"the magic wand" review

the magic wand

there is some to explore but not much

more of a discrete forward-moving tale than gob grot

like a short story although with novel-length tropes

feels like a condensed novel, condensed via video gaming

interest in art like that

catamite's games feel like soft-boiled renditions on popular academic themes

with the extent to mostly paucify their message

i.e magic wand feels like a sad goodbye to art

nostalgic, making

a meaning relating to slidey boop boop noise rpgs

way these have of expressing scale

the idfference is, catamites is really good at writing

like 'cause he's well read

but also can inhabit these character voices

which draw on bildungsroman-like novels

like it's surprising that enough density is packed into radiget

he's not interested in helping anyone else, but at the same time

there seems to be a larger story behind it all

w/r/t the magic wand. also,

capsule toys. It's not

a zero-sum thing. The capsule toys

are there because

radiget and friends love capsule toys.

"an eroding of authority". while at the same time,

trying to ossify a fantasy for a period. a short story,

somewhat apologetic like the robert walser bit.

but the difference is, however temporary,

thecatamites performs for us, a landscape

some characters, grasps a temporary lunatic vibe,

and a dark scary chilling one, and then a sense of something ominous,

maybe- and then you walk past the giant overworld

maps with a mountain-sized skull of a king.

I think it's designed to be easy

to dismiss-out-hand. Sort of like

Robert Walser. Tinylittle pixelgame,

only 30min long. 

Has a lot of art, not

too much, mostly

it's made out of block art,

stereoscopic 3d thing

lit about $5. "music and colors" "wandering" gamejam games

game element over design... primacy of colors, hooting

but lodged within nostalgia. in a space where everything is filtered through games. memory. childish renumeration. all games = activity of children = things we did when we were young = nostaligia. it's why it all has the veneer, to be true-to-life.

merritk said she broke up with videogames and that like pursuing the "these must mean something" feeling of them was endless, contexualized experience of being an abused or unhappy child playing games, spending hours of time writing games, games being ...

definite links to monsterkillers in some of the art, here (in "space people")... not all innocent either. things occasionally scary, which are innocent. windy the boss monster

there's no secret ending. it's just the real ending. it's a short story - from space people

coping mechanix gamez.

capturing 'n enshrining a nostalgia of private space

twenty three reviews

twenty three reviews


new star wars:

the last jedi was how I learned to stop worrying and love the bomb. as in global warming. the exact connection is hard to tease out - I saw a dark sun behind the real one, riding my bike back home. actually it was a streetlight


neo turf masters golfing:

not much a game vis a vis gamefeel, it’s not Wii Sports Golf, but everything is narrated with a high-energy sounds like vietnamese woman and there’s the pixilated golf swings. it’s weird to see the direct ancestor of Mausland which you had forgotten about


Wii Sports Golf

The putting on this is insane. you have to hold the controller pointing down, it turns out. even then there’s this tiny band of sensitivity out of the whole controller’s movement that responds aggressively and makes you fling the ball off the green. other than that, this game is one of my favorite friend negging tools, for one, but there’s also a demure peace.


infinite jest:

the real “killer diller”, IJ, is like the only book I can read as if it were TV. I remember reading this four years ago and thinking “wow, I bet this is the first step I’m going to take into a world of talented authors” and like, noooooo. You’re gonna give me a reading recommendation for Neal Stevenson and my face is gonna drip off my skull. IJ is the only book I can read as if it were TV


DCC rpg (dungeon crawl classics)

sadly, the most beautiful book in the OSR (old school revolution-- the renaissance of tabletop role playing games) is also bland and sad, much like stonehell (see below). there’s sort of no surprises left


Stonehell dungeon

both this and DCC are written in like, boring fantasy prose (I already said this)


Black Books

I mostly watch Bernard Black to try and pick up on the psychopathic funny bits he does, yelling at people as a sense of humor, most british comedy shows like the IT crowd with just a touch of funny prop use make for good shit


the nintendo switch

the design of the switch is innovative to the point that the vocabulary of video game controllers hasn’t caught up yet. It’s “joy-con”, not “controller”and when I say “hold the controller like this and press this button” it can be confusing especially since the buttons aren’t labelled to work on the individual joy-cons, those are referred to positionally, a position which only fits if you hold the device the right way anyway. ok, so the main screen thing is the “console”, right. if you have the joy-cons attached to the console its the “console, with joy-cons attached”. If the joy cons are separate, they are “separated joy cons” or “individual joy cons” or just “joy cons”, there’s a sort of abstraction that bleeds from the procedure and is associated with the visual language on screen telling you which buttons to press- it’s the “left” button, when you hold the joy con up? down? you hold it in the seperated fashion.


