Category Archives: Games

I write about games! I write a LOT about games! Everything I do about games is here, in this tab, in some way.

Paradox Pokemon (But Just the Dinosaurs)

I think it’s fair to say that at this point in my life I have fallen out of interest in actually playing Pokemon games. The last one I finished was Pokemon Sun & Moon, which I thought was excellent! I didn’t finish Sword & Shield, and I think that’s mostly because the game is full of guardrails and reminders that are designed to keep the game playable for a four year old who may be learning to read, and in the process plays very slowly compared to how I want to play games. I do know enough about the game to think that most of the criticism of Pokemon as a franchise is at the very least, weird, if not outright bad faith nonsense.

Despite all this though, I love looking at Pokemon. I love watching streamers play it, and I love watching strategy reports from the real competitive scene. I am, for lack of a better word, a spectator. A fan.

This last generation of Scarlet & Violet, has brought with it something that I’ve wanted for so long, and never really formally been able to express. Thanks to time travel shenanigans – oh, spoilers, I guess? – this is the generation where we get to see Pokemon’s dinosaurs.

Promotional art of the ancient paradox pokemon
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Goblin, Vandal, Sugg

Every word you’ve ever used comes from somewhere. The structures you use to discuss ideas is informed by ideas that came before it. I’m not getting all Sapir-Worf about this (and if you don’t know what that is, you don’t have to know because it’s probably not true), but rather wanting to draw your attention to the way the world you live in is in part defined by the words you use. If you’re an English speaker, there are ways you describe food that are a byproduct of French invasion centuries ago. Words like ‘technocrat’ and ‘hyperspecialised’ are constructions that borrow from how intellectuals used to use Latin. Your swear words are almost all from the poor working class, and used to describe sex, god, or excrement, and that’s not how all swear words work in all cultures!

Your world shapes your language.

In any given fantasy setting you work on, you don’t usually have the same linguistic history to justify why the people there talk like we talk now. In fact, to be completely fair, they probably don’t talk like us at all: you have fantasy languages, across fantasy constructions. Any given phrase a character in your world says is probably not using the exact same words as we are and we’re all working with a sort of fictionalised fantasy that makes the concepts reasonably translate across.

There’s a whole treatise then about how we handle Native American names and loanwords that we italicise like etouffee.

Point is that you have words, in your world, and you can attach stories to them. You’ve probably seen me talk about Orcs and how they relate to language and stereotypes, along in my long post on the word ‘Orc’. Here’s another set of examples I like for my world of Cobrin’Seil, as they pertain to the best little evolved raccoons, the Goblins.

an icon of a goblin hut
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The Yawning Boredom Of The Word Epic

Good god this is a dull word, right?

Cancon was a fun convention, I liked it a lot. But while I was there, I saw this word being worn into a groove in my brain. It was an all-purpose descriptor, a vague and generic positivity, a detailer of scope and an encouragement for engaging, and every time I saw it I felt a bit of my brain shut down in response. I think some of this is just the normal overuse of meaningless words. If someone described a game as being ‘lit’ I would probably also just as much immediately ignore that descriptor. Packing peanut language, that kind of thing.

And I know it’s rich, coming from me to complain about overuse of cliche. I just said ‘packing peanuts’ which is something I am very selfconscious about saying a lot.

It’s not just the ungoogleable game Epic by Wise ‘Maybe We Don’t Want To Be Called White Wizards Any More’ Wizards. It’s also games like Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt Skullzfyre or Epic Resort or Tiny Epic and their franchise of genuinely exciting little games, or Crafting Epic Dungeons or Epic Scenery or Epicness Incarnate or Warhammer Epic or Epic Confrontation and you might not know if I made any of these games up, or all the other things I saw on the convention floor that just kept using the term, and every single time made me realise that in so doing, I now knew less about them than I would if almost any word was in that space.

an icon showing three divergent arrows

What is ‘epic’ for?

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Playing For Money

Hey if a game is the consensual overcoming of unnecessary obstacles, are people still playing a game if they’re being paid to play?

What if the game does not have money as part of the game?

What if being seen as playing the game is incentivised?

Is capitalism fundamentally violent?

Sure let’s start it off with some easy questions.

an icon of a hand receiving money
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Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 2 — College Days

What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.

This second section is about the characters travelling through the Kraivh highways to the city that holds the Iacon College

Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.

WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!

