/Pendragon

Candlekeep Mysteries: Amber Diceless/Rennaissance

Radiant Citaedel: Between the Skies/Mage: the Ascension

So there it is! My challenge to you is as follows: if you were considering starting a new 5e campaign with one of these campaigns, expose your group to something new and try one of these instead. Let's break WotC's near-monopoly on this hobby, because they sure as hell don't deserve it. If you do do anything with any of these (or, as I say, if you have better ideas) please let me know!

[veryspecialfungus]

I'm gonna ask you to bare with me for a second here. I have a non-Psychonauts game that's been stuck in my craw ever since I played it.

And like...I don't know of anyone that's also played it or even heard of it. I guess this is a recommendation? All I know is that I can't stop thinking about it. I'm probably never going to forget it.

The game is out now, I just think this trailer gets the game across better than the release date trailer.

Farming sims are kind of an odd beast aren't they? Most of the time there's a Back to Nature Simpler Times Heal Your Soul By Growing a Simple Turnip theme but like...the mechanics never quite match for me. It's still capitalism. It's still running your farm the most efficient and money-making way possible to buy more stuff to make more money. That's not really a criticism, mind; I like farming games as much as the next person, even if the Cozy game genre has been throwing them out so hard and fast I needed to play a bloody violent shooter as a break from all the Wholesomeness.

So it was just a little bit of a lurch to play a game where the farming is working towards something, namely a ticket to the moon.

Before the Green Moon has you farming a piddly little patch of land on a post-apocalyptic Earth to save your pennies to start your life over. You know someone up on the moon colonies, or so you think. You haven't seen them in forever, there've been no letters. They might not be there anymore. They might not even be alive.

But what else are you going to do? The only way you have a future is on the moon. You can't live in this dinky little town of, like, six people forever.

But you do live there. You can't help but talk to them. You only get a few seeds every morning to start with, and once you're done with that there's just nothing else to freakin' do. They teach you to fish, they ask you to plant new seeds, you get a free stamina-boosting meal at the mess because you're a neighbor. You develop your relationships and make friends and become part of the community full in the knowledge that eventually you're leaving and never coming back.

It's a bittersweet experience. You might have guessed.

Before the Green Moon reminds me of a game Love De Lic might have made back in the day. Specifically, it reminds me of Moon RPG (hey wait a minute). The emphasis on being in the world and getting to know the community around you, sharing in their hopes and fears even though it's not really your world, not really your home. Maybe it could be, in a different life, under a different set of circumstances. But it's not. Eventually you'll move on. That's just the end of the story.

I love the way that hangs over your head the entire time. Do you really want to start dating the melancholy scientist girl when you know it'll only hurt her if it gets too serious before you go ? Do you come help the cook at the mess hall clean up each night or leave him to it when it seems like he's falling in love with you? What about the person who thinks farmers are bad luck? Do you keep up that relationship just because there's only six people to talk to total and you already chatted with the mayor today?

One thing that kept getting to me is that people from the moon come down to this crumbling little town you're trying to escape and they...suck? They really suck. They're too good to talk to you, they clog up the streets, they make the wait at the mess hall take two to three times as long, and they dump plastic takeout boxes and styrofoam cups all over the place. It's not clear why they've come down in the first place.

Maybe it's heartening to think you could come back to this little town if you wanted but...if you started a life on the moon and came back like this, who would even recognize you?

Aside from an annoying glitch where my anti hurricane poncho refused to protect me from hurricanes, I don't think I can speak highly enough of this game. It's a short experience that lives right in the middle of bitter and sweet and if you like contemplative atmospheric video games, I highly recommend it.

[danganronpasurvivoraskblog]

Rpg Anon: Strap in, mod. Cuz I gotta give my two cents on you being interested in Disgaea now.

First of all, I don't anything about what happens in disgaea 6 or 7. Kinda didn't care anymore after the older characters didn't feel like work was done to make their moves modern anymore.

