Fool's Pyrite

Consequence Heatsinks

2026-07-10T00:00:00Z

So I’ve got this dilemma. I like rolling dice to see how well things go, and I like asking players to roll dice to find out how well their actions go. But I don’t like the dice stymieing a perfectly good plan or an interesting action from a player. What’s a girl to do?

There are some answers I find basically unsatisfying.

Roll the dice, but ignore them if you don’t get the roll you like. This can be good advice if used sparingly, but I think it bothers me enough that I’d rather avoid fudging if possible. It sort of trivializes things for me and feels dishonest in most games^[1].
Roll the dice, but have mechanics to alter the chance of success so that players mostly succeed. Maybe the players have a metacurrency to add points to their dice, or reroll, or they get to have 5e-style advantage / disadvantage. Now you’ve made the failure case less likely, but it’s still gonna happen. So… I’m unhappy less often, but I’m still not happy.
Do an interesting fail-forward thing, where the GM improvises a way the situation changes orthogonal to your actions. That sounds nice, but I can’t think on my feet consistently enough for this to be enjoyable for me. There’s a whole blog post floating around in my head about this, but it’s when a game designer says “just GM good for this part to work” they’re taking an easy out by offloading all the work onto the GM.

I’m a fan of Chris McDowall’s take on diegetic difficulty (TL;DR: different situations warrant different outcomes, sometimes the worst failure you could face isn’t that bad or the best success you can hope for is still pretty dire), but it sort of falls into the same pitfall as answer #3 from above. What if I just don’t have a very good idea for a consequence?

Well, then I probably shouldn’t ask someone to roll, at least according to some schools of thought. Maybe we should only roll if I have well-defined, interesting outcomes in mind^[2]. That’s a fine way to think and play, but rolling the dice is a form of percussion^[3]. Sometimes I feel like the rhythm calls for a random outcome, a little taste of gambling. What to do then?

I’ve come to call my preferred solution “consequence heatsinks.” They’re mechanics or techniques that let us take consequences from the present situation and store them in a nebulous, potential form to be revisited later.

The first time I ever really considered the consequence heatsink was at the end of a Blades campaign. It was my first time GM’ing, and one of the first tabletop campaigns I’d participated in. I had handed out Harm like candy, and the players felt like the game had been overly harsh. Some of that comes down to Blades’s harm & healing rules, but some of it… was because I was too eager for consequences to come in the here and now. I should have handed out more Heat! Lowered more faction status ratings! Ticked more long-term clocks! That way there’s still tension, there’s still a sense of stakes, there’s still consequence, without being punishing.

The Resistance system by RRD (used in Spire and Heart) features stress tracks that build up and create consequences. I’ve always felt like it worked somewhat oddly though, and one reason is that the stress system sits alongside traditional success and failure. There’s three main results when you roll, to my memory: success, success-and-take-stress, and fail-and-take-stress. Then stress can manifest as bad things later on (like your cover being blown in Spire or body horror shit in Heart). But if taking stress and do-you-succeed are covered by the same mechanic, then I can’t shunt failure into stress as a heatsink. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes the consequences for failing a roll even more nebulous and blurry and hard for me to adjudicate.

It may be controversial, but I actually think HP is a heatsink just like a clock in Blades. In a dungeon-crawling type game, most times when you lose HP nothing else happens. Struck by goblin? Lose 1d6 HP. Stick your hand in a dart trap? Lose 2d6 HP. The consequence is deferred until later, when you lose enough HP to die or be injured or whatever. This is a really useful function of a dungeon game, and I think when rejecting “big pool of hit points” this style of play becomes much harder to run.

Heatsinks don’t even have to be numeric. “You can bully this guy into letting you in to the conference, but roll to see if you hurt his feelings.” Or “you can break into the mayor’s office, but roll to see if they notice and announce it on the news.” These are harder to conjure up on the fly (numbers are so easy! picking off a menu as a GM is a huge decrease in cognitive load!) but they still represent a fundamental deferral. Deferring consequences is great, because it lets the current scene or situation play out smoothly while still building up a sense that actions and results matter.

Of course there’s the question of making sure your heatsinks aren’t too good at sinking heat^[4], because then you’re just back at “roll the dice and ignore the results” with extra steps. That’s the whole problem with HP, where each event (getting hit by a club, falling from height, being stabbed) is entirely weightless until the big shebang (keeling over dead). But folding events from play back into the future of the game is a subject for a different time.

Though I don’t feel this way about the explicit rule permitting dice fudging in Under Hollow Hills – I contain multitudes, I guess? ↩︎
A good PbtA game takes the choice of “when should I made players roll?” out of the GM’s hands somewhat: they should roll when the game says to. Are they going aggro? Then roll. But usually there’s at least one or two moves that are shaped like “when you do something dangerous…” or “when you do something difficult…” that require a judgement call like I’m talking about here. ↩︎
To avoid plagiarizing, I think I first heard “percussion” used in this way by Jay Dragon talking about how she understands tokens in Wanderhome. ↩︎
Can you tell I have no mechanical engineering knowledge? ↩︎

What I'm Reading: January to March 2026

2026-04-20T00:00:00Z

Honestly kind of a run of banger books these last few months. That’s good, because I’ve been cooped up with a persistent foot injury more or less the entire time.

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin: Having bounced off Go Tell it on the Mountain, I worried that I was going to find Baldwin impenetrable. I’ve loved what little I’ve read of his nonfiction, but maybe I just wasn’t going to click with his fiction? No need to worry, this novel is a fucking masterpiece. We follow a deeply repressed New Yorker on his gay awakening in Paris, through a doomed affair with the titular Giovanni. There’s a lot going on here, about class and desirability and gender and sexuality and violence. In some ways it’s sad to read what will probably be my favorite book of the season (the year?) first.
Simplicity by Mattie Lubchansky: I think because Mattie is best known for her four-panel gag comics^[1], her satire and science fiction is under-appreciated. Simplicity sends us a hundred years in the future, past the fall of the United States, to a small religious community in upstate New York called Simplicity. Our protagonist is an anthropologist from the corpo-fascist state that the City has evolved into; he’s been dispatched to study the people of the community. But would it shock you to know that his bosses have less-than-perfect intentions?
The Lions of Al-Rassan by Guy Gavirel Kay: I think I’m forever going to be chasing the high of Under Heaven, Kay’s historical fantasy novel set in a Tang dynasty analogue. Where River of Stars, the centuries-later-set sequel to Under Heaven, ended up something of a disappointment for me, I did enjoy this novel. Al-Rassan is set in Reconquest-era Spain with the serial numbers filed off. The characters are standouts, the setting feels alive, and the pacing balances personal drama and glimpses of a much broader war story. Still, some of Kay’s propensities wear on me. Some are prose tricks, like the narrator dipping into a portentous voice (“little did he know, it was the last time he would look upon his home” and things like that). Some are structural decisions: while I’m glad Kay writes women as people (unlike some of his contemporaries), I’m tired of his women being relegated to pursuit and support of the Great Men of History.
The Paladin of Souls by Lois McMaster Bujold: Speaking of women protagonists in fantasy, the library arranged my holds to create a little comparative reading assignment. Paladin returns to Bujold’s medieval-Spain-infused fantasy setting from The Curse of Chalion, now following the Royina Ista. She was a side character in Chalion, so we spend little time setting up her frustrated situation and instead get to dive into her PoV. Again we tumble through a fantasy mystery, though this time with decidedly less court intrigue and decidedly more frontier vulnerability. In this book, women are characters who drive the plot (giving me what I was missing from Kay), but they’re also bound by patriarchal pressures. And those pressures differ greatly by class position and age! Great stuff, I should try more of Bujold’s work.
Convenience Store Woman, Sayaka Murata: One of the scariest books I’ve ever read. It’s about a woman who completely sublimates herself into the soothing routine of being a convenience store worker. As a “dead-end” job it allows her to escape most social obligation and prying from her family. Then the novel picks up as that becomes complicated, and her placid routine is shaken up. There are some uncomfortable in here parallels to my feelings about my own profession. To what extent am I good software developer because it has a pleasingly self-annihilative quality?
A Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again, by M John Harrison: This book feels like reading litfic underwater. It’s like a murky dream about being a downwardly mobile millennial but also something… else is happening (in a Lovecraftian, Weird Fiction kind of way). I think it’s not my favorite Harrison, and honestly the qualities in his work that annoy me are apparent enough that I think I’m good on his ouvre now.
We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson: This is a deeply paranoid and agoraphobic novel that feels kind of like an inverse haunted house? There’s a murder mystery that everyone outside the house cares about, but not so much the characters inside the house. The narrative voice is unique and our protagonist is compellingly strange. Go read this one, it’s worth your time (though The Haunting of Hill House is better, so start there if you haven’t).

Though she did not do “we should improve society somewhat”, that’s her former boss! ↩︎

Season-ing my game world

2026-04-14T00:00:00Z

Right now I’m running a game of The Drowned Isles, a setting / ruleset I wrote to play a bunch of OSR adventures. There are plenty of inspirations for the game, but one its earliest seeds is an attempt to write a game about where I’m from. Of course, I’m not from an archipelago infested with seafaring magical adventurers. But I’ve tried to infuse a little New Jersey into this far-future science fantasy.

The thing I missed most, when I briefly lived in the perfect weather of the Bay Area, was seasonality and weather. It is not natural or godly for it to be a pleasant seventy-something degrees every day. It’s bad for the character or something. Plus, seasons give the passage of time interesting texture, especially in a game where the time in the characters’ lives is utterly desynced from the time in our own.

There are four seasons that define the weather in the northeast: spring, summer, fall, and winter. It gets hot and humid enough in the summer to be miserable (and cold enough in the winter for the same), but spring and fall contain drops of real beauty, as long as you can bear fluctuation and unpredictable storms. So what rules am I going to use to get these feelings across?

Cribbing from Mausritter?

I initially planned to just grab the weather and season system from Mausritter:

Roll 2d6 for weather each day.

Weather that is highlighted are poor conditions for travel. For each Watch spent traveling under these conditions, a mouse must make a STR save or gain an Exhausted Condition.

2d6	Spring	Summer	Autumn	Winter
2	Rain storm	Thunderstorm	Wilds winds	Snowstorm
3-5	Drizzle	Very hot	Heavy rain	Sleet
6-8	Overcast	Clear, hot	Cool	Bitter cold
9-11	Bright and sunny	Pleasantly Sunny	Patchy rain	Overcast
12	Clear and warm	Beautifully warm	Clear and crisp	Clear and crisp

Had I not snagged on one little thing, I would probably not have bothered to write my own system. But I did snag: that’s not how summer weather works in my climate, at all. The storms, humidity, and heat form a rhythm: hot, sticky weather that crescendos into a sky-splitting thunderstorm, followed by a day or two of sweet relief. Repeat until everyone begs for colder weather, even a snowstorm, oh god this heat is unbearable (of course, they’ll say the opposite when the blizzards hit in February). So if I really want to capture my seasons, I’ll need to write my own weather with some bespoke seasonality.

Let’s add holidays

And while I’m at it, I think we should sprinkle in holidays. Holidays serve as anchors for seasons in my life: Passover to greet Spring, and Memorial Day to send it off; the Fourth of July to break up the long stretch of summer; Labor Day and Rosh Hashanah to herald cooler weather, and Thanksgiving to herald the truly cold; Hanukkah, Diwali, and New Year’s Eve just when the nights are darkest and Lunar New Year for when the warmth and sun begin to return.

For gameplay purposes, each season gets one holiday. That way everyone can easily keep the holidays in their heads. And also I don’t have good ideas for two holidays every season.

Spring

Blossom Parade: To bring in the New Year with good fortune and chase away the winter doldrums, it is traditional to parade floats of cherry blossoms. Guilds and families create floats with themes of renewal, new life, and good tidings. Generally the parade ends after noon in a massive picnic in a public space.

Twill has precious few cherry blossoms, but has a longstanding relationship with Ark to its east. A baby cherry tree is ceremoniously shipped through the riverways each year.

Spring is the New Year in the setting for a simple gameplay reason: I want players to start the campaign at the start of the game-year, and winter should be “adventuring hard mode” that they reach as seasoned Wardens.

Also I know that cherry blossom holidays maybe don’t scan as quintessentially New Jersey, but I do want to point out that Branch Brook Park in Newark has the “largest collection of cherry blossoms in the United States” (see Wikipedia). That’s right, Tony Soprano is neighbors with a bunch of beautiful blossoms accessible by half-decent public transit.

Anyway spring weather is unpredictable, so I decided for a truly random and flat distribution.

Roll 1d6.

Sudden thunderstorm.
Scattered sunshowers and rain throughout.
A light drizzle
Chilly, but clear.
Perfectly pleasant weather.
Beautiful day: crisp, clear, refreshing. All Wardens recover 1 Guard or Aether.

Summer

Midsummer: A gift-giving holiday celebrated differently across the Isles. In some places the Baron demonstrates his beneficence to the peasants; in others business partners curry favor; in others tribal leaders one-up each other in public displays. The one constant is that children across the Isles hope for a more exciting gift than socks.

Midsummer is my weakest holiday. I wanted a gift-giving holiday but I didn’t want Christmas (because I am a grinch), so I put it in the summer. I know that’s how it’s celebrated in the southern hemisphere, but I can’t let the concept of seasonal gift exchanges be a casualty of the war on Christmas.

Summer weather has the most involved rules. For the first day in an adventure, roll on the “pleasant” column below. Then each day, roll on the column for the previous day’s weather.

Hot weather ranges from “pretty nice” to “I don’t want to do anything without a wet towel draped across my neck”.
Humid weather is hot, miserable, and sticky. Intense daytime activity may be dangerous, but night provides relief.
Heatwaves give no such respite. It is unrelentingly hot at all hours.
Summer storms are violent and sudden, sometimes with deceptive lulls before striking a second time.
Pleasant days are rare. Maybe the cloud cover provides a shield from the sun; maybe a storm has just blown off days of heat; maybe you’re just lucky. All Wardens recover 1 Guard or Aether.

1d6	Hot	Humid	Heatwave	Storm	Pleasant
1	Heatwave	Humid	Heatwave	Storm	Storm
2	Humid	Humid	Heatwave	Storm	Humid
3	Humid	Humid	Heatwave	Hot	Hot
4	Hot	Storm	Storm	Pleasant	Hot
5	Hot	Storm	Hot	Pleasant	Hot
6	Pleasant	Hot	Hot	Pleasant	Hot

Fall

Harvest Banquet: It is said before the Kernish Empire, the farmers of the Drowned Isles shared alike during the autumn months. After months of back-breaking work, all shared equally in the fruits of their labor. In today’s world of deeds and tithes and taxes, the spirit of the commune lives for one night each year. Everyone brings a dish of fresh food to the town hall for a potluck-style feast. It is traditional for farmers to bring their choicest fruits, and for traders to bring their most unfamiliar wares and spices. It is a terrible faux pas to eat any food that one ate at last year’s Banquet.

