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This is so good folks

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cardamom, cinnamon, saffron, nutmeg, clove, star anise, black pepper, allspice, cumin, fennel, turmeric, coriander, bay leaf, sumac, juniper, fenugreek, ginger, mace, mustard seed, thyme, rosemary, marjoram, lavender, oregano, basil, tarragon, sage, chervil, dill, parsley, mint

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My favorite for unexpected prompts is Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine. Quests are largely orthogonal to any sort of challenge or conflict, so I don't think it makes sense to think in terms of "bad things" or "good things". Quest flavors like "you are torn apart by spirits or birds, or turn into birds (generally in a break from reality)" or "you work or sleep in a space cluttered with piles and piles of papers and notes" or "you encounter a shade, ghost, or other misty spirit or doppelganger" leave whether this is a good or bad thing pretty open to you/the group to interpret (and often it'll be somewhere in the middle).

I do more and more feel like what I value ttrpgs for is prompts and mechanics that lead to or inspire directions/elements/twists we wouldn't have come up with on our own. I can run a quest or a combat or a trial or a heist as freeform RP just fine without needing a formal system. But a good game will add thematically, creatively, and/or emotionally to elevate play to something beyond what that would've been.

Working on a collaborative world building type thing and grappling with whether to include prompts. (And if so how)

I think there are three benefits to prompts in such a game (in order of difficulty to craft prompts that achieve the benefit) :

Aiding players who might struggle to come up with ideas

Encouraging a tone

Creating results no one at the table would have chosen

The last one is something I think people often overlook and, when lacking, can often be the cause for games that are gm-less, collaborative and dice-less feeling flat.

It's important to note the difference between 'bad things' and 'things no one at the table wants', even though it will often be bad things that players don't want. There is a tremendous emotional difference between deciding that a character will die, or that the team loses the big match, and having that result decided by the game system.

It is also the case that good things can feel more emotionally satisfying when spat out by the game system than declared by player fiat. Again for the question of 'the big game' simply declaring that the team wins feels emotionally empty.

Collaborative games with really well crafted prompts will force players to pick between options where neither of them are things they want to happen, which can be even more emotionally impactful than when it is a result of a dice roll.

The other way 'things no one would have chosen' is good is that as wall as introducing unwanted things, it can also introduce unexpected things. Ideally in a collaborative game this should also be coming from the other players but it doesn't hurt to add a little extra.

Considering the two (probably?) best known collaborative world building games: The Quiet Year has prompts that do this well, while Microscope has no prompts at all and I think does lack the emotional engagement as a result (possibly because that is not the primary level it wants you to engage on). The two also contrast in terms of how suitable a candidate they are for the inclusion of prompts on practical terms.

The Quiet Year is constrained both temporally and thematically. It will run for no more than a set number of turns and will be about a very specific situation, making it comparatively easy to craft a complete set of prompts. Meanwhile, Microscope is designed to run indefinitely and to encompass complete histories of about anything. Constructing useful prompts for that is just not feasible.

My concept is moderately thematically constrained, but isn't intended to have a defined run time, putting it somewhere in the middle in terms of suitability for prompts.

I think over the course of writing this I have convinced my self I ought to include them. But not really got anywhere in terms of working out how...

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One Unique City

Something I love about Pelgrane Press's TTRPG 13th Age is the "one unique thing" for every character. Lots of things make Defy the Gods' adventurers unique—raised by animals, in love with an exiled god—but the city you live in has something unique about it too.

Is it always night? Is it built on an ancient maze? Does fire refuse to light? Is it ruled by a council of animals who hate the wilderness?

I started out thinking about the Odyssey. In it, Odysseus travels to bizarre places, and the way you know they're bizarre is that they do things differently, or you encounter strange creatures there. The voyages of Sindbad (by way of Burton) do the same. So I made pick lists for describing a foreign city in a far-off land, with fantastical things about them.

But my first cultural consultant, Omar Ramadan-Santiago, showed me how exoticizing this is, how it abets Orientalism for a western audience. I didn't want to make the world less interesting, so I let you make every city, including your home, singular in its own way.

It feels very sword & sorcery. But from the jump, it also separates you from traditional sword & sorcery—also sometimes called "weird fantasy"—where weirdness, queerness, and the exotic are often just there to reinforce the normal. In this game, "weird" is you. It's who you are and where you live. It was one step toward reënvisioning the game, and its take on sword & sorcery, through a queer lens.