Doll Doll Doll

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s music. I think something awful got transmitted to me about killing children, like maybe the “cool” side of it? I was like, oooh, child killing is edgy and cool, ya know, like as an edge-of-society thing. maybe society’s edge is somehow linked up to our inner sense of passion? hell ya


Doki Doki Literature Club

odd when horror actually gets to the point of changing you emotionally, especially when it’s like a pop culture sensation jump scare game, but like I knew cute high school people who’s cuteness was a facade for intense psychological disorders, and DDLC does not really derivate from real-ass problems people have. Maybe also something like the snare of anime portraiture does me every time, psychotherapy


Getting Over It with Bennet Foddy

I don’t have anything new to say, except the throughline of frustrating drops away pretty easily and then it is just a tight mouse-platforming game, which will still insist that it’s about frustration. Especially of interest is Bennet Foddy himself playing Getting Over It, and him making the exact frustrated sounds f/x live that he put in the game.


it’s also fucking funny


Devil Daggers

Nice to see perfect things, in every way perfect, that do not assume and merely create a relationship, a weld

welds your brain to your hands, is conspicuous in perfect, as: every part takes up the exact minimum of space, has nuance, tesseracts, makes sense, is obvious, every part refers to every other part: a game about shooting skulls in hell on a stone ledge where if you get hit once you die, high score is 8 minutes 13 seconds, the instant of your death your score is submitted to a complete & international scoreboard.

what occurs to me is that sense of interconnectedness, every part taking up the exact minimum spare to approriate and flair every other part, with an overall vision that complements the thing, is in itself a seamlessness reminiscent of hell. which says good things for hell, honestly


yoon-suin: 

reading this book and oestensibly running it made me realize I shouldn’t use content that I don’t love, in my tabletop rpg games, because then I’m gonna be playing pretend about some stuff I’m not that invested in, and it’s all gonna seem trite. Despite the relatively strong prose and composition, I basically have no interest in the orientalist adventuring the book offers. as with DCC above


vornheim:  there’s a sense I get with a couple lamentations of the flame princess products of a greater project condensed and foreshortened, like I feel vornheim with all the praise it gets is only 64 pages long and the cover which you’re supposed to roll dice onto is pretty small. I feel the same way with Veins of the Earth, maybe, and probably with A Red and Pleasant Land both which I dunno how much I trust the terrain generators thereof. It’s too hard for me to launch a ARAPL campaign what with the geography and endless rooms-- I always imagine some huge procedural generation engine to handle it all for me

I usually want game books to provide, in easy reference, original, interesting content, which is easy to use, not work-intensive.  this is not true for AR&PL and Veins where it’s a campaign book where you have to assemble all the pieces; you have to manage a caves environment/ endless alice-rooms environment (both: dramatically different from normal terrain & therefore possibly much harder to describe), and provide some sense of direction, maybe. Both books are kinda bestiaries with a set of environmental goals added, and some tools. for other people that’s maybe enough but for me it’s a challenge to put it all together. I’m doing it right now with Veins and although it’s rewarding it’s also a responsibility.

but back to vornheim, what is there ?really?to recommend vornheim? a lot of people use it. there’s 2 dungeons, some rules for moving about a city, a bunch of nouns in tables, and a more general sense of what vornehim is supposed to be like. but uh “complete city kit” I don’t know I just don’t know what’s it’s like or what you need or even if my players would like a really high-concept city environment to work with. I feel like you can fit everything you need to know on a page. But I do use the noun list ofdifferent professions.