Ok now, if you're that interested just of the hinazumi bit, you can ignore Disgaea 1 and 3. I didn't play them either but they didn't seem too interesting to me. Just know Laharl, Etna, and Flonne are old characters from the first game.

I recommend playing Disgaea 2, 4, and 5. Mostly cuz I biased like these ones. You can play 2 on a psp emulator like I did. 4 is the first game I saw and how I got into the series tho and 5 was pretty fun to watch and had a great story.

Before I gush over the hinazumi-ish details of Adell and Rozalin, important tips for Disgaea 2 tho. 1. DO NOT kill your friends. Friendly fire is always on and it's always a bad idea to accidentally do this in all the games but 2 actually punishes you HARD if you do it way too much. *shivers in fear remembering the Worse Ending* 2. Adell hits REALLY hard if the opponent is stronger than him. Prepare yourself to see him level up like crazy for being a level 100 fighting level 500's. 3. Adell's cowardly scaredycat little brother is the best unit in the game bar none. His aoe attack where desperately flails all around himself does more damage than anything in this game.

Now for the stupid gushiness. Spoilers tho. Adell and Rozalin start off really not wanting to be around each other. They really don't like having to drag or be dragged everywhere. Character Development happens tho and by the end of the game, well, Adell fucking kisses the insanity out of her. 👍. Funny as the credits show her trying to shoot him for doing that. Here comes the reall Hinazumi levels of tsundere lovey dovey shit. Come Disgaea 4, you can recruit them separately as dlc. The thing is, well, they both seem to have secret motives for why they want the job and need the money when you first try to recruit. Turns out they secretly wanted to buy something valuable for the other. (Adell wanted to buy a fancy necklace for Rozalin and Rozalin wanted to buy a new fancy house for Adell) How sweet. However, whoever you recruited first suddenly arrives after the second is beaten and admits their reasons and they feel moved. Cue the lovey dovey atmosphere of "You did all of this for me?" "You were doing all of this for me, too?" "I... um... uh..." *long silence and then the atmosphere burst into colorful hearts and rainbows as they're both lost in their own world, staring at each other in silence* What happens next can only be described as:

Ibuki coming out of nowhere screaming out "OH. MAH. GAWD. These two. Are. MARRIED!!!"

(Cue the tsundere.)

Hinazumi finally realizing everyone was watching: WE'RE NOT MARRIED!!!

Hajime: yeah um um um she's just a freeloader living together with me under the same house!

Mahiru: Hajime, you idiot! You're only giving them more of the wrong idea! Also who are you calling a freeloader?!

Ibuki: You two are definitely married!

Fuyuhiko: Okay okay! That's enough. You're both fucking hired. Work together as husband and wife to make money for the business, you two.

Hinazumi: We're not married!

(This was fun to go thru again.)

From then on, it gets more and more intimate and hilarious. Honestly, I wish I could gush over it more but I don't have time.

//Ok, so I checked out a video on what you were talking about, and I'll link it here.

//So there's two possible outcomes, as RPG said, and they both give off this absolutely perfect tsundere romance vibe. This is the most Hinazumi thing I have ever fucking seen, and I adore it.

//Kaguya-sama wishes it could be this good.

//And what's funny is I imagine this being a potential story interaction for the Survivor RPG we brainstormed a while ago. Except maybe instead, it's just Ibuki and the other Remnants teasing Hinazumi that they are stupid in love and married.

