Pink Potatoes: A New Play review'd

• a long time ago I wrote, if absolutely obscurely, about the pittsburgh surrealist play scene as being a stand-in for the only solution in the post-trump reality. How to deal with the rise of facism? Suck on my butt!
• If the solution here actually is, ultimately, a descent into madness that may or may not actually correspond to a real solution in the facist reality-- isn't that escapism?
• The play ends with the respective members of society escaping from earth in total to the planet of spiders, helped along by the mother-ly (real baby literally attached) force of the wind.
• Is it okay that this message corresponds to a giving up on earth entirely?
• I think perhaps we must follow those lines of grief that come up on our faces, as a discussion of alternate realities at all is perhaps, the ultimate solution (excuse me) to Facism™. 

But what is an alternate reality? We assume that those who beg to differ from the mainstream have a social debt they refuse to pay. Always some kind of retribution along the path to the grave, one, and two-- an escapism in our imaginations which, we must hope, is querulously "real". 

I live a life of constant dread and sucidial thinking, interrupted occasionally, with the help of drugs and perhaps, art, by the FOMO-laden minefields exactly depicted in this production. Touching on a world better than myself, with those artists with their brazen sexuality and good work and better lives. The grass is always greener but I think the point is that the grass is greener because it is separate from us.

To deny the existence of our imaginations, even as they live out alternate lives, is to do ourselves a disservice. Haruki Murakami's "Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" shows that in each of us is a greater life than the one lived outside. We are all mendicant then to this stronger internal life even as the lights outside wink out one by one. 

death stranding review'd: to love supply

Snaps and buckles, backpacks and belts.

The game ends in a signature Kojima-annoying fashion; two hour cutscene including two separate credit rolls, the "crying president" scene, and a half-hour sequence where you're blue and can't move much. Arguably a lot of the digital acting is boring, and a lot of the dialogue is nihilistically bland.

The themes are somewhat good. Information is transmitted wirelessly using ultrasonic frequencies. Something something extinction; politicians give us hope but are also executioners.

The metaphysics/mechanics/fx make the themes better. Ghosts in this game fully bridge geography and transmission. The internet piggybacks on death; "The name of the bow is life but its work is death."-Heraclitus.  You play almost all of the game while carrying a child which needs to be comforted. In a climactic boss fight, you are given only broken cargo to use.

Those kinds of inspired visual/mechanical fx are paired with occasionally poignant moments, or wackycreepy departures, from the digital actors. All of this rests on a bed of walking sim gameplay.

How Death Stranding innovates on the "walking simulator":

1. The essential action is carrying cargo. Everything the character picks up is represented by luggage which takes up space and is heavy. Generally, you want to carry as much cargo as you can manage.
2. The more cargo you carry, the easier it is to stumble and fall.Stumbling and falling can damage your cargo. You want your cargo to be undamaged.  
3. Things that can make you stumble and fall: slopes, rocks, rivers, ghosts.

The essential action is to avoid stumbles (or crashes, if you're using your motorcycle). Carry enough cargo, and a rocky slope can be dangerous. So there is a real zoom-in on the importance of terrain. And there are many ways to manage terrain: powered skeletons, vehicles, ladders, climbing anchors, build-able bridges, even roads.

Gloriously, there is also military combat. I say gloriously because it is introduced relatively late into the game. Package delivery is more important and is introduced first. Most of any army is supply.

There are also dreamlike sequences where tactical warfaring becomes the focus. These are a unique and interesting departure, which self-consciously and with some critique, cater to the modern warfaring needs of today's gaming markets.

Death Stranding is innovative primarily because it refocuses a familiar world. Post-apocalypse, survivalism, supernatural forces tied to dubious technology-- but it's about packages. In many ways it is a playable version of David Birn's "The Postman".

And, alike Dark Souls, it has a very sturdy and efficient asynchronous multiplayer system, cooperative only. I hope they introduce a player versus player mode, even clumsily applied, it would seem fun.

Pro:
-Adult, melancholy and complex emotional tone and gameplay.

Con:
-Kojima-signature interminable exposition.
-Save system is clumsily presented, main ops trigger game overs.

Death Stranding is a weird PS2-era artgame. We used to carve around the bad spots of these games, bc art that was actually good and mechanics that actually innovated were rare. I say that they're still rare, good art is always in short supply.

Gloomhaven: review'd

GH is a game which can take upwards of 10 minutes per turn to simulate 6 seconds of combat. I spent years of my life trying to get away from overcomplex rpgs. Pathfinder is a mess. Sleepovers spending 4 hours making characters and then whatever energy we have left trying to run the first combat.

The appeal of being a nerd is fiddling with minutiae. Conversations about parliamentary procedure, debates about art, Gloomhaven, all yammering obsessives trying to squeeze approval points out of each other by means of what ultimately comes down to aggression. I'll admit though that Gloomhaven handles this process, mass quarreling, gracefully, by encouraging competition between the mercenaries. Secret objectives, unlockables, perks, XP, all the rewards are best won via selfish actions like abandoning your teammates for gold. So there's something *fun* to argue about.

I like Gloomhaven enough to emulate it using Tabletop Simulator. For a game that is very much alike emulating a video game, I am emulating it using a video game. I felt embarrassed talking to my babe about this, the shuffling and parsing of minutiae, dragging digital cards around, muttering to myself and sitting hours in a simulation. My partner was like, why are you ashamed? "This seems totally normal to me."