I wish there was kinda a more comprehensive understanding for how to run this just like AR&PL where there’s soemthing vital that remains unsaid. too vague of a criticism. “advice on running a city” too Idk. that all being said I actually feel yoon-suiin is an easier zone to run


maze of the blue medusa:

I’m glad this book has eclipsed into a “rare book”, it’s pretty suited up to be, and like a monumental breath of life into rpgs in general for the most part

like the writing and concepts and very especially layout are enough to present a pristine experience reading this

running it: I don’t like how glossy the pages are and the room shapes are impossible to convey that easily, then again if I just drew them out it would have been fine

also this crowded megadungeon doesn’t always have great dungeon ecology sense relative to zak’s pictures, and patrick’s writing, and the walls and secret rooms, these not always making sense  (maybe a plus, it’s supposed to be crazy). like a witch is supposed to be guarding a room with trapped rune-doors, but there’s another untrapped door off to the side away from the witch so...


edmund’s letters to nabokov:

bought this in the vain attempt to acquire nabokov’s writing re: lenin, at least more than the “bucketfull of milk with a dead rat at the bottom” remark. you’d think I have to read nabokov’s novels to learn what he thinks about communism but I just want the straight dope, son. anyway this book is mostly discussion of russian grammar.

it’s odd I think how hard it is to narrow in on that perspective of like post wwii thought on communism, or at least solely in my google search era capabilities


the killing of a sacred deer:

playful like “the lobster” but has more of a fire under its butt and is a little less dreadful. a sacred deer? the fun part is Barry Keoghan talking like a loon to distressed Colin Farrel


cuphead: Dont deal with the devil

fleischer bros animations have attack cycles if you look

I beat the robot boss with a hack

when I first saw this game I thought the huge, cartoony animations would blow out the gamefeel but playing it it’s tight, tight tight. there’s a certain versimilitude you get when all the sprites are the right size and have good rhythm and it’s especially impressive seeing this in like, the most expansive visual/audio project I’ve ever seen in a video game


caveblazers:

procedural roguelike jumpy games, spelunky, programmer art’s junky, arrows for arrows wasd but the double jump’s funky, mild and wild the game takes a while and I never beat it, seeing as I run out of steam about 45% of the way in, bombarding everything with my super powerful bombs

suffice to say it’s a good game, it’s got perks,probably every design trend since 2000, pretty well done, used to play it all night


hearthstone:

good and fun and yeah I got to hone my mana curve down to one stone, managed to get up to the point of facing combo decks before I went “oh, right” and turned that shit off


breath of the wild:

a series of overlapping & shallow resources, which have the advantage of being easy to refill, and easy to deplete. your horse can die, your weapons explode, but you can make about an infinite amount of food, but if you get in combats where you lose most of your heart meter in one hit, you’ll burn through it all quickly. so you can pick up up fairies at the fairy fountain without it feeling overpowered; sure, they’ll prevent you from dying but you’ll keep on getting hit.

that being said combat does sort of taper off in difficulty reltaively, fast but there’s still that consistent ability for it to surprise you with a couple different enemy types, or all your damage dealing weapons have been depleted, and you just wanna kill this 300h bokobkin for some reason, or you find yourself with an ice spear pushing frozen dudes off cliffs because you don’t wanna wear and tear your normal weapons. at this point in my game all I’m using is elemental arrows because normal arrows are too expensive

but it turned around when I realized hearts weren’t the only thing, it was also _navigation_, which the game takes seriously enough! there’s a couple points where you’d wanna use photos, or the map-stamps, or you have to look at photos and try to match it up and that all encourages wandering around, and thus more random encounters, and therefore more grinding up against the various resource-meters

90% of the art for the game though is not good, but oddly what it is that’s nice is the landscapes, “wild”, huh, which are gradually ruined by giant red laser beams that shoot across the sky the more you complete the game


super mario oddessy

main point of this game is the ass-end opens up like 900 more stars which you’re supposed to collect, it’s all in reference to super mario 64 albeit again it’s that fucking linerarity problem, in sm64 it’s like they didn’t know what level design was exactly so they just experimented and in oddessy it’s all boss battles with rabbits

fuck this fucking game man the colors are so bad and they got that dumb loop of music and like ⅗ of the levels are swimming levels damb… but you can pose mario and take HD pictures and share them and Peach has a different classy outfit for each zone


the relentless picnic podcast

in their earlier days there was the thought, bc of the election, that there was some boundary that had been crossed, and these were exciting times. but things kinda picked up in this wonky-no-worky fashion, all the crisis bled out. I remember the “id queen” episode of this podcast and it became clear that there was this sort of fascism donald was the head of. a feeling of stunned wakefulness in the company of learned friends. but then it kinda drifted off, like everyone did, there wasn’t something so super-insightful as you’d think there’d been, at least, not practically; I’m just worried/notworried/worried