This one is Thanksgiving and Sukkot. I’m banking on enough cultures having their own harvest holiday that the direct inspirations here don’t matter as much as the general autumnal vibe.

For fall, I’m actually going to crib the weather rules from Mausritter (more or less)

Roll 2d6:

2d6	Weather
2	Blustering storm
3-5	Rainy
6-7	Cool
7-8	Patchy rain
9-10	Heavy wind
11-12	Clear and crisp

Winter

Snowfall: Starting on longest night of the year, a bacchanal is held in each town, lasting three nights and three days. Townspeople party with wild abandon (even scolding aunties and curmudgeonly grandfathers). Each morning, whoever drank the most mead is crowned the King of the Day (though you are disqualified from Kingship if you fall asleep at any point when the sun is down).

Tradition tells us that Snowfall is celebrated as Lady Night encroaches upon Father Day. It is important to stay awake and light up the dark, so that the Lady does not think Her temporary gains from Her Father will become permanent. In the furthest southern reaches where the winter nights threaten to swallow the day entire, the party continues for five nights instead.

Here’s my secret: I don’t have a good idea for winter weather! I want to somehow simulate the feeling of snow piling up as storm after storm dumps more on you, and then the snow being cleared from some paths but not others, and snow melt… that all seems impossibly fiddly.

If you’ve read the whole post, your reward is a challenge from me to you: send me pointers to games that do a good job at capturing winter!

What I'm Reading: The Second Half of 2025

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

I want to declare book amnesty for myself, having fallen behind on my habit of writing up my reading habits (previously in January, April, and August of 2025). In rough order, with some books probably missing, here’s what I’ve read since July.

Books

Unquenchable Fire, by Rachel Pollack: A really unique book about a woman living in a religious dystopia. Miracle-working fundamentalists of a storytelling-based religion have remade America in their image, but the magic of their religion seems to have died out. Our main character is propelled by forces beyond her control (often violently) to bring a realignment to her world.
Dr. Bloodmoney, by Phillip K Dick: A post-apocalypse story with strange ideas about disability and delusion. Not my favorite, but I like it better than The Lathe of Heaven which is LeGuin working in the same vein.
Star Wars: Ronin, by Emma Mieko Candon: I actually liked this better than Candon’s later The Archive Undying, which descended into near-incomprehensibility in its third act. I still think Candon has issues with muddy characterization and overcomplicated plots in both works, though.
Brown Girl in the Ring, by Nalo Hopkinson: A novel in a sort of cyberpunk apocalypse Toronto, with some fantastical elements. It’s a great read but it was pretty funny that I ended up going to Toronto two weeks after I finished it.
Girlfriends, by Emily Zhou: Excellent short story collection about contemporary trans life. Read it!
Spelunky, by Derek Yu: Dive into Yu’s career and philosophy, as well as some of the development and release of the titular game. Recommended to anyone who’s interesting in indie gamedev
The Library of Broken Worlds, by Alaya Dawn Johnson: Science fiction about a library in a wormhole-filled space opera kind of setting; our main character grapples with questions of her humanity and increasing scopes of politics to avert a genocide. Just the right level of strange.
A/S/L, by Jeanne Thornton: Three young not-yet-out trans women make a game together online, before a convulsive falling-out and sseparation. They then all grow into varying types of dysfunctional womanhood, leading to their re-connection as adults. Stressful and very tense. Also partially set in my neighborhood, which is a first. High point of the year.
A Safe Girl to Love, by Casey Plett: Another excellent short story collection about trans life! Probably a substantial inspiration for Girlfriends.
Chain Gang All Stars, by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah: Dystopian future where America’s prisons feature gladiatorial death games, following a cast of mostly incarcerated characters. Good skewering of America’s sports culture, oddly reminiscent of The Hunger Games?
Idlewild, by James Frankie Thomas: Two young women attending a Quaker school in NYC in 2002 navigate coming of age and queerness (one of them is a self-conscious lesbian; the other… well that’s covered throughout the novel). Breezed through it on an Amtrak to Toronto.
The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K LeGuin: The gender stuff is boring and kinda retrograde, yes. But I think this is a great novel if you’re not looking for it to be a Masterwork of Queerness.
The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson: Wait is this one actually a Masterwork of Queerness? Either way it’s peerless. I’ve never really been compelled by haunted houses before but this one very much compelled me.
Keeping Two, by Jordan Crane: Random comic I picked up at the library. It was fine.
The Witch Elm, by Tana French: Mystery / suspense novel starring an absolutely rancid dude. I think I liked it, but it did test my limits for inhabiting a PoV character who sucks.
The Devourers, by Indrapramit Das: Maybe it’s because I just watched the AMC show this summer, but I would describe this book as “Bangladeshi Interview with the Vampire but with werewolves.” Queer, feral, lots of piss.
The Incandescent, by Emily Tesh: Magic school but we’re following the teacher instead of the students. Not as daring as Some Desperate Glory but it also holds together much better. Inevitable Scholomance comparisons aren’t misplaced.
One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, by Omar El Akkad: I think I wanted the wrong thing from this book. I expected a lot more analysis and history, and got a lot more memoir. Wasn’t blown away, but I was convinced at book club that this is probably a good dip-your-toe-in entrypoint for Western liberals.
Sabriel, by Garth Nix: Re-read of a classic YA fantasy novel, in preparation for running my current campaign.
A Storm of Wings, by M John Harrison: I’m starting to see why people like Harrison and Viriconium so much. The Pastel City, our first Viriconium novel, is a pretty straightforward deep-history, swords-and-spaceships kind of book. This one has much more complex prose and also significantly more interesting ideas. I’m absolutely stealing the premise: “bugs who come from another dimension invade Earth from the moon.”
The Raven Scholar, by Antonia Hodgson: Basically perfect execution of the YA fantasy genre, but in the format of an adult fantasy book. Chinese-inspired court drama turns out to be the perfect blend with a “pick-and-choose your faction” type setting.
Ink, Scholar, Sister, Scribe, by Emma Törzs: Twisty and propulsive urban fantasy. Not too much to say about it, other than it’s good.
Disappoint Me, by Nicola Dinan: In the last quarter of the year, I nearly neglected trans litfic. Glad I dipped back in for this one. Disappoint Me was gripping, with twinned perspectives that had me white-knuckling my way to the inevitable emotional car crash.
Wolf in White Van, by John Darnielle: Darnielle is an amazing writer. I got to see him performing live this fall, and I love his music, but his writing is the major draw for me. Wolf is easily my favorite novel of his (beating out Universal Harvester and Devil House) for the way it captures a sense of bone-deep alienation. It’s a book that left me feeling profoundly alone and deeply upset.
The Jakarta Method, by Vincent Bevins: This is one of the most straightforward nonfiction books I have ever read. The first third is a recent history of Indonesian politics, mostly focusing on the few decades after independence. The next third is a detailed account of the anticommunist mass murder program that was instituted in the '60s. The last third is Bevins drawing direct lines from the violence in Indonesia to anticommunist and anti-Left violence across the world. A sobering and painful read, but politically worthwhile.
Traitor Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson: I had an impulse to revisit Baru this year and was richly rewarded. This debut novel from Dickinson is still their best work, and frankly stands head-and-shoulders above its empire-focused-speculative-fiction peers (the Ancillary series, A Memory Called Empire, Ninefox Gambit, you know the ones).
Metal From Heaven, by August Clarke: After the last four books, I needed a break. I texted a friend “the next one is going to be lighter.” Nope! Instead I reached for another “butch gets tortured by Empire” book, this time with a lot more derring-do. Metal From Heaven’s first half is a rip-roaring and tragic adventure story with a laser focus on the immiseration of the Second Industrial Revolution; its second half is a less-strong-but-still compelling political thriller; and its denouement is an ambitious experiment that totally falls flat for me. With a better ending this would easily be my book of the year. Would also be nice if there was any hint of transfemininity in this book about queer and gender-non-conforming women. I still highly recommend checking it out.
The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold: If you can handle a 30-something man’s love interest being a late-teen girl (I barely could), this is a solid fantasy novel. Just enough grit and darkness to be my comedown from the last few reads, while being overall more bearable. I’ll probably read the sequel soon.
Monster Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson: My understanding is that Monster and Tyrant were supposed to be one book, and it shows. I don’t think this is a very good novel taken on its own, but I still enjoyed reading it. If you haven’t read Baru yet and are thinking about it, plan to read the sequel novels as one piece.
Tyrant Baru Cormorant, by Seth Dickinson: Especially when taken with Monster, this is a great entry. I really admire the decision to provide a resting point, a passable ending for the series, while leaving the door open for the planned fourth book.
Everlasting, by Alix Harrow: My first successful foray into a romantasy, off the strength of a trusted book friend. I’m not too proud to admit “gruff woman knight” works on me. This is the queerest het romance I’ve read, and probably the trans-est cis romance I’ve read?

Games

This year I discovered the joy of playing narrative and puzzle games with my partner, so here’s a couple of text-heavy games that fit the “reading” theme.

Blue Prince: Game of the year easily, despite its often-frustrating gameplay loop. If you’re down to do some deckbuilding in service of exploring a (haunted?) mansion, it’s fun to painstakingly unravel the story and conspiracy at the heart of the game.
Venba: Absolutely heartbreaking game about food, family, and the immigrant experience. Really short too, it’s like one feature film worth of gameplay. Arts funding is awesome, I wish it was real.
The Curse of the Obra Dinn: The actual narrative you learn in Obra Dinn isn’t the point. The point is the presentation (an understated technical marvel, by the by) and the unique structure: moving through the story of a doomed English trading voyage one death at a time.
Frog Detective: Sorry to be a grinch but I didn’t vibe with this at all. Maybe it was too fondly talked about by my cohort, but I expected something more than an hour of hit-or-miss gags, some basic adventure game mechanics, and cute character designs.

Drowned Isles Beta

2025-12-22T00:00:00Z

Hey, did you hear it’s the Year of the Beta (at least according to Prismatic Wasteland)? And did you know that the year is… almost over^[1]?

Well (ready or not) I guess I have to put out a beta of my game: The Drowned Isles.

What’s the game?

It’s an adventure RPG with a DIY spirit, sort of mashing up Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts with an OSR game like Brighter Worlds or the GLOG. Players take on the role of Wardens, super-powered investigators who sail the seas of a science-fantasy world. They arrive in a dangerous place and are presented with a mystery, explore and learn what they can, probably confront mortal peril, and publish their results.

I’m particularly happy with the Power system^[2], which has done a good job balancing free-form play and mechanical adjudication. Players each have a specific Power which outlines the nature of their supernatural ability. When they want to use it, they describe the fictional outcome they want (I buffet away those incoming arrows with a gust of wind, can my animal companion dig us a safe tunnel to pass under the danger?, let me I send my spirit through the Investigator-Priest’s wards to examine the crime scene). Then we assess the mechanical cost together, they spend their resources, and get their effect. Over time players can also create Techniques, which both restrict their actions and lend them greater fictional power.

(The rules are also free and on the web, so you can just go click on that link and read 'em.)

Why’s the game?

Basically I wanted to run some OSR adventure modules, but I don’t like many D&D-style games. Often they feel like a combat system with some other mechanics bolted on the side. It’s always a bummer to crack open a game and see “The Pyrokineticist class” …and then read that they have 20 spells that all do the exact same thing: “fire damage to target.”

Also I’m not a big Tolkien person, don’t like Lovecraft, never tried Conan, and couldn’t get into Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser; the inspirations behind lots of D&D / OSR games don’t do a lot for me. In their place are things like Nausicaä, A Wizard of Earthsea, the Book of the New Sun, the Steerswomen series, some anime, and Friends at the Table. In various fits and starts I’ve spent years making stabs at a far-future, sea-rise-inflected game about ruined cities. Now I’m actually getting to play it.

This is a game I wrote for myself to run, and my weekly group to play; I can whip up a new Skill or Power with an hour or two on a park bench, and show it to my audience right after. Even the core mechanics are somewhat interchangeable. I have a travel system written that will see play for the first time this week; depending on how it goes, that system may get totally re-written. The game is malleable so that we can change it as we go.

How’s the game?

Great, thanks for asking! My group is five sessions^[3] into our campaign and I’m very happy with it. Last week a player created a new Technique for her character (a monkey-kin who is on the hunt for the secrets of immortality):

Swiss Army Hands: You can harden your fingers into Excellent tools for a Few Minutes.

You can’t use it while in danger.

If you use it against a potential friend, you lose the finger.

To activate it, you have to eat a Siglos.

This is basically the perfect outcome for the system. She’s crafted her own character upgrade and put her own (fun, strange) restrictions on it, as guided by the game system.

Reader Beware

There is very little Referee advice, because I am my own intended audience. Do feel free to send questions my way^[4] if you want to run it, though!
Many of the Powers are incomplete or totally untested.
The Skill section of the game is very much incomplete.
The game world is fragmentary and exists largely in my own head.
I keep switching between addressing the players directly (Apocalypse World style), addressing the Referee, and some kind of secret third thing. I may eventually decide on a style and shoot for uniformity but I probably won’t bother.

If anyone does read the game, take inspiration from it, or even run it, I’d love to hear about it!

Two weeks ago I realized the Year of the Beta deadline was almost upon me. I wailed. I gnashed my teeth. I checked to see whether or not I could find a loophole with any lunisolar calendars instead. Having failed to find a way out, I was forced to publish my game. ↩︎
Taken more-or-less entirely from the unreleased superhero RPG Fall of the Red Planet, which itself is inspired by the ritual mechanics in Blades in the Dark ↩︎
We’ve also played about nine playtest sessions previously: two when this was a hack of Into the Odd, two when it was derived from 2400, one with a PbtA game that was inspired by Hearts of Wulin, and four with a previous incarnation of a Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts-based engine. ↩︎
Either through the comments section, email (ryan @ this blog’s domain), or on Discord if you see me around. ↩︎

What I'm Reading: August 2025

2025-08-22T00:00:00Z

RPG blogging may resume soon; there’s another Drowned Isles playtest wrapping up next week and I have some thoughts. Crucially: the game works, I have fun running it, and my friends have fun playing it. I’m excited to get to work through all the adventures I’ve accumulated over the last couple years.

But for today I’m here to talk about what I’ve read from April through mid-July. (I’m actually pretty backlogged and will be including July and August’s reading in some early fall catchup post instead.)

