dorchadas | Entries tagged with rpgs (ロールプレイゲーム)

I Feel: amused
I Hear: Paralysed Age - Bloodsucker 2000 (Tzimisce)

Relistening to the H.P. Lovecraft Literary Podcast's episode on Dracula and the use of the word "draculosity" made me think of the degree of draculosity various Vampire: the Masquerade Clans have.

Like:

Tzimisce: 6/10 Draculas. Lords of the night living in crumbling castles in the Transylvanian wilderness and calling wolves on their enemies is pretty strong. On the other hand, there's the whole Necroscope-based body-sculpting powers that warp the entire concept around them. Dracula never turned Renfield into a ten-foot-tall killing machine with bone spikes for hands.

Ventrue: 8/10 Draculas. Yes, they don't live in crumbling castles but the whole plot of Dracula was Dracula moving to the modern world! In some kind of theoretical Dracula 2000 that isn't Dracula 2000, Dracula would have a penthouse apartment paid for in Turkish gold. Plus Ventrue can enthrall others and dominate their minds--Renfields galore!

Gangrel: 3/10 Draculas. Dracula is much more sophisticated and urbane than the Gangrel are, but the Gangrel are the only Clan I can imagine crawling down the wall of a castle in the middle of the night (a power which actually doesn't exist in V:tM, what's up with that?). Like the Tzimisce, they can also sic wolves on you.

Brujah: 1/10 Draculas. Other than being vampires, the Lost Boys don't have a lot in common with Dracula, and neither do the ancient Greek debate guys that the Brujah were later turned into.

Followers of Set: 0/10 Draculas. Technically these guys are vampires but they've never felt like it, since they clearly stepped out of the pages of The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian with only the most tangential connection to even V:tM's mythic history--"how did Set become a vampire?" is one of those questions that V:tM fans have been asking for decades and never had good answer for it. The answer for that is "it's taken from the secret vampire history in Anne Rice's Queen of the Damned with vampires ruling proto-Egypt, don't think about it too hard" but we're already talking about two books and neither of them are Dracula.

Salubri: -1/10 Draculas. Three eyed demon-hunting healers? Come on.

I Feel: relaxed
I Hear: Sabled Sun - Planetarium

Laila is asleep,

sashagee is napping, it's grey and misty outside, and I'm still here at work. The Shabbat candle-lighting time starts right when work ends. We already did our Shabbat cleaning yesterday. Not much to do now.

sashagee is feeling sick--she's been sick, off and on, for about a month at this point. Laila can tell and she's not happy about it. Emoji dejected

She has tons of energy, always moving and always climbing and always wanting to go fast, and it means she's constantly testing boundaries and trying to get away with things and

sashagee just does not have the energy to deal with it a lot of the time. I can play with Laila after work, but that still means most of most days I can't do much.

sashagee already contacted her doctor to try to get some more tests done, and hopefully they can adjust her medication or do something else to help her get her energy back.

After the small number of games I played last year, I decided that this year I would try to beat one game a month and so far I'm...very behind. I haven't even started a new game this month at all and I have less than a week left. Fortunately, the game I want to play is the NES Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, which takes maybe three hours to beat and which I ran through probably a dozen times or more during my childhood, so I just need to sit down and actually put in the time. We don't have any other plans this weekend so this should be the time to do it.

Lately I've been into the RPG Break!!, which I kickstarted last year (when the kickstarter happened at the end of a 10 year design process). The game looks gorgeous and while I'm usually not a big fan of OSR games because they're not fiddly and complicated enough for my tastes, Break!! has some things in it that are almost always emphasized but rarely actually given mechanical weight--for example there's a whole section about marching order and how it mechanically affects what you can do! Plus the world it takes place on is hollow, the outer surface has no sun and while it used to have a "sun machine," the machine broke and crashed down to earth and so the world is divided into the Blazing Garden, the Twilight Meridian, and the Whistful Dark. In the far past, the world was ruled by capricious beings called the Unshaped (shades of Exalted), until one of those Unshaped took inspiration from the prayers of mortals and became Regulus, the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFUEz-8phDc&t=311s>First Hero</a>, leading mortals to victory. There are cat people who are actually aliens and arrived on a crashed spaceship. It looks like a ton of fun and I can't wait until I get the actual physical book. We had a bunch of snow back when I posted about how cold it was, and since then the weather climbed up to 6°C and it's been raining almost nonstop for days. The streets are wet and glistening in the streetlights now. Alright, Shabbat in a few minutes. See you on the other side.

I Feel: amused
I Hear: Clamavi de Profundis - The Song of Hammerdeep

Back in the 80s and 90s, there was an explosion of RPGs and in order to distinguish themselves from Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of them came up with their own words for various common gaming terms. White Wolf games had "Storyteller" instead of "Dungeon Master" (or the older "referee") and "Chronicle" instead of "Campaign," for example. Immortal: the Invisible War is famously impenetrable, with terminology like:

"Beheading: The only reliable way to kill an immortal. It works by separating the connection between the brain and vox. When you behead an immortal, their immaculum spills out, the himsati is let loose, and the himsati soul either goes to the “Blue Air” as a “Gossamer” or remains in the living world to try to absorb immaculum and reform itself."

I can't complain, I love Polaris, the RPG where all game terms are ritualized phrases you recite to the other players to accomplish actions, like saying "But you ask far too much!" when you're bidding on stakes and want to turn down the offer.

Anyway, the point of all this is that I just backed a new RPG from Onyx Path called The World Below, a game with elements of both exploration and settlement-buildign but, more important to me, a pre-made example of my holy RPG grail, a d10 dice pool-based classic fantasy RPG. And it has some excellent examples of 90s-type RPG terms. Let's go through them in alphabetical order.

Ancestry: One's species background, but also one's cultural background, with no real distinction. As the game says:
An ancestry isn’t always biological. Sharing cultural ancestry is more significant in the World Below than genetic ancestry, due to the sheer number of children who lose their parents in monstrous attacks or environmental disasters, or simply because one day they ventured too far out into the Dark and never returned.
though this really doesn't square with the actual Ancestries in offer. There's your classic humans, elves, dwarves, and goblins (humans, elvkin, darvs, and hobgobs) but there's also entissia, cold-blooded egg-laying reptiles, or makiru, who are born as rats and become more humanoid as they grow to adulthood. And sure, an elf raised from infancy by lizard people is going to have much more in common with lizard people culturally, but they'll never be cold-blooded. Ancestry determines your Momentum Generators.