la decimma vittima

the conception of sci fi maybe used to be philosophical and cooly so. what changed it I propse was an obsessive attention to detail, or any kind of fixation on reality. but really reality happens when you let go, when the guidance of things is allowed to exist and not hammered down; you can compare la decimma vittima to the star war prequels, or star trek original to the rest of star trek


overall conclusions: kiling children and satanic material has more to do with inner wellness, RPGS: pick two: [easy to run, good original content I want to run, consistent internal sense], the switch doesn’t have any good games, ultimately a life of pursuit of game-objects is unsatisfying and wears down your eyes

veins of the earth: roads

veins of the earth: what does a city looklike, anyway.

these are all tunnels.

the #1 rule is there is no visibility.

most cities have the thing where you can see them from afar. Well there's no sightlines in the veins. that being said there are many other signs, as much as you'd expect to see driving up to a city: institutions, travelers, smaller hubs, and most importantly, roads.

here's a question: what does a road look like in the veins? there's a couple kinds that occur to me

1. climbing routes, as in Blind Descent, or any supercaving: scratched rock, permanent pistons, rope maybe

2. heavily used climbing routes: handholds a combination of obvious and reliable and sometimes faulty, one obvious path that is different from everywhere else, loads of graffiti, ziplines

3. duerger were here: very different, travel is along whatever architectural fantasia duerger were into that week, in my game rn it's ziggarauts everywhere, also marks of perilous supermachines

4. a climbing route good enough that essentially no checks are needed. requires a decent amount of upkeep

probably most important is quality of climbing path, the closer you're to civilization the better it'll all be, plus the more likely you are to see other travelers, plus the density of other travelers to each other

you can measure this in days of travel for both: distance from civilization, = bonus to climbing path quality = likelihood of travelers = density of travelers to each other

so this is a random encounter chart for a road. check daily. roll 1d10 per table and add +1 per day's distance from civilization.

quality of path:

10+ no established climbing path whatsoever
7-9 traces of a path: direction discernible, no bonus
5-6 poor quality path: +1d4 to all climb checks needed
1-4 quality path no checks needed

if there's some sort of special situation going on, like duerger carvings, use that instead.

likelihood of travelers: 

8-10+: no group encountered
7: fresh traces of another group
6-1: group encountered

if you roll a 1, you always encounter a group.

density of travelers (roll if you encounter a group)

7-10+: no other groups detectable
6: you _think_ someone might be nearby
5: there is another group within ear/smell/distant light range (not detectable constantly, inconstantly)
3-4: 2 groups are encountered instead of one.
2: crowded at a block.

self-defense on the veins-road:

the rule for travelers in the veins is that generally everyone expects that if you can be taken by force with little damage incurred you will be; it's considered magnanimous if you don't kill and eat the vulnerable on your travels.

so, everyone tries to guarantee to do more damage than they're worth. they'll be prepared to defend themselves against things more powerful than you; but remember, it's not an even matchup most can afford, but rather a threat.

(the threat is, if you're damaged=weakened, you're likely to get eaten by a whole host of other travelers. this is something pretty well supported by LOTFP's rules on hp recovery.)

forms of self-defense: (these aren't mutually exclusive)

1. weapons

2. explosives. bad idea underground. but some do carry: suicide jars full of poisonous gas. guarantees of a curse are ever popular, and some do actually work; it's unpredictable. rarely there could be actual explosive devices.

3. incompatible value; the food we have won't suit you. can be achieved alchemically or with those poison pills duerger-actually-derro sell. (y'know, the ones who say their dwarves, but you can really tell...)  sort of comparable to #2 above with the addition that some races really aren't edible to each other. you have to be pretty different for that to be true, as even poisonous food has way of getting digested. esoterically you might find a group of travelers disguised as a different race not edible to anyone, which I guess would be archeans or cambrimen (both impossible to disguise as, I should note)

4. screaming really loud, like really loud


the state they're in: roll1d10, don't add bonuses

1-5: full strength
6-9: less than full but they appear pretty much full (-1d4 HD, d4 explodes)
10: it can be readily perceived that they are not at full strength (-1d8 HD, d8 explodes)

their goal: roll 1d10, no bonuses, note that travel is fantastically expensive in the veins.