-Mod

[callioope]

I want to scream into the void and rant about offline stuff, but I also feel this huge hesitation of posting too much detail on the internet, so, here's as short and vague as I could pare it down to:

just basically feeling super overwhelmed by "adulting" offline stuff including: buying a new house, moving but taking several months to actually pack/move/unpack, selling the old house, shopping for more furniture to fill the new house, being constantly ill since early October, researching and choosing new doctors (including primary care and OBGYN), having a rough stretch of OCD and anxiety ickiness, having to stop fencing for medical reasons (not related to fencing, i did not get injured, i just have Other stuff going on), and experiencing the general holiday fatigue of gift shopping and event hopping

I spend my free time handling the above items, on top of the usual daily chores of, you know, laundry and cleaning and "what do you mean i have to make another meal again i just ate"

and i haven't really had any time to connect with my creative outlets -- posting on tumblr, writing, playing the uke, even DND to a small extent (not enough time to put into character building between sessions) although DND has been like the ONE thing still happening

and it just sucks and I want to write but when I finally do get time I'm just so tired, so i just ended up scrolling mindlessly on tumblr or watching dumb youtube videos -- if I'm lucky instead I'll watch an actual play show but for a bit I was caught up on CR and Fantasy High and didn't know what to watch next because the next season comes out so soon so I don't want to get caught up in something else

[side bar: been working my way through one-shots, finished the amazing Escape from the Bloodkeep and I'm almost done with Mice and Murder. Mice and Murder has been super fun and entertaining and I kinda want to play a clue style rpg now -- side side bar but i collect clue variations -- and with the RO anniversary on my mind I've been wanting to read like a clue or sherlock holmes style AU but i have been having trouble finding one? like it can't have been 7 years with no sherlock holmes type rebelcaptain AU? maybe i need to try different AUs or search terms or filters? anyways. would also read a shadowgast murder mystery AU too, still mostly reading shadowgast fic anyways although EVEN FIC I haven't been reading as much either, but the RO anniversary had me thinking about Them again a little bit]

anyways i kinda felt like posting here would help me feel a little bit more connected, i guess, to the creative side of myself? since this is sort of my primary creative outlet, or used to be, if that makes sense.

also i saw a post about something called get your words out, which had some writing goals that looked attainable even for me with all the Stuff happening, and that has felt a little bit like -- something to maybe look forward to, to maybe help me get back into things... I don't know if I'll pledge yet and maybe I'd just do something for myself in that vein but yeah. something more interesting to think about than searching my insurance website or shopping for shelving or chairs or sofas...

gonna go back to watching Mice and Murder. thanks for reading this rant.

[whumpitisthen]

here's a quick rundown on astarion: gay vampire spawn (not a vampire. like a demo version vampire. a "lesser" one but don't let him hear that) who has been kept for 200 years by his master as a slave. guy (who was an actual vampire) carved him up, tortured him and forced him to lure victims into his manor. astarion has been abused in so many ways i'd hit some sort of character limit if i listed half of them. he was only allowed to feet on rats and small vermin in the sewers. poor little meow meow astarion is now free due to [game story] reasons and seeks power and revenge -- he's an edgy fuck with a lot of swag and no moral compass. bro is a menace and loves causing problems on purpose. [slight spoiler] he will literally try to suck some of your blood like a day or two after you meet him and unless you succeed a skill check he'll just keep doing it until you die. if you resurrect yourself afterwards he'll go like "ooooh ooopsie sowwy! i wouldn't kill you if i knew you'll be back teehee can we forget about this? ;) <3 don't fucking kill me". he's such a good fucking whumpee you don't even know. it's insane. i don't want to ramble but he's almost everything i've ever wanted from a character like this in a large scale rpg. [slightly bigger spoiler] despite being the go-to "fuckable" character who everyone finds hot as hell (both in-universe and online) he's HORRIBLY traumatized by his sexual experiences from when he used to be a slave and when you romance him a good portion of his storyline revolves around trying to make him realize that he's more than just a slab of very attractive meat. he hides his feelings behind a facade of "evil tumblr sexyman-esque" mannierisms and getting to finally peel it back and see him for the poor wet cat that he is is so fucking satisfying. [an even bigger spoiler] i loved watching him cry when he finally gets to confront his former master. pristine content. there's so much more to his character (and this game in general) but if you ever need to justify spending full price on a new videogame release, there's nothing better than bg3. if i could choose one game to beam directly into the brain of each whumpblr user, it'd be this one.