Bonds: Relationships that tie the characters together.

Calling: Basically class or profession, it gives you access to Sorceries. Things like Alchemist, Farsighter (people who live in the wild), Silhouette (thieves), etc. Calling determines your Theses.

Community and Settlement: A character's home. Settlements have a fixed location, communities are on the move. Examples include the Zilenz, a group of nomads who are trying to develop a comprehensive map of the World Below; Agosby, a town build using bridges and vines over a giant chasm; Oracaster, the deepest known town, built near magma flows; or Chlzyl, people who lived in the World Below before the cataclysm destroyed the surface (primarily subterranean elves and morlocks in the past, now made up of all kinds of people). The ones who hated the exodus all went deeper to who knows where, so the ones who stayed are friendlier. Community and Settlement determines your starting skills.

Dawn: A combination of Ancestry, Community/Settlement, Dogma, and Guild.

Dialectic: Now here's some quality nonsense. A character's dialectic is their supernatural attunement to something--Adamas are attuned to gemstones, Scarabs are attuned to insects, Qeobacca are attuned to Kaos (q.v.), Myceli are attuned to mushrooms. Here dialectic is used to in the Hegelian sense, where two opposing truths are reconciled--world above and world below, human and gemstone, or whatever. Dialectic determines your Syntheses.

Dogma: Religious belief, faith, or personal drive. It says a Dogma does not have to be religious but the examples listed are mostly religious beliefs. The exception is the Hades Tract, who believe that everyone died in the cataclysm that drove people underground and they're actually in a purgatorial afterlife. There's also the Lords and Ladies of Rot, who believe that the monsters who live underground are the rightful inhabitants and they should be allowed to rule as they like.

Guild: Large-scale organizations that united multiple peoples and settlements. The Union of Cartographers and Stratigraphers makes maps, the Company of Artificers create things, the Excavators and Explorers Collective dig new tunnels between settlements or mines to raw materials, the the Kitchen makes food safe, and the Moths are a mercantile consortium. The Guilds dislike Communities as small organizations outside of their control. Guilds determine your starting Attributes.

Kalm: The time of year when Kaos rises up, causing monsters to attack settlements and magic to go wild. Characters hole up in a stronghold, train, recover, and wait for the Kalm to die down. Suggested to be named due to reckless adventurers all going home to their families during the season.

Kaos: The wild magic of the World Below. Kaos flows from the Well at the deepest known point, which is guarded by the Well Liches, and thus gets stronger deeper down.

Sorceries: Supernatural powers derived from your Calling. Example include Mend the Flesh (Holy, heal nearby targets), Call Animal (Farsighter, summon animals to help you), Floral Fortress (Farsighter, build a flowering structure to hide in), or Perception Feedback (Kaosist, lash back on anyone scrying on you). Sorceries are also divided into Wisdoms, so a character will be better with one Wisdom than with others.

Syntheses: Supernatural powers derived from your Dialectic. Examples include Breakaway Weapon (Adamas, grab a bit of rock as a single-use weapon), Detachable Limb (Myceli or Scarab, escape danger by taking damage), Foul Omen (Qeobacca, inflict bad luck on an enemy or friend), or Light Eater (Plutonic, literally eat local light sources for sustenance). These are balanced to be used one per session.

Tether: To channel raw Kaos and try to create some effect. This is dangerous and unpredictable, but might be exactly what you need in a desperate moment.

Theses: What in other games would be called Advantages/Perks/Merits. These are things like Armor Expert or Darksight or Keen Sense or Quick Reflexes.

I love this kind of thing.

I'm not sure I'd ever run the given setting, though I do like the mechanics for go on adventure, come back and defend your settlement. It could work very well for any kind of exploration in a dangerous area game, like post-apocalypse, exploring a new continent, or what have you. But I'm like 99% sure when I do I'm just going to call these things Class, Powers, Spells, and Merits, the same way there are great names out there for people who run games like "Absolute Judge" or "Hollyhock God" but the majority of people just say Game Master.

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Clamavi De Profundis - The Dragon Is Withered

Been reading Against the Darkmaster--odd name, but a neat RPG based on the old ICE Middle-Earth Roleplaying--and thinking of it lately. Yesterday I read a blog post about what Middle-Earth looks like if you ignore everything after The Hobbit and how it's a much more fairy-tale, magical place. For example:

"Burglar" is a known social role, and you can hire them to help your wandering adventurer party
Animals can talk, and people can learn animal languages.
Bloodlines have idiosyncratic magical powers. Bilbo can't understand the thrush, but Bard--of the old blood of Dale--can. Beorn can turn into a bear, and while this is treated as wild and a bit dangerous, it isn't something totally unique that the dwarves have never heard of.
Magical items are common. The dwarves find Gondolin-forged swords in a random troll den and one of the trolls has a magical wallet that screams when Bilbo lifts it. There are rings of invisibility and glowing gemstones. Bard has an arrow that kills anything it hits. None of these have glorious, thousand-year storied histories, they're just there.
There's no indication that humans can't be wizards. Gandalf, Radagast, and the Necromancer are all just old men who know magic.
Everyone sings. The dwarves sing a silly song while eating and then a grim and melancholy song of their lost home. The elves sing "Tra-la-la lally, here down in the valley, ha ha!" Can you imagine the seven sons of Fëanor singing that? Even the goblins sing! "And down down to Goblin-town / You go, my lad!"
There's a note that some goblins and dwarves work together! Can you imagine that in The Lord of the Rings?
Most of the land is wilderness, with the occasionally small kingdom or settlement. Dale is gone but Laketown remains, and Dorwinion is off somewhere but close enough for the elves to trade with. There are enough scattered settlements in Eriador for the trolls to have eaten "a village and a half" after coming down from the mountains.
The wilderness is wild but not expected to be dangerous. Proof? The dwarves do not bring weapons on their quest--until they loot the troll-hole they have no weapons at all. The wilderness is very dangerous but this is implied to be a recent thing.
The elves are much more like Fair Folk. They hold hidden revels in the woods that outsiders cannot approach, love getting drunk and singing silly songs, and are happy to lock up visitors for a hundred years if they get annoyed with them. They'll leave their woods to go treasure-hunting but otherwise just want to hang out in a magical forest.
Dwarves are on the decline but dragons are on the rise. There are a lot of empty dwarf-holds in the north that are now dragon lairs.
Troll are smart enough to argue about nonsense until the sun comes up and they turn to stone. They're not living siege weapons. They have names like "Bert" and "William"
Possibly most important--there's no Dark Lord. There are a lot of evil overlords out there, like the Necromancer or the Goblin King, but there's no "Free Peoples vs. Evil" great struggle.

In summary, it's much more gameable than a world descended from The Silmarillion, which is great for epic storytelling but not particularly good to have adventurers doing their thing.

I Feel: creative
I Hear: Antti Martikainen - Eternal Saga

I've been doing some RPG tinkering lately--slightly modifying True20, which hits my sweet spot between complexity and ease-of-use--and when trying to find a good setting to run with it, I've been looking at my old Rules Cyclopedia and the twenty years of fan work up on the Vaults of Pandius and I'm realizing that Mystara has the combination of interesting fantasy and totally crazy sci fi nonsense that I love in RPGs while also avoiding a lot of the problems that people have with standard D&D settings. For example:

( A long list )

It honestly all sounds like the kind of fantasy that would be the background of an isekai anime series, which makes since because anime fantasy is based on 80s D&D through computer games like Wizardry and Japanese TTRPGs like Sword World. Low magic, humanocentric fantasy is out, kitchen sink fantasy is in. A town street with wolf people hawking wears, a group of elven tourists, a wizard doing magic tricks for money...and honestly, you could even have some guy from Japan who was magically transported there after being hit by a truck. It'd all fit.

This seems to be keeping my attention for longer than usual. What I really need is to be running an actual game so I can devote my creative energy toward that.

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Liz Katrin - Imperial Shrines

Haven't used that icon in a while. I finished Shadows of Amn but I need to get back to Throne of Bhaal.

So in my constant jumping around from RPG project to project, I've recently been trying to modify True20 to fit my design sensibilities and am thinking about running a game in the grey box-era Forgotten Realms with it (1351 DR or so), and one of the things I'm running headlong into are the fundamental assumptions underpinning D&D religion. D&D has clerics, who are literally Bishop Odo and Bishop Tilpin crossed with Abraham Van Helsing. In original D&D a holy symbol was just a cross, and a lot of cleric spells replicate miracles from either Tanakh or the Christian Bible. A cleric is a devoted servant of their god, spreading the word and attempting to enact their god's agenda within the world. But this all takes place in an explicitly polytheistic worlds where each god has their own area of influence.

The devotion to a single god that shows up in official material, the way D&D religion is like thirty different monotheisms that all happen to be side-by-side, is one of the weirdest parts to me. I was telling

sashagee that you'll have the god of winter, who's all about freezing people to death and having wolves eat their crops, but then there'll be a temple of winter built in a market town, where every Sunday people come to hear winter sermons from the winter priest, who was appointed to his position by the local winter bishop. And the followers of winter wear furs even in summer to demonstrate their devotion, and maybe if there's a writer who's given enough word count they'll have some kind of Midwinter holiday celebration described. But why do people do this? What do they get out of it? What's so great about winter and in a polytheistic world why wouldn't you do what real-world polytheists do and consult specific gods for specific problems. Well, it's because the god of winter is the center of their devotion, right? They have faith.

And that's the problem. Faith, for the overwhelming majority of human history and for the majority of existing human religions, is secondary to practice. That's not to say it's pointless--Islam has the shahada and Judaism has Maimonides's "Thirteen Principles of Faith," for example--but especially in Forgotten Realms, the current official D&D setting, faith is the most important principle. The gods derive their power directly from the faith of their worshippers, which is why clerics go out and try to proselytize--gods who have no followers vanish. Faith is of ultimate importance.

In the real world, though, what usually matters is specific acts. In Roman state religion, the form of the rituals was of ultimate importance, to the point where a mistake made in the words recited invalidated the entire ritual. There's an elemental of this in Judaism as well, in the way we interpret the Third Commandment. Not taking G-d's name in vain does not mean not saying "G-d damn it," it means not using G-d's name heedlessly or frivolously, such as by prayers that are unnecessary or to no purpose, so there are entire lists of foods and what specific blessing they call for you don't use the wrong blessing and thus say G-d's name in vain.

Modern people often have a "try your best, G-d will understand" attitude about things, but that is not historical. The gods had expectations that things would be done a particular way, in the same way that if I went to see a performance of Hamlet I'd expect the "To be or not to be" speech to be in verbatim. The belief of the priest or the worshippers did not matter in the least. But there's little sense that D&D clerics really do any sort of rituals. There's no sacrifices, there might be daily prayers but it's often not clear, and while sometimes this is described I've rarely seen it actually portrayed. There are few strictures that don't relate to usable weapons and armor. Second edition had some of this with its specialty priests, but 5e doesn't have anything like that since clerics are divided by their granted domain, and there's nothing mechanically to differentiate one cleric with the Arcana domain from another. They aren't religions in the ancient sense. The religious duty of a cleric is turning undead and casting cure light wounds.

The other major Protestantism of D&D religion is how top-heavy it is. Protestant Christianity has the trinity and...well, that's it. Ancient religion was absolutely filled with a vibrant spiritual ecology, with gods of major concepts like "the ocean" or "the underworld" all the way down to gods of "the city I live in" or "the lake we fish from" or "my family" and basically everything smaller than a major concept is completely missing from D&D. What would have been ancient local gods, dryads and naiads and so on, are physical beings in D&D with stats who can be killed. There are no city gods the way that the Egyptian city of Thebes had Amun, Mut, and Khons as the gods of the city. There are barely any spirits at all as ancient people would have understood the term.

This means there are no gods whose area is limited. Ancient peoples believed that even powerful gods had geographic limitations to their power. You can clearly see this even in Tanakh:

"Meanwhile, the officials of the king of Aram advised him, “Their gods are gods of the hills. That is why they were too strong for us. But if we fight them on the plains, surely we will be stronger than they."
-1 Kings 20:23

The ancient idea of omnipotence was not the ability to do literally anything, it was the ability to exert power in all places, and this was not common. Gods were local and tribal. I know this is ignored so that clerics aren't stuck in a particular area and can travel to wherever the adventure is, but local deities is part of interesting local culture.

In Chiyoda, the local rice god Sanbai lives up on a mountain, and the point of the Mibu-no-Hanadaue festival is to alert him that the rice-planting has commenced and call him down from the mountain to assist. Official D&D does not have anything like this.

I get the sense that a lot of people aren't interested in it, though. They want D&D primarily for character drama and cultural exploration is low on their list, if it even exists. I'm reminded of this post I wrote from the author who thinks that picking a race in D&D should be like picking a Fortnite skin and they should all be completely interchangeable. That attitude is completely alien to me but it exists. The number of people interested in a more accurate depiction of ancient religion is always going to be smaller than the people who want to make a cleric of the God Of Granting Flamestrike 3x A Day.

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Simon Stevens - The Road to War

Still plugging away at at some D&D homebrew. I'm maybe a third done and currently writing up a bunch of spellcasters. Since I hate the way D&D does magic, I'm giving every class its own theme and very limited list of powers. Pyromancers blow things up (or make food spicy or inspire courage or see through flames), shadewrights control shadows and darkness, glamourweavers do Fair Folk-style trickery like changing leaves into gold or making people lose their way or cursing people, and so on. There are no generalists because I think generalist wizards is one of D&D's worst design problems. Rather, wizards should have to be creative to figure out how to work their limited magical area of expertise into a solution to the problems they face. A pyromancer is great in a fight but less so when you need to sneak into an enemy camp, and so on.

But in doing this, I've found that the general approach in the 3.X community is actually the complete opposite--there's a lot of character design strategies that are based around coming up with a single strategy and making sure it applies to all situations. Like the infamous spiked chain tripper of yore, but even more so. For example, there are oracle (a Charisma-based caster) builds that involve putting everything into Charisma and then making Charisma apply to everything. Take the Lore Mystery and then add Charisma to Armor Class and Reflex saves instead of Dexterity, take Lore Keeper to add Charisma to Knowledge skills instead of Intelligence, take the Spirit Guide archetype to get some shaman powers but use Charisma instead, take the Noble Scion of War feat to add Charisma to Initiative checks, take two levels of Paladin to add Charisma to all saves, and then just stack +Charisma items.

This is one of those things that just rubs me the wrong way, but it's an inherent part of character customization. With a large enough group of options, it becomes possible to cherry-pick a group of abilities that synergize extremely well in a way that the disparate designers of those abilities never intended. The only way to avoid this is to have a gentleman's agreement, to redesign the available powers (my take), or to have players who don't care, because the simple truth is that D&D is a game and having a character who can't affect the game world to the same degree as others is not fun.

You'll often see the terms "SAD" and "MAD" (single attribute dependent" and "multiple attribute dependent") used in these discussions, where classes like the wizard are SAD because they basically only need Intelligence but monks are MAD because they need Dexterity to hit, Wisdom to defend, Constitution for hit points, Strength for damage, etc etc. And it's obviously easier to power up a SAD class because there's only one number to raise, and since you can only wear one hat, two rings, one belt, one set of gloves, and so on, if you can dedicate all of those to your one trick that trick goes much higher than if you have to spread that power out.

That's why a huge part of my RPG design philosophy is to bring down the ceiling. If there are no Angel Summoners then the BMX Bandits in the game don't feel put out. People can branch out rather than having to expend all their capabilities keeping up with higher and higher numbers.

I guess my main point is that I'm trying to use Pathfinder to make a game that feels more like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. We'll see if I succeed. Dark Souls

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Andrey Vinogradov - Greshny Cheloveche/Niurochka

That's how the joke goes, anyway.

Today I saw an article entitled Why race is still a problem in Dungeons and Dragons and I have some Thoughts since I'm doing my own heartbreaker at the moment.

( My two coppers )

I Feel: creative
I Hear: Murgrind - Through the Nightland

It seems like every few months I come back to the well. This time it's about wanting to maybe run a heavily modified game of E6, once again based on the long-dead webcomic Dark Places, which I wrote about here.

There's two main. things that prompted this post, by which I mean, two problems I have with baseline D&D that I want to change: the way combat works and the way magic works.

(Yeah, just minor changes, no problem).

( Further thoughts below )

I Feel: annoyed
I Hear: Stoneburner - Osafa Chram

So it turns out that Muhammad Abd-al-Rahman Barker, professor of Urdu and South Asian Studies; creator of the Tékumel setting, one of the first major TTRPG settings not based on a pastiche of European history; and author of Empire of the Petal Throne, the RPG based on that setting, was a neo-Nazi who sat on the board of the Holocaust-denial journal Journal of Historical Review and wrote a book called Serpent's Walk:

Serpent's Walk is a novel where Hitler's warrior elite--the SS--didn't give up their struggle for a White world when they lost the Second World War.

The book was published by National Vanguard Books, the same group that published The Turner Diaries. I found a pdf online and paged through it and it's basically Richard Spencer's version of modern neo-Nazism where multiculturalism leads to whites dying out so every race has to form their own nation-states back where they "belong," along with claims that it'll somehow be done without violence. The main character is a mercenary who starts up thinking this is a bunch of Nazi bullshit and, over the course of the book, slowly gets convinced that that fascists are right. It explicitly includes a lot of justifications for Barker's own situations--there's discussions of how high-caste South Asians are "Aryan" (Barker's wife was Pakistani), a meeting with some American Black Muslims who also talk about segregation (in that Muslims should live apart so as to make sure they rule their own states and govern them by Islamic Law)--the book talks a lot about Islam, which puts Barker's conversion to Islam in a more sinister light--some random Holocaust denial, claims that we secretly control America through the media, the works. There's also apparently some past war where Israel conquers most of the Middle East in the backstory and deports the Beta Yisrael, amidst all the standard antisemitism. And it ends with the main character as the neo-Fuhrer, all non-Nazis dead (after they just can't peacefully let AmeriKKKa live and launch a surprise attack or something, apparently), talking about the Thousand-Year Reich and asking "Would you like to read other books in which the good guys win?"

There's more in this reddit post. The part that really stands out to me is the quoting of an archivist who was going through Barker's old papers:

My reaction, as it had been when Phil had done things like this in the past, was "Oh, Phil, WHY?"

as it had been when Phil had done things like this in the past

Phil had done things like this in the past

I'm sorry, what?

I don't really have a dog in this fight, since I've never played in or run Tékumel, just read about James Maliszewski's campaign over at Grognardia and read Raymond E. Feist's Kelewan books which are, let's say, heavily inspired by Tékumel. But I do feel bad for the people who loved Tékumel. It was niche but one of the famous weird settings, drawing on Barker's background in South Asian studies to create its future history, not full of knights and orcs and Caverns of Chaos.

It's true that Lovecraft and Howard's work both also reflect their bigotries, but the difference is that we've acknowledged the problems, had the conversation, and moved into the phase of reinterpretation. The question of whether Tékumel will survive this is a real one, since apparently the Tékumel Foundation has known about Barker's Nazism for a couple years and just kind of hoped no one else noticed, which reflects far worse on them than how the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's FAQ literally begins with "How can you support or promote the works of a terrible racist like H. P. Lovecraft?" The Tékumel Foundation will need to have its own reckoning and after their past behavior, it's not clear that they're equipped to do it. I suspect it might be some time before mention of Tékumel is greeted with anything other than "Tékumel? Isn't that written by a Nazi?"

For my own part, I was slightly interested in Tékumel but honestly Skyrealms of Jorune is weirder anyway (even if less meticulously developed), and Mechanical Dream beats them both for oddities. Hell, even Exalted steps away from knights and orcs. There's plenty of other RPG material out there for me.

I Feel: excited
I Hear: Andrea Tonoli - Funeral for the Blackhearted

Well, this is a surprise. Twenty-five years after it was originally supposed to be published, Secrets of the Dead Lands has been released by Athas.org, along with a companion adventure called The Emissary.

This is one of those lost books that got tossed around as an impossible treasure in discussions about Dark Sun for decades. Some people had gotten draft copies, but since it was the 90s they never made it onto the internet and if you weren't one of those people there was no way to read it. Some of those people posted in the Sages of Dark Sun Facebook group and that's where I heard about it, plus the Terrors of the Dead Lands monster book existing for years without a book actually describing the place all these horrible things came from made it obvious there was some source they were drawing from. Well, maybe it was in the service of securing eventual permission to publish the whole thing, since Athas.org has some kind of limited license to use Dark Sun IP, and in the end, it worked. More books for Dark Sun is never a bad thing.

I've briefly poked through it and what most stands out is the use of the term "bugdead"--the Dead Lands are thousands of square miles of lifeless obsidian plains half ruled over by undead wizards-lords and their legions of terror and half by countless insectile monstrosities (including some living ones!), and each half is locked into an endless war against the other. It's very "the whole world has gone to hell," which is quintessential Dark Sun.

It also got me to work on my homebrew Dark Sun conversion to the same system I used for Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom for the first time in over a year, so hey!

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Clamavi de Profundis - When the Hammer Falls

It's been a long time since I wrote a TTRPG post about mechanics--looks like the last one was this one about deciding between magic systems, back before the Plague Years. I guess Wizards & Witchery counts too...but considering I used to write multiple TTRPG-themed posts a month, that's quite a decline.

Well, here's another one.

Lately I've been hit with massive inspiration--I have no idea from where--to convert Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay into the Exalted-based system that I used to run Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom. WFRP (2e at least, haven't played any other editions) already has a perfectly fine system that I've used to run a year-long game of biweekly sessions, and I could just do that, but to be honest this is mostly to satisfy my urge to tinker. I have a half-dozen adaptations of this same system to other games--Dark Sun (maybe 33% done), that Wizards & Witchery post (maybe 10% done), Warcraft (maybe 20% done), Forgotten Realms (literally just started)--but the benefit of doing WFRP is that converting things is much easier than writing them from scratch.

Here's some mechanical notes about what I've done and planning to do:

( Mechanics )

I Feel: happy
I Hear: Paleowolf - Homeworld

Been a bit since I had a general update post. Time to drink my tea and write another one.

Saturday was Laila's naming ceremony at Mishkan. There's a standard ritual for giving baby boys their Hebrew name, but no standard ritual for girls, because historically women did not have separate Hebrew names. One's Hebrew name was used to summon them for an aliyah, and that was only afforded to men--and still is, in some streams of Judaism--but nowadays we're more broadminded and so Sasha and I, as her parents, received an aliyah for parashat Vayishlach. I didn't read from the Torah because my Hebrew is awful and it would have taken forever--something else I need to work on--but I did get to hear the entire congregation say "awwwwww" as they saw me carrying Laila up to the bimah. The rabbis gave Laila a blessing and told Mishkan her Hebrew name, בינה בת ברק Binah bat Barak (meaning "Wisdom, daughter of Lightning"), and unlike the bat Mitzvah or the couple given an auf ruf (Yiddish: "Calling up"), they did not throw candy at us. But I got to save some for later!

I really like Mishkan's approach to tradition, which I can sum up as: they have female rabbis, but during the part of the prayer service where the priestly blessing (Numbers 6:24-26) is recited, they had the rabbi who's a descendant of the Kohanim priests do it.

A bunch of people came to the service--

thosesocks,

britshlez, my family, and

sashagee's family, but after it was over everyone went home. We put Laila down for a nap and when she woke up, we drove out to the suburbs and played games with

sashagee's parents, brother, and his brother's girlfriend until Laila couldn't take it anymore and was nearly an exploding kitten herself. Fortunately, since I was the car, so when Laila got fussy I was able to put a hand back and calm her down. She was angry for maybe twenty minutes and then fell asleep for the rest of the ride home.

Monday was the end of the Scum and Villainy game that

thosesocks has been running for a while--what was originally supposed to be a simple three-session game or so turned into fifteen sessions, but a changing work schedule meant that there wasn't enough time left for game. Having crashed on a quarantined planet and recovered the ensouled hoverbikes we were looking for, we escaped the traps set by the things from the Dark Between the Stars and took shelter in a Precursor ruin, where we found a still-functional Precursor ship and learned at last what the Precursors looked like (spider-geese, basically). We took the ship and flew off into space, past the Hegemony ship that certainly wasn't expecting a flying Precursor artifact with possibly the last still-extant Precursor group-mind. It's all set up to be lead into a glorious new chapter of the game that...might not happen. Or it might?! I guess we'll see.

I've also beaten Shadowbringers and

sashagee and I have been watching the Wheel of Time TV show, but I'm going to make separate posts about those.

Tomorrow we're going out to my parents for Thanksgiving and staying the night, and then the next day we'll be at

sashagee's parents' house. On Saturday we're going to a parents' group that Mishkan is starting as well as visiting

sashagee's old roommate who's currently laid up with an injury, and on Sunday we're going to the zoo! The last few days have been quiet, but we're entering the busy period of Thanksgiving week.

I Feel: hopeful
I Hear: Dimatis - Who Am I Without You

Today's the day that I get my second dose of the Moderna COVID vaccine! Soon I'll be immune, one of the lucky people in the zombie movies who somehow don't react to the rage virus, and I'll be able to...still stay at home most of the time because really, what is there that I'd want to go and do? The CDC's updated guidelines means I'll probably be able to have a Seder this year since Pesach is two weeks from now but it's not going to be a huge one. It'll be me,

sashagee,

britshlez, and maybe one other person. It won't be until much later in the holiday cycle that things get back to normal, though I am excited for

sashagee to go to her first Seder!

We've gotten a ton of emails from high up in the AMA the last few days over an incident with podcast put out by JAMA. The emails didn't have any context, so I just notice that something was horribly insensitive and we'd need to do better and recommit ourselves to racial equity and it was a lot like every time I log onto social media against after Shabbat and try to reconstruct what the Discourse is. So I looked it up and that article is a good summary, but here's the pull quote that JAMA tweeted out:

"No physician is racist, so how can there be structural racism in health care? An explanation of the idea by doctors for doctors in this user-friendly podcast [...]
-image archived here

Even the idea that they were going for clicks is belied by the content of the podcast, which has a lot of complaining about how terrible it is to be called racist. So we're meeting this afternoon for a town hall where they're going to go over steps forward and what we're going to do. We'll see if there's any good actionable steps they announce

I started a new TTRPG!

thosesocks invited me to play in a Scum & Villainy game (a derivative of Blades in the Dark). We've had one session so far and most of it was taken up by character and ship creation, so I can't really say that much about how it plays, but we started off with a mission to steal a bunch of speeder bikes (essentially) and came up with a plan to do it via staging a race and then winning. My character is a "gothic hood ornament," a mystic devoted to fighting the Dark Between the Stars, since I read this setting primer and the space feudalism, humanocentrism, guilds, and vanished aliens called the Ur all sound a lot like Fading Suns, one of my favorite RPGs ever. I'm looking forward to seeing where the game goes!

Lastly, our drier is fixed! I didn't realize it was broken, but it had always been weird--the windows fogged up when it was used and I thought that something might be leaking, but it's stuck in a closet and since it's a washer/dryer combo it was far too heavy to move myself without risking it falling on me, which was not something I wanted to happen in a pandemic. Last weekend my parents came over for dinner and for my father to do some Dad Things around the house and when

sashagee mentioned how dusty everything is, he managed to wiggle his way over the top and find out that the hose had been disconnected at the back! Probably by something falling off before I even moved in--there were drier sheets and a detergent back there that I've never used. My father reconnected the hose, I vacuumed out the inside of the closet, and now hopefully it won't be nearly so dusty in here all the time. Good thing too, with a baby coming.

Alright, now time for that town hall.

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Antti Martikainen - Vale of a Thousand Rivers

I've been thinking about running a game of D&D, to the point where I actually bought some 5E sourcebooks. But not official sourcebooks--third party ones that overhaul the magic and combat systems called Spheres of Power and Spheres of Might, because I really don't like D&D's magic system and if I run a game I'd want to totally overhaul it. I write a lot about tinkering with the magic system, like in this post about Dark Sun's magic vs. psionics or this post about deciding between different magic systems for a homebrew game, but I've never really done a post about my problems with D&D magic, so this is that post.

( This post causes 1d4+1 damage per two caster levels )

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Sequestered Keep - Arcane Imbibement (Chugging Strange Potions)

I've been thinking of writing this post for days but, well, my appendix tried to kill me so it took a bit. I should also say this is mostly about dungeon-crawling-style RPGs and other games don't always have this problem.

( On reward structures affecting player behavior )

I Feel: pleased
I Hear: Quest for Glory I: So You Want to Be a Hero - Late Snows of Winter (jmr OC ReMix

lisekatevans said that she and

afschifler were going to participate in a game run by

ansel.burch as part of TTRRG Pickup Con and said that I should join them, so I did! I went onto DND Beyond, whipped up a quick character--Shalsanressar Manishtusu, the silver dragonborn paladin--and joined up with Mango the halfling rogue, Jhor-Khal the elven monk, Reesa the half-orc paladin, and Prose the tiefling bard to save a village from the depredations of the local dragon.

The Dungeon of the Dragon
In the late winter, the group arrived at a sleepy village at the temple of the Horned Owl, its tutelary deity, to speak to the priestess Mother Enizio. She said that their village had been blessed with good weather and fair harvests by a local dragon in exchange for sacrifices of cows and sheep, but this year the dragon had requested a different sacrifice--a person. Mother Enizio believed that the dragon may be controlling the weather using an artifact of the Horned Owl, and asked the party to steal the artifact and, if necessary, to kill the dragon. After a rousing performance from the bard, accompanied by dragonborn throat-singing, the party boarded a cart who took them to the dragon's cave and left them there. Briefly examining the amphitheater that had been built outside the cave and finding nothing, they entered. The path split inside, with the right path having a strange blue glow and the left path leading into darkness, so Mango and Jhor-Khal scouted ahead. In a room further in, they came on a white-scaled kobold working over bubbling pots in a room filled with detritus, and after a brief battle, continued on to another room filled with kobolds! Though the battle (and the dice...) seemed at first to go against the party, eventually they killed or subdued all of the kobolds, and some questioning revealed the truth--the "dragon" was actually a puppet, and that plus some impressive acoustics had allowed a now-dead wizard to extort wealth from the town. The kobolds had taken over the caves after the wizard died, but were unable to maintain the puppet and had requested a "sacrifice" because they were hoping for help maintaining the scheme. The party, led Reesa, offered a counter-suggestion to come live in the village, where they could be accepted and wouldn't need to skulk in the caves. As they took some of the dragon's wealth and the wooden statue relic of the Horned Owl and made their way down the mountain, Shalsanressar turned to the kobold he had terrified into submission and said, "Tell me, have you heard the teachings of Bahamut?"

It was a bunch of fun! I haven't played D&D in over twenty years, since the days of 2e, and have mostly been out of caring about it since I spent the whole time playing World of Darkness and Call of Cthulhu and running Exalted and WFRP and Delta Green and Cthulhutech, so I'm glad that D&D Beyond exists and I could press the "make character" button and then tweak things afterwards. There were fewer weird rules and exceptions than 2e, and a much smaller focus on a humanocentric world with everyone else being a deviation from the norm (the example characters included two half-orcs, a changeling, and a goliath). I didn't have as much to do in the beginning, but mostly because I couldn't see in the dark! I appreciated how when Mother Enizio suggested we kill the dragon, the rest of the party looked at Shalsanressar to see his reaction...and I was going to be against it until I learned that it was a white dragon, since white and silver dragons are ancient enemies! That freed up my conscience to go a-dragon-killing, right up until we learned that everything was just tricksy kobolds.

There's another online con next month and I'm definitely going to go.

I Feel: creative
I Hear: The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time - Generations (DrumUltimA, Jillian A OC Re)

I don't know if I've mentioned Reclaim the Wild, the fan-made Legend of Zelda TTRPG by one of the creators of the old Final Fantasy Returners RPG, but I read it a few months ago and other than Exalted, it's probably the system I most want to run a game of right now. And last night before I went to bed, I thought of a great game premise, starting with the same basic background as Breath of the Wild:

The Calamity is coming, all the signs are there, but it has been so long that anything more than that is legend. Instead of preparing to fight, the people of Hyrule decide to hide. Following the research of the goron sage Kenjoro, the wizards of Hyrule develop the Ritual of Harrow, which can be used to build an impenetrable Sanctuary underground beneath a Sheikah shrine. The gorons are the first to enact the ritual, burrowing into the slopes of Death Mountain to wait out the coming storm, but soon the other tribes do the same thing--the gerudo into caverns with walls of hardened sand, the zuna into hollowed-out spaces beneath desert oases, the zora into vast underwater grottos, the twili into shadowed caves, and even the rito overcame their fear of enclosed spaces and left their aeries. The hylians were the last, but eventually they realized there was no option but flight and sealed themselves away, watching the Malice Harbinger installed in every Sanctuary that would tell them when it was safe to emerge. Entire generations lived and died underground, locked away behind a magical barrier, never seeing the sun, hearing stories of the verdant lands of their ancestors.

And centuries later, the Malice Harbinger in the PCs' Sanctuary has finally indicated that it is safe to go outside, and the elders are planning to open the gates.

Yes, it's Legend of Zelda and Fallout. Or rather, it's Legend of Zelda and the TTRPG Earthdawn, which came out four years before Fallout and already did the fantasy post-apocalypse that looks like a magical nuclear war first. Much like both of those games, there'd be Sanctuaries that opened early, Sanctuaries that were breached by Ganon's minions (a naturalistic explanation for dungeons!), emergency Sanctuaries with members from multiple tribes--the PCs would come from one of these, to expand the range of character options--and a whole world of ruins and monsters and treasure, ripe for the PCs to rebuild society.

Reclaim the Wild is very focused on crafting and scavenging, with extensive rules for what kind of ingredients monsters drop and how to make food and potions from materials, and there's an entire supplement called "Rebuild the Wild" with rules for building and creating settlements, so the system is already perfectly calibrated toward the kind of hardscrabble treasure-finding that's common in post-apocalyptic gaming. If I make Malice more like 50s sci fi radiation, and have it mutate plants and animals and people from breached Sanctuaries into malevolent monsters, there's a bunch of extra angles I can take with that. Is there a cure? Is a corrupted hylian or gerudo still a "person" in a meaningful sense? How much can the land be saved? And is the Calamity still out there?

This lets me play to the system's strengths and get entirely away from the hero chosen by the Goddess, so I'm all for it. It's like the original Legend of Zelda, with the land a howling waste overrun with monsters and treasure. Perfect for adventuring.

I Feel: run down
I Hear: Chicago Symphony Orchestra - Symphony No. 9 in D minor, Op. 125

My phone calendar is full of "coronavirus shelter-in-place" and "work from home" events. I've gone on a couple walks outside because of the nicer weather, wearing a mask and constantly ducking out into the street to avoid people walking their dogs. But today's the end of that for a few days, at least--it's going to be colder starting tomorrow, though the rain will stop. I'm kind of sad about that, to be honest, since the storms rolling in is part of Chicago spring that I really love. I went between rainshowers yesterday and the earth smelled of petrichor, and then I got back with my ice cream and my salmon just as it started to rain again, took the alleyway and found my necklace that had fallen off as I was walking to the grocery store, and had some flourless choco cake with ice cream. I've been sitting in my sun nook as the storms roll in from the west, drinking tea by candlelight with the rain pounding at my windows and the thunder crashing overhead. At those moments, I don't mind being stuck inside so much.

A few days ago, a friend posted a D&D 5e adventure someone wrote for Pesach that also acts as a Haggadah because it tells the story. Heroes breaking into an ancient pyramid to retrieve at least four sacred cups, a group of evil rabbit-people as the enemies (based on all those medieval manuscripts with rabbits killing people), matzah golems named "Gebrochts," the Four Children as an animal people miniboss fight, Hebrew palindrome riddles, a cameo by Serach bat Asher (the only woman mentioned in Moses's census lists)...it's great.

Why is this night different from all other nights? On all other nights, not even half of our D&D group can meet, but on this night, our D&D group can meet. Emoji Dragon Warrior march

My Japanese tutor texted me today and said that she was almost done with her personal project and suggesting that we meet up for FaceTime lessons. It'll be good to get more Japanese practice in again.

Speaking of Japanese, I've been watching more anime now that I'm stuck inside all the time, and while I was previously watching 3月のライオン / March Comes in Like a Lion, I was looking for something much lighter and fluffier to help distract me from all the terrors of the Plague Year. I remembered people talking about この素晴らしい世界に祝福を! / KonoSuba! a while ago and after I looked up a quick summary, I watched a few episodes and let me tell you, I played World of Warcraft for six years, I have met all of these people. In Vanilla WoW terms:

Kazuma: The Combat Rogue who never bothered training stealth.

Aqua: The Holy Priest who opens every battle by casting Smite.

Megumin: The PoM/Pyro Mage doing PVE.

Darkness: The split-talent Prot/Ret Paladin who never, ever dies while leveling but can't do anything in a party.

It actually made me really want to break out some kind of grid-based dungeon-crawler even though they haven't yet gone into a single dungeon (and would probably fail miserably if they tried to). Though honestly, the only thing that can really match that same feeling are either MMORPGs, which I no longer want to find the time to play; or tabletop RPGs, which I really should get a group back together.

As I described it multiple times to other people, I always run my worlds as 100% serious because the players will bring all the comedy the game needs.

I'm not feeling particularly well, and while I don't think it's coronavirus because I don't have any respiratory symptoms or, I think, a fever, my pounding headache and general tiredness are still making it hard to get anything accomplished. I'm glad I did a ton of cooking yesterday, because today and for the next few days, it'll be leftovers for every meal. Right now, it's back to grinding in the Sky Castle in Final Fantasy I as preparation for beating the game and probably more watching KonoSuba! later. I'm currently listening to livestreamed recording of Chicago Symphony Orchestra performing Beethoven's Ninth, so I even have my ominous chanting in the background as I fight WarMech!

I Feel: creative
I Hear: Sequestered Keep - Legends Told By Boreal Winds

Working more on the setting I was thinking about magic systems for here. I went with

shadaras's suggestion of splitting Changeling: the Lost's Contracts apart into individual spells and called it Sorcery, representing the weird and capricious magic learned from the Fair Folk, and I also want to take Vampire: the Masquerade's necromancy and make that magic learned from ghosts and the dead, and another system that I haven't picked a name for yet based on the demons of the Outer Dark. So that's sorted out.

Anyway, I saw a post on Twitter not that long ago about being careful not to replicate colonialism in fantasy worldbuilding and I've been thinking about it:

( Thoughts )

Anyway, I haven't actually done much fleshing out of the world, but that's what I've thought of so far!

I Feel: sad
I Hear: Everything to Guppy podcast

This is news from last week, but I've just seen it now--apparently the current owners of the Judges Guild are massive Nazis. Like, just verbatim Nazi propaganda. Content warning, obviously.

I didn't get into D&D until Second Edition, so this era of D&D totally passed me by, but I do remember playing in a 1e game with a friend in elementary school who was drawing inspiration from their City-State of the Invincible Overlord. The closest connection I had is that

etainemccul was dating, and later married, Robert Bledsaw I's nephew, though I lost contact with both of them a long time ago.

Looks like DriveThruRPG removed Judges Guild products from sale, to keep the money from going toward Nazis. And even places that whine about "SJWs" or "cancel culture" are condemning this because it's so obviously beyond the pale there's no defending it (I mean, Skarka's Law still applies, but).

Number of days I've gone without seeing Nazi propaganda: 0.

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Musica Cthulhiana - The Unnamable

So there was a dust-up on social media about sanity rules in RPGs recently, kicked off by this tweet:

There are no sanity rules in Fate of Cthulhu. We don't require anyone to play or perform mental illness.
(If you choose to, we have guidance on how to do it respectfully.)
Instead your PC gains Corruption, a potent, alluring slice of the Elder Gods' power.https://t.co/v0F853zsM0 pic.twitter.com/13tLqmE3wR
— Evil Hat Productions (@EvilHatOfficial) January 30, 2020

And of course, since Twitter is a terrible medium for most discussion, everything descended into hell. But I'm going to talk about it here where I can write as much as I want!

( Unleash the eldritch madness )

I Feel: thoughtful
I Hear: Nox Arcana - Magic and Moonlight

I went back to my old Dark Places/Avernum game idea, stripped out the Avernum part, and decided to make a more traditional fantasy setting using the Exalted-derived system that I started with Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom and have been developing since then, that I called "E10" in its latest incarnation. It turns out there's not much market for a skill-based, dice-pool, adventurer fantasy game, so I've got to make it myself.

Anyway, I'm trying to decide between three ways of handling magic:

( Abra or Cadabra? )

I Feel: working
I Hear: Sabaton - Gott Mit Uns

This is the song I found while I was cleaning yesterday and have listened to at least thirty times today:

Watch on YouTube

The thing is, there's a set of lyrics that go:

From the old world's demise
See our empire rise

But which I cannot help but hear as

From the old world's demise
See our vampire eyes

And it's reminding me of the Flight of the Phoenix game that

schoolpsychnerd ran based on a setting I came up with where the main premise was that after a thousand years of rule by the vampiric Nobility, the humans rose up in a rebellion called the Dawn War and threw down the vampires. And because of a millennium of literally bloodsucking, inhuman aristocratic rule, the very concept of birthright and bloodline granting privileges was irrevocably corrupted such that all the nations built after the rebellion were democracies. Accusing someone of aristocratic leanings was tantamount to accusing them of being a vampire-Dominated sleeper agent.

We were very careful in-game to always remember that the word "Noble" itself meant "vampire."

The whole thing was a great counterpoint to the usual chosen one/born-to-power hero narratives in a lot of fantasy. I've always wanted to go back to that setting but haven't had the chance, and now I'm really busy. But maybe someday.

I Feel: fulfilled
I Hear: Illenium feat. Annika Wells - Crawl Out of Love

Every weekend should be a three-day weekend. Emoji happy flower

( Do all of the things )

So, uh, am I an extrovert now? Emoji ~Cat Planet

Even beyond everything I've done, I was all set up to do something tonight, tomorrow, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday. I wrote about this and some of my friends said they got tired just reading it. I've living that city boy life, as I told

fiendishfanfares.

What a lovely weekend.

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Page Summary

Specific draculosity
Lazy Friday afternoon
Some quality RPG terminology nonsense
"The Hobbit"-only Middle Earth
Been into Mystara lately
On the inherent Protestant Christianity of D&D polytheism
On playing a 10th level One-Trick Pony
D&D is the most racist, classist game on the market!
D&D thoughts once again
How do you say "I did Nazi that coming" in Tsolyáni?
Secrets of the Dead Lands
Dicepool-ed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay
Thanksgiving Week
Vaccination Day
Wizards & Witchery
They bravely ran away: on players eschewing combat
I played D&D again!
The Legend of Zelda: Dawn of Hyrule
Every day's the same when you're in quarantimes
Fantasy settings and colonialism
Oh lovely, another bigot in the RPG industry
This post costs 0/1d2 SAN to read, five minutes to study and comprehend
Deciding between magic systems
Welcome to flags, the AMV
"I was sleeping, diving, eyes closed, blinded / Now for the first time, I can see"

Listen to the Rain

Entries tagged with rpgs (ロールプレイゲーム)

Specific draculosity

Lazy Friday afternoon

Some quality RPG terminology nonsense

"The Hobbit"-only Middle Earth

Been into Mystara lately

On the inherent Protestant Christianity of D&D polytheism

On playing a 10th level One-Trick Pony

D&D is the most racist, classist game on the market!

D&D thoughts once again

How do you say "I did Nazi that coming" in Tsolyáni?

Secrets of the Dead Lands

Dicepool-ed Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Thanksgiving Week

Vaccination Day

Wizards & Witchery

They bravely ran away: on players eschewing combat

I played D&D again!

The Legend of Zelda: Dawn of Hyrule

Every day's the same when you're in quarantimes

Fantasy settings and colonialism

Oh lovely, another bigot in the RPG industry

This post costs 0/1d2 SAN to read, five minutes to study and comprehend

Deciding between magic systems

Welcome to flags, the AMV

"I was sleeping, diving, eyes closed, blinded / Now for the first time, I can see"

Profile

June 2025

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