10-7:trading (well protected)
6-5:refugees (will probably lie about it)
4:pilgrimage (large group, well protected)
3:carrying a message (small group, well protected)
2:migration (large group)
1:a group of adventurers (well protected)

number travelling:
1d4 small group
1d8 normal group, d8 explodes
3d10: large group

HD values: 1/number travelling + 2d6/if well protected (or more, depending)

noncombatanats: anyone who can't fight is either a baby or a child too young to fight (very young) or like an otherwise extremely useful old person and are virtually treasure, so tack on a few maybe

racial makeup: in my game I think I'm going to have it be somewhat vague, but everyone is pretty much human with some built in other genetics and mutations mayb

travelers from the more exotic cultures of the veins:

derro: because travelling is such a vulnerable activity derro will zero-deny their own state of travel to the point of not ever travelling. nonetheless they are found on roads, unfortunately. derro travelers are just a standard derro encouter with the improv paranoia

olm: sole travelers, nearly all, 3 or 4 olm travelling together would be the equivalent of an entire army in terms of resources being marshaled. that being said 3 olm are not an army in terms of strength so when olm have to travel its one olm trying to avoid trouble, up to something like a vision quest (an example borrowed from the random encounters table)

gnonmen: gnonmen caravans are an absolute thing, they'll absolutely help anyone that they can detect as good, which is rarely anyone down here. a caravan looks like just a bunch of walking gnonmen maybe dragging something, no vehicles. 3d10 gnonmen +2d6 HD protection

duerger: duerger travel in titanic war-construction-crews so they're almost never encountered solely, except as the reaching fingers of the mass, so if you see some they're the scouts of the swedish army so to speak.  duerger scouts: 1d12 duerger of like d6 hd each, each interested in information, not food or lumes. conditions of the environment more important than the people. wandering around, thumbs in the air, squinting. one hand may be idly carving

deep janeen: the main impression deep janeen want to give their travelling servants is a bandit's score so apparently rich that it goes beyond being obviously a trap.

some deep janeen travelling servants:

1. a single weathered man carrying a pack 4 times his size completely covered with hanging and glittering emeralds. the emeralds sing and scrape, it's like a love song to bandits, they reflect all light as if its their light. any route with a squeeze would be impossible, these travelers take their time.

I think if you kill the servant (not easy, they have HP in their reality like we do in our abstraction; they just sort of soak up damage for a while [10HD] ) and they'll defend themselves after lowering the pack down, with an old and large knife ([1d8]) ....or take the emerald (it just rips away in your hand, like an overripe fruit or else it hangs really strongly and cuts your hand) you'll find the meat of the body wiry, and the emeralds not as valuable as you thought. They certainly won't reflect light like they did... or try to lift the pack: immeasurably heavy, as if one solid superdense object. inside: things, many things, none of them treasure exactly.

2. a curious, girllike servant, always asking questions, wearing a silk smock, carrying nothing. wandering and crawling on her bare feet and hands. people avoid her, even monsters. she is not trying to get anywhere. she can't climb, she asks for help.

3. a bunch of migrating penguins, carrying an i-beam (from the ironic deep janeen)

4. a thing that burns everything within .75turns with fire, you start feeling the heat approaching at 1 turn. if you get to the center somehow it's a superhot boy struggling and carrying a heavy magic-ball-sized orb

5. {sound of a regiment of cavalry, moving through the veins, will hail other travelers as appropriate, can inflict harm}

6. rival substratal machine reduced to carrying messages. has blade arms and not enough limbs, covered in muck, pathetically scrabbling at walls, will try over and over again.

7. avalanche of pure crystal which moves quickly through the veins, crushing all it passes (should be rare, terrified of salt)

aelf adal: i don't fucking know, probably use skerples's thing, although I believe they describes a regional situation.

knotsmen: groups of knotsmen already well detailed in the book.

also you can use the encounter table on p 269 instead.