Okay so i already loved him from the very little information i had about him, but this is so delicious

I saw some pics of bad scars which are always hhh and heard that he is a whumpee but i didn't know the extent and now i think ive collected a new blorbo

You are telling me he meets his old master at some point...... and he cries..... and hes all sad....... he rly was made for tumblr but especially me youre telling me he has white hair and is a vampire twink who was a slave and hurt and traumatised and he has incredible sad wet cat energy and he only has a flimsy layer of confidence and absolutely no idea what morals are. i knew i needed to know more you have to understand my knowledge of the game stopped at the bear sex scene like that is it and yet i somehow always find the most pathetic little men no matter what in any media i could not give a shit about any of the rest i will consume the entire thing just to know the exact extent of his sad little life

Also i wish i had the opportunity to even consider buying a full price new release no matter how good the game is there is no world in which id be able to pay for that. Also idk about the gameplay either it seems very story oriented roleplay and almost dating sim-ish? Not a huge fan of those in general its gotta have more gameplay than walking around and basically watching a movie, but, again. No idea about anything, maybe it has incredible gameplay and i just dont know. Dont tell me if it does itll just make ms sadder bc that would absolutely make me wanna play it myself. Its kinda funny honestly the longer i spend not knowing anything the crazier everyone seems to me both online and irl. Its like im living in a separate world, i know no one who hasn't played this fucking game fjfhskhfd

[shuunnico]

any games you're interested in thisyear?

Actually quite a lot, which is different than most years. In no particular order:

2023 Confirmed

Warhammer 40k: Space Marine 2. I liked the original. It was simple but fun. I'm hoping they have evolved the formula a bit from that point.

Darkest Dungeon 2. I have a lot of issues with the game changing directions into an FTL-ish game. But it could be good, regardless of my feelings on the genre shift.

Starfield. Bethesda is still on my radar but they're no longer a "Must buy" company after Fallout 4 and Fallout76. The fact that they're STILL using the CreationEngine gives me worry, but I'm still waiting to see how it turns out.

Hogwarts Legacy. It's a immersive RPG with character customization. That's going to always catch my attention.

Redfall. Arcane disappointed me with Deathloop but they still have good will from Prey. If they can break the core "Xshock" gameplay they've reused for nearly all their games, I'll be interested.

Book of Hours. I really enjoyed the mythology set up in Cultist Simulator and I'm interested in any game that further explores it.

Suicide Squad. Rocksteady is a solid studio and I liked the Arkham Games, even Knight. So I'm willing to give them a shot in this.

Atomic Heart. New studio attempting the Xshock formula, so I'll be watching to see how it turns out. But I've heard this was a troubled production, so I dunno how it'll be as a final product.

Like a Dragon: Ishin. I'm a sucker for the Yakuza franchise.

System Shock. After so long, I'm just interested in how it'll be when it finally comes out.

Baldur's Gate 3. Someone gifted it to me back when it started Early Access, but I haven't tried it because I don't want to be spoiled. I've just toyed around with the character creation. Larian Studios is a studio I still have a lot of trust in.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. I have not seen either Avatar film. But from the start it seems like Cameron want to build a world and only crafted a story as an excuse. He should've just made a game like this instead to begin with.

Announced but TBD (so may not be in 2023)

Into the Dead: Our Darkest Days. Looks like This War of Mine but with zombies and a 1980's aesthetic.

Warhammer 40k: Roguetrader. Made by Owlcat and I liked their two Pathfinder games. A Warhammer CRPG? Sounds fun!

Hellboy: Web of the Wyrd. I love Hellboy. I just hope the game itself is good.

Frostpunk 2. I liked the original, will see what they do with the sequel.

Silksong. I only recently played Hollow Knight, but I enjoyed the experience enough to look forward to this.

Avowed. I really, really liked Deadfire and this game is set in the PoE world. The 'eh' feeling I got from Outer Worlds puts a damper on things, but I hope that maybe by returning to the PoE universe, there might be a return to form. Also, immersive RPG with character customization, so...