Books

Little Fish, by Cacey Plett: We follow a 30-something trans woman who has just learned her Mennonite grandfather may have been a closeted trans woman. Unfortunately this didn’t do a lot for me. Partly I think I struggled to grab onto any of the characters, and the plot is sort of meandering? I read it curled up on a rainy late-spring weekend, which was a nice experience though.
Stag Dance, by Torrey Peters: The largest, strongest man in an illegal logging camp is a little too enthusiastic to take on the role of a woman at the titular dance. Things sort of go off the rails from there. This is the good shit. I think this is the only transfem novel I know of set before “trans woman” was invented as a social category? Peters is really adept at writing dysphoria and social messiness, and I had a great time following her usual style into a very different genre.
The West Passage, by Jared Pechacek: I described this to a friend as “fairytale Dark Souls” and I stand by that. We follow two characters raised in a sprawling ruined castle: one young girl who has come into the leadership of the funerary Grey Tower too early, and one young man whose master failed to induct him as the new Guardian before she died. The history of the castle, its towers, its massive Ladies (who wield reality-warping powers), and the great threat it faces have become obscured by the long passage of time. There’s a classical adventure story feel; lots of weird vignettes with imaginary characters or situations a la The Wizard of Oz. I really enjoyed this! It’s probably my favorite fantasy fiction this year.
Boys Weekend, by Mattie Lubchansky: A graphic novel that follows a newly(-ish) out transfem on a trip to their friend’s bachelor party in a parody of Las Vegas and hypercapitalism. Really good, if you like her other work you’ll like this and vice-versa.
House of Suns, by Alistair Reynolds: Humans have settled the whole galaxy despite being bound by the speed of light. Our protagonists hail from a Line, a loose organization of semi-immortal clones who make a circuit around the Milky Way and meet up once a circuit. They see civilizations and entire ways of human life rise and fall as they avoid getting too bogged down in the cycle of stellar empires. Unfortunately, that description is more interesting than the plot, which revolves around a somewhat tedious intrigue. Disappointed in the cis-het-ness of it all, given that gender variance among the clones is clear but unremarked on.
Any Other City, by Hazel Jane Plante: Like Plante’s previous work, Little Blue Encyclopedia, this is a very formally playful book. In it a fictional writer, Hazel Jane Plante, co-writes a memoir by the fictional rockstar Tracy St Cyr. We visit St Cyr as a young “man” exploring Paris, art, and his relationship to a group of trans artists he admires. We then hop forward decades as she returns, post-transition and a well-loved indie rocker recovering from an abusive, traumatic breakup. Enjoyable throughout, often touching, and a novel-ass-novel.
A Drop of Corruption, by Robert Jackson Bennett: Did you like last year’s A Tainted Cup? Did you wish it was sort of… worse in every way but still decent? Well, Bennett has just the thing. The mystery here is cloudy and not as satisfying, the characters are less interesting, and the overall meta-mysteries of the setting are basically not explored. But I do like seeing Ana and Din pingpong around and overall had some good pulpy fun.

Things that Aren’t Books

A bonus section, with a film and a video game.

Do the Right Thing: After a hot, hot day out and about the city my partner and I made it home to our apartment just across the Hudson River. For movie night I offered xyr a choice: Do the Right Thing or Escape from New York; xe picked the former. I knew going in this was “a movie about a heat wave and a riot”; what I didn’t realize is that it was a tight character study about a single block in Brooklyn. We come to know (and in some cases love) a few dozen characters and their relationships with each other before things reach a proverbial boiling point. (I do think the treatment of women in the film is… messy? But that’s not unusual at all for Hollywood).
Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown: Due to market pressures and capital crunch (or whatever), I feel like games have been bifurcating into no-budget indie storytelling darlings and hyper-budget AAA tech demos. That’s why it caught me off guard to be playing a Hollow-Knight-inspired Metroidvania coming from one of the few major publishing houses left (Ubisoft). The basic game feel of hopping around is pretty good, the combat system is surprisingly deep for this kind of game, and the upgrades you get throughout are inventive (lots of time manipulation and teleportation, which fits the franchise). Also it’s like the first game ever to be dubbed in Farsi? It took me a little while to get into the story but when I realized it was Prince of Persia by way of a shonen battle anime, things clicked into place. Would be my game of the year, if not for a little architecture-themed puzzle game that I’ll write about in my next post.

What I'm Reading: April 2025

2025-04-23T00:00:00Z

Wow, wonder what might have happened to totally blow up my blogging schedule. Well, time to look at the news and—blog posts have been delayed by a month.

Ah shit. Well lemme look at bsky and—blog posts have been delayed by another month.

Fuck. Fuck. I guess I’ll go outside and not use the computer. Blog posts have been delayed by another month, but good this time.

Books

The Pastel City, by M John Harrison. This is the first of the stories set in Harrison’s Viriconium, apparently a classic of the “so far in the future that everything is Medieval again” genre. In the story, heroic knights must defend the princess of the realm against an evil plot involving brain-stealing killer robots.

I thought it was okay, but didn’t feel especially compelled to read more. I guess if I’m going to read about guys with swords in the Dying Earth future, and the few women involved don’t really get to be characters, I’d rather be reading Wolfe.
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. This was for mutual aid book club, and I’m a little disappointed I didn’t read it earlier. The reporting and prose in this book is really, really good. Coates is a fucking writer. Politically it left me lukewarm, but that’s fine. Some truly harrowing descriptions of what it is like to cross the boundary between Israel and Palestine.
Count Zero by William Gibson. This is the sequel to Neuromancer, set 8-ish years after the end of the Straylight Run. I found almost every element weaker than the predecessor, and probably wouldn’t have finished it if not for reading along with Shelved by Genre. (New Jersey mentioned, though).
How Do We Relationship by Tamifull. I read the last few chapters of this lesbian manga this spring. The manga as a whole follows two young women who start a lesbian relationship in high school (because “we’re the only gay girls each other know, I guess we should date?”). Heart-rending problems of young queer love ensue, set over a period of years.

This manga is beautifully drawn, the characters are excellently observed, and the emotional range is intense. I’ve laughed out loud and yelped in pain while reading. The whole thing is finished and translated, and you owe it to yourself to read it.
Tales of Neveryon by Samuel Delany. This is my first exposure to Delany, which maybe embarrasses me. I feel like I should have read someone with his stature a little earlier, but everyone’s gotta start sometime. This novel seems like it’s structured as a series of unrelated short stories in a fantasy setting, each exploring some concept of commerce, slavery, or alienation. The threads begin to twist together in the back half, toward a single story. It was good, but not so compelling that I feel the need to try any of Delany’s famously difficult science fiction yet^[1].
River of Stars by Guy Gavriel Kay. This is a distant sequel to Under Heaven (the other Kay book I’ve read), both books being set in the author’s China-inspired fantasy world. The first book features hungry ghosts, a revenge quest, a clan of women martial artists, and political intrigue. This one featured… decidedly less of that. It follows a young man as he progresses from village life to outlaw to great general, and a cataclysmic war that sees not-China in the grip of the not-Mongols. Honestly I had a good time (especially as grounded historical fantasy novels go), but don’t feel any of the spark its predecessor inspired in me.
Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante. This is a book-ass book! We follow a young trans woman writing an encyclopedia for her recently-passed best friend’s favorite TV show. It’s a Twin-Peaks-esque sprawl of characters and concepts, which we glimpse through the encyclopedia entries. Those entries are embedded in a narrative of the narrator’s relationship to and love of Vivian. This one hit close to home for me, in a way that it is statistically improbable to hit close for you, dear reader. Still, I highly recommend it.
“Infect your Friends and Loved Ones” by Torrey Peters. I finally got around to this Peters story, because it’s a pack-in with her new book Stag Dance. We open in an apocalypse brought about by a disease that destroys human’s ability to produce their own sex hormones. Then we flash back and learn about two trans women’s tumultuous t4t relationship, and how their story is central to this whole apocalypse situation. It also features a disastrous date that ends in the phrase “THE WHOLE WORLD MONITORS AND MOCKS MY EVERY WAKING MOMENT!” Which, like, yeah.
“The Chaser” by Torrey Peters. This is a new story published with Stag Dance. It features two young men starting a gay(?) relationship, though one of them is likely to transition in the future. I thought it was good, and don’t have much else to say about it.
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer. This is a (unasked-for?) prequel to the Southern Reach trilogy (of Annihilation fame). VanderMeer is an intensely hit-or-miss author to me. I think he is for a lot of folks; it’s just pretty rare for two people to agree on which works are hits and which are misses, exactly.

For me this goes in the miss bucket. Diving deep into the spy drama of Central… to what end, exactly? The setting just feels too bare to me to support this kind of narrative. I gave up after the perspective switch, because the new PoV character used the work “fuck” so I often I found it hard to keep reading.
The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel. Nonfiction book about textile history. After one too many snide remarks, I got the feeling the author’s politics were incompatible with mine (Wikipedia confirms this). Plus I wanted a little more technical description, or a little more high-level history; this book hit right in the unhappy middle for me. DNF.
The Hades Calculus by Maria Ying. Extremely over-indulgent and way too long? Why, that’s table stakes for self-published fiction! (I kid, I kid. But it is too long). This is a science-fictional, mecha-infused take on the Hades and Persephone myth. It’s also extremely trans, extremely lesbian, and extremely horny. If I had a nickel for every mecha trans-lesbian web novel where I had the same criticisms (that I won’t publish here) of the sexual dynamics at play, I’d have two nickels, but it’s weird that it happened twice. Overall pretty good.
Woodworking by Emily St. James. This is a novel following a few different PoVs, most notably a thirty-something high school teacher who has just realized she’s trans… and the only trans girl she knows, a 17-year-old trans student in her class. Yes, the friendship has to be kept secret to avoid outing the teacher. Yes, this leads to lots of sitcom-esque misunderstandings. The characters are the main attraction here, with propulsive plot and totally workable prose. A really good debut novel.

I’m a little sad that the author needed to set it in 2016 to justify the (relatively) low ambient transphobia, but I’m more sad that I agree with her decision to do so. It’s a good period piece, though, as someone who was in fact the age of one of the protagonists in 2016.
The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. This is a novel about a disastrous Jesuit first-contact mission to an alien world. I was interested in how the novel might play with questions of faith and contact, and was disappointed that wasn’t really the focus. Instead the focus is on the traumas visited on our main characters to shape them into the people who are suited for the expedition, and the utterly broken state one of them returns from the expedition in. Our narrative jumps back and forth between the late 2010s-and-early-2020s and the 2060s, before and after the expedition. Eventually (after quite a lot of book) we’re working with during-the-expedition and after-the-expedition.

The alien society depicted is pretty interesting, but nothing lives up to the build of the mystery in the first half. You’re waiting and waiting to find out how things went quite so badly… and the answer tumbles out in a rushed third act, in ways that don’t really feel satisfying to me. I’m not exactly mad that things come to a brutal and horrifying point (which you are prepared for from the 2060s segments), but I feel like the need to tie up the plot leads to brushing off most of the themes and questions of the novel. There’s a sequel, and I’m torn about whether I want to read it or let it lie.

The brutal and horrifying part is no joke, by the by. I had a couple nightmares reading this book and occasionally thinking about it makes bile come up in my mouth. So… I guess that’s an endorsement of the writing ability, but maybe an anti-endorsement for reading it.

Movies

I visited my grandma in Florida and watched two movies, one on the way there and one on the way back. The flight was short enough that I didn’t have time to try Dune 2 or Wicked, which was probably a blessing on both counts.

Conclave (2024). RIP Pope Francis, I guess? Between Kill James Bond’s Jesuit-heavy season, The Sparrow, Conclave, and my upcoming reread of A Canticle for Leibowitz (for the next season of Shelved By Genre) I’m having a bit of a Catholic moment. I was a little worried this movie would be impenetrable to a nice Jewish girl such as myself (Christian media sometimes assumes you’re already steeped in the mythos). To my relief, the entire process was perfectly legible to me. Dramatically the movie hung together excellently until the denouement.

Politically… I mean, this movie feels like it was slated to come out in 2016. Like… “jihadi terrorists are prompting us to vote: racism or good, open-hearted liberalism? And then we’re gonna win with a speech about how racism is wrong?”

I do want to say if you’ve heard anything about the end of the movie: this isn’t really a movie that you spoil. I think a full plot summary would barely have decreased my enjoyment. Watch it, and then you can pretend to understand what’s up with Cardinal Pizzabella or whomever.
Erin Brockovich (2000). This movie is part legal drama, part biopic, and part finger-wagging scold of the working woman. This might be an of-its-time thing but I was a little surprised that the cinematic language is so clearly against Erin’s working at the law firm on the chromium case. Sure, she can’t spend as much time with her kids or partner, but that’s true of plenty of men who work to support a family. The movie swings from “isn’t she such a bad mom because of the poverty?” to “isn’t she such a bad mom because of the job?” with such ease. Maybe I’m being ungenerous, but it feels like the movie is saying “lean in” and “ew, get back in the kitchen” in the same breath. Still a good watch overall.

Plus… the books touch on Delany’s whole deal with age-of-consent stuff. I’m not opening a torch-and-pitchfork store here, I’m not arguing a well-defined point, and I’m not telling you what to think. Just that there is a sexual relationship between a “man” and a “boy” in this book, and that’s in line with Delany’s stated views, and it makes me uncomfortable and a little unhappy. ↩︎

What I'm Reading: January 2025

2025-02-03T00:00:00Z

Now that I’m once again employed, my reading has decreased. I’m still making room for books, but I’m trying to spend less time on the Internet - no “links” section this time.

Books

The Bright Sword, by Lev Grossman. Usually Arthurian legends end with the end of Arthur. That’s instead where this book picks up, perspective-hopping between our plucky young hero and the straggler knights of the round table. They engage in surreal adventures across an England ravaged by Arthur’s fall. Overall very enjoyable, well-written, and hard for me to describe. There’s more historical grit than you’d expect here, but also plenty of anachronism and fairy-tale logic? I found the presence of gay and trans characters in this kind of novel pleasantly surprising.
The Space Between Worlds, by Micaiah Johnson. There are infinite multiverses. You can travel between them, but only if you’re dead in that reality. Otherwise you die instantly on arrival. From there we discover that the super-future social democrat city needs to recruit impoverished dirt-farmers, because they’re more likely to be dead in nearby alternate realities. All of that speculative element… doesn’t really make sense or work for me. The characters do though, so I overall enjoyed the reading experience.
Burning Chrome, by William Gibson. This is a short story collection that seems to be the origin point for the entire cyberpunk genre. “Johnny Mnemonic” is a particular standout. If you’ve been listening to Shelved By Genre you’ve heard this bit already, but take a gander the way this story starts:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible.

Not only is everything from Shadowrun to Cyberpunk 2077 ripping directly from Gibson, he’s a better stylist than any of his imitators. If I had read this as a teen I would have been saying “I’m a very technical boy” obnoxiously often.

The Wizard of Oz, by L Frank Baum. Mostly I wanted to read this because I was curious about how it compared to Wicked, and I heard that Ozma of Oz has some trans vibes. I was generally charmed but obviously there’s not much going on here.
Son of a Witch, by Gregory Maguire. Sequel to Wicked, following Liir (a boy who maybe is, or maybe is not, the son of Elphaba). Mostly he drifts through life this way and that before a near-death experience that puts him on a new path. Ultimately I think I liked the scope and ambition of Wicked much better.
The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. This was fun - a murder mystery in a setting based on bio-engineering. Something about the mystery-solving itself wasn’t very engaging to me; maybe it’s that we get very little access to the Holmes character? We’re very much following a Watson-type, but our Holmes mostly stays in her room and thinks. There’s a The Fuckup Protagonist is Actually a Very Special Boy plotline which ties into some “my disability is actually my superpower” bleh-ness. The setting is unique and the moment-to-moment plot was pretty propulsive. Ultimately a solid if not remarkable read.
Nevada, by Imogen Binnie. Nevada is probably one of my favorite books that I’ve read in the last year. It’s a very effective trans story that is either about a woman destroying her life, finding herself, or both. I’m now devastated that Jane Schoenbraun quit an adpatation of Nevada “due to creative differences with cis people”. (Image sent to me by my partner, original creator unknown)

Bonus: Baldur’s Gate 3

For the year after its release, I assumed I wouldn’t like Baldur’s Gate, because I don’t like D&D 5e. Then, when I was taking a break between jobs, I realized that was prime “playing big AAA games I never have time for” real estate. I didn’t really play games over the summer because I was outside, and had a back injury that made it hard to sit for extended periods. Once winter hit and I had a new job secured (but not started), the gaming set in.

First off: this game’s achievements in scale are incredible. It’s broad, it’s long, there’s full voice-acting and motion capture for freaking everybody. Sometimes quantity is a quality all its own, and this game has quantity.

Secondly: this is a good adaptation of D&D 5e. There’s a lot of flexibility, environmental interaction, and generally good crunchy systems stuff under the hood. Also, some basic action economy tweaks (like Shove as a bonus action) go a long way. I’m not enough of a D&D-head to know all the balance changes, but I noted that fireball has a less-ridiculous range which is cool.

The game is divided into three acts of very different structures.

The first is a pretty open-ended, D&D-ass sandbox. Some goblins want to kill some druids and steal their stuff, a bunch of tiefling refugees are hiding in the druid gove, and the druids want to kick the some tiefling refugees and seal themselves away from the world. There’s also lots of other little areas to explore, and an entire Underdark segment.
The second is a more-linear area with an environmental hazard twist. This is also the most dungeon-crawling portion of the game.
The last is a hyper-dense urban area filled with sidequests. There’s very little main narrative; you can track down the main villains really whenever you like. After that the finale sequence kicks off. I much preferred the first area. When I got to Act 3 I was excited about the open-endedness, but the pacing eventually slogged on for me.

The game’s main narrative is uh, fine? kinda bad? It’s “pretty good for a AAA video game”, which is to say kinda bad. Lots of race-war stuff inherited from D&D too. As is the case in lots of modern RPGs the real juice is in the companions, who range from “just okay” to “really well realized”.

The First Outing to the Drowned Isles, feat. Tannic

2025-01-24T00:00:00Z

In November, I ran a oneshot using my ruleset/setting/campaign, The Drowned Isles. I was trying to test drive the kernel of a ruleset I’ve written as well as some character classes. This oneshot ran for two sessions, each about three hours. We played Tannic by Amanda P, sticking pretty closely to the zine’s material in the first session and diverging sharply in the latter.

Feel free to jump ahead to my thoughts on Tannic or my takeaways for the game’s design.

What’s the Drowned Isles?

For a long answer, check out my March blogpost introducing the project. For a shorter answer: the core of the game is investigative adventuring, social interaction, and interesting superpowers. Decent rules for handling fights are a genre necessity, but not my overall focus. Think of it like “D&D as imagined by someone who has never played an RPG.” It’s sort of my forever-WIP RPG, which is finally coming to fruition this year.

Play Report

If you don’t want spoilers for Tannic, I suggest skipping to the system postmortem.

Three intrepid Wardens set out to rescue the missing children of Tannic:

Niya^[1] (she/her), played by Andrew (he/him). On this adventure she is a Stratus^[2], a hacker/infiltrator archetype I wrote. We established that she had just recently incited the ire of a local highway gang of animalfolk by tying their tails together, if that helps you get the picture.
Chet Lemon (he/him), played by Izzy (she/her). He is a Crashball Player, an archetype I wrote that focuses on feats of oft-violent athletic ability.
Vonk (he/him), played by a different Ryan (he/him). He is a Sunflower Initiate, an archetype I adapted from a GLOG class called the “Action Botanist”. It allows players to essentially cast spells via plants

Well, before they set out they played some carnival games. Niya stole an axe so she could enchant it to win a game of strength, but she was caught by Peregrine, the town’s local Warden. Peregrine were disappointed in her behavior. She did go on to win a plush unicorn.

Shortly after they set out on the road, the Wardens were beset by bandits. These bandits were unpracticed and disorganized. Their leader fled after Chet delivered a devastating blow to his head, and the others shortly followed suit.

The Wardens found the children’s campsite and investigated it. They found some footprints that lead to the south-east and decided to follow them. Just as they were leaving, Niya sampled some suspicious liquid in the camp, and became enchanted. Her companions chased after her while she blundered through the woods, thankfully in the same direction as the children.

Unfortunately the blundering and chasing lead them right into the arms of a carnivorous tree. It scooped up Chet and Niya, and nearly succeeded at eating them. While Vonk failed to save the pair by hacking at the vines with a knife, Niya was able to magically confuse the tree and the three fled. They rested for the night once they were a sufficient distance. Vonk used one of his magical seeds to create a pit-trap plant, and placed Niya in it (to prevent further wandering).

At a forge in the woods Niya encountered a ghost named Gustav, that only she could see. Under his instructions she repaired his forge, which caused small iron elementals to spring to life. Chet defeated them by soccer-kicking them into the furnace. Niya then forged the ghost into iron horseshoes, which she attached to her stuffed unicorn. I ruled that Gustav was now able to use the stuffed animal as a body.

The next day they made better progress and arrived at the adventure’s dungeon. There they found Astrid hiding in a suit of armor, with her ears stuffed up to avoid hearing the enchanting harp. The Wardens calmed her down and left her with Gustav the unicorn as they moved further into the dungeon to free her friends.

Niya drinking some embalming fluid aside, the party made their way to the bottom of the dungeon uneventfully. There they encountered Prince Sebastian, playing his haunted harp to enchant Flora and Osric. After some experimentation, Vonk decided on a course of action. He created another pit-trap plant under Sebastian (who promptly fell into it and stopped playing). Chet grabbed the dazed kids and high-tailed it out of there.

When the Wardens returned to the entrance of the dungeon, they discovered a consequence held from earlier in the session: the highway band of animalfolk that Niya had harassed kidnapped Astrid and Gustav. They left a note demanding Niya come to their boat alone.

Around here is where the content from Tannic ends. Everything after is Drowned-Isles-related embellishments.

The Wardens arrived to find Tannic under siege by Atlantean soldiers. They had been informed of magical goings-on in the region and decided to quarantine the town until things were thoroughly investigated. Vonk used the last of his power to create a tunnel across the town and return Osric and Flora to safety.

Rather than allow Niya to face her ransomers, Chet decided to do some negotiation / intimidation. He did retrieve Astrid and Gustav, but did not placate the band. They attempted to blow-dart Niya and the other Wardens as they left, but only succeeded in wounding Vonk. The Wardens returned Astrid to their home and decided to shelter with Peregrine until the morning.

At this time it was around the end of our usual session slot and we decided to call it there. It can be assumed that the Wardens wrapped up the situation satisfactorily off-screen.

Tannic Thoughts

I picked up Tannic from a new hole-in-the-wall local game store. The module sounded familiar, looked appealing, and was a nice small zine. It was a great pick! The stats provided are for Cairn and OSE. Our combat was pretty loosey-goosey, but when we did use dice it looked something like Cairn.

The zine is well-organized, with a nice overview in the first few pages to situate the referee. The map immediately after is helpful as well. Places and characters are well-described; I ran most of them out of the book with no issue. Overall Tannic strikes a nice balance of lighthearted fun and enough menace or danger to keep some stakes. I especially had a lot of fun with players drinking various mind-altering substances, though in a less one-shot/nothing-matters situation I think fewer players would have partaken. The central mystery is good, with enough points of interest pushing you in the right direction.

I had only two criticisms. One is minor: the page number references are consistently wrong throughout. Tannic is short enough that this wasn’t game-stopping, just a point of friction. My other problem is that I had a hard time understanding the layout of the dungeon. The provided map doesn’t include any obvious indications of verticality - unless the numbering of rooms also indicates their floor (which may be the case). I’m also unused to a dungeon-based playstyle, so that could be on my end rather than the zine’s.

Overall I enjoyed Tannic, would run it again with a new group, and recommend it.

System: What Worked

Decentering Combat

The reason I haven’t found any suitable ruleset for the Drowned Isles is how dang combat-focused a lot of fantasy adventure games are. I just don’t care that much about fights, and I find games where characters are built with that in mind a little limited. My hope was that ICON, by siloing its combat rules into a separate game, would do the trick for me. It turns out that wasn’t the case.

Back at the drawing board I decided two things: I don’t want to break into a separate game “mode” for combat, but I do want some rules support for it. I’m still vacillating on the exact form it will take.

In this playtest, no character was built with a narrow focus on battle and all the fights flowed pretty smoothly. That’s exactly what I wanted.

Archetypes

I’ve always struggled to write character classes. It’s not in my interest to write numerical, game-y classes like you’d see in D&D, but it’s not in my skill-set to write large classes composed of interesting and unique upgrades. Years ago (when I had more free time and energy) I tried to write a hack of Heart, giving each player a branching upgrade tree with a dozen abilities each. That’s hard work to write, and even harder to make ‘em good!

What I settled on for this draft is essentially GLOG classes, but with a higher overall level cap. A class (called an “archetype”) grants some interesting core to a character and usually around 4 level-ups. Players start with one Archetype and can earn others by spending XP.

Some Archetypes are going to be adaptations of existing GLOG classes (see above - one was used in this very adventure) or ripped from Brighter Worlds. Others I’ll write myself. I can knock out a pretty passable Archetype with a good idea and an hour jotting notes on a park bench. My goal is to have twelve to fifteen archetypes available at the start of the full campaign, and end with thirty to fifty.

Powers

There are two main approaches I’ve seen for superpowers in RPGs. The first is “codify you to death” (any 90’s superhero RPG, any D&D spellcaster), which I want to avoid. The second is “superpowers exist in the fiction but not the mechanics” (i.e. Masks), which I find unsatisfying and difficult to run. Whitehack’s freeform magic system comes close, but the random elements of power cost and the relatively arbitrary criteria put my group off it.

The best superpower mechanic I’ve seen is from Fall of the Red Planet^[3]. Each time a character uses their superpower to do something significant, we use a table of different factors to calculate the cost. There are some various bits and bobs (currently characters can choose to cause mayhem to get more power), but that’s the core idea.

Where I think it excels is the kind of thinking it encourages. Player inputs are totally freeform; someone might propose “can I use my feats of athletics power to kick this golem into the river” or “I want to use my performance power to distract everyone in town.” The rules only kick in after that and help give structure to what characters are capable of. My hope is that it can encourage creative and surprising uses of character powers^[4], and so far that hope has borne out.

Threat Roll

For the first of two sessions, I used a dice ladder kinda system. Your stat is a d6, d8, d10, or d12; get a 4 or higher to succeed. It was kinda meh. Then between sessions Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts dropped and I knew I had to steal the Threat Roll. It worked great! I’m really loving it.

System: What Didn’t

Stats

Characters had four stats: Toughness, Agility, Finesse, and Presence (standard heartbreaker stuff). Honestly I didn’t like the result. Things felt stiff and unnatural - tons of rolls don’t slot in nicely to those stats. I forgot that I actually… don’t like D&D stats. I think I’ll probably go with a Blades-style Action rating?

Moves

Before play I had written out some PbtA-style moves to guide the social side of play. I ended up preferring threats I had created on the fly to the moves I had pre-written. Great moves make games sing, but poorly-written moves grind like broken gears. If I had a strong vision I could spend more time hammering out moves, but I think I’d rather just spend effort elsewhere.

HP

I don’t really like HP in general? Any time you’re rolling for damage and subtracting numbers, it’s hard to remember that there’s some actual fiction that should be underlying combat mechanics. I had HP because “getting into a fight with somebody” is something I want to model with rules, but I think much smaller numbers with fixed damage values (a la Apocalypse World) is the way to go.

A two-foot tall gremlin who haunts my playtests. She has seen the Drowned Isles from a hack of Into the Odd featuring crashed spaceships, to a Trophy Dark derivative with sea-walled cities, to its current iteration. Each time her character abilities are rebuilt from scratch, but her nature is constant. She is very short, she is petulant, and she causes problems on purpose. Previously she has wielded wizardly abilities, thunder magic, radioactive materials, and strange tree powers. ↩︎
The name and powerset is inspired by Mako Trig, a character from COUNTER/Weight. Instead of hacking machines, though, this archetype is about confusing and misdirecting people. ↩︎
Also in CAIN, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some kind of shared ancestor that both games are inspired by. ↩︎
The “creative and surprising uses of powers” is one of my favorite parts of Hunter × Hunter, which I’ve been watching through with my roommate for a year and a half. It’s become a significant influence on Drowned Isles. ↩︎

ICON Final Impressions

2024-12-07T00:00:00Z

The ICON campaign I was playing in wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, totalling 28 sessions in 9 months. I’m not going to write up a big comprehensive review^[1]. Instead I’ll just touch on a few things that I think are most interesting.

The Campaign

Briefly: I had a lot of fun in this game. My character was an intentional break with my usual “witty and sarcastic” fallback archetype. I played a jester named Yorrick, who had a penchant for explosives and capital-a Anarchism. She was probably my best-loved PC yet. The scenario we played through was enjoyable, and followed an escalation curve one might expect from ICON’s chapter system (local, then regional, then global adventures).

Earlier Questions Answered

I had two questions at the end of my first impressions post:

Will the combat system’s complexity continue to slow down play over time?
Will character growth stay along an appropriate curve?

To the former question, yup! The complexity got more manageable, but it never felt simple or smooth. Even after nearly 30 sessions, I am the only player in the group that knows all the movement types without looking them up^[2]. We knew vaguely what each status does, but interactions between different rules still required consulting the book fairly often. I would say that many of the issues we faced could be fixed with some streamlining, rather than a rework of the game’s bones.

To the latter question, we have to look at combat and narrative separately.

Character growth in combat felt perfect. Numbers don’t really go up, so we weren’t dealing with “oh, this always hits now” or “this early game option doesn’t work at all anymore.” Instead we just ended up with wider, more interesting builds. On the flipside, those options did accrete over time and slow the game down.

In narrative, things are a mixed bag. My experience is that Blades characters tend to grow their attributes to the point where the game breaks down, because every roll is a hard 6. ICON solves that problem, by giving players a finite and slower-paced set of attribute improvements.

On the other hand, its narrative powers need a little re-tuning. Some sound good, but never really felt right in play:

Gaia Compass - You have a knack for navigation. You always know the distance and direction of the nearest (I) village (II) town (III) settlement of any kind. You can sense dungeons within a few miles, and get a bad feeling when one is about to surface.

We just didn’t spend that much time lost or near soon-to-surface dungeons. Other abilities look fun, are fun, and grow into game-breaking demigodhood:

Habitual Line Stepper - 2/session - You instantly disappear from sight and re-appear somewhere:

I: Nearby

II: Within two or three hundred paces

IIII: Within a mile

You don’t have to see your destination, but you are shunted back to your starting point if it’s occupied or obstructed (like trying to hop into solid rock, for example).

This was the first ability I took for my character, and I used it to its fullest. If I were running the game I’d probably change the ability to require line-of-sight to the destination, because “you can teleport anywhere within a quarter mile (or a mile)” is too powerful a tool. As we increased in chapter, play increasingly warped around instant-win abilities like Habitual Line Stepper. Opportunities for creative problem solving, spiraling consequences, or unexpected characterization could be tossed aside, which is a shame.

The Two-Game Experiment

Over the campaign I came to think of ICON as a statement: roleplaying and tactical combat don’t mix, and if you want both you want two different games. ICON provides both games for you. The gossamer-thin connection between the games is character advancement, where each level grants both narrative and combat benefits. Otherwise abilities, character states, and even the environment around you shares no continuity. In my first-impressions post I praised the game for its honesty in this regard. “There are two games and never the twain shall meet” seemed like a way to cut through the contradictions of the roll-d20-to-hit lineage.

I was initially very resistant to the idea that harm would be separate, though. What, you mean if I fall down a shaft and break my leg it doesn’t slow me down in a boss fight right after? Or if I’m riddled with wounds after a disastrous ambush, I can scramble up the side of a building no problem? I decided that I was probably being unfair, and that this sort of situation would feel natural in play. The reality was sort of in the middle. This dissonance popped up a few times, but we sort of ignored it and moved on.

There did end up being some friction from having two separate sets of capabilities. My character could teleport across a battlefield as long as she wasn’t fighting, and could pull bombs out of her sleeves as long as she was. Outside a fight I would start to say “oh, I can just use my bombs here” only to remember I didn’t actually have any? Again the solution is to ignore the discrepancy and move on (begrudgingly - I wanted those bombs).

Where the experiment actually fails for me is the gravity combat exerts on the rest of the game. Because the combat system requires the prep of selecting a group of foes and designing an arena to fight them in, fights were rarely spontaneous. Usually they were more like setpieces, which the GM needed to set up in advance and the players knew to steer towards. We would also play very differently leading up to a fight, because we knew the narrative situation would fall away in the face of the combat rules.

Strangely the core issue is that combat is just too meaty and interesting. When we started play each battle would run about half a session. By the end of the campaign, we were regularly taking a session and a half. As fights grew longer they felt less related to the narrative play that surrounded them; it was like a second game we happened to be playing. It’s a weird complaint, but it was one that pressed on my mind the longer we played. My roommate, who also played in the campaign, put it best: “I like Magic the Gathering, but not in the middle of an RPG session.” Making the system deeper and more fun doesn’t mean it better serves the play experience.

I come away from ICON really impressed by its grid-based combat, which is the best of all tabletop games I’ve played or read. The narrative rules are a good time, and I love when people take what works for them from Blades without bringing the whole 800 pound gorilla. I also come away from ICON with an increased conviction that I’m not interested in games designed with a skirmish wargame subsystem. I definitely don’t want to break one one out every session. To a large portion of the hobby, crunchy tactical games and roleplaying are like chocolate and peanut butter, two great tastes that taste great together. To me it seems like they’re a different food metaphor that I can’t think of, two meals that I’d kind of rather have separately.

Not least because I hear there’s a major rework coming to ICON next year ↩︎
Probably because I had to keep them straight when writing my combat glossary appreciation post. ↩︎

What I'm Reading: November 2024

2024-11-30T00:00:00Z

Not sure how much life-update I wanna put in these? Let’s see… I got over my COVID infection, the election happened, I began a gradual-but-long-anticipated life change, my partner and I went on a little vacation, I dyed my hair blue, and I started a new job.

Last time I did all sorts of sections including what I’m watching, but honestly it’s all about the reading for me.

Books

Magic’s Price by Mercedes Lackey. This is the third entry in a trilogy (previously I read the first two) that I had liked. Honestly I thought this final book was mostly dull and unsatisfying. It disposes of most of the cast we’ve built in favor of a handful of mysteries that I didn’t care much about, and its central driving antagonist sort of comes out of nowhere. I think the villain’s shadow should have loomed large over the whole trilogy, instead of a gesture in the first book and essentially a whisper in the second.
An Indigenous People’s History of the United States by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz. I didn’t realize how tight the focus of this book would be; it reasonably focuses quite tightly on the Indigenous People in its title rather than History of the United States. Frankly it’s a haunting work that lays out a well-documented program of genocide waged over hundreds of years across an entire continent. I’m not sure how someone could read this book and not come away with the conviction that settler colonialism must be opposed in all forms and that repatriation of lands to indigenous nations is both necessary and insufficient.
Dragon Ball Z by Akira Toriyama. I think I get Dragon Ball as a cultural force now. It’s funny that the anime has a reputation for slow pacing, because the manga rushes along at breakneck speed. The misogyny eases up a lot as we move to Z, from “disastrous” to “normal teenage boy material.” Now I know what a Goku is and how he’s different from a Gohan. Was that essential? Not at all, no. Was it fun? Hell yeah.
Too Like the Lightning, Seven Surrenders, The Will to Battle, and Perhaps the Stars by Ada Palmer. Most of my November reading was a slow descent into madness by way of Palmer’s Terra Ignota series. As I read the first book it dawned on me that this wasn’t the utopian science-fiction quartet that I had expected. Without spoiling too much you’re in for an unreliable (and maybe monstrous)^[1] protagonist-narrator; global intrigue; a world totally reorganized away from nation-states and borders; and philosophical questions of miracles, death, and faith. That’s really only the first book or two; after that things escalate.
- This series also smacks of Gender and Race and Eurocentrism, in ways that work and don’t. Certainly we can attribute some of this to our protagonist, but there are a couple passages I wish the author wrote differently. It’s not the worst “cis person writing Gender” I’ve read, far from it, but go in prepared for some bumps in the road.
Noor, by Nnedi Okorafor. A cyborg woman blows up her life and goes on the run in a medium-future Nigeria threatened by desertification. I think I might not finish it, which comes as a surprise. I remember thinking very highly of Okorafor’s Who Fears Death, but Noor thus far hasn’t gone down smoothly. I think it’s something about the prose? The dialogue doesn’t feel quite right? I can’t tell if the problem is me or the book.

Let’s just say Ada Palmer wrote the forward for an edition of Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, and it’s clearly an influence. ↩︎

Blades in the Dark... 2e?

2024-11-03T00:00:00Z

Blades in the Dark: Deep Cuts by John Harper is a new expansion for Blades in the Dark. It’s not marketed as a second edition of Blades; instead they call it

a treasure trove of lore, setting material, and alternative mechanics I’ve developed over the years for use in Blades campaigns.

Honestly I didn’t pay the lore and setting material much attention. I’ve never run or played a game in Doskvol, and that’s unlikely to change in the immediate future. But the “alternative mechanics”? I’m as excited about these as I have been by any RPG I’ve read in about a year and a half.

If you haven’t read or played Blades, I don’t think you’ll find much interesting here. If you have: everything that snagged in my Blades campaign looks to be fixed here. I strongly recommend check it out. There’s some small jank that I assume will get fixed (the PDF chapter bookmarks don’t work, at least in my reader; there’s a couple TODOs for links and such, things like that), but it’s well worth the price.

Harm

First up: all level one harm is now temporary^[1]. Now the GM can hand out low-level harms without kicking players over to the (often punishing) healing system. Harms still stack up and escalate as in the base game, but you have “infinite” level 1 harm slots. Level 1 harms are only upgraded once you receive the same harm twice. Getting “bruised” when you have “tired” just adds “bruised”, but getting “tired” a second time might upgrade your level 1 “tired” to a level 2 “exhausted”.

Also, there aren’t fixed penalties for harm anymore. Instead there’s a system where the GM can invoke harm, FATE-style, to introduce a consequence or complication. Players get XP if they accept or can spend stress to push through their pain. I like this because it’s less punishing, and I forgot to apply Harm penalties so often in Blades.

As far as I can tell, the old level 3 harm state (“you must spend stress to act at all”) is removed entirely. Removing it is great, because “you can’t play” is a pretty bad failure state for an RPG.

Trauma

The updates to trauma seem fairly minor; players can explicitly invoke trauma for consequences and XP instead of having an end-of-session XP trigger for it.

Equipment

There are now only two Load levels: Discreet and Conspicuous. It wasn’t always clear how to distinguish “light”, “normal”, and “heavy” load; I think “are you discreet or conspicuous?” is a much clearer choice. There’s also some additional rules tweaks and clarifications around heavy items, picking up new things on the score, and encumberance.

Downtime

The new downtime system is diceless, to remove the possibility of turns with poor rolls. This isn’t really something that ever bothered me as a GM or player, but the impetus makes sense to me.

The (complicated) Entanglements table is removed in favor of a list the GM chooses from when your Heat is high enough. I kinda like rolling Entanglements, so I may keep the old system instead.

Indulging your Vice now costs 1 coin and always clears your Stress. If you had more than 6, you overindulge. It also doesn’t cost a downtime activity (unless you roll the overindulgence which takes away an activity).

Healing now grants Tier+1 ticks to the healing clock. Level 0 crews will still have a long way to go to grind through injuries. However, there are new rules for hiring a physician or going to a hospital (which clears all injuries). I’m still not entirely sold on the healing clock, but removing the healing roll and adding a “wipe the slate clean” option goes a long way to fixing my problems with Blades’ healing.

Training is now how you spend XP rather than another way to gain it. That’s neat, I don’t feel strongly about it.

There’s now a side hustle downtime activity which generates 1 Coin or advances a long-term project. Previously Train was the sort of default, “I have no better ideas” option. Working a side job is more thematically and mechanically appropriate.

Action Threat Roll

The game’s core mechanic has been reframed from how Actions are resolved to how Threats are resolved. Scoundrels are assumed to succeed, but negative consequences may come to pass. “Position” has been reworked; “effect” remains but is not emphasized. Instead the GM lays out the threat, the player rolls, and then the result works much the same as in base Blades. A 6 avoids the threat, a 4/5 reduces it, and a 1-3 is the full threat.

If there’s more than one relevant threat, the player gets a bonus die per extra threat. Then they assign dice from their pool to each threat as they wish. This is sort of like a Devil’s Bargain in base Blades, but it’s even more like Otherkind Dice. I love that, because Otherkind Dice usually requires specific crafted experiences. The Threat Roll gives us a more improvisational approach to that mechanical framework.

“Controlled” situations now don’t call for a roll at all, because there’s no Threat. Awesome. “Desperate” situations treat a 4/5 the same as 1-3: full consequence. The only way to avoid a consequence in a Desperate situation is to roll a 6.

The game does mention that “failure” is an acceptable threat in some situations. It’s not that the scoundrels always succeed, but that we start with the assumption they do and only introduce failure if appropriate.

Push Yourself and Resistance

Pushing yourself before a roll to get more dice is cut entirely. Instead it’s been unified with the Resistance roll. After a roll is made, you can Push Yourself for more effect or to reduce a consequence level by one (a 1-3 becomes a 4/5; a 4/5 becomes a 6). You pick the appropriate Attribute (Insight, Prowess, Resolve) and roll its pool. Then you take stress like a normal Blades roll:

Result	Stress
1-3	3
4/5	2
6	1
Crit	0

No more “6 minus the highest die”, which was always a little clunky and made it easy to both avoid stress entirely or take a huge chunk of it.

Takeaways

None of these changes are drastic. Some are pretty similar to ideas floating around the Forged in the Dark sphere already. Taken together, though, I feel like this is a major streamlining of Blades towards its core ethos. Players take on the role of competent scoundrels in risky, dangerous situations and consequences ensue. I’m really excited to try them!

Also… I’m very curious to see how this impacts other games playing in the post-Apocalypse-World pond. The Threat Roll is sort of folding the already Blades-inspired 2400 back into storygame land. I hope to see creative designers take these tweaks and make all sorts of new Forged in the Dark games with them.

This is a common feature of houserules and hacks; it was maybe even suggested in the base game? ↩︎

Fixing my GPU

2024-10-27T00:00:00Z

Recently I noticed my desktop was struggling to run games that it should have no trouble with. My partner was getting severe frame drops playing Overcooked 2; Tactical Breach Wizards was running like a slideshow for me. What gives?

I checked Task Manager to see if there was a secret background process hogging all my GPU compute, to mine crypto or something. Nothing materialized. I did notice my GPU was at 96 degrees Celsius. That is too many degrees Celsius, especially for running Tactical Breach Wizards, at 1080p, on its lowest graphics setting. It explained the poor performance; the GPU was throttling to avoid generating more heat. My discovery also raised the question: “why the hell is my GPU getting so hot?”

A friend suggested I run the computer with the case opened up, to see if the fans were running. Reluctantly, I did just that. Due to my desk setup and my computer’s internal layout, I sort of had to lie on the floor and look up into the case with a flashlight. It was pretty annoying. I could see that the fans did not spin, even as GPU temperature spiked. I Googled around, and was forced to admit what everyone else on the planet has been saying for a year and a half: Google might suck now? I found it very hard to find useful information about GPU fans and their defects.

I considered giving up. My GPU is not new or powerful (it’s an NVIDIA 1050 Ti), and getting a replacement unit wouldn’t be that expensive. Honestly the only things that stopped me were e-waste guilt and worrying that the issue was with the motherboard (so a new GPU would have the same problem).

One online resource did suggest touching the center of the fan to see if it was hot. In that case the motor could be going, and generating waste heat instead of spinning the fan. With a metaphorical shrug I went ahead and tapped the fan’s center. It felt like normal, cool plastic. But it almost felt like… it was moving? I got back down on the floor and shined the flashlight at the GPU. Sure enough, it was spinning.

It’s been a couple days and my GPU is back to normal. I’m having no trouble running the demo for Metaphor: ReFantazio, let alone Tactical Breach Wizards. Maybe tapping the fan moved something that had been unseated back into place? I couldn’t say for sure, but at least it works now.

Moral of the story: try a little percussive maintenance before you give up on your hardware.