3d mapping veins caves

I used a draw.io and the "veins of the earth" tables to generate a cave system

then I illustrated it in paint

then I put it together in 3D Paint with microsoft remix models and the 3d doodle tool

...then I colored it and added a knight for scale

"the shape of water" 2017 review

it is edited badly. sally hawkins is enchanting as the reverse end of a monster-human relationship. the score is cornball. Octavia Spencer is good, but a little cornball. Then we have the white guys- Michael Stuhlbarg, Michael Shannon, and the indomitable Rich Jenkins. This movie is insane, it gives the three white guys SO much screen time, some of it is good like the Rich Jenkins relationship with a pie counter clerk but a lot of it seems intent, laser-focused-in on exploring a white supremacist’s background life, & this boring scientist guy, and even Rich Jenkins talking a lot reveals this movie has very little to say

Also it’s a mild whitewash with Elisa Esposito/Sally Hawkins

I think it’s ‘cause Guillmero thought he could bring out some of the sharp edge out of the white supremacist dude, like he did with that Spanish General in “Pan’s Labyrnith”, that we spend so much time with the antagonist’s home life, buying a car, the pressures of his job. But, thankfully, there’s just nothing there, the dude is a fascist and you can see the vein popping out of Michael Shannon’s forehead TRYING to bring some sort of a humanity to the position

when you think there’s something there but there’s nothign actually there

“Crimson Peak” was another less successful long-scale experiment in trying to convert golden age horror into, like, a soft-focus modern feminist drama with f/x, Crimson Peak was also _very boring_, it seems Guilmerro really loves and wants to take his time with the individual swimming details of the set and the ornamental character personalities. It’s like a Studio Ghibli film, like if it were all Spirited Away, with 90% less detail (more lke, 200% less) and less characters etc, and it’s slower because there’s -less stuff-

THAT BEING SAID that kind of joy that made the original Hellboy good rears its head a couple times like with the dream sequence near the end, but uh there’s still a lot of deliberation on “glassy green water” looks

THE FEMINISM OF MONSTER DICK:

movie does a VERY GOOD JOB of encapsulating a male sexuality as the target, something to be contained and fought over, with 1 (one) phallic object and a bunch of yonic objects in the mix, just the idea of a captured/vulnerable sexual monster that ppl fuck, as a male figure, it is definitely a male monster rescued (spoilers) by a female main character and they have empowering consensual sex

its badly edited tho but it makes it seem half-awkwardly like Elisa Esposito is like, from the start, zoomin in, super into this monster man. I’m being unfair, at the start its clearly curiosity, the film does a good job of revealing Elisa’s attraction to the monster-man in retrospect, like all along she was in it to win it... Which is kinda a thing, right? In the space in my little brain it doesn’t have enough room to process upfront that Elisa would be immediately attracted to The Thing From The Black Lagoon, but she totally is

it still has this sort of throwaway sexual harassment subplot which is brief but not brief enough and I think is simultaneously too much and doesn’t go far enough, not meaning “there isn’t enough sexual harassment” but rather I mean it ends up in easy movie characterization territory, vile

vis a vis Elisa’s status as a mute character: the film is pretty good at going the distance with this one, but it’s still an uncomfortably central dramatic theme, like the ability to talk/not to talk, its pretty bald at times

I mean I’d push for a movie with a mute main character where the preponderance of the film isn’t squarely on their muteness about 20-30% of the time

the white supremacist’s journey actually is a little interesting, he’s kinda swirling down the toilet bowl of materialism, pop psychology, he actually makes a break for it but gets reeled back in, it’s half-sympathetic, and at the end he realizes “ooh there’s actualy NO LIMITS” and he gets his throat cut

which, again, is Guilmerro Del Toro’s half-decent attempt to try to soft bush a villain but it comes off as too generous in my opinion, we have already been informed about what’s going on

'deep carbon observatory' review & lamentations of the flame princess diary

 THIS REVIEW is mostly inward-facing to people who have already read or indeed, written the product. To those who haven’t, suffice to say that even if you don’t play RPGs, the text of “Deep Carbon Observatory” is notable literature, being serious and well-written and not fucking stupid like every other piece of rpg material under the sun.

 things are good:

• the opening scrawl with the village worked servicably for me, imparted a sense of interconnected chaos
• I played the rival adventurers a little corny 
• the deal with the eel in the tree was resolved well
• the wizard’s duel was truly chaotic, with a miniaturized flying 8ly mirrored little wizard flying around, the players got a canoe and were introduced to the pike, and also backstabbed a wizard after the spells wore off; that was pretty good
• the windmill with the crabs was the source of enormous energy and fun due to the creative problem solving revolving (literally) around the crabs… also the gore of like 19 murdered ppl inside the windmill was horrifying
• the squid, the hill, and the farm animals trapped on it was also pretty much the above; a lot of fun, creative and risky problem solving getting past the squid, a little sense of peace and hope from the animals including one pc getting a (second) dog, and then a messy escape from the island with squid-fishing and -towing and -wrestling and deaths of the two dogs and a PC
• the golems were the source of some hints on the mystery, a constant source of mercurial intimidation, and good tools ultimately as the pcs used the golems to destroy Snail Shell Zarathustra’s ship
• Snail Shell Zarathustra was professional, and relatively no nonsense, and he had a doctor onboard. As the PCs began to lead him astray he grew more suspicious, but was still betrayed by them when they lead a golem to his ship. 
• gruta was just a weird sight that I forgot to capitalize on
• the scratch-built dam didn’t make sense w/r/t hydrophysics 
• I was too afraid to use The Crows, much. They mostly dickied around with a zombie horde, before forgetting about the retreating pcs and completing the adventure themselves. I shouldn’t have played them as a truly independent force and instead should’ve used them entirely in relation to the pcs (but I was afraid)
• the scrolls in the crypt that the family was burning was good because the scrolls were the proper fire-making tool that the pcs needed to burn down the windmill to get the gear to get the gold boat. Also they figured out that one of the scrolls they got was the very powerful Time Stop but they lost this when the crab smashed them when they got the boat.
• The gold boat was good and complicated and incurred the crabsmash and got the party 50,000 sp and the two surviving party members a level each (like +1 and +2 hp each, and 2 skill points) and allowed them to buy a river galley and hire 30 soldiers and a crew for the galley and a cannon and 3000 rations to feed the starving villagers, well, those who survived. It also provoked a deep and physics-knowledge-intensive puzzle of how to dredge up a sunken boat using a pulley, which we tested using a real tub of water like it was science class
• the crabsmash was a philosophical moment: a giant crab dropped out of the sky and killed half the party. no warning, just a save. philosophical bcuz I asked 

...but I think crabsmash as written sorta functions as a violation of that principle. Sometimes random instadeath, fersure, if you think that you’re exempt then look sometimes rocks actually fall and everyone actually dies in real life and if you’re using save vs. death as common as it is in most lotfp products isn’t that “random instadeath”? But really, the entire thing makes me uneasy, in a way that I like.

• the giant platypus was good
• the dam: the interior of the dam was probably the most “tight” part of the whole adventure, that being said my players managed to find a way to both make impassable the secret door to the right as well as lure out all the Canoptic Guards to bombard them with cannon fire. But the red-herring trap room worked well, they never relaxed about it. 
• the valley: was good, although I removed many of the elements from it, mainly the battle between the reed people and the kapeks, the kapeks had already won, and the bacterial mat had turned solid brown. The light defense system was creepy and good. The golden boats were another red herring, the chieftain kinda pointless maybe because the reed people had already died. 
• The eel forest was funny because our suicidal player kept getting 1dmg eel bites and an eel got a critical and bit out her eye
• The first descent into Nightingale hall was good and creepy and the players picked up the evidence to deduce a horrifying slave-culture 
• The cave giant’s long fierce fingers were creepy and deadly, I wish I remembered that it didnt kill by squeezing but by slamming u into a wall and chewing
• The cave giant served as a territorializing force, although for most of the dungeon crawl everyone was too preoccupied with internal strife and with the many strange things in the observatory to notice it was there. It came into focus only when it first snatched up a child PC who stayed alone in the dungeon and later when the monster was blocking exit from the dungeon
• The chem-plant-bomb room killed everybody but also they had fun roleplaying not knowing what an electric light was
• The Cervit was cool because it was like something you’d find on a factory floor, the value thereof was not obvious, everyone was really anxious about transporting this mysterious industrial material
• The hall of silks was o.k., the monsters terrifying, and they used a chem-plant-bomb to kill these 
• The silks in the hall of silk was a fine note of color
• The hall of shells didn’t capture their attention and the hall of core samples was too much detail for anyone’s good
• the overall shape of the Observatory tripped me up vis a vis describing it and simultaneously not making it too obvious that it was “two giant stalactites hanging in an abyss” but the depth and darkness of the abyss was good
• the metal boxes full of gear was good, everyone was really happy to find like, equipment
• the little elevator/scale setup in the lower lefter hall was too hard to describe compared to its relative interestingness, but i did describe it and the pcs did ignore it
• the azimoths and reflectors remained a mystery but a good one, there was disappearing vomit
• I fucked up describing the world-clock and honestly seems like a mouthful
• the sheer craziness and utility of the tables for the Tektite Lens made the whole procedure of generating and saying the results fascinating for everyone, it exactly hit the note of “peering into another world? but how? what’s going on? what is this… madness??”
• I actually wish I would have limited the use of the Lens to d6 uses in retrospect. Why? more cthonic…
• Climbing down the chain in retreat from the Cave Giant was the pretty much “transcendental cliffhanger” which will serve as the perfect transition into a campaign of Veins of the Earth, especially since I get to emphasize the sheer starving darkness of climbing down an infinite chain, I’ll get to lead off with new character sheets and a new inventory system saying “due to your infinite climb downward, you’ll have to discard anything too heavy or too cumbersome that you can’t make fit on your body” and emphasize food and water as resources and start everyone off in a place of desperation. This ending also gave a beautiful, dark bow on the whole geographical narrative of the adventure. There were only 5 soldiers left, descending into the deep…