"Shut Up & Sit Down" has a good review which covers the benefits and frustrations of Gloomhaven, and the reviewer summarizes his affection as a feeling of "warmth" when extracting or putting away the complex innards of the box. Very much the nerdy management of minutiae, but let's also give credit to the game for creating continuous iterations of interesting puzzle-combat.

I wrote my own version of dnd

I had a rush of energy and wrote down my own little version of dnd, like one does. Someday I may playtest it... but for now I'd just to like to curate the good or interesting ideas I had.

SUMMARY OF THE "GOOD IDEAS" IN MY DND-LIKE I JOTTED DOWN:

• Three stats, between which you can distribute 2 points at character creation:
• Strength, Magic, Cunning.
• Strength: 1 point of strength = +3 hp, +2 bab, and +1 ac. Also helps some skills.
• Magic: 1 point of magic lets you cast one 1st level spell per day, 2 points of magic lets you cast as many 1st level spells as you want. 3 points of magic lets you cast 1 2nd level spell per day (and as many 1st level spells as you want), 4 points lets you cast as many 1st or 2nd level spells as you want etc. etc.
• many spells have their own restrictions about how often they can be used to limit the power involved.
• cunning: 1 point of cunning gets you 1 free action before initiative is rolled. So if you have 2 cunning you get two actions before everyone else goes.
• if multiple participants have cunning, these free actions happen in random order.
• skills, from which you get to assign 2 points at character creation:
• hunting- str OR cun +hunting vs. prey. can also be used to track
• healing- d4 hp per patient per day, per point
• climbing- str and cun + climbing vs. DC
• thievery-- includes sleight of hand and all stealth. vs. prey's cunning, or 
• no social skills at all.
• advancement:
• you can improve skills by fulfilling conditions like "practice this skill for a year" or "achieve great wealth using this skill". 
• improving stats, however, happens mostly on the basis of patronage, that is, service to divine figures in exchange for power.
• this is essentially a substitute for classes.
• examples of patronage:
• serving god:
• you get rewards for building churches, burning heretics, bringing righteous justice, leading a flock, converting nonbelievers and so on.
• rewards include the ability to channel divinity, stat bonuses, "taking communion"=full heal by going to church, holy weapons.
• however you are required to follow a strict moral code and receive
•  forgiveness from powerful priests if you misstep.
• serving the devil:
• can directly trade your soul for money or stat bonuses, and greater amts for a more pious soul.
•  Also you're destined for hell.
• Also the devil then can speak to you whenever it wishes, and will try to tempt you with, like, better positions in hell. or other stuff.
• serving the chaos god
• directly trades stats bonuses for people killed, e.g. +1 at 10, +1 at 100, +1 at 500, +1 at 1,000...
• You can improve your magic score by finding eldritch texts, building a library, communing with other wizards, and practicing the art; essentially the study of esoteric knowledge is its own "patron".
• Patronages can usually be advanced to some extent by spending money. Churches built, monuments to satan, etc.
• Failing patronage requirements usually doesn't take away the stats, but rather imposes other penalties: wizards who get their libraries burned get mishap chances when they cast, for example.

REFLECTING ON THE "GOOD IDEAS":

• Cunning
• Cunning awards actions before initiative is rolled, essentially free surprise rounds. Thus, the more often you can trigger initiative being rolled, the more often you get your free actions. So to some extent, paying attention to when initiative is rolled will be necessary for the design to prevent abuse.
• Free actions like Cunning gives might be very overpowered.
• Potentially complex and/or bad interactions with how chases work.
• Making initiative more complicated might not be good.
• This seems like a unique take on initiative, and I'm proud of it. Going first has always been a huge advantage and often underlooked by design, so I'm happy to place it as a primary feature of the character mechanics.
• Also seems like a good way to keep tactics fresh. Goblins have 0 strength but 1 cunning so they're weak but they get to do something surprising.
  
• Simplicity
• Not sure how much benefit there is to constructing a very simple framework for characters, especially since so much of the appeal of DND-like games comes from specialization. With 2 points to distribute between three stats, every character will be shades of each other.
• On the other hand, there is a lot of variety presented by a party composition such as this:
• guy with 2 magic
• guy with 2 strength
• guy with 2 cunning and stealth.
• Patronage
• the essential idea is that instead of XP you have class-specific goals. Improvement happens in a wider context, such as a hero's rise in a church or a deepening debt to the Devil. 
• This lends more drama than just becoming more powerful by defeating monsters.
• Asking players to pay more attention to their advancement seems like it might turn people off or split the party more.

• No social skills at all
• LOTFP gets away with just using reaction rolls, and for a while I've insisted that players offer good deals if they want NPCs to do stuff. I don't like "roll to convince" so I'm fine taking it off the table. However, there will probably be unforseen consequences.

I don't know when I'll give it all a playtest. Sharing on my blog because its where my creative mind is rn. 

You can see the rough design doc here.

SEPTEMBER 1ST SUPERFIGHT

a superfight is an exercise where you run a fictional tournament between some fictional combatants. today's fighters are:

kirby
mahatma ghandi (2nd time participant)
mewtwo
morrissey
a lamp
me
president bill clinton circa 1994
horse (returning champion)

Mr. president.