What makes a game slow?

2024-10-26T00:00:00Z

As the ICON campaign I’m playing in wraps up, I’m thinking about what makes games “slow.”^[1] I’ve come up with four distinct sources of slowness: pondering, friction, too-damn-much-to-do^[2], and inattentiveness. When I play a game, these all end up feeling the same (“wow, this game is dang slow”), but their causes and possible fixes are different.

Pondering: Time spent waiting for an active player to make a decision. The more often a single player is selected to decide something (e.g. strict initiative or turn orders, or a GM-type role in lots of games), the more often this will slow down play.
Friction: Time spent trying to get a single action done. Often this is looking up rules, debating rules, figuring out math, answering questions, etc. More complex games have more friction, but you can mitigate some of it with good book design.
Too-damn-much-to-do: Time spent working through the game itself. Sometimes a turn in a game is two decision and a roll of a die. Other times it’s moving six characters around a board, allocating ten points of metacurrency, deciding on two actions, and then resolving twelve different status effects. In the latter case, the game ixs slower, even if we’re sailing through each individual step at maximum speed.
Inattentiveness: Time spent waiting for an active player to re-immerse themself in a game. This is sort of the same as pondering (we’re waiting on someone to make a decision), but it’s different enough that I broke it out. Especially as games slow down, people start chatting or eating snacks or getting up to stretch. Then they have to come back and take a second to get ready to play, which further slows the game down. A vicious cycle we’re all guilty of participating in at some point or another.

For example, having played nearly 30 sessions I can say ICON does a good job at reducing friction compared to its peers^[3]. But as you gain interesting new powers, the possibility space of the game expands, and you can end up with some serious pondering. The same goes for some builds that gain lots of per-turn effects; the “too-damn-much-to-do” factor has climbed steadily through our play. My instinct when faced with a slow game is to remove friction, but that wouldn’t speed up our ICON play all that much. Sometimes there’s just too much game, maybe?

My full thoughts on ICON may or may not be forthcoming, but (as you can tell) I think the combat system doesn’t move quick enough. ↩︎
I wanted a snappy name for this one as well, but couldn’t come up with one. ↩︎
RPGs with grid-based fighting. Your D&Ds, your Pathfinders, even other Abbadon games like Lancer ↩︎

What would a sociable comment system look like?

2024-10-20T00:00:00Z

Natalie’s vision of a sociable web is exactly what I’m hoping for in the post-Cohost blog era. Her post got me thinking about what a comments system for an indie, blog-based web could look like.

Obviously the main attraction is leaving comments, which should be tree-style.
I also think it would be nice to have a Cohost-style like button^[1].
Posters should have a display name and a link to their homepage(s).
For abuse prevention reasons I think I’d want “all comments go into an approve queue” as the default or only behavior. Probably there’s some more anti-spam magic you’d want; that’s a losing game if you need to beat every spammer but I bet you can beat something like 80% of the spam with 20% of the effort.
I’d also like to have the ability to mute/block a poster across all sites in the comment network. The more sites that use the same comment network, the more useful mute/block becomes.
On the same token, cross-site signin would be nice. That way it’s pretty frictionless to like a post or leave a short comment, even on a blog you don’t frequent.

There are three main reasons I’m not planning on building this, even though I want it to exist:

You probably want a comment system to send email, so you know if your comment has been approved or you have replies. Sending email at any scale beyond personal seems like a bit of a headache.
I don’t want to be responsible for the social aspects. Technically I’m happy to spin up a server and provide a little support, but I don’t want to be making moderation decisions like “should we ban this user?” (outside the scope of my own blog).
I don’t want to market it. If I want the 15th standard to take off, I’d have to convince a lot of people to use it, and that seems like work I wouldn’t have fun doing.

Users can hit the like button and their like/unlike state is visible to them; no one sees a like counter, not even the owner of the blog; the owner of the blog has a notification feed for post likes. ↩︎

What's Up: October 2024

2024-10-11T00:00:00Z

I got COVID right at the end of September^[1], putting me out of commission for about a week. COVID infection and isolation means I’ve been reading less, coding less, going outside less, touching less grass, and being less social.

Now that I’m starting to recover, I’ve been dedicating most of my productive energy towards the final stages of my job search. Outside of the job search I’ve mostly looked at posts; unfortunately my premiere source of posts is no longer in business. I’m not having a very good autumn so far! It stinks because autumn is my favorite season.

Books

The Siege of Burning Grass: I found the first act intriguing, most of the book haunting and effecting, and the last stretch flat and stale. If there’s a sequel I’ll probably read it, but I think losing the last 10% or so would make the novel stronger overall.
Children of Memory: Of Tchaikovsky’s trilogy this is my least favorite (I think each book is slightly less compelling than its predecessor). This is still top-shelf sf though; it feels rare to hit both “compelling hard sci-fi” and “compelling character drama”. If you like spaceships and can stand to read about bugs, I strongly recommend picking up Children of Time and reading the sequels if it hooks you.
Magic’s Pawn: Gay Wizards are gonna get me through the 2024 Election. I get why people are wild about romantasy, even if this is just “fantasy that has romance.”
Magic’s Promise: I’m starting to think that it’s not going to go well for the gay wizards.

Comics

Dragon Ball: The first arc of Dragon Ball has a shocking amount of sexual harassment, which continues as background radiation throughout. Honestly I can’t recommend reading it, even though I loved Toriyama’s art. I’m unsure if I’ll go on to Z, which seems to be the portion that captured pop culture.
Hunter × Hunter: I’m halfway through the Chimera Ant arc of the anime with my roommate, but I’m isolating with COVID so I can’t watch it with him. I’ve been reading the manga instead and I’ve made it up to Greed Island. Some choppy season 1 anime pacing goes much smoother on the page, but overall I think I might prefer the anime?
Akane Banashi: Great art, extremely cute, love to see the tropes of a battle manga applied to traditional Japanese theater. The best manga recommendation I’ve gotten since I entered my comics era this year.

TV

Armored Trooper VOTOMS: I watched the final arc of VOTOMS the first day of my COVID isolation and it did not impress me.
Haibane Renmei: The first half is a cute angelgirl slice-of-life in an interestingly low-key fantasy setting. My partner and I paused this one because we got COVID, but it seems like the second half is going to have higher stakes and more “plot.” Next time I’ll probably have finished it and can give actual impressions.
The Haunting of Hill House: We watched this dubbed in French for my partner’s language practice. Sometimes I would start lip-reading the original English using the subtitles which gave me a weird vertigo-like sensation.
The show itself was fine, good pacing and scary effects. Thematically it almost works, but there are a few major swings missed in the last two episodes. Definitely clears the “better than laying sick in bed” bar.
Slow Horses, season 1: Brief digression first. Last year my partner and I watched the first three and a half seasons of Person of Interest. I had previously watched just seasons 4 and 5. The politics of that show are honestly disgusting; “anti-terrorist” stories from the 2010s hold up extremely poorly. The events of the last year have probably rendered Person of Interest permanently unwatchable. In contrast, I was pleasantly surprised that Slow Horses is a spy story without being a racist fever dream; instead it’s mostly a workplace drama about having incompetent coworkers and unlikeable bosses.
Madoka Magika: The lack of spoiler support in semantic HTML or in my blog’s styles will make this one hard to talk about. We’ve watched through episode 7 (though my partner has seen it before), and I’m surprised how obviously sinister Kyubey is from the beginning. I’m also surprised at how slow the pacing is in the first half.

Games

Tactical Breach Wizards: I started this one right before I got sick. It’s good! For some reason it makes my desktop chug; I think my GPU is dying? The desktop is in a shared space in the apartment so I haven’t been using it for the past two weeks.
Final Fantasy VI Advance: The only game I’ve been playing because it runs on my laptop and doesn’t require much brainpower. I’m playing on an emulator with the color and sound restoration patches, at the recommendation of a friend with more Final Fantasy experience. ATB is a fun system, it gives more spice to RPG combat than I expected.

Podcasts

The Prisoner’s Dilemma: A rewatch podcast of The Prisoner. Only one episode out so far, but it’s a good episode.
Media Club Plus: The cast of Friends at the Table watch/rewatch Hunter × Hunter (2011).
Blowback Season 5: Blowback is well-produced, well-researched, and universally harrowing. Season 5, which focuses on Cambodia, is no exception.
Shelved by Genre: Cameron Kunzelman, Michael Lutz, and Austin Walker talking about gay wizards is going to get me through COVID.

Projects

This website: I’ve revamped the home page and added some slight friendly touches, now that this is my main home on the web. Also, I now have h-entry support! Hell yeah! My next major step will be embed cards so these linkposts will be a little richer.
- I’m not 100% sure: do I want to use the HTML embeds provided by Mastodon and BlueSky, or do I want to do my own? Their HTML embeds produce very messy markup and rely on injected Javascript for styling. I would probably prefer to have one uniform embed style on my blog…
- Comments are coming soon™. The options that seem reasonable to me:
  - Use something like CommentBox or Komments. Comments would be injected entirely by scripts, and run by a third party service
  - Include a mailto link for a new email (like comments@) and build some scripts to manage it. Or even just do it manually; I don’t expect to have that much traffic.
  - No comments here, only on Mastodon and BlueSky (this would require cross-posting my blog to the protocol microbloggers, which I feel iffy about).
  - Please do email me at ryan@fools-pyrite.com if you have an opinion on site comments! Especially if you’ve tried one of my options already!
Some Obsidian plugins: one to help me with my weekly journal reflection, and one to help me log books as I finish them. They’re on my Github but not at all documented or suitable for other people to use.
Drowned Isles: The job search pressure has eased somewhat so I’ve been writing again. Nothing I want to show off publicly yet, but enough that I let my friends have a peak.

COVID Rambles

The receptionist at the urgent care where I got prescribed Paxlovid wasn’t wearing a mask (even though she knew I had COVID). For once I was more worried for the unmasked people around me than I was for myself; I think the KN95 I was wearing protected them adequately though.
The COVID vaccine bridge program to allow uninsured people to get the vax ended this August. Healthcare policy in the US remains disgusting.
I dodged both Paxlovid mouth and Paxlovid rebound; my partner got hit by both.

It was my first close encounter with SARS-nCoV-2; I’d like it to be my last. It probably won’t be though. ↩︎

Will There Be Apples?

2024-06-20T00:00:00Z

Let’s consider a game where player characters cook regularly, to resolve conflicts or scenes. During character creation, Alice selects the following ability:

Keep the doctor away: Whenever you prepare a dish that incorporates apples, choose one:

The flavor is surprising and unique

The apples stay crisp and don’t brown, no matter how long they’re exposed to air

The plating is visually arresting

And for the sake of the thought experiment, this is the only apple-related ability she’s taken. She’s excited to use it in play and everyone agrees it looks like a fun power. The game has no focus on fruit, and incorporates a variety of food-related equipment and skills. There’s a potential problem: will there be apples in this game? Because if Alice’s characters never come across any, then this ability won’t come into play. It still exerts a gravity on the game, but Alice really would like to get to play with her apples.

If the game is GM-less, maybe Alice can conjure the apples into existence herself. Problem solved!

A game with a referee may make this a little trickier. Alice can simply verbalize her desire for apples^[1] during Session 0 (or at any point in play, really), but that may be as far as her narrative authority extends. If the referee is attentive maybe they’ll write “apples for Alice” in their session notes. Then later, if they remember what the hell that means, they’ll prepare some apples in a future session. Maybe the characters will be tasked with making cider, or maybe they’ll encounter apples for sale in a market, or run across a haunted orchard. Problem solved? Well, only inasmuch as the referee has energy to do this for every player. Maybe multiple times for every player! When I’m the ref, this quickly spirals beyond my ability to keep easy track.

Setting pre-game expectations can help. That can take the form of a referee explaining a campaign pitch: in a post-apocalyptic campaign with no access to fresh fruit, an apple might be hard to come by. If Alice knows that the game will be Mad-Max-inspired, maybe she won’t take the apple ability because she knows that it won’t be useful. Alternatively, if the group is building the world collaboratively, then we’re back to our GM-less solution (Alice adds apples to the world) or our referee’d solution (Alice asks the referee to include them). Obviously this isn’t foolproof: a campaign set in a sprawling forest may or may not have apples. It’s hard to say for sure.

Flagging-based strategies to solve our apple problem all feel like coping mechanisms to me, ways to work around the fundamental tension of traditional RPGs^[2]. They really boil down to “just GM good”^[3]. For my project the Drowned Isles, I find this conceptually unsatisfying. How can I spend effort beforehand to make refereeing the campaign easier and more fun? I think my ideal solution is to attack the problem at its root: the ruleset. For example, we could generalize our earlier ability:

Whenever you prepare a dish that incorporates fruit, choose one:

The flavor is surprising and unique

The fruit stay crisp and fresh, no matter how long they’re exposed to air

The plating is visually arresting

In this case we lose some flavor^[4], but now Alice’s character has a much greater chance of using her ability. Often I’m okay with that compromise, but sometimes I’m not.

We can also grant players enough narrative authority to “do their thing”, even in a referee’d game. Maybe our player-characters have a pouch they can produce any ingredient from, once a session. Or maybe they have a signature ingredient they always have access to. Or maybe there are some rules for sourcing arbitrary ingredients, but only when you’re in a bustling market town. We’ve got options! No more no-apple campaigns!

I used to assume that if a player took an ability, they wanted an opportunity to use it. Sandra of Idiomdrottning points out that a player may be expressing a totally opposite desire. They may be tired of performing poorly when making apple dishes, and would be perfectly satisfied if not a single apple appeared in the campaign. I find that this is rarely the case, but explicit communication can solve the problem better than assumptions can. ↩︎
Players create a character sight-unseen, who has more knowledge of the world than they do, and knowledge of the world is mediated exclusively through the referee. ↩︎
One of many short phrases my roommate-and-partner-in-crime and I use to talk about RPG design. “Just GM Good” is any solution to a problem with a game that relies on skill or effort of the referee, rather than making their life easier. ↩︎
The whole blog post is worth it for this pun. ↩︎

If You Can't Simplify, Reference

2024-05-03T00:00:00Z

A few sessions into the ICON campaign I’m playing in, I was struck by how much smoother the game played than its d20 cousins. There are drastic simplifications and streamlining choices made throughout the game text, but ICON’s true advantage is in its layout.

In ICON, there are five different types of movement and a few types of movement-impairing effects. All characters have access to standard moves, which allow them to move a certain number of grid squares. Movement can be taken at any point within a turn, but it can’t be interrupted and resumed (unlike in D&D 5e, where movement is a pool that can be expended between other actions). Three effects increase the cost of moving: difficult terrain, engagement with foes, and terrain height. Difficult terrain is a per-square modifier which increases the cost to exit by +1 movement; spaces adjacent to foes work the same way. Moving to a higher space costs movement equal to the height difference. These are all pretty easy to remember and straightforward.