 Biggest overt issue is the geography of the flood not being too clear, even one sentence like “the flood extends for miles before turning into pseudo-swamp” would have cleared everything up.

 The other issue is the practicality of everyone starving. "The water of the river is ripe with life, over-full with predators and fish of every kind." Players pointed out this was ideal fishing, which seemed kind of obvious.

Also to stop all the villagers from just becoming refugees I had to say some stuff about how the village was 2 weeks of travel away from the rest of civilization, or any source of food, which was odd, because there was a river right there

 Minor issues that maybe are just the referee’s responsibilty: figuring out relative speeds in flooded areas, translating the Crows’s AD&D stats, figuring out the geography around the dam (mountains, thanks to the authors for help on this), the physics of the scratch-built dam, and yes, the clearness of the maps. 

 THE EMOTIONAL LOAD OF LAMENTATIONS 1ST LEVEL:

 I posit: that if the referee is gratious in their warnings, and if the players are -all- trying to stay alive and are somewhat good at it, you can run a game of Lamentations of the Flame Princess where everyone starts at 1st level AND there is extremely lethal shit everywhere AND if you die you restart at level one AND some player characters survive and level up.

 My actual experience with LOTFP is that there are 1d4 deaths per session, it’s really frustrating and depressing to some people, and it’s really frustrating to everyone at some point. And yes, some players take a liking to it.

When I first started writing play reports for this system ‘lanir’ on the forums was talking about how I was basically gonna burn through players until I found some who liked my playstyle. I really was trying to create a roleplaying game where:

1. combat was deadly and pretty simple & quick, and kinda realistic
2. no railroad would reign
3. NPCs mostly acted realistically, in their own self interest
4. a lot of the fun came from figuring out how to survive 

...and with a handful of other values which I enforce more or less conciously, like “no fudging”.

  After about 2 years of play I think I found some players entirely willing to play in the above frame of mind, where stupid mistakes in lethal situations are usually lethal. I did have to burn through a bunch of other players to find these couple players. But then again the burned ones have their own group now, which I’m apart of, we’re playing GURPS…

 (I might ease off the difficulty in the Veins campaign, because I’ll be writing it all myself.)

 --

 When I first started LOTFP dming and I ran “tales of the scarecrow” I was laughing in the faces of my frustrated players. This sounds bad and is bad I guess but also that was kinda how it was in that group of people. And then there was the time where I did just the heart puzzle from “Fuck For Satan” for my brother and his girlfriend and how they were hounding me for the answer for hours after.

 One night after a roleplaying game I was walking with my friend Dave and I had a little broken buddha statue in my pocket. I said, here’s a riddle, what’s in my pocket? Dave couldn’t guess, even after 20 questions, and I was like, O.K., you lost, I won’t tell you. This seemed essentially unfair to Dave. What was I gaining? (I did tell him)

 I sort of thought that way of the grinning game master who has the knowledge that you don’t have and the allure and the power-mystery was kinda something to bring to my friends’s tables back in 2014-5. These days I still do it, but with a subtler hand, and with plenty of warnings beforehand: this game is going to be super hard, you’ll probably all die… and although it’s still frustrating at times it also gives out some thrills: