Game Pile: Brew
Brew is a 2021 game made by Stevo Torres, and published by Pandasaurus Games, who you may recognise from other titles like Machi Koro, Dinosaur Island, The Mind, The Loop, Ctrl and – you know what, Pandasaurus just have a lot of great games in their catalogue. They also have Brew, which doesn’t tend to get that much attention, and that’s where I could do a great job of pivoting to rubbishing on this game, because hey, if they don’t promote it maybe it’s because it’s baaaad.
No, don’t worry about it, I like Brew a lot.
Brew has a really cool premise for its fiction. Something’s gone all messed up with nature, and day, night, and seasons are all happening at the same time and also at random. You represent one of four alchemists in this space, who’s going to travel into the surrounding forests where different seasons are happening, brew potions, tame animals, and get chunks of the forest to Settle The Hell Down for a bit, and all in the name of establishing some control. You can walk from one section of the forest where it’s winter across a line to blazing summer, while you try to find animals that are transformed by these chaotic magics. Along the way, you brew potions that let you perform transformative magics, channelling the energies of the land into safe, stable places.
The winner is the person who gets the most victory points.
Continue Reading →The Sporekin
The term ‘Sporekin’ refers to any of the number of humanoids who can symbiotically link with and connect to the forest known as the River of Madness from the nation of Mosetto. Officially, the efforts to contain this forest are absolutely successful and there’s no growth from the forest outside of the ravine, and there are no people living in there – only dangerous plant life and symbiotic living-seeming things from inside the forest.
There’s nothing in the River to worry about and the whole affair is contained.
What do you mean you’ve seen people coming out of it? You must be mistaken. The spores cause madness, after all. Do you need to sit down? We can take you in for medical examination. Anything in the name of containing the River, you know. No? Then you best stop with these rumours.
Continue Reading →Skyjacks and Sporekin
It’s a growing concern when I write about the world of Cobrin’Seil that I’m creating a vast and sprawling set of locational information that is not interesting for a player to engage with and not detailed enough for a world nerd to truly love. Part of it is really that I’m filling out a map, and each place I fill out, I want to be both a real enough place with an economy and a vision of everyday life, and yet I also want each country described to be its own place with a reason for it to be its own place. When there are multiple countries that are like one another in a reasonably close proximity, Europe style, I tend to think of them as ‘provinces’ of a larger body politic.
What’s more, I feel like I know what I like to see in a Nation writeup but I also know the things I need in a Nation writeup. A Nation writeup is a hook, a place to belong, and I want you to give me ideas like how my life as a person in that space might be a thing I can feel and inhabit. A Nation writeup is also a thing a DM needs to be able to check for useful data with signifiers quickly, because it’s a place to come from but also a place to go to. Basically, it is a dessert to consume but there are vegetables to have first.
Presented in a book, I know that I’d be presenting a big splash graphic, with sidebars, and mechanical references in nice formatted popouts. Not so here, where the only visual material I can generate is either icons, stock art, or morphed/warped pictures of similar locations from the inspirations. The rest, all I can do, is with words, words, words.
Come with me to learn of Motesso, the Skyjacks, the Sporekin, the Citadel Ironsky, and the River of Madness.
Feinting Couch Ugly Alpha
Hey uh you wanna ugly pnp version of the duelist game I’m working on?
No promises, first draft, it’s 2 AM and I wanna put this up somewhere.
Game Concept — The Path of Wandering Samurai
Thinking about another game idea. Gunna put it down here. You’re going to read it, maybe. I’ll be able to reference back to it. Either way, it’s a card game about wandering samurai.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Wingspan (Video!)
Here’s the video:
And the thumbnail is below the fold!
Continue Reading →How To Be: Kaede Last Blade (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.
Hey, I left this introduction blank and nobody noticed. Anyway time to talk about a character I’ve already spent thousands of words describing in terms of the negative space created by fighting games that enable a lot of fun interpretation and also selling us the vast and valuable currency that is nothing.
Bloodwork: Combination Locks
Here’s the banner!
Game Pile: Ring Fit Adventures
Ah, the best of intentions.
I bought Ring Fit Adventure during the August 2020 lockdown. I bought it from a local business, so it could be delivered cheaply. When it arrived, I unboxed it, showed it to Elli and to Fox, and left it next to the TV for two weeks. I did this because Fox would go to bed at night, and take the Switch with her, meaning that I did not have a joycon-powered way to play the game. I did not check if I could use the spare joycons on my Switch Lite. I did not ask Fox to make space for me.
I just… ignored it for a little while. You know the thinking?
Tomorrow. Tomorrow. I’ll start.
I started using it on September the 4th, in 2020. I took notes, for my first twelve days. Twelve! I thought I’d have a lot more than that. And that was two years ago, with this article staying in draft form for oh so long.
I think that Ring Fit Adventures is pretty good. It’s remarkably nonjudgmental game which makes its particular focus of exercise interesting. I got it to get myself an outlet for exercise that I could maintain under lockdown conditions, when normally, I would be travelling around and doing things… and also, I know that I’m getting older and should have a more regular exercise schedule. It seems pretty good at what it’s doing and it didn’t make me feel bad.
I did, however, feel bad.
Content Warning: Under the fold is less of your typical ‘game review’ or critical engagement with the game text. It’s much more of a diary examining myself and my feelings about this game and how I struggled with it. There’s some reflections on my relationship to my body and I’m honestly embarrassed of it, but I think I need to fight that embarrassment and present a fair account of this game.
Continue Reading →Cox: Mu’Tant
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.
Roughly one person in a thousand has enough Mu blood to get the attention of the primal forces that drove the magic of antedeluvian Oranbega. Roughly one person in a thousand had the rare linked genes that help the mind tap the process, and most of the Mu you see use intense concentration and sensory deprivation to maintain that mindspace, to use that power.
Tanner, however, got lucky. A simple mutation, a hiccup in his DNA, and that whisper of Oranbegan power is, to him, a shout. When these powers came into their own, the boy took to the streets of Paragon to use his powers, without the oversight of the Mu hierarchy or Arachnos.
At least that’s what he tells people.
And it’s not like they need to know.
Continue Reading →Justum Bellum Sidus: Making a Plan
One of the classes I teach is about the critical engagement with a videogame text (or paratext). One of the things we do in this subject is to engage with the class materials ourselves to show the students what’s involved. Basically, ‘hey, this is about engaging in something that interests us.’
I proposed, for my pitch, the idea of a video essay that examined the idea of just war in the videogame Starcraft 2. I picked Starcraft 2 as an example for a few reasons:
- It’s more recent than a lot of my videogame interests. It’s more contemporary to my students’ age group.
- It’s got a thriving esports scene, a real world paratextual surface, so there’s an element of the game to examine.
- It’s not something immediately obvious to me, so I’m not just cheating and answering a question I already know.
With that in mind, here’s a little audio of me thinking through my process for how I’d work on this project, in the early days.
USP-08: August’s Custom Cards
The Masqued shed their old identities to become anyone; known mostly for masks they wear that distinguish them from normal partygoers on the Palace Boats. The Faceless have masks of wood, bone, and dirt, or create faces that look like animals just because they know it is hard, otherwise, to tell where to look when you talk to them. Some take on forms designed to express an identity that demonstrates their skill, their aesthetic sense. But then there are those, in these same magics, who have their identities shriven from them – people who need magical aid to restore themselves to being a person again, people who somehow are there, but not, manifested to the world but done so without an identity. It is a strange thing to have every name, and stranger still to have none.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Les Manley And Pay Your Archivists
Thumbnail below the fold!
Continue Reading →How To Be: Mystique (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.
Let’s look at the first* transgender* X-Men*!
Bloodwork: Yanking a Bandaid
Here’s the header!
Game Pile: HitchHiker’s Guide To The Galaxy
Did you know that one of the funniest English language authors in history wrote a bunch of videogames, and they’re really funny? Well, you probably did, because Terry Pratchett made that huge Oblivion mod, but also, his peer Douglas Adams also made stuff, though on earlier, clunkier, uglier hardware.
Yes, once more I delve into the infocom vaults to talk to you about a game that is, primarily, just text, almost as if I have some kind of bias towards that kind of media for some reason.
Anyway, I’m going to complain about Twine briefly.
Continue Reading →Werekin in Cobrin’Seil
Cobrin’Seil, being a magical setting of my own devising, has its own range of shape-shifting creatures known for various titles of ‘were-something.’ Werebears, weregoats, wereboars, all that kind of thing, grouped together under the community title of ‘werekin.’
The word ‘werekin’ comes from the Erd language, as do the phenomena of the werekin themselves. The actual condition is comparable to a kind of magical medical symbiosis; a bit like a long-term medical condition but not seen, generally, as a kind of illness.
Continue Reading →4e: The Were-With-All
Players love options. Players love the ability to differentiate their character. One of the problems that D&D character building has is that, certainly in the versions that are centralised like 3e, any given member of a class has a certain limited number of options that are worth taking. A wizard wouldn’t take Weapon Focus (Longsword), for example, even if the longsword is the best weapon of its type. This meant that there were a lot of options that were made to create or convey a mood about a character that weren’t worth spending one of your limited feat choices on.
In 4e, they added another dimension to each character, with the idea of character themes. Character themes were optional, and gave a character in the level range of 1-10 something class-independent that nonetheless let you expand the abilities of your character in a way that had a sort of, well, for lack of a better word, a vibe. By making these packages contained, it meant that the game mechanics for them could be balanced against one another —
Which unfortunately, they weren’t.
Continue Reading →3e D&D: The Werewolf, The Shifter
The promise of Dungeons & Dragons is that it’s a game system that lets you play with a wide variety of fantasy tropes to construct, generally, a fair game that also lets you experience a narrative. It is a deliberately broad system. In its earliest incarnations, it was narrow, and there used to a random whore table but no way to craft pants, and now, in the current days of 5e, the rules system handles all sorts of interesting rules attachments and modules that make the widely available, easily engaged game capable of doing even more stuff.
And this is, generally, seen as a bad thing, coincidentally by people who are heavily invested in other things.
But the promise of D&D, as a system that can include a lot of things, is sometimes at odds with the promise of D&D as a system that allows for a reasonably fair game. Such as in third edition, the period I want to talk about today, ‘fairness’ in what characters could do, in any reasonable estimation, was completely bananas. Absolutely troppo.
Anyway, let’s talk about werewolves.
Game Concept — Moonshiners!
Alright, alright, I know I’ve been thick on the ground for game ideas lately. This one’s even more frustrating than normal because I feel like I could convince a university colleague to pump out AI art and beta test it with me in a weekend but I feel like that would be an abuse of our limited time right now.
Here’s the core of it: You’re all Appalachian, redneck ass criminal booze makers and sellers, classic moonshiners. To maintain your business you’re travelling into town every month with a load of product, and while you’re there, you offload product, you recruit gangsters, and you make money through a series of auctions.
Also, you’re werewolves.
Game Pile: Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate
Fox and I got a whole new Dangeresque game to play, and that’s what we did! I don’t play the whole thing, I just play the first third, and I try not to play too thoroughly, so my commentary about things isn’t getting in the way of a proper long play, but this is really fun! I recommend it! Thumbnail belowa tha folda!
Continue Reading →Game Concept — Packidge!
Here’s a game concept post! You’re going to get the pitch for the game, you’re going to get a rundown of the rules, then a description of what the game needs.
Game Concept — Shaky Hands
This is going to be one of those ‘write up a game idea’ posts I do – if that’s not your jam, that’s okay! It’s just going to be me taking notes on an idea, and trying to explain it to a general audience. In this case, I’m not approaching a game aesthetic or art resources, but instead I’m approaching a purely mechanical idea to see what fictions can connect to it and what material components I’d need.
CoX: Juke
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.
…the police are the crime…
Dead drops and drunk tanks. A door left unlocked. A hole in the guard patrol schedule. An undersecured door, a familiar password, a moment of forgetfulness, or believable forgetfulness. In Praetoria, you could get a lot done by leaning on the way that everyone thought everyone else was corrupt.
Juke was one of them. Secret police, that is. You could only go along for so long, though, until it all went wrong. That’s when he found friends, found rebels, but not the resistance. Instead, it was dead drops and secret messages, and now, nobody knows anything he had to do with the revolution.
So that sucks.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: Hit The Silk
I like Hit The Silk. If you’re not familiar with Hit The Silk and also to extend the introduction a little bit, it’s a card game where the players are a bunch of crooks on a plane at the last part of a heist movie that has gone completely terrible. The characters of Hit The Silk are all riding a plane without a pilot, with a pile of money to divvy up, and there’s always not enough parachutes. You have two competing demands, then, as a player, one of which is a numeric value (how much money you get, and if you can get over a threshold), and one of which is a binary value (did you get out with a parachute or are you dead).
The plane is going down, and it goes down faster and faster as you go on – so there’s a clock on how many turns players can play and two competing failure states. Oh one of the other competing failure states is that you can kill people and lock them to one another with handcuffs but they can get out of handcuffs with keys but then those keys can’t be used to raid the plane’s lockbox and potentially get more money. You can attack people to take cards off them, and that means that now, you don’t want people to know too much about what’s in your hand, but your only way to get cards into your hand tends to be interacting with people in trades.
Continue Reading →Feinting Couch
Ah, the age of adventure, of conquest, of nobility and of duels. Yes, the time when if someone defied you, you pulled off your glove and you threw it to the ground and demanded she meet you on the battlefield with god as your witnesses. Sublimated homosexuality and swords with reach, raucous adventure and getting out of town just ahead of the local law, it’s a question not about who did it first, but who did it best.
And the best… needs an audience.
En Garde!
MtG: Oh How It Pains Me To Do This
I’m really liking the Transformers cards as commanders. I know, since I hate the Lord of the Rings so much what am I doing being okay with transformers? Well, I mean, for one, nobody pretends the Transformers aren’t dumb as shit, and also the central narrative of Transformers is bunches of idiots smashing their toy collections together, which makes a great fit for Magic: The Gathering commander games. But wait, you may wonder, what – what’s with this elaborate trap? You weren’t paying attention for a moment and now, I have seized power! It is time for a transgender icon, STARSCREAM to command!
Now, let’s you and them fight.
Continue Reading →USP-07: July’s Custom Cards
While the Outlands rage at all sides, as the Vast’s people slowly gather themselves to respond to the Ice Palace and the open door of death in the Usurper’s Throne, what are the Palace boats doing? What of the culture of Vampires that scourged a whole mountain range and ruined forests of centuries of growth, how have they prepared for the obvious oncoming war?
They haven’t.
They’ve been busy.
They’ve been busy fighting with one another endlessly about who, exactly, is the most royal member of all these Royal bloodlines.
Warning: Wizards employees, this post contains unsolicited designs of custom magic cards.
Continue Reading →Game Pile: You’ve Now Lost The Game
Thumbnail and outline below the fold!
Continue Reading →Jam Game: The Lost Voyage!
I jammed in the Kenney Jam 2023! Do you know Kenney? Kenney make some of the best creative commons games assets in the world, assets you can put all over the place and use in your game designs. The point of the Kenney Jam was to get people to engage with these assets and make a game quickly. It was fun!
At the moment, I think I’m the only participant in the jam who made a physical game, and if you just want to skip to check it out, the game I made is called The Lost Voyage and it’s over on itch! The game is a push-your-luck yahtzee style dice roller, and I was only able to do a small amount of playtesting, which was more ‘does this engine work’ and not ‘is this the most engaging version of this game.’ It’s free, it’s a print and play game, you’re going to have to put some work into it to play it. But I also want to talk about the process of making it, and, importantly, what I want to do next.
Game Pile: Unblock Gridlock
Thumbnail and script below the fold
Continue Reading →