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Vox Maxima Gallery 2: The Kraivh Empire

The world is broken; wounded, and one in seven in the entire empire expunged. A billion are missing and amongst them were workers, guards, scholars — and those missing people have left a wound across the entire world. Thankfully, the strong leadership, the head of the Kraivh Assembly, have been able to hold the institutions of the world strong in this great, yawning disappearance.

The armies of the Kraivh defend the borders. The Osteotheruges pick through the graves and memorials, trying to find the truth that has been lost. And even Emperor Kraivh, The Eternal Undying himself has assigned his closest blood to the quest of solving the great question, beginning the quest meant to solve that mystery, and in the process, bring back a satisfactory answer to be spoken in in the Vox Maxima.

Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.

WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!

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Game Pile: Gensou Narratograph

I’ve spoken in the past about the sprawling storytelling tradition of the Touhou Project. If you’re unfamiliar, the way I consider Touhou is not a series of videogames or even a franchise as you might conventionally interpret it, but rather a sort of communally shared storytelling space created by a large body of uncapitalised creative sources. Despite the fact that Touhou is the product of, initially, the work of one person (working in concert with an audience and then a community), it isn’t really reasonable to call it a franchise or even a universe. Those things imply a structure, a sort of coherence or an overarching ownership, and that’s something that Touhou absolutely does not have.

What Touhou has is a community and that community connect with other members of their community in almost any communication media you can find. It’s games, sure but it’s also doujinshi, fanfiction, fan art and in pretty much every single place people can create stuff, you’re going to see people creating something Touhou adjacent. In this way, Touhou stretches from a source point out and into pretty much every single other place people can be. I don’t have any proof but I’m confident that someone on the Antarctic Research Station of some country or another had a Marisa sticker inside their backpack or whatever.

Touhou is a lot of things, which is to say, I better watch my mouth. What I think I can say, pretty unreservedly, is that Touhou is distinct. Touhou material does not tend to look like or present itself as anything but Touhou. There are other materials full of girls who look like they’re twelve and wear numerous petticoats and ostentatious hats, but most of them succeed at looking like Touhou and not so much like their own thing distinct from Touhou.

What Touhou makes tends to be made for an audience of Touhou fans, which is why some of the games have a reputation of being brutally, comically hard. There’s a sort of deliberate alienation at work: Don’t you dare ask Touhou to change for you, you need to change for Touhou! Yeah the game is unfair and hard and you can’t get the good ending if you can’t skate through these bullets right, that’s how we like it! That’s how you know you’re a real fan!

(This is not really how they talk)

(most of the time)

(Since they left 4chan)

Anyway it’s this pre-existing weirdoscape that gave rise to what is, to my eye, simply the strangest goddamn Tabletop Roleplaying game I’ve ever seen.

The cover of the book Gensou Narratograph

Content Warning: I’m not really a Touhou fan and this game doesn’t change my opinion of it. If you’re heavily invested in this game being a good game and want to see me praise it, you won’t, so it’s probably best to just jog on.

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How To Be: Cassandra and Rapunzel from Tangled (In 4e D&D)

In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:

  • This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
  • This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
  • While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
  • The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic

When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.

Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.

You know the story of Rapunzel? The kid’s story about a girl with long hair in a tower which you can tell as a bedtime story and it takes maybe ten minutes, fifteen if you’re doing a lot with the voices and details and want to make the witch’s end really grisly? Well, yeah, turns out that got a movie back in the day and then that movie got a TV series and that TV series kicks ass, and so for this Smooch Month, I decided to try and make an article about base-level optimising choices for a pair of characters, a battle couple. In this case, one of those Battle Couple members is Rapunzel, the hero of the story Rapunzel, and the other is, uh

Her name’s Cass.

a book cover meant to look like a 4th edition expansion book, showing art of Cassandra and Rapunzel from Tangled, the Series, with the text on it "Tangled synergy" and "Crossing the line twice." The art is by Nonadraws
Original art by Nonadraws

And hey, I’m going to talk about some spoilers for a kid’s cartoon you probably didn’t watch but I do like it and I think if you care about spoilers, well you should watch it without me being the way you find out about the third story arc of the TV series and what it means okay byeee.

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FFXIV: Rin Stormenni

This is an explanatory writeup of one of my Original Characters (OCs). Nothing here is necessarily related to a meaningful fiction you should recognise and is shared because I think my OCs are cool and it’s cool to talk about OCs you make.


An image of Rin Stormenni, a brown-skinned, blue-haired Viera bunny boy. He is wearing a midriff armour top, and a featureless visor mask that hides his expression in the middle of an old city. The image has blood and burnmarks in the background.

“If you follow this path, of this abyss of love, then you must do it knowing. You will be bane, outcast, criminal, rival, sinner. All the world will hate you, young one, and you will have no kingdom but that of strife.”

The young man beamed, dripping still with tyrant’s blood.

“Then I shall be the Prince of a Thousand Enemies.”

Self-made outcast. Valiant crusader. End of days. Bun goes hop.

It’s not arrogance if it’s justified.

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A Mechanic For Love

Hey, have I shown you this already?

A card face illustration. The left side is dedicated to a tall region called 'tall portrait + name plate'. The right hand is split into a section labelled 'rules', then 'payout 3,'
payout 2,' and 'payout 1'.

This is a card that’s meant to represent a piece in a worker placement game, where the pieces also represent the places they’re meant to be placed. And I think this might be a game where your workers can date other people’s workers.

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Game Pile: Thirsty Sword Lesbians

I feel ill equipped to even examine this book.

I do not think I am considered aesthetically or in my presentation particularly thirsty, I own no swords nor do I feel that that’s a deeply spiritual failing on my part, and I am not in any but the most technically accepting and deliberately broad definition an lesbians. I’m not asking for anyone to change the qualifications on my part.

splash art from the game Thirsty Sword Lesbians.

“Ah,” you may glibly say, “Talen, that doesn’t mean you have to be those things to participate in this game,” okay, cool, great, thank you for explaining the basics of fiction to me. I can understand that that’s something you may feel you have to do with my demonstration of difficulty grappling with that.

Come along, and maybe you’ll learn more about me by listening to me, as I talk about this book, and the game it ostensibly is about.

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MTG: Wife Guy Decks

There are 43 legendary creature cards in Magic: The Gathering that use the word ‘And’ in their name, which is used to represent a pair of creatures. For a number of them, like Firesong and Sunspeaker, or Tibor and Lumia, these cards represent relatives, and I have done my best to check for these, and also the pairing with actual children in them. Here then presented are ten different decks where your commander represents some measure of Wife Guyness.

 Anax and Cymede {1}{R}{W}Legendary Creature — Human SoldierFirst strike, vigilanceHeroic — Whenever you cast a spell that targets Anax and Cymede, creatures you control get +1/+1 and gain trample until end of turn.Akros’s greatest heroes are also its royalty.
3/2
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How do Pokemon Breed?

I’m something of an originalist in Pokemon. I think that the games are the core of what the narrative flows from and everything else is flexible story that builds on that. What’s more, in Pokemon, people can say things, but there’s nothing saying that they’re right. People are wrong all the time in Pokemon, and sometimes people even lie to the player characters, to themselves, or to one another.  What’s more, the player character is a kid, somewhat, but also a kid who is experimenting with and learning about Pokemon training and breeding, so chances are good, people would explain the useful things to them.

But they don’t.

an image of the red-blue-yellow day care centre, where you couldn't breed pokemon.
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4e For Two

A common complaint amongst fans of Dungeons And Or Dragons is that organising a playgroup is hard. It’s a game with a lot of investment, a lot you can do outside the game to play with it, and people love to play with it in those ways – I mean what are these articles if not me playing with D&D when I’m not playing D&D? – but there’s a thing that people talk about from time to time when trying to circumvent the challenges of running D&D which is:

an icon of a dragon's head

What if D&D but fewer players?

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Vox Maxima Story Spotlight 1 — All The Emperor’s Daughters

What follows here is a discussion of what, if I had the means and writer tools to make my Custom Magic set have proper story spotlight material, it’d look like this, it’d be built out of this. This is basically about story mechanics underlying a game system, and I want to present it to you so you can have a handle on what it looks like when I’m trying to explain game narratives for the presentation of conventional narratives.

This first section is going to be the establishing shot; it discusses the characters that are going to be introduced, the goals of this story section, and then the beats of the story that the writer can then take as their subsequent storytelling. This helps inform character dynamics for flavour text and the later appearances of characters on cards.

Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.

WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!

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Vox Maxima Gallery 1: The Emperor’s World

Ten years, ten long years of life, disappeared from the collective memory of all citizens of the world. People blink and wake up, seeing about themselves a world defined by new factions, new ideas, and new technologies, many of which they may have even had their hand in inventing.

Where am I? What’s going on? This isn’t the body I remembered, people don’t call me the name I remember – what has happened to us.

This is the new world of the Vox Maxima – waking up the moment after, all the anxieties of before confronting a new world, and a new life. What is this world, and what is present here? What is strange and what is it that your damaged memory can manage as being somehow normal?

Vox Maxima is a custom magic set created by Talen Lee. It’s composed of 187 cards, with 71 commons, 60 uncommons, 41 rares, and 15 mythic rares. Vox Decima is a custom Magic: The Gathering set, with at least one card spoiled a day, on Cohost, Kind.Social, and the r/custommagic subreddit.

WOTC Employees: This post in full presents unsolicited custom Magic: The Gathering card designs, which I understand current employee practices forbid you from looking at unsolicited. You shouldn’t be here!

Continue Reading →

Game Pile: Dream Crush

Back before you, satistically, were born, there was this thing called The Nineteen Hundred and Eighties. These are defined by nobody my age properly remembering them and attributing all sorts of things to them that didn’t necessarily exist. But also in that space, there were things like dating TV game shows, which took off in the 1970s and were petering out by the 80s.

Oh okay, so a dating TV game show is a TV game show where the premise is one of the prizes is a really cool date, and you win it by picking one of the potential dates and going out together.

Oh, so a TV game show is a type of game where the game is played primarily on TV, for an audience and—

Oh okay, so a TV is like a really big phone that only could receive streams from five people—

a picture of the game Dream Crush, showing the box and pieces set up. Sourced from Boardgamegeek's Image collection.

Anyway, the board game Dream Crush.

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For Love Of Novelty

There’s this idea in board game discourse of ‘the cult of the new.’ I’m sure it exists elsewhere, but I can see it very much in the culture of spaces like BoardgameGeek, and I always like making fun of that site, so I shall do so. The idea is that new things get more attention and are considered more worthy than old things, and this is true even if the old things aren’t actually all that old. At the time of writing, the oldest game in the BoardgameGeek top 10 is War of the Ring: Second Edition, which is from 2011. While sure, 2011 is 13 years ago, it is pretty interesting that this is a hobby with important representatives from the 1960s, 1920s, 1880s, and then we get into things like Chess and everything gets weird.

And it isn’t just that these older games like Uno and Scrabble aren’t considered part of the ranking system on BoardgameGeek, that the site is categorically unrelated. They absolutely are, and you can see their place in the rating system that they have. It’s a funny thing that I’ve spoken about called the tail of spite, and a smarter scientist than I have written about it.

An icon of a present in a box with a ribbon.
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How To Be: Power (in 4e D&D)

In How To Be we’re going to look at a variety of characters from Not D&D and conceptualise how you might go about making a version of that character in the form of D&D that matters on this blog, D&D 4th Edition. Our guidelines are as follows:

  • This is going to be a brief rundown of ways to make a character that ‘feels’ like the source character
  • This isn’t meant to be comprehensive or authoritative but as a creative exercise
  • While not every character can work immediately out of the box, the aim is to make sure they have a character ‘feel’ as soon as possible
  • The character has to have the ‘feeling’ of the character by at least midway through Heroic

When building characters in 4th Edition it’s worth remembering that there are a lot of different ways to do the same basic thing. This isn’t going to be comprehensive, or even particularly fleshed out, and instead give you some places to start when you want to make something.

Another thing to remember is that 4e characters tend to be more about collected interactions of groups of things – it’s not that you get a build with specific rules about what you have to take, and when, and why, like you’re lockpicking your way through a design in the hopes of getting an overlap eventually. Character building is about packages, not programs, and we’ll talk about some packages and reference them going forwards.

I suppose, in addition to any of the other standard comments you see from me in a How To Be post, I’m going to be mentioning some details from late in the story of Part 1 of Chainsaw Man. To that end, consider a spoiler warning in effect. You’re going to learn some stuff about how Power’s story goes, in general. No point by point, and I will keep the details broad, and if you’re interested in Chainsaw Man I do recommend you check it out. You know, if you don’t mind an action horror manga where discussing the character requires a mandatory Spoiler Warning I suppose.

A How To Be cover title graphic. It shows a 4th edition book cover with Power on it. The top title is 'All That Power', the bottom title is 'wait there needs to be wo' spilling off the side of the book. Power is mispositioned in the page so the text covers her eyes. In the background is the Chainsaw Man logo.
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