ROUND ONE

kirby v me

I am able to grievously wound wound kirby. however the kinetic force of his "suck" power is able to carom me off a wall or piece of furniture, dislocating my spine. Match: kirby. 

president bill clinton v. horse

bill clinton: not in shape, however has been photographed riding a horse (see above). Tame a wild horse? Unlikely. Victor: HORSE

mahatma ghandi v. a lamp

ghandi cinches this? Dude can break a lamp.

mewtwo v. morrissey

mewtwo uses confusion and flips morrissey into the ocean. the battlefield for this superfight is on a beach. winner: m2

ROUND TWO

mahatma ghandi v. a horse

mahatma could swing this. however, he wisely chooses not to ride the horse, as it poses a health risk.

match: mahatma. he is able to calm the horse down or simply outwait it until it sleeps.

mewtwo v. kirby

the actual fight we've been waiting for. obviously kirby copies mewtwo off of the bat. from then on we have a classic shadow ball match. kirby however does not have a reflective ability and I think that means mewtwo has the upper hand. perhaps the wound sustained in kirby's fight with me earlier makes an unfortunate reprisal. 

match: mewtwo

FINALS

mewtwo v. mahatma ghandi

mewtwo is curious about philosophy enough to stay its psychic powers. Can the mahatma sway mewtwo to the the path of pacificism? my gut instinct says no. ghandi is obliterated via psystrike

**MEWTWO WINS**

Pros and Cons of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Additionally: How to Prep, and the Game's Basic Tenets As I Know It, After 4 Year's Experience

THE PROS OF A GAME OF LAMENTATIONS OF THE FLAME PRINCESS:

1. The game simply enables quick, deadly, and meaningful combat. This was the retroclone that did it for me and keeps on doing it.
2. Character creation is brief.
3. The rulebook is lightweight, full of good art, and generally easy to reference.
4. The skill system is versatile and lightweight and simple. It also encourages "avoiding the roll": the player is encouraged to use inventive techniques to avoid the often difficult skill checks.
5. "Avoiding the roll" is innate to the tactics. The stats are imposing, and this encourages imagination over rote gameplay. 
6. The GM does not know how the PCs can win or even if they will win, so the story is that much more uncontrolled and up to the player's wits.
7. Diplomacy is not a roll, instead it's up to the referee's rulings. In my games the players have to offer good reasons for NPCs to do what they want.
8. Heavily balancing the odds against the players means there's no reason to flinch when the PCs acquire some kind of heavily overpowered item/spell/demon. 
9. The game's portrait of magic is "high risk, high price, high reward" which makes for good horror storytelling.
10. The rulebook has many hidden power levers, the Summon spell is the most standout.
11. A focus on horror is a focus on glorious and weird adult drama.

THE CONS:

1. Players should be warned/informed of a number of factors:
1. Player Characters can easily die.
2. Extreme content. You need to ask what everyone's comfortable with.
3. The skill system is radically different than D&D's. Ditto for magic, XP, leveling up, classes/race, and diplomacy.
4. Combat is super deadly, retreat is important to keep in mind.
5. There are special combat options (charge does double dmg, press, parry, etc.)
6. Alignments don't govern behavior.
2. Being able to improvise well requires having a proper prep workflow (see section below).
3. The encumbrance system works best if it's not thoroughly addressed.
4. Fleeing from combat is somewhat under-written.*
5. Rules for stealth, sneak attack, helplessness, and surprise are not collated.
6. The system of saves is a pain to copy down or check against and seems overcomplicated.
7. The skill system is often confusing for new players.
8. High player character death volume can be demoralizing and hard to explain in the fiction.

"Young Girl Eating a Bird" Rene Magritte,1927

How to prep for LOTFP well:

• Make a large map which has loosely sketched locations on it.
• Have a handful of modules or adventure locations which you bought, read, or wrote, and have (agonizingly) sat on for years. Put some of these on the map.
• If the PCs go beyond your prep, you need to be able to improvise until the end of the session, and then spend the interim week catching up. This is the core of the workflow-- bringing something to the table, and if necessary, catching up between weeks.
• Be able to, at a moment's whim, discard hours worth of prep. This is crucial! if the PCs leave your adventure zone, you need to be able to keep up! Don't dawdle!
• As a gm, your role is imagining and writing stuff which may not ever be played, and the more gleefully you can embrace that, the more efficiently you'll prep, and the more fun you'll have. Plus you can and should save unplayed prep for later campaigns, even for years later in your life.

Basic Core Tenets of Lotfp (as I know it):

1. Success in adventure is not guaranteed.
2. Moral behavior is not especially rewarded.
3. If the players depart from the extent of the referee's prepared notes, the referee must improvise and follow their lead.
4. Humans and their power structures are usually predictable and genuinely powerful in their own rights. 
5. Monsters and magic are by nature horrifying, weird, and variously powerful.
6. If a participant in the game is not content with how the game is played they should address the group's agreements on how the game is played. 

The end result should be a game about planning and taking risks against desperate and weird circumstances, with unexpected results. It should spit out weird horror and invite unique contemplation. 

* It comes down to a fairly random roll off (1d20 + speed/10) with a few additions-- monsters have to pass a morale check if you drop food or treasure. Rules on how failed escapes work would be appreciated-- are the players are able to flee again after being caught?

border 2018 review

This movie at heart is about troll sex. The film is similar to the director's previous hit, "Let the Right One In". This guy is establishing his own cinematic universe-- modern day monsters in Sweden. 

The prosthetics glued to the actors do get in the way a little but they are pretty good. The sexual attraction between the trolls is the best. They are sniffing and it feels relatable and revealing. The actual sex is somewhat shocking. 

However the B plot which is about child pornography unfortunately feels folded in by coincidence with the A romance plot, and the movie's pacing struggles in the second half also. "Let The Right One In" had a more functional and compact story.

There's some amount of ironic gravitas surrounding trolls and baby-stealing which, like in "Let the Right One In", plays off the original emotions of the mythology. However as I said the conflict is a little less centered and therefore the protagonist's struggle at the climax fell flat for me.

Which do you exclusively choose: community with others of your kind or a sense of universal ethics? I don't think the film suggests a more interesting question.

"Prog rock" sexy.

Hereditary & Midsommar

The films are mirror images of each other. There's an obsession with sacrifices made by fire. Cults and manipulation in the face of grief. There's a formula:

1. Messy family trauma played realistically
2. Loud crying scene
3. Cult enters; first signs of cult
4. Cult influence and horrid intentions become more obvious
5. Total abandonment of reality as cult reigns supreme 

Like "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Wicker Man" pretty much but with family trauma and loud crying scene upfront. The contrast between grief and the supernatural is what "Hereditary" receives praise for. I think both films don't stick the ending.

"Hereditary" has a perceived resolution with the Mom hanging above her son (Peter) and cutting her own head off with piano wire.  Unlike my mom who would never do that. In "Midsommar" the main character watches her boyfriend burn alive in a bear suit.

I think it's about the cult in both cases-- in "Hereditary", the cult is mostly invisible, and therefore their web of power can be easily imagined. The supernatural flourishes in the dark. In "Midsommar", the cult is very visible.

"Midsommar"s visibility leads to a lot of beautiful and striking crowd scenes. It's all shot in a giant field which, by the end, feels claustrophobic. The utter presence of every building in every exterior shot is a notable accomplishment for the filmmakers.

However, the acts of violence that start piling up feel too extreme for the Swedes. By the end it's a horror movie bloodbath. What we deserved was a more nuanced and realistic tale.

It's a case where utter visibility defines, for me, stricter requirements for my suspension of disbelief.

Collected Silent Titans Play Reports

Collected Silent Titans Play Reports, Spring/Summer 2019

Session 1:

OK SILENT TITANS PLAY REPORT... DRUNK DRUNK DRUNK... THE "TIME TORNADO" NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE... FRIEND BRINGS OUT KNIFE... IS THIS THE END OF OUR SOCIAL CIRCLE?

Session 2:

Play report of 2nd session of SILENT TITANS.... folks wander around wir-heal.

NOTES ON WIR-HEAL:

• it became obvious that is hard to leave wir-heal, due to the travelling mechanic. There's only two spots to get to the "southern border" which you have to roll randomly. In addition tracking your own location can be difficult.
• Court of wapentake happened, went pretty well, fairly disheartening for the convicted player who was sentenced to the gibbet for killing a pig child
• Near end of session: court of wassail overturned this conviction, freeing the player character (after the player had already made a new character)
• Players got separated within wir-heal, to avoid too much b.s. gonna start off new session "you all found your way back to legion's fort"
• They were on a quest from the Cathedral of the Duck to check on the other two churches, they will be rewarded 5 shillings on return to Legion's Fort

Session 3:

 SESSION SUMMARIZATION: They go into R8-BY in search of lost memories after speaking to NPCs about titan-lore. There they find the Wraeca, a scrambled ghost of one PC... after some trouble with the Court of Wapentake this Wraeca is sentenced to "crawl" on all fours for a year.

The Wraeca leads the party to R8-BY's Titan Mouth. Within the titan/dungeon they defeat a giant screaming owl and some associated ghosts... The environment: flooded libraries and stained-glass angel doors.

It takes them a while to understand, but they learn they can open the dungeon's doors with eyes stolen from cephalopod monsters. Wandering further in the Titan, they feed milky fluid to some ghosts and listen to lore-fragments from a giant damaged android. They climb to a central room full of damaged cephalopods. Striking battle there to claim more cephalopod eyes, they win, but are damaged. They choose to retreat from the dungeon.

On the way out they are harassed by ghosts and sadly a PC is lost. They head back to legion's fort, numbering one less...

PLAY/MECHANICAL NOTES:

• they are learning how to navigate Wir-Heal surprisingly fast, and I think the navigation system is reliably providing strange picaresque elements as well as a melancholy doom.
• the R8-BY titan went very well, considering the bizarre elements. I really thought the tone came across, and the descriptions went well! Christian Kessler's layout was generally helpful, I just read from the specific notes when they wanted more information. ((should take more time to analyze this later)). Flipping back forth to the monster stats was an issue although a minor one.
• players were appropriately confused by R8-BY's eternally flooding room, not by first encounter but by their second.
• I didn't realize until later, but I was misusing the table with the talking damaged android. I was summing all the d8+mods and reading one entry/turn instead of using each d8+mod to read one entry for a total of 3 entries per turn.
•  I used the R8By map, printed out full color, with unexplored segments of the map covered with scrap paper. It worked really well, particularly bc the more straightforward elements like the hallways and doors are very clear and simple. (there's a picture below)

(I used scraps of an extra copy of the ravens dungeon map to cover the unexplored parts of the R8-By map)