Detail of an illustration by @sheydgarden !

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Went on a nice chill western MA trip. Lots of farmstands and ice cream, Mass MoCA is a really great space and a really great museum. Some various flavors of mishap but a good trip overall.

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猫の恩返し / The Cat Returns 2002, dir. Hiroyuki Morita

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Hi! You've posted/reblogged some fun blogs on game design. Can't seem to find them at the moment, would you mind giving a few recommendations?

uhh off the top of my head my favourite article about game design is probably jay dragon's dozen fragments on playground theory:

generally, jay's medium/patreon are great. i also think reading mark rosewater's articles on the magic the gathering website is really valuable and important in terms of accessible comprehensive widely applicable writing on game design

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why bother caring about the environment when 1. It’s so obviously a lost cause and 2. There’s definitely going to be a nuclear war?

And what are you doing about it Anon? Learn about ecological restoration or get out of my way.

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light rain is underrated

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"read whipping girl" i have and personally i think that while Serrano has a lot of valuable insights and analysis, her writing is ultimately mired in her very specific perspective as a white binary trans woman in the american west coast queer communities. this leads to her theory on other groups falling short(not to mention getting snagged on some of the authors underlying biases), especially regarding racial dynamics. Serano herself has acknowledged this, stating that Whipping Girl was meant to be an autobiographical snapshot of a very specific time and place, and that her writing leaves a lot of gaps that should be filled by the relevant perspectives of other minorities. ultimately i think that the book could've benefited a lot from engaging more with existing literature on intersectional feminism, especially black feminist writers. at the end of the day i think that the book has a lot of good pieces but has such a limited perspective that the whole fails to be truly and fully intersectional, and in my opinion Serano has a lot of bias that i dont think shes fully interrogated and it drags her writing down, but hey, thats academia for you

anyway, now that you know i have the required context, what part of whipping girl did you want to discuss further?

.......

ah. i see. you didnt actually want me to read whipping girl, you just wanted me to shut up and agree with you

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forgotten kirby facts 252 - the enemy "gruegloom" from mass attack is a likely reference to the grues from zork.

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this one liberal dude on twitter made the (correct) take that parents have overwhelming power over their kids and very often abuse it and restrict children's rights and he was ratio'd by conservatives, communists and liberals alike who made comments like "my kids will have rights when they pay the bills" to "aw are you upset mom and dad didn't you get you a lega set for christmas". way to prove his point lol! any criticism of the power dynamics adults and particularly parents have over kids and how it is often used to abuse kids or refuse to let them exist as themselves is drowned in mockery and the idea that parents have absolute authority over children and that any less than that is actually spoiling them.

i said it before: people only care about Children as an ideal. as property. as something that is Innocent and deserving protection From Evil Traffickers but also something Dumb that barely deserves the status of human with autonomy. and its fucking wild how even the staunchest communists think of this as normal, and how people refuse to understand that this dynamic is how kids are emotionally, physically and sexually abused, as well as robbed of their voices and too scared/ashamed to talk about it.

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a lot of people could stand to start viewing the nakba and the holocaust as a continuum rather than as competitive binaries

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i have a storytelling thing i like to call "making the jailer". its based on world of warcraft where in its eighth expansion shadowlands in order to up the stakes of the world it was decided that all of the previous villains where just pawns of a bigger badder guy called The Jailer. and it was terrible. it retconned so many previous storylines because none of that was ever planned. people hated the jailer. live service and long running series's will inevitably run into the moment where they want to up the stakes even further and when this time comes they may be tempted to create the jailer. You must avoid making The Jailer at all costs

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Hi guys! Here’s my newest commission sheet, if you’re interested in some cool art by yours truly I'm re-opening them now! :D

Contact me via the private chat function or send me an e-mail right here for any offer or further question : cecild2101@gmail.com

If you like my art please consider or hit that reblog button, that also helps a lot! Thank you, and have a very nice day <3

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It's pride month so I'll allow myself to express one opinion on the internet :

There are no "exact color" of pride flags.

I see more and more sites and posts talking about the exact hex codes for the lesbian flag, or the right purple for the ace one, and how it should be more or less saturated and I just want to say: pride flags were meant to be sewn in your kitchen. To be spraypainted and to be recognised.

There are no "exact colors" of pride flags because you should do them with what you have ! Nobody should care if you use a crimson red instead of a cherry red or whatever ! Be free ! wave your colors ! The colors you have !