Where we’ll run into trouble is when we start stacking exceptions:

Dash is a special movement type that ignores engagement (but not difficult terrain or height)
Fly ignores engagement, terrain, and all obstructions
Teleport instantly moves a character from one square to another (so it’s not quite movement)
Rush movement makes the character unstoppable and immune to all damage
- Unstoppable characters are immune to statuses, cannot be moved by foes, and ignore engagement
- I don’t think rush affects difficult terrain or terrain height, but I’m not 100% sure

Got all that? The cherry on top is rampart: “foes cannot enter or exit a space affected by a rampart effect by dashing, flying, or teleporting” (page 104). Both PC and enemy tank characters often apply rampart to the area around them.

How is the game playable with five movement types that all intersect differently with four different obstructions? The answer is the “combat glossary.” The game sets aside four pages to quickly define every bolded keyword, even if its canonical definition is elsewhere in the book. During play someone will say something like “can I teleport out of rampart?” or “does fly trigger vigilance?” and someone else can instantly jump to that section of the PDF and consult the rules^[1]. This glossary also isn’t the only place ICON sets aside space to redefine terms. Each combat class and sub-class (called “job”) has a quick review of relevant rules, like rampart for the tanky Stalwart or dash for the rogueish Vagabond.

Reference Lightning Round

From some games I’ve played, here are other reference materials that have made an easy-of-play difference!

In my first few sessions as Director, I relied heavily on this type-matchup chart from Armour Astir: Advent:

Likewise, when I was a baby GM running Blades in the Dark as my first game, the inkblot phases-of-play were invaluable:

Lots of John Harper games are really good about this actually, here’s a chart from Agon that clears up some fiddly GM rules for assembling a dice pool:

If you have favorite reference materials or layout decisions that you want to leave as a comment, shoot me an email, ryan@fools-pyrite.com.

Equivalent moments in Starfinder could take minutes of searching through the rules (often elided with a GM ruling, because we’d rather be wrong than waste time being right). ↩︎

First Impressions: ICON

2024-03-21T00:00:00Z

This week I played my first session of ICON, Massif Press’s tactical fantasy RPG. It’s my usual group less two players, so that makes one GM and then four of us on the other side of the table. So far we’ve done character creation, introductions, a morsel of narrative play, and a few hours of combat. At this point I can give some early impressions.

The book is still very much in an alpha state (as indicated on the itch page, which describes the game as a “playtest”). Color is used to differentiate elements in the text, which is an accessibility issue^[1]. There are a couple terms we’ve run into with conflicting definitions, such as pierce (does it ignore armor and weak, armor and vigor, or all three?) and regeneration (does it cure you or give you vigor?). No character sheets are provided, though we’re using third-party sheets built into our VTT of choice. I can’t imagine that these sorts of layout or editing issues will make it into the final product, but they are true of the book as it exists today.

ICON is divided into four sections (called “books”): one for narrative play, one for combat, one for adventuring, and one for foes. I can’t speak to the GM-facing portions like the custom rules in the adventure section, or pretty much any of the foes. The player-facing sections are all readable, though the book’s navigability is mixed at best.

Neither the narrative nor adventure rules are much to write home about. The narrative rules are a stripped-down version of Blades in the Dark, with some tweaks to lean away from the gritty and punishing design of the original game towards a lighter or more heroic tone. We haven’t engaged with them too deeply yet, but I’m pretty confident our experience playing Blades will transfer directly. While I’m not too impressed with the Blades clone here, I am glad to see significant improvement over LANCER. The out-of-combat pilot rules in LANCER seem basically superfluous to me, an RPG coat of paint over a wargame core^[2]. ICON provides much more scaffolding for play than its older, mech-ier cousin.

There’s a provided setting, which I don’t feel strongly about. The game doesn’t make any stumbles (boring lore dumps, glaring racism, etc) and does an okay job of setting up a world for adventure and heroics. There’s some stock humans and various animal-folk, and they’re living in a post-post-apocalyptic world dealing with the ruins of an older one. Thus far I would toss everything I’ve been given in favor of Songs for the Dusk, which does “hopeful post-post-apocalyptic Forged in the Dark” in a way I find more interesting.

The combat rules are where ICON distinguishes itself. The game is honest about its abstraction, kind of like a classic JRPG. Combat takes place in a square gridded area. Each grid square has a given height, with no possibility for overhangs (easing the logistical challenge of terrain building). Ranges and speeds are given in squares, not distances, and no euclidian calculations are ever required. All the finer details of reality are sanded away, in favor of a mostly-unambiguous tactics game.

All the combat rules are delightfully non-fiddly. You don’t roll and track initiative; it’s a simple snake draft instead^[3]. Save are a flat d20 against a DC of 10, and attack rolls are a flat d20 against your opponent’s Defense. Neither of these require arithmetic or calculation. Defenses are mercifully low compared to other D&D-derivatives, with only the most agile player characters at a Defense of 10 (others as low as 6), so most attacks land. Even if you do miss, you deal a little damage. These are all little things, but they add up to big wins for clarity of play and quality of life.

A nice set of combat abstractions is just the foundation, of course. Where ICON’s combat shines are its Abilities. Every character gets two action points to spend a turn; they can either spend them on a basic ability or one of dozens of bespoke combat abilities. For example, here’s one I made great use of in our session:

CAVALIERE

1 action, Attack
+1 boon
It is not enough to rudely and plainly strike your foe down. One must make it entertaining.
Effect: Dash 3, then dash 1 space to the side of your movement. This movement ignores all movement penalties and has phasing. However:

You must move if able

You must move as far as possible

You cannot move diagonally during this movement.

Attack: On hit: [D]+fray. Miss: fray.
Effect: Foe is dazed.
Finishing Blow or Slay: Summon a bomb

The upside is that each ability has a clear-but-interesting procedure. There’s no linear fighters and quadratic wizards here^[4]! The glaring downside is the weight of the jargon. Action, attack, boon, effect, dash, phasing, [D], fray, dazed, finishing blow, slay, and bomb are all referring to specific game mechanics^[5]. These keywords aren’t intuitive either: “finishing blow” doesn’t refer to an attack that finishes off an opponent (that would be “slay”). To its credit, book does its best to provide each class with reminders of the relevant rules for its abilities, but this doesn’t help when trying to get the hang of the game. We had more than a few exchanges that went something like

Player: And now the weird slime guy is dazed.
GM: What’s dazed do again?
Player: Uhhh, that sounds like your problem.
Sound of everyone scrolling through the PDF

Time will tell if this is a new-player problem, or a complex-game problem. My guess is that it’s a little bit of both.

I’m also curious how character growth will feel. In the last few games I’ve played, characters have grown painfully unwieldy as they gain advances. Either the characters grow so fictionally and mechanically powerful that nothing interesting can stand in their way (my experience in Fellowship 2e and Armour Astir) or they grow so mechanically complex that keeping track of what everyone can do is impossible (my experience in Starfinder, or any D&D-style game with spellcasters). Complexity growth seems pretty tame in ICON - even at higher levels, players can only have up to six combat abilities available to them in any given adventure. We’ll see about power growth, though!

Currently I’m optimistic for the game and campaign, and eager to play more sessions as my horrible little jester that I’ve created.

Though one that will be fixed in a future release, according to the author. ↩︎
This is in contrast to the post-3e era of D&D and its clones. Those games claim to be all things to all people, but their pages are stuffed with interesting toys for combat and vague gestures at everything else. ICON and LANCER get points for honesty: there’s rules for fighting stuff and there’s other rules, and the text doesn’t pretend to be interested in unifying them. ↩︎
A player takes their turn, then a foe. Alternate until the end of a round or one side is depleted. Switch which side goes first each round. ↩︎
My understanding is that this is in the lineage of D&D 4e, which I’ve never read or played. Interested to hear from folks who have! ↩︎
This game has so many keywords. It’s sort of unreal, even the Blades end-of-session XP triggers get a keyword (“Ideals”). ↩︎

The Drowned Isles: A Scrap Game

2024-03-12T00:00:00Z

I’ve got an RPG campaign burning a hole in my pocket. It’s a fantasy adventure setting, with a little world of my own devising seeded with smaller adventures and modules to ease on prep. The only problem is that none of the rulesets I’ve played or run have hit the vibe I’m looking for in this game. So instead I’m going to cobble together a ruleset^[1] I find acceptable, out of other games, blog posts, and spare parts. Along the way I hope to blog through the process, because it’s fun and might even be useful for other people embarking on similar projects.

Setting Highlights

The setting is a time impossibly far off into the future where “everything has been tried, and everything has failed.” What is inherited is a total mess of human history: relics of all sorts, magical technology, and a completely muddled history. This is my excuse for having Atlantis bump up against an industrial port city which is uneasily eyeing the neighboring wizard college
There’s some kind of hand-waved-magitech (nanomachines or something, idk) called Aether which permeates the world. Anyone with sufficient training can tap into the Aether to achieve superhuman feats
Climate change raised sea levels to ruinous heights, but further effects seem to have been mitigated or halted by Aether.
Storms and the ocean seem to have an odd effect on Aether; hurricanes often bring a host of other magical effects.
The titular Drowned Isles are an archipelago coated in a magical fog, which sometimes release Old World wonders and horrors onto the mainland
Spreading through the forests that coat the mainland is a fungal hivemind called The Garden. Sometimes symbiotic, sometimes parasitic, sometimes outright hostile. Its origins and goals are unknown
The game starts in Twill, a coastal city that is the nearest port to the Drowned Isles
Players take on the role of Wardens^[2] of Twill, sort of a catch-all adventurer social role. Their responsibility is kind of like a coast guard: protect sea-based travelers, investigate disturbances upriver or out in the bay, and brave the fog surrounding the Drowned Isles when necessary

Inspirations

Hopefully this mélange helps capture the vibe I’ll be going for:

The Northeast Woodlands: the climate, the geography, the wildlife, the pre-Columbian civilizations, the modern urban centers
The Arles Amphitheater, which was a Roman theater that became a fort town during the Middle Ages
Spring in Hieron and Twilight Mirage, by Friends at the Table
The Steerswoman series by Rosemary Kirstein, and to a lesser degree the Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe
A Wizard of Earthsea and Always Coming Home, by Ursula K LeGuin
Debt by David Graeber and The Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wengrow
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
The Quiet Year by Avery Alder
Dead Astronauts, Ambergris, and Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer
Caves of Qud by Freehold Games
Dark Souls 2 by From Software
Unjust Depths by Madiha Santana

Also I’ve got Hunter x Hunter on the mind because I’m watching along with Media Club Plus.

Die Rolling

In the spirit of “everything has been tried”, what rules can I ~~steal~~ borrow for rolling some dice? Without even looking around I’m pretty sure I want a basic “core” rule to fall back to, one that isn’t too fancy. Just enough to make adjudicating uncertain situations a little easier. The games I initially considered were Stillfleet, 2400, Blades in the Dark, the GLOG, and Cairn. Usually I’d throw a PbtA in there, but my last two campaigns were Fellowship 2e and Armour Astir, so I’m looking for a change. I like any game where I don’t have to set the DC, which makes roll-under or a dice pool appealing. But roll-under was unsatisfying for my group when we played Whitehack 3e^[3], and I’m arbitrarily avoiding dice pools for this game. I also want to avoid having any kind of arithmetic modifier, which leaves me with dice-as-stat. Looking good for 2400, right?

Eh? Sorta? I ran a fun one-shot session with a lightly modified 24XX game, but felt myself struggling a bit with the mixed success option. When the game isn’t providing interesting support for a middle option (like moves in a PbtA game), I think I prefer a binary result. That knocks 24XX out of the running.

For a moment it seemed like I might need to have an original thought and do some design work. Fortunately I was reminded of Brighter Worlds, which elegantly fulfills my criteria. Time to ~~steal~~ take inspiration! As of right now, characters have four attributes (Toughness, Agility, Finesse, and Presence^[4]). Between these players assign a d4, two d6, and one d8. When rolling an attribute test, a four or higher is a success. If I have any situational modifier or boost-your-roll mechanic, I’ll use a dice chain^[5] just like Brighter Worlds.

What’s next

This is definitely the kind of game where characters have fun abilities. Currently I’m in the prior-art-gathering stage, looking at both fantasy games and superhero RPGs. I want to thread the needle between “cool” and “game-breaking”^[6]. So far I’ve been surprised by how hard that is! I’ll probably blog about that process soon.

Books: January and February 2024

2024-03-01T00:00:00Z

Inspired by Throne of Salt’s bookposts, here’s what I’ve been reading in the first two months of the year.

January

The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera

What a book! A brilliant second-world fantasy about a super-powered protagonist trying to live a normal life in a city poised to explode. It’s a city novel, it’s a coming of age novel, it’s a fantasy novel. It’s about parental abuse, it’s about dating shitty rich men, it’s about border violence and incarceration. It also loses a lot of narrative momentum in the third act, and leaves behind the parts of the novel I found most compelling. I still come away strongly recommending it.

Moon of Crusted Snow, by Waubgeshig Rice

Read this because a friend liked it, but unfortunately it didn’t click with me. The prose and dialogue did nothing for me, and the characters were just fine. Events moved too slow in the beginning and too fast at the end. It was short and propulsive enough that I got through the whole thing though.

Empress of Forever, by Max Gladstone

DNF, bailed after three chapters. The back-of-the-book comparison of the protagonist to Steve Jobs and Elon Musk should have tipped me off. 2019 was a different time but not that different of a time. I hope that the book subverts this whole benevolent billionaire thing later in the story, but I’m not going to find out.

No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy

Read the whole thing. Didn’t like it. None of the characters grabbed me and the prose was unremarkable.

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, by Hayao Miyazaki; Volumes 6-7

It’s wild how much of this manga there is, and how little of it shows up in the movie adaptation. The manga is every bit as evocative as the film, with a far expanded story and scope. I just wish the art was a little more readable; there are one too many characters who I have trouble telling apart, and action quickly becomes a mess of characters with no relation in space. (I would say the same thing about Berserk’s fights, though; take my opinion with a grain of salt.) Overall I found the film more compelling because it was tighter and easier to follow, but I am tempted to re-read this whole manga at some point.

The Light at the End of the World, by Siddhartha Deb

DNF, but I might come back to it. My partner took this out from the library and I decided to read it after xyr. It’s not an easy read by any means, and I stalled out about halfway. Partly this is because I’m working with a middling knowledge of Indian history. When the narrative jumps to Bhopal in November 1984, I need to check whether the Union Carbide disaster has already happened or is due to happen in the future. During an anti-Sikh race riot, a crowd is exhorted to “Go answer the five shots from Bean Singh’s revolver, the twenty-five from Satwant Singh’s carbine.” I had a pretty good idea that this violence was related to the assassination of Indira Gandhi, but I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even consider that they were the assassins. These bits of implicit knowledge were constant low-grade stumbling points for me. The second POV character is also gut-churningly vile, which prompted me to put the book down for a while. I hope to come back to it in March.

February

Free People’s Village, by Sim Kern

This is a book I bought on a whim from a local bookstore, in the employee recommendation section. The premise hooked me: in 2000, Al Gore wins the election. His presidency is defined by a “War on Climate Change” which transforms the landscape of America into a superficially climate-friendly future. (He also prevents 9/11). In the distant year of 2020, our protagonist stumbles into a boiling-over conflict between local leftist elements and the neoliberal administration of Houston.

Unfortunately I don’t think either the story or the speculation live up to my expectations. The characters felt pretty one-note and thin, which bothered me my whole way through. Also, the transformation that occurs in alt-America is totally backwards to me. In the story, Americans don’t drive cars anymore. Instead they use mag-lev transit to and from the suburbs, or ride bikes for intra-urban transport. The dirty secret is that most power is still supplied by petro-chemical means. Isn’t that backwards? I think the ultimate faux-environmentalist America would be solar panels and electric cars, without any abatement of car culture. The cost of rare earth minerals to build batteries or the damage of pouring asphalt to make roads then provide that dark secret the narrative needs.

How High We Go In the Dark, by Sequoia Nagamatsu

DNF. Picked this up because I saw it at the bookstore and the author had blurbed The Saint of Bright Doors. The second chapter is about euthanizing children who have contracted a lethal virus. Maybe I’ll pick this back up if I’m ever in the right headspace.

Beautiful World, Where Are You, by Sally Rooney

I picked up some Sally Rooney at the library because I wanted to get outside my comfort zone. Usually I’m knee-deep in speculative fiction, and rarely venture into “literary” fiction. My January detour into McCarthy didn’t work out well, but Rooney proved a much better pick. I devoured the book over the course of two days, barely putting it down. The characters are painfully real, total disasters flailing through life and deeply anxious about their future. Reading the Wikipedia page for the Bronze Age Collapse while anxious about climate change? They’re just like me fr

Circe, by Madeline Miller

Miller’s previous work, The Song of Achilles, was super popular. I read it and thought it was decent, but a little bit… thin? Where Song feels like a retread of The Iliad, Circe takes a side character from The Odyssey and traces her entire life. Along the way we get a look at familiar gods and demigods from an outside, disempowered perspective. The actions and attitudes of these heroic figures are horrific, which was a real shock for someone raised on Percy Jackson books. Soon I began to dread seeing a familiar name, or recognizing a mythological story as it was told.

It’s just such a good book. The witchcraft is great. The characters are heartbreaking. It makes me care about a mythical figure I haven’t thought about in years. Easily the best mythological fantasy novel I’ve ever read.

Echopraxia, by Peter Watts

The sequel to Blindsight (though sort of a prequel? the end of Blindsight references events that occur during and after Echopraxia) which builds on one of the weirdest sci-fi settings I’ve ever encountered. A rundown: vampires used to be real, they were a hominid species that preyed on humans, and they have a totally different brain architecture than humans do. While they can’t see a right-angle without suffering seizures, they are also hyper-rational and extremely intelligent. It’s a lot.

One thing that Blindsight excelled at was creating a sense of incredible menace. The vampire and post-human crewmembers feel well beyond the capability of the baseline human, but even they struggle to comprehend the first contact they’re supposed to investigate. It is their competence that sells the creeping horror of the situation. Echopraxia struggles a little here for me, because our protagonist is totally lost for most of the narrative. When the book reveals who has been orchestrating the events and why, I sort of shrugged in a “sure, why not?” way. In a similar moment in Blindsight, I think I physically leapt to my feet in electric surprise. That’s sort of how I feel about the novel as a whole: like its predecessor, but less.

The Library at Mount Char, Scott Hawkins

What is this book? It’s a fantasy novel. It’s set in a hazily contemporary America. It centers on nigh-immortal beings in titanic struggle for control of the world. It’s a family drama about cycles of extreme abuse. It was compelling, strange, and I’m not sure I recommend it.

Normal People, Sally Rooney

Reading Rooney’s work backwards does it a disservice, I think. Beautiful World, Where Are You achieves heights that Normal People doesn’t quite for me. Judged on its own merits, I still fell in love with the characters and felt my heart break at their avoidable-yet-inevitable tragedies. Also someone pointed out to me that Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow has like, the exact same structure as this book? Which is also the weakest part (imo) of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, but it works really well here.

I Played: For the Queen

2024-02-23T00:00:00Z

For the Queen, by Alex Roberts, made for the smoothest oneshot I’ve ever played. It took less than five minutes to jump into play, and the whole game wrapped up in under an hour. At no point does the game stop to ask you to come up with a name, or describe an elaborate backstory, or act out a scene. There’s really just one mechanic: draw, read prompt, answer prompt.

The game takes the form of a single deck of cards. The rules are cards (the first dozen or so cards in the deck, intended to be read aloud in a circle). The fourteen included illustrations of various Queens are cards. There’s an X Card. The rest of the cards are prompts. No extra materials are required. This has the neat side effect of making it super portable; I stuck it in my sling bag on a whim and almost forgot I was carrying it. Once we wanted to play, all it took was opening the deck and taking turns reading the rule cards. Then we were set to tell the story of a treacherous journey.

Our group discussed nothing about the Queen beforehand, other than choosing her appearance. We didn’t even name our characters before drawing the first set of prompts. In a hobby where my default mode is two-to-four hour marathons fueled by meticulous preparation, this was a breath of fresh air. After our first complete round, we had discovered that our party consisted of a master tailor, a disgruntled advisor, a ceremonial houseplant, a political exile, and a newspaper reporter. Over time it came out that the exile was actually the Queen’s son, the tailor newly elevated after their master had been executed, and the advisor plotting the Queen’s downfall. Some of this was directly prompted by the game, and some was invented by the players. When we reached the last card in play…

The Queen is under attack, do you defend her?

…all but one of us betrayed the Queen. The formerly exiled prince took up a sword to defend his mother and was struck down; the advisor was killed by the attack she helped engineer. The master tailor, tipped off by the advisor, slipped into the night. The houseplant was taken as loot by enemy soldiers. The reporter broke the story of the Queen’s capture back home. And that’s it!

With just one session, I can’t make any definitive statement about For the Queen. I’m not sure how many times the magic trick would work. Even in our one game, some cards felt a little repetitive (one character started with a prompt asking why they have already betrayed the Queen, and later received another asking why they hated the Queen). Maybe repeat play sessions would fail to recapture the original spirit as prompts grow familiar, but at least right now I’d gladly play again. Playing with just prompts cuts away crunchy mechanics, scene-setting, and even dialogue from gaming. What you’re left with is just decision-making: how do I respond to this prompt? And eventually, do I betray the Queen?

Understanding the Line

2024-02-16T00:00:00Z

In a 2010 blog post, John Harper argued that custom moves in Apocalypse World have a danger of “crossing the line” between player and MC roles. I’ve read it before, but only recently come to appreciate the actual implications of the division between the player roles. To quote the relevant passage from Apocalypse World itself (on page 109 of the first edition):

Apocalypse World divvies the conversation up in a strict and pretty traditional way. The players’ job is to say what their characters say and undertake to do, first and exclusively; to say what their characters think, feel and remember, also exclusively; and to answer your questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings. Your job as MC is to say everything else: everything about the world, and what everyone in the whole damned world says and does except the players’ characters.

This makes perfect sense. In fact, it makes so much sense that I sorta skipped reading it my first time through the game. What I understood was “players decide what their characters do, and the MC decides everything else”. And isn’t that how all games with referees work, more or less? After finding myself drawn to Apocalypse World’s social conflict rules, and disappointed by other games’, I found myself coming back to this division. The MC, and not the game rules, decide what all the NPCs say and do. How does that compose with the game’s social mechanics? Let’s take a look.

In Apocalypse World, you’d use the move “go aggro” when a character is threatening or intimidating someone. In the second edition it reads as follows:

When you go aggro on someone, roll+hard. On a 10+, they have to choose:

Force your hand and suck it up.

Cave and do what you want.

On a 7–9, they can choose 1 of the above, or 1 of the following:

Get the hell out of your way.

Barricade themselves securely in.

Give you something they think you want, or tell you what you want to hear.

Back off calmly, hands where you can see.

I was surprised that even on a 10+, your target doesn’t have to cave. Even more surprising is that on a 7-9, they can barricade themself safely away from you. After all, isn’t the pattern of moves in Apocalypse World that the player succeeds on any hit, and suffers no consequences on a 10+? From a certain point of view, this isn’t success (you didn’t get what you want). From another, it is: you succeeded at being aggressive and intimidating. How your target responds is still up to the player controlling them. Their options are very limited on a 10+, but a little broader on a 7-9.

Compare this to the Bully rules in Starfinder (the D&D I had nearest to hand, but similar rules exist in any rules-heavy D&D):

You can use Intimidate to bully a creature to temporarily change its attitude to helpful […] The DC of this check is equal to either 10 + your opponent’s total Intimidate skill bonus, or 15 + 1-1/2 × the opponent’s CR, whichever is greater. If you succeed, the creature gives you information it has that you want, takes actions that do not endanger it, or grants limited assistance that you request, but does so under duress. Such a change in attitude lasts for 1d6 × 10 minutes. At the end of this time, the creature’s attitude toward you becomes unfriendly. If you fail the check by 5 or more, the creature’s attitude becomes unfriendly, or hostile if it was already unfriendly. If the creature becomes unfriendly due to a failed check, it is likely to try to deceive you or otherwise hinder your goals.

Here the decision has been reduced entirely to a mathematical formula. The quality of the threat, the setting in which it is made, the relative standing of the two characters involved, or any other factors don’t come into play. Or maybe they do come into play, as modifiers to a d20 roll. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a table in the book somewhere for how status or weaponry should factor into social engagements. Either way, the result of the roll itself is truth: you get what you want if the sum of your modifier and roll are greater than the target number.

By contrast, Apocalypse World places factors like “how scary is this threat” outside the roll entirely. As we saw, a player’s result determines how the MC may respond, but not how they must. A failed roll puts the result totally in the hands of the MC; the target of the threat might retaliate, or escape, or even cooperate with their own agenda. Even on a 10+, the MC may call the player’s bluff if the character believes the threat to be particularly weak. The text constrains players’ choices, but doesn’t dictate the results. Because, as we established at the beginning, that’s the role of the players and MC. They say what their characters do.

For another example, we can look at “sway someone” from Apocalypse World: Burned Over:

When you try to sway someone to your side or your way of thinking, roll+Cool. On a 10+, they have to choose: set reserve and skepticism aside and go along with you, or else explain to you why they must refuse. On a 7–9, if they don’t want to go along with you or refuse, they can choose to ask you for evidence, time, a compromise, or some concrete assurance; they must go along with you if you provide it.

The move guides the conversation towards a decision without taking choice away from the players. If the MC finds your reasoning unconvincing, they have some options with how they respond. Each outcome propels the game forward: if a character refuses and offers a reason, that’s an implicit opportunity to change their mind or learn more about them. If they ask for an assurance, then you have to find or provide it. There’s no need to tinker with the probability when someone is especially weak-willed or closed-hearted. The die roll determines how cool the PC is, the move presents the options, and the MC decides what the world does in response.

This distinction seems to be lost in a lot of PbtA games I’ve played, which I think is a shame! Whatever rules I come up with for my next campaign will definitely ~~steal~~ be inspired by this pattern from Apocalypse World. Maybe in a future post I’d like to dive back into that opening quote about the players’ responsibility, specifically “to answer [the MC’s] questions about their characters’ lives and surroundings”.

Rewriting Fellowship's "Get Away"

2022-06-05T00:00:00Z

This year I’ve been playing Fellowship 2e, a fantasy adventure RPG that’s Powered by the Apocalypse, and I have a few gripes with an otherwise great game. Since session 1, I’ve felt like the core move Get Away needs re-writing, and I decided to take a stab at it.

The contents of this post are licensed under CC-BY-SA. The excerpt from Fellowship is used under the same license.

The relevant move:

When you need to get somewhere out of reach or out of sight, tell us where you’re going and roll +Grace. If you have the Clumsy tag, you take -1 to Get Away. On a 10+, choose two. On a 7-9, choose one:

You get there quickly, avoiding any harm along the way.

You get there quietly, drawing no attention.

You grab someone nearby and bring them along with you.

Two things bother me. First, I think “You grab someone nearby and bring them along with you” has only been picked a handful of times in ten sessions of play at my table. It’s just not very useful in most situations. The other is the move’s use of “negative choices”; the player is choosing things that don’t happen, rather than things that do. This can put the GM in an awkward situation: if you don’t choose “drawing no attention”, does that necessarily mean you do draw attention? Does it depend on the situation?

Fortunately, I read a Gauntlet post by Jeremy Strandberg, author of the upcoming Stonetop, a little while ago:

So if you’re going to use moves that have you chose “avoid negative” options, you kind of have to assume that some players/GMs will take it one way, and others will take it another, and ask yourself if you’re okay with either interpretation.

Or you can make it clear via the move’s text which you intend. A few ways to do that. You can set the default in the “body” of the move and then let choices counter/add to the default. I think this works well for moves that mix and match “positive” and “avoid negative” choices.

[…]

Personally, I generally try to avoid moves with “__ doesn’t happen” choices. I find that moves are cleaner and easier to understand when the choices are “positive” (as in: pick things that do happen, good or bad) rather than “negative” (as in: picking things that don’t happen).

With that in mind, I thought about the move. It’s not hard to imagine this being a “positive” list (as in ‘pick things that happen’, not ‘things that are positive’), at least for the first two options. The third is a little harder, but I think with a little tweaking it could work. Here’s what I’m running now:

When you need to get somewhere out of reach or out of sight, tell us where you’re going and roll +Grace. If you have the Clumsy tag, you take -1 to Get Away. On any hit, you get where you’re going; on a 7-9, choose one:

You take a treacherous route, and take damage along the way

You leave yourself open to being spotted or trailed

You leave subtly or suddenly, with your allies behind and none the wiser. You cannot choose this option while working alone

I see a few advantages. Importantly, this move is just friendlier to players. Often something that requires a character Get Away can also be Overcome (Fellowship’s catch-all move for avoiding harm). Overcome’s 10+ condition leaves the character perfectly fine; why not the same for Get Away? The new move also makes the outcome clear: on a 7-9, the player chooses something bad that happens, rather than taking one possible option off the table. You can either be damaged, followed, or abandon your allies. I chose to make the last option sting a little more, and also close off its use in solo scenarios.

This isn’t the only tweak I’ve made to Fellowship, and I may have more to say about my ongoing game and the hacks I’ve made later. For now, if you use this in your own game, let me know!

Fool's Pyrite

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January

The Saint of Bright Doors, by Vajra Chandrasekera