• I think I'm good at running npcs now as a dm. I should also commend the text. The Wraeca seemed like a challenge to run when I first read it, but I found that the loose and shallow amount of information provided encouraged me to rp the character as glitchy and confused, which is exactly how it should be.
• the combat; one player (who's pc died) complained that they don't know if they really like it. We had some ambiguity about Critical Damage. I'm generally very generous with initative. Lots of ghosts wrestling each other in this session.
• overall this game is going very well. The mechanical elements flow smoothly, nothing takes too long as far as I'm concerned. Both wir-heal and the Titan function well, and the Titan in particular is exploding with bizarre detail. I'm having much less trouble describing this detail than I initally feared.

xxxxxxxxAs for difficulty: Into the Odd combat seems to lead to escalating stakes as PCs start taking Critical Damage. IF the last PC is knocked out, everyone dies, but if they kill the monster first, everyone recovers quickly. There was at least one time where one die roll would decide whether everyone died or everyone was fine. I consider one PC death after a dungeon delve to be pretty good result in terms of player demoralization, not too bad.

Silent Titans Session 4:

ok we dropped silent titans gonna do a veins of the earth campaign instead

:/ basically we concluded that the wir-heal navigation system + random encounters was bullshit having to repeat dense adjective-laden prose on a random, frustratin basis, and then encounter one of two wandering Courts, was kinda bullshit like. it just got tiresome after they figured it out, and involved a lot of guessing and for me, stumbling though a lot of dense prose :/

how my silent titans game crashed and burned

"I stopped paying attention because every time I looked up you were struggling with a series of adjectives"- my friend

The overland exploration part of the Silent Titan is pretty busted. You get to choose between two random paths; the paths themselves are described via complex pieces of prose:

Some examples.

Some of these are a little hard for me to visualize, let alone describe. "Escher-maze of cracked concrete steps."

And the courts kept showing up-- Court of Wapentake, Court of Wassail. 2 primary entries on the random encounter table. Good the first time but stopped being weird and started being repetitive. Not much was happening between iterations of mock trials, parades, and Ouzel visits.

It feels like a failure of with the system. Wir-Heal can be weird to navigate but it shouldn't be onerous and repetitive.

It would also be better if the paths you could take were more succinctly described as paths and not just landscapes. "Do you head over towards the gogmagogic buildings or the dense maquis?" Along with the vocabulary and diction it's a clear case of style over function.

The paths they took would often lead right back to where they started, which grew frustrating. It felt like a slot machine where most results were boring, creating boring gameplay.

Things I should have done to save the game:

• Not just read the prose describing the paths, but rather use the prose to inspire some simpler options. (In retrospect, I did this: "Tarmac paths or concrete steps"- but it was too late?)
• Fudge the results on the random encounter table to achieve more interesting results.
• Completely substitute the navigation system as soon as it stopped working. 
• The players were trying to ask locals for directions, which I resisted giving. 

 I also think the players could have been more inspired to find the titan's mouths. That might have ameliorated the aimless frustration. 

How it crashed and burned: the end of the 4th session I realized all the business with the tables and rolling options and being marble-mouthed at the prose wasn't working out, and we the gaming group decided to play something else... another Veins of the Earth campaign.

Ironically I'm having similar overworld journey struggles with the exploration rules in Veins, the setting thereof being a giant series of underground caverns.

My new overworld map for Veins.

Navigation in strange environments probably a continuing difficulty for roleplaying game's mechanics... blogosphere dead, unable to sort it out... Nonetheless I'm applying best principles and dropping a massive amount of preparation which has shown itself as unworkable.

I used to get heartbreak over this kind of thing, reading a big beautiful rpg book, preparing for weeks, and then not getting to use most of it... Difficulties in the rpgtext forbidding an ultimate experience. Well I've been through enough to not be too troubled. Maybe it will work out next time.

SILENT TITANS PRELIMINARY REVIEW

"Silent Titans" is kind of like if Joyce's "Ulyssess" was a rpg, same islander's speculative take, a lot of wandering through shitty beaches. Have not covered an actual Titan proper in my game, outside of the first one, Chronos, where the book has you start.

Properly speaking, it's worth your $50, because the book is a3, (a4?), and has good art in it, and has good writing. That's all it takes being worth as much.

The game itself: I haven't gotten to the dungeons/titans yet. I wrote Chris Kessler, the layout designer, a bunch of questions as I read it for the first time. The room labelled #1 is where the PC's start off in. The tubes in Hilb are hallways. Sometimes a bullet point is in the wrong place. I got all mad about the overmap but it's working great as a play-aid.

I printed out all the maps using my work printer, in color, the players loves them. Character creation is lovely. The gang is wandering around Wir-Heal and one got captured by the Court of Wapentake.

Big weird-o's are the combat, which is quick, area weapons are crazy good. Does the keyword "fast" mean they get to act twice? What about "slow"? This is not a book which, as a design choice, makes sure to define every little thing. The navigation system inside Wir-Heal is quite strange and provokes some dictionary lookups.

The navigation system essentially has you experience what I imagine, quaintly enough, Patrick experiences wandering around the post-industrial landscape of his homeworld, kicking trash and occasionally encountering bombastic threats. A lot of loneliness, and then you stumble into another animal-man village, while you're slowly turning into a Woodwose. It's surprisingly somber experience...

...As the rest of the book is, when you get into it, it tells a story which is quite fatalistic, the implicit tale of the Knight of the Pentangle. I originally wrote Dirk Detweiler Leichty that I hoped the game would be kinda board-game-like, considering his art looking like Jumanji/Chutes and Ladders. I definitely do have a board game experience when I print out the maps and slide around my friend's 3d-printed miniatures on them.

There is the added benefit that Dirk's escherian/arcane linework can be displayed to the players without giving away too much; and once explained it becomes clear.

AN EXAMPLE:

Guess what the below map-segment illustrates...

.... it's a library filling up up water... "Ink-black water sheets down the shelves and falls from the sky in an eternal pounding rain." Obviously the verbal description is needed to make this clear, but once done so the image becomes a shorthand. No visual spoilers by displaying the whole map.

The above is hypothetical as I haven't run most of the game yet, although a few illustrations like:

have already served me at the table basically as I've described.

-----

I am worried, or rather, more aware that within my group there will be a lot of character-chucking into the abyss, horribly random occurrences may prevent any dungeons from being explored, or maybe they'll visit just one. What is the larger narrative to be had here; PIGPIP, the players will fall and be consumed by the raging time-lords.

endgame's spoilers

• meal scenes
• jokes
• void
• dialogue
• 
  
• pretty good action sequences
• mark ruffalo slowly enunciates

Overall this is a comic book movie in a way I can't be mad about. How could I be mad. What is madness, the state of being mad. Is it that there is something we are watching and we feel bored and irritated? I felt that way a lot. The outer-space sequences especially. 

It is cool that there is so much scale in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The space stuff is important like the Los Angeles stuff (there is no L.A. stuff -ed). There are a lot of meal scenes.

This is the basis for fun that comic book superfans extoll. The interconnectedness of all places, and people. Will this freeform fun extend to the machinations of larger studios? Well, the movie is three hours long, and it features Fat Thor.

As the Red Letter Media guys said, the powers-that-be realized that Chris Hemsworth is an excellent comedian. Wisely, they continue to countenance immortality with humour. The project, large scale, could be said to be thus.

Of course, they fail, for the most part. "I get the sense that comic book movie's main struggle is over sentimentality". I said this in a blog review of into the spiderverse and I repeated it for my friends when we rewatched "Spiderverse" last week. There are 3-4 father figures in that movie.

At the end of the day, wringing emotion out of supercharacters becomes a crapshoot based on who the audience actually knows about, the confluence of writing, the "needs of  plot", the acting, and ultimately the editing which has to assemble it all. No wonder the movie is three hours.

jordan peele's us

“Us” is at its core an experiment in acting, wherein the principals are asked to play alternate horror-versions of their characters. I assume that each actor was worked with individually to come up with this character; I might be wrong who knows. 

Anyway that experiement in acting can be judged either to the good or to the not-so-good, that’s probably why this movie is divisive. The other reason it is divisive is due to the gaping blatant holes in the plot and logic. You can really chalk this up to the shitty writing. I tried to find  a sort of neo-camp disregard for plot or logic but nah.

Also J.P. is still not that great of a filmmaker, things were really boring and slow a lot of the time, and the momentum of the film stutters a lot. There are some pretty cool images and scenarios, though.

delivarance 1972: reviewed

a fruity pebbles rice krispies treat… left in a small green plastic bag. It sat on my living room end table for a week. I had run out of money for groceries... no dessert.

I ate the rice krispies treat. Yeah, it was an edible. I was watching “Deliverance” and getting really happy. I eventually understood that I had been poisoned. The best part of the movie is the end, where the author of the book interrogates his own characters. James Dickey played the sheriff who has final call over our protagonist’s fates.

The movie does an admirable job of interrogating american/southern masculinity. “Deliverance”, the title, refers to the process by which the four southern middleclass men scramble their way out of deep deep trouble. Most stories would end with the death of the villain and handwave the police; this one instead sees the entire process through.

And as such this movie has: a dinnertime breakdown in tears, hurried grave-digging, that scene with the sherriff/author, and a very good shot looking at the man who was a victim of assault, back lit by gold walking away saying he’d “rather keep this under wraps”. 

“Deliverance” implying a burden, the relieving of a burden. That scene with the sheriff is very good. James Dickey has thin little teeth. 

Lester burnham in "American Beauty": an instadeath:nights

Lester Burnham, as played by Mr. Kevin Spacey, lately accused of sexual assault

american beauty joins crash grand canyon donnie darko has a very donnie darko style character you know you all know the brightness on my tv cant be adjusted but but! there is that scene that attraction that lester burnham played by kevin spacey has, sure in retrospect even creepier than otherwise, to his daughter's teenage friend, which resolves itself apace to Magnolia, by paul thomas anderson, a pretty sad stupid movie, all of these movies with their positive-tone endings are pretty bad, even the ones that end with the death of the main character, i.e. this one and donnie darko

they are all bad because they take as a given a certain love is inherent, proceeds apace of death and confusion, when in reality the love that kevin spacey would find came out of something problematic and to its problematic grave it should follow: essentially the body of that teenage friend, not to the family photo which is where his brains end up splattering.

To be honest, if we are being honest, and letting ourselves conclude that the things we find are essentially problematic, not cancelled, but problematic, I guess to that end I find that our virtue comes and goes in problematic places. Sure, in that body of a teenage daughter's friend, and it ends up leaving through the same path it came in. Or it doesn't; it spreads like a bullet a gooey mass of blood all over the wall. Sure, that's destiny.

There's something about this movie innit tempts a certain amiable viewership with me, a critic. Yeah they take the time to circle around a moral point. But is it ruined bc it's all white people? Would the inclusion of a few people-of-color help? Probably probably, yes.

I have this intense fear of being exposed as someone, just like the other white shitlords out there, being traced on the internet and my crimes revealed. Like being a troll. Anything can be spun up and whipped; and there's this gunning in the air...

That is to say though, Georges Baulldiare quote, "art which avoids evil rapidly becomes boring" (paraphrased). Shittalking, happening behind closed doors... No chance to respond. You know, social anomie. It's all linked, and Lester Burnham had his chance to, but at the moment, he realized that he was something boring. The same pathway towards the soul leads out rather than in, the things that touch us have a habit of spinning us and bringing us to a vile end.

Georges Bataille. With my apologies.

marvel studios movies ranked

marvel studios movies ranked

1. sama raimi spider man trilogy
2. daredevil good villain
3. the avengers 2012
4. black panther 2018
5. iron man 2008
6. ant man
7. doctor strange 2016
8. captain america winter soldier
9. camptain america civil war
10. incredible hulk 2008 ruffalo honerary inclusion
11. g of the galxy 2017 #2 

games roundup: bloodborne, hyperlight drifter, uhhhhh Paratopic, Binding of Isaac, more

Bloodborne
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Have been waiting a long long time to play this. It's super violent, you get covered in blood the longer its been since you've saved, which is nice. Also it treats violence the way Bioshock does, with you questioning your role in the ecosystem by putting you up against evocative enemies: priests, mobs with torches, werewolf ppl, etc.

This game has "punishing and rewarding" combat which relies heavily on timing. Sadly it also relies on a drip-feed of healing potions which are sometimes sparse, sometimes plentiful, and because they drop randomly from enemies, it makes me feel like often my deaths are from a lack of grinding.

There's more to be said about the potions plenty/scarcity; sometimes you have to play survival horror, sometimes you can bloodily tank + massacre everyone. But there's no grease on the ropes here, to buy xtra potions you have to sit through 2 loading screens.

It's the loading screens which are the issue I guess.

Limbo & Inside
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"Inside" is miles ahead of "Limbo", for being a playable cutscene. Streaming this for my buds Angus and Corey was really fun bc they were so pulled in.

"Inside" manages to achieve a lot with landscapes, and also with NPCs, and also sometimes with puzzles and also sometimes with hazards. The evocative mystery elements are pretty good. Maybe there's something lacking; but both "Limbo" and "Inside" aren't really into being complete messages as much as impressionistic depictions.

----------------------

Hyperlight Drifter

Made more sense to me, felt that more poignant, when I heard the creator has a degenerative (?) heart condition which the story in this game is broadly a metaphor for. Otherwise it just seems like stock imagery, narrative wise, a black goo monster/sickness.

I played to the simple end, but uhh... it's an appealing game with great combat, and it should have all the appeal of the mystery of its ruins-filled world, but something's missing for me... genuine inspired elements like decayed frozen titan hanging off side of zelda mountain, these seems underused... deeper story about genetic modification kinda ends up being about generic monsters in tanks.

What's really cool, tho, is the ambiguity provided by the HUD elements. Due to the diegetic cnxns between the avatar and the data presented to the player, mostly routed thru a little floating homonculus, it seems as if yr player character may actually be in a virtual reality themselves. This is supported by the dataish way segments of the floor keep popping in and out; but I really like that homonculus...

Paratopic
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A short walking-simulatorish game which has 1-3 cool bizarre moments and one very cool facial rendering technique. This is a good case to ask whether or not a short, surrealist, and boring game does enough. In my experience it was a pretty intriguing setup with a very small payoff.

Rain World
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This seems like one of the first Adult Swim game releases not based on an TV show. The cute illustrations on the package do not match the brutal and alien gameplay visuals. This is a lot like Knytt, if you've ever played Knytt, but it has many more surprises, incl. very cool weapons.

You run around and eat/be eaten, with a lot of depth resting in an organic balance between predators, prey animals, spears, plants, etc. which deeply rewards experimentation and improvisation.

I am not sure if I am crazy about the save/death system. You need to survive a certain number of saves (meaning: trips between save points) for certain doors to unlock. It seems to encourage an organic form of exploration: you need to survive to explore more. Dark Souls however had a tighter sense of rhthym, more arcade-y, this is a little loose and wobbly. That being said it's stylish and I need more time to analyze its effects, I have no idea how big this game is.

Condemned: Criminal Origins
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May have been innovative in ps2 days, this game is the quintessence of a "beat up homeless" simulator. It doesn't shy away, in the enemy design at least, from realism tho, so there's something to be said for the horror therein.

I stopped playing when I got to the bit where you meet up with your radio contact, who turns out to be a horrifically reskinned version of the player model, who is an anxious timid italian man (the player is an italian man, the radio contact is a middle aged black women with glasses).

Baba is you
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Certain level of unwritten rules in this game, like "text can't overlap with other text". The whole game is based on writing rules to solve sokoban puzzles, so occasionally the unwritten rules throw a wrench in the gears.

That being said this is such a perfect puzzle game, if so because it takes very little for granted, all objects have only pictoral value and are assigned meaning via on-screen puzzle pieces. The arrangement of the non-negotiable rules-pieces can make aesthetic flourishes, like a good layout in a magazine:

The rules outside the walls cannot be changed, but they are pretty.

The Enigma Machine
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Fun to chat with this thing, albeit its cyber horror leanings are too archetypal.

Binding of Isaac
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The music is actually quality, drops and serious beats, and the visual aesthetics are original... The whole theme is child abuse. Like horror/comedy.

Gameplay after years of playing still holds up. =randomly and slowly lvling a more and more fucked over kid, with v. serious and lovely endgame aspirations. A warm and generous skinner flash classic.

"In the Woods" Review'd

Once you get all the papers settled you'll have a good time with In the Woods. I have it on authority that Pearce Shea pretty much put this together in a fever state, which is saying a lot for Pearce's fevers....

Let's go ahead and say what happened: 3 players went to the woods, and they saw some shit. They got out after two-and-a-half hours. It was pretty good~! It drew people in, it really did.

"In the Woods" is a fairly large document that was pretty easy to run. Even the navigation, given the lack of a map, wasn't that bad. This is a puff piece.

There is a map, but it's supposed to be secret. There's a lot of unspecified elements of play, the text written specifically to include lacunae as is the wont of indie rpg games. The DM makes up a bunch anyway. Although its worth it to note that In the Woods intentionally includes game-design-lacunae as a means to engender a creepiness.

That being said, the non-lacunae are surprisingly solid. You bounce up and down on the floors of this thing and it holds! It's not that surprising. There's a solid construction:

1. character creation
2. rules
3. introduction
4. hex map
5. hex map key
6. bestiary

There's mysterious elements, not given much explanation. There's some factions in the hex map. There's a serviceable lightweight combat system.

Benefit of horror often is to keep you guessing at the elements. RPGs tell a similar story, bcuz players elaborate on an archaeology. You won't discover all of the elements; but you can, maybe construct an explanation; but I, the narrator, am waiting, there to stick a thumb in your eye...

to purchase: https://gumroad.com/l/fWSrw

Michael Raston's "Angel's Burial Ground" Review'd

Overall Michael Raston's "The Angel's Burial Ground" suffers from a lack of glamour. There's something here, some things beautiful and interesting, but it's stuck behind (A) the lack of an illustrator and (B) some occasionally mediocre prose.

(A) The lack of an illustrator
1. The cover is ugly.

2. That which is entirely new and interesting within the text can only be visually suggested by the public domain art collages.

3. The angels, in particular, seem begging for illustration, they're colorful as fuck:

for example.

4. It's simply a less-appealing book without beautiful or interesting illustrations.


(B) this book has a smattering of humor and self-aware charm but, for the opening at least, it relies on straightforward description of fantasy elements, which, ultimately, in the scope of other ARTPUNK products, seems mediocre.

1. I think a good introduction is actually quite important to the rpg books that I like. think about Deep Carbon Observatory's introduction... minimalist. A widely loved part of AR&PL's opening:

The many zany intros of James Raggi. A good introduction is a good indication that the writer intends to do away with what's normally dry and boring.

STRAIGHT-UP GOOD THINGS:

1.The space described is claustrophobic and wonderful and detail-rich, unique and scary:

another example.

2. The lore of the scale-men particularly appealed to me.

MIDDLING THING:

This text seems reasonable, although not particularly convenient, to use as a reference text. I'd print out the map page and refer to it, etc.

But: I've mostly stopped using resources that don't fit entirely on one page.

IN CONCLUSION:

about half of what drew me into TRPGS again was texts which were self-conscious departures from the fantasy norms for prose. Not just departures from fantasy norms, but departures from prose norms.-- Surprisingly presented texts...

the odd joys of CULTIST SIMULATOR

I can't figure out the Stag's Riddle but I've got the right ritual to turn my depression into demons. And I'm just raiding the hell out of various international sites. I start killing all the detectives sent after me. And yeah, I'm eating their bodies.

But eventually some kind of Constatine mfer gets sent after me and he knows how to kill my demons... not good....

also I figure out i need to have 36 grail points to beat the game. So I need to like get 10th level Grail tools, rituals, and like a lvl 10 grail influence. and by this time my hunger for bodies is generating a lot of notoriety and the Constantine guy has killed like 6 demons so I'm getting nervous.

For the entire duration of playing this game I've had an issue with my ergonomics so clikin and draggin little cards was kind of a strain. This game does not do the best to make clickin and draggin those little cards super easy. It's pretty simple and functional though.

Cultist simulator is also self-care simulator with the addendum that the eventual goal is to develop greater and greater viscious cycles. You have to take your mental and physical health seriously, with the caveat that to pursue your spiritual goals you will put these things at risk. And more significantly, the lives of others, which may or may not trip up your own little cycles of self-care and renewal.

I have found Cultist Simulator broadly as a potent metaphor for the creative process in a life, the cycles of care and funding buffeting a spiritual journey which is poisonous. The slow accumulation of the supernatural that the fictive elements in CULTIST SIM provides helps create this sense of a gathering magic which is parcel to my best experiences with creativity.

Moreover, the us-vs-them experience, being hunted by the results of your mischief, underlines my desire to see artistic exploration as an antagonistic exercise. You can make enemies in the art world or in the artistic discourse, there is always a time to fight, those duties are represented in the game.

Deeper tragedy, too. An artist can use participation in a tragedy is a way to get some juice.

And of course, the possibilities of manipulating your emotions via your (artistic/occultist) work.