Hades 2. I LOVED Hades. More of it is going to appeal to me.

Judas. The creator of Bioshock comes back to make a brand new Xshock game? I wanna see if he innovates the formula he helped popularize or not.

Nightengale. I'm not huge into the 'survivor crafting' game but the aesthetics interest me.

Cyberpunk: Phantom Liberty. Okay, not a game, but DLC. Cyberpunk hurt me, but I'm really, really hoping that this DLC is being made by CDPR with the idea that they need to step up their game.

[cyberpunkpizzaman]

Returning to Oblivion

I’ve probably spent more time telling stories about Oblivion than I have actually playing the game. That time I randomly found Dark Brotherhood robes in someone’s basement during a burglary. That time my English teacher spent a good portion of class talking about how cool the vampire questline was. The mess that was horse armor DLC.*

I never even came close to beating the game when I first bought it on Xbox 360. I’d launch it every now and again, sneak around, do some stealing, do some assassinations, and close it down. After I swapped over to PC I ended up buying it in a Steam sale and going all in on mods… racking up maybe 10 hours in the process and never getting past Kvatch (the first phase of the main quest).

I recently came back to the game, and oh man. It’s still so beautiful. And so much of what it does is so very interesting.

Sometimes a game pioneers a new system or a technological innovation that becomes key to the entire experience. It doesn’t always have to the mechanical focal point of the game; I’m talking less about Shadow of Mordor’s Nemesis System than I am about Half-Life 2’s physics engine. It’s not the focal point of the game’s core loop, but it’s a key part of the experience and the game’s designers clearly wanted to show off everything it can do.**

For Oblivion, that system is Radiant AI.

Here’s a recent article from the escapist talking about the system in far more detail than I’m planning to here, digging into the development history and some of the insanity that resulted from the original draft build. On a basic level, the system establishes a set of time and need-based routines for every NPC in the game. Around 7pm, you’ll find most of a town’s residents in the inn, socializing and eating. During working hours, they’ll be manning their shops or wandering the streets chatting with ‘friends’.

What I didn’t realize until now is just how many of the game’s quests are designed to center this system. In the last few hours of playing I’ve had quests say:

“Come back and talk to this person when their boss isn’t around.”

“Follow this merchant after he closes up shop to see where he goes.”

“Search this man’s house when he’s not home.”

“You can find the guard captain in the barracks after dark or patrolling the streets during the day.”

So much of the game is designed to show off the Radiant AI system, emphasizing NPC routines and using that structure to enable interesting interactions. It’s honestly super cool and there aren’t many RPGs in 2022 that leverage systems quite like this one.***

And Skyrim’s Solitude looks like a village compared to Oblivion’s Imperial City.

If you want to finance Todd Howard’s next Skyrim release, all links above head to the Humble Bundle store (and I get a small portion of any purchase you make using them).

* I’m weirdly nostalgic for that controversy in today’s age of micro-transactions and skins…

** I think you could argue the point with Half-Life 2; I’ve heard the argument somewhere that the game existed in large part as a tech demo for the Source Engine.

*** Roguelikes are, of course, another matter. Streets of Rogue and RimWorld come to mind on the crazier end of the spectrum.

[jeff-from-marketing]

Wow so uh, some shit has been going down in the TTRPG space lately. I didn’t exactly intend for this to become a TTRPG blog, but oh well that’s what brain has decided and I’m not one to argue against it. Wouldn’t go well anyway.

I do however want to talk about “holy shit Paizo are absolute fucking mad lads and I respect the shit out of them.”

Let me get one thing clear: I trust any company about as far as I can throw them. Often times, if given the chance and the choice, most companies will gladly stab you in the back if it means a few extra coins in their pocket. Hell, Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro have shown that perfectly fine this month and a bit. But I would also be lying if I said I didn’t have trust in Paizo, because as far as I have seen and as far as I can tell, they do basically everything right and everything I could ever hope for in the TTRPG space.

Everything a player needs to play the game is available for free by Paizo on sources like Archives of Nethys, which reduces the barrier of entry to basically nothing and heavily encourages the “try before you buy” mentality that more of every industry needs to adopt more of. They have really solid and respectful representation of so many people across so many different walks of life, as well as do a lot to actually look after their players and ensure that everyone has a good time. Hell they even became a union without a fight. And this is to say nothing of their community outreach, how well they encourage third party creators to make stuff, the actual quality of their works, etc. etc. If anything my biggest complaint is that it’s hard to find their books in local game stores, which isn’t really much of a complaint.

But the announcement of the ORC? Holy shit. I was not expecting that. 

I was absolutely expecting Paizo to have something in their back pocket. A “break glass in case of Wizards of the Coast” plan if you will. Something to ensure that they can stay afloat, and maybe even fight WotC in court or something. Comments they’ve made in the past have suggested such things anyway. Paizo did that and so much more. Seriously I cannot do the whole thing enough justice, I really recommend reading it for yourself. The fact that Paizo have effectively said “we waited for your response Wizards, we were there when the original OGL was forged, we have not forgotten. So we’re making our own OGL, with blackjack and hookers” and came out with the Open RPG Creative License (or ORC License, which I just find is a delightful name). Then in that same post, openly and publicly stating that they are ready to legally fight Wizards of the Coast is one hell of a move. Not to mention the not insignificant number of other sizeable members that are behind the creation of this new ORC, and Paizo’s plan to not own the license so there’s no chance of history repeating itself. It’s as if Paizo saw everything that’s happening now, and was like “right, make this even more watertight and so that none of this can ever happen to it.” 

I gotta say, I respect the fuck out of Paizo for that. The absolute audacity to slap down Wizards, come out with their own license with blackjack and hookers, and futurerpoof to ensure this can’t happen again. 

The question now is simply: where does this leave Wizards of the Coast? 

Now I’ll admit, I’m no legal or marketing expert... ignore the Tumblr handle real quick. But I can’t see this possibly ending well for them, at least not with the D&D division. This whole situation has caused the biggest backlash I think I have ever seen to something like this. Such is the case that several major news outlets and even non-TTRPG based content creators such as Linus Tech Tips or Moist Critical are covering this and going “my dude, what are you doing?” Coupled with the backlash being such that they’ve had to completely cancel announcements relating to the OGL, and now the campaign to mass unsubscribe from services like D&D Beyond...

Thing is, even if they do in fact perform a 180 and cancel all OGL 1.1 plans, that’s still a net loss for Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro. They’ve shown their hand now, they’ve shown that they are a bad faith actor that cannot be trusted, so why would anyone willingly enter any deal with them? Why would anyone trust that they won’t continue trying to undermine the OGL? And now with the ORC, why would anyone not go for that instead? Even if this somehow does result in some short term monetary gain for Wizards, they’ve lost the one resource that is incredibly difficult to renew: good will. A resource that Paizo and other companies are now drowning in. That can only do harm to D&D in the long term. Leaks show that they’re banking on the community just simply forgetting and moving on. Were this the gaming industry, I’d say that’s a safe bet. This isn’t the gaming industry. I’ve found that people in the TTRPG space have long memories and harbour deep grudges. This is certainly something that’s going in The Book.

Personally? I’m excited for the whole thing. I’ve been saying for a while that D&D’s soft monopoly is hard to beat; that the brand name of Dungeons & Dragons is incredibly powerful and often analogous with TTRPGs themselves. But they may have just undone that monopoly themselves. I don’t expect D&D to just shrivel up and die, it’s still a very big name after all. I do, however, expect other systems to gain a surge of popularity following recent events, and that much is even already starting to happen. I do hope that other systems will get the light of day they deserve, and that it’ll now be easier to convince those new to the hobby to try other systems. 

With this latest announcement, I think the future is starting to look quite bright for TTRPGs.