Bloodwork: Emergent System Design
Boom here’s a banner.
The Privilege of Acceptable Voices
Bloodwork: Systems And Entanglement
Blah blah blah here’s the banner!
Thousand Word Chunks
Bloodwork — Abstraction
Hey, we’re talking more about Bloodwork, the card game about building a network of vampires in the context of a 90s aesthetic representing new and interesting ways the society we live in is parasitic and we’re going whoosh okay.
Shirt 23.05 — Haru-Ni ’06
Anime in my mind comes in strata. Different ages, different things that made significant changes to the landscape of anime. Things that feel contemporary weren’t, because I got to watch them at the same time. Things that were contemporary didn’t seem to be to me because I missed one. And in 2006, there were two different anime that shook my world launched – and I didn’t enjoy either of them until they were years old, unaware that the impact they had was nearly simultaneous.
The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, a really great series that I should write about sometime, and Ouran High School Host Club, an equally excellent anime that made a lot of millenials grapple with being gay or girls or gay girls, both hit in April 2006. They were important in ways it was hard to explain, and even now they’re both handy touchstones where you can point to them to just open conversations about anime of that time. They, in a way, ruled the world.
And they both had main characters named Haruhi.
Here, then, I present stickers for you to show which you support in their quest to take over the world of anime as of 2006. If you’d like them, you can get them, with Haruhi Suzumiya as the Presidential runner, or with Haruhi Fujioka as the Presidential runner.
How To Be: Amity Blight (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, you know The Owl House? That’s a recent animated television program that has all sorts of conversations around it about the way queer representation gets handled and creators get treated and yes, did you know, did you know that Disney are a bad company? It’s the first I heard of it too! Anyway, The Owl House kicks ass so I want to do a How To Be about a character from it and…
And how hard could this be if … oh jeeze, I see the word count.
Okay!
CoX: Labyrinthal
Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose. This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.
Day job? Youtuber. His name’s Acre, even. The channel’s pretty popular, in the low thousands, where his channel is guides on history, as told by examining historically interesting weapons and swords.
Thanks to this, he did one day get his hand on a cursed, haunted axe, which complicated his life quite a bit. Now, when he picks that weapon, the spirit of the Minotaur flows through him, which – well, he wrecked his studio recording the video unboxing it.
But a secret identity is too useful to pass up, and Acre is out on the streets, doing what he can to take advantage of this power.
Continue Reading →Midmonth Bloodwork Work — Stuffness
Alright, Bloodwork, it’s a vampire game, it’s a builder game, it’s like Machi Koro but instead of an idyllic seaside town you’re making edgy vampire associations that look like Multi-Level Marketing pyramid scheme.
I’m thinking about this game a lot today, and part of what I’m thinking about is the game’s relationship to stuff. Specifically, the kind of material boundaries I have to deal with in the creation of a game which relies on a pyramidal card structure, modelled on the classic 52-card card game pyramid.
Magic, Eugenics, And How To Do Not That
Do you have magic in your setting?
Does that magic have a genetic component?
Okay, bad news, you’ve justified eugenics.
The Magic of Goo
You know that book I wrote (that I’m willing to admit)? One Stone? The story set in an alt-history British Empire at some mangled point in history where they have guns and trench warfare in the middle east, but also farmers unions are recruiting to mass-harvest food and oh yeah, there are dinosaurs. It’s an ahistorical setting that’s about how stories about fantasy kingdoms that are clearly England feel to me, as an author raised on those stories from the wing of the empire.
I mentioned, offhandedly, to someone recently that the magic system of One Stone is – and they interrupted, asking hang on, what magic system?
The Szudetken Empires, Part III
This is a continuation of the previous post describing the Szudetken Empires peninsula in Cobrin’Seil.
The Bernean Lodges
Where the forests weave in tight against people and farmland is hard-fought from its ownership, there are the night-time howling stands of the Bernean Lodges. Tall, narrow houses, with tightly angled roofs to slough off the snow and rain, the people of the Bernean Lodges isolate themselves from other communities, because they are keenly aware of the way that Szudetken is full of monsters that look like humans. In response to the threat of werewolves, ghosts, changelings, cultists and other horrors, the Bernean people opt to threaten and endanger almost everyone who moves around in their spaces,
Continue Reading →The Szudetken Empires, Part II
This is a continuation of the previous post describing the Szudetken Empires peninsula in Cobrin’Seil.
Voolfardisworth, The Glimmering Net
Where the land becomes mountainous, the castles of Voolfardisworth start to jut up on various cliffs and high peaks, overseeing inevitably, valleys of small communities beneath them. Sometimes known as the Fard, the Fooly or the Fanged States, Voolfardisworth is an aristocratic nation composed of many different, widely distributed noble houses that would rather you not admit they’re vampires (and may even do something to make it so you can’t).
Continue Reading →The Szudetken Empires, Part I
The largest single nation on the Cobrin’Seil continent of Bidestra is Dal Raeda. That is, at least, for those who measure around the edges of the nation, following its perimeter along each distinct shape, and measuring out the distance there. Of course, this does not accommodate for a measurement where an observer takes the furthest points of the nation, at all of its edges, and maps the space that contains; if one measures by that means, then obviously the largest nation on the continent of Bidestra is the Eresh Protectorates, a set of city-states strung out like beads on a string across the King’s Highway. A box, drawn to contain all of those cities, thanks to their distance between one another, could almost contain the entirety of the continent. A third method of measuring exists, where one looks for the area dictacted within the boundaries of the land mass, and composites together that space, such that deep canyons and tall mountains can exert influence on the scale of the nation.
By this metric, as uncertain a measurement as it can be, then the largest single nation on Bidestra is easily one of the six empires that occupied the peninsula known as Szudetken (pronounced schoo-det-ken).
Continue Reading →Prototype 23.04 — Blood Work
There’s not been much public work on this one. Most of my public spaces are annoyingly, lacking in engagement from the audience I’m used to — a very awkward thing which means I might start making points of using maybe even a discord? To get people to talk to me about the stuff I’m doing so they can engage with it? Not sure.
Either way, I have been thinking a lot about necromancy, about death and life, and the ways systems feed on one another so of course I’ve been thinking about multi-level marketing cults and vampirism.
Continue Reading →The Redbubble Bummer
Redbubble announced, at the tail end of April, starting now in May, that they were going to charge a flat fee for people who make money on their site. This sucks and here’s a thousand words about how this sucks and how I may stop making stuff to put up on Redbubble, which, also, sucks.
I Wanna Be Cool
Dredging Up Schmavenloft
In the maps of Cobrin’Seil, up and on the right someplace, there’s a place called Kryphaneos. Setting aside that that name is very close to The Kingdom Of Mal-Bad, Kryphaneos is definitely one of the signs of an unrefined worldbuilder’s ‘that’ll do.’ Kryphaneos was my all-purpose place for horror stuff, dark magic came from there, there was an ostensible kingdom with supposed capitals and places and purposes and that was all a thing but it was a thing that happened over there. Kryphaneos was very much a ripoff of Ravenloft, as written by someone who didn’t read any Ravenloft books — a kingdom of nothing but dark horror, divided up by foggy lines, where the most notable detail ever provided about it was that nobody wanted to be there.
As time goes on and I keep trying to refine these ideas I meant to write down someday, I figured it was time to confront this space of grim and dark horror, and write down what I wanted it to be. But this isn’t that, this isn’t a writeup of the place, as much as it is instead, a consideration of what I want that place for. What do I want to have in this part of the world, and why do I want it to be different to just any old existing space.
Basically, if I have an Evil Country, why do I have it? What’s it for? And why is it there, and most of all, does answering those questions make my world a place that sucks to exist in?
Continue Reading →
Pitch: Development Issues
You know for all that this blog is a space to put down my own creative work, it’s kind of shocking how ill-equipped it is to talk about things I can’t do. I do board games and card games and talk about RPGs and anime and media and a lot of being angry about fundamentalist christianity, but there are rare times when there’s other stuff that interests me as well. Remember that one time I presented some recipes? What about the occasional outbursts of flag threads?
Here’s something I don’t think I’d ever have the means to make, then: I’ve been thinking about web shows.
Continue Reading →CoX: Ironworks
Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose. This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.
How much work do you have to do to convince yourself that you’re normal?
He goes out at night wearing gauntlets he built, with knuckledusters designed to keep gangs down and send a message. He returns home to the mechanic shop and sleeps. And through it all, he tells himself he’s a normal guy, just fighting crime how he can.
Which doesn’t explain the flaming aura.
Or the unbreakable bones.
Or the way gods shudder at his presence.
Callum thinks he’s a normal guy, fighting evil with no greater purpose. And he couldn’t be more wrong.
Continue Reading →How To Be: Samus Aran (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.
Really gotta specify that ‘in 4e D&D’ on this one.
When we talk about How To Be, the point has always been to take characters that are interesting in some particular way then see how we can carry that vibe into the creative space of 4th Edition D&D. What we’ve seen, when we try and make things like a real-world-alike gangster or a robot dinosaur, is that there are some concepts that seem very easy to translate into the play space that really aren’t. Zelgadis is a D&D character and he was very challenging to translate to the game just because he’d already been filtered through another set of different game rules. Minfilia showed us that when a character leaves large parts of their method and ideology as blank slates, there’s a challenge creating something in the space that fulfills that character.
Extremely defined and extremely vague characters, in both directions, are hard.
Anyway, let’s look at Samus Aran.
Shirt 23.04 — Can’t Lose
I need very little encouragement to make some things. Over on my Patreon (where you can sign up for as little as a buck to give my brain good chemicals), I suggested this shirt design as a potential one for this month. One person went ‘I like it,’ and so I went and did it.
I was aiming at evoking a university sports team logo (which I looked at a lot of) and the DOOM logo from 1993 (which I also looked at a lot of, but for different reasons). This design involved learning a lot of things about how to make 3d-looking shaped text, which is how I got this eventual ‘curving’ effect — it involves the Lens Distortion tool in GIMP.
The popped text above and below the logo was made first in a vector program and then also made 3d in GIMP, too. Honestly, looking at this piece I’m pretty proud of how many pieces of this involved developing or refining a new skill to do something, or built on a skill I’ve gotten so used to I didn’t even conspicuously think of it.
I kinda want to get a hoodie or coffee mug with this on it for my dad but I think he, a preacher, might balk at the actual pentagram.
Anyway, you can get this design in black star or white star versions.
Horny vs Spite
When explaining creativity to newcomers, I express the idea that everyone who makes something makes it out of one of two possible motivating factors, when viewed broadly enough. The line is:
Everyone who ever made anything made it out of one of two possible motivators; horny, or spite.
This maxim serves to get the conversation started. You either wanted the thing to exist that didn’t exist yet, or they were mad at the thing for not existing the way they wanted it to. These two driving could also be seen both in terms of just ‘wants’ – but I think that when you simplify it that far, you leave the listener without a valuable handle, a way to grapple with the idea.
Continue Reading →Prototype 23.03 — Planetary
This month, for phd reasons, game development took a backseat. But don’t worry, I still have something I dedicated time to looking at, even if I didn’t get to get it to a playtesting table (and I may yet get it to the table in the next few weeks, thanks to uni work).
But most of all, I think this game presents a very exciting looking form factor:
Yeah, right? Like get a load of that. It’s a bunch of planets, made out of cards. Each turn, players are going to be laying cards that expand on the identities of these planets, and each time they do that, the cards change how players may value those planets. You may occupy a place that’s rich in gold and eggs, haha, but now you see, I have discovered this region of the planet that reveals it smells like dinosaur farts. Do you want to populate the planet that smells like dinosaur farts? I didn’t think so, farty.
Continue Reading →4e: Dangling Claws
The weapon system in 4e D&D is full of specific keyworded mechanical distinctions for each grouping of weapons in a way that’s designed to add depth to the play experience of any given type of weapon. While in earlier systems, axes and swords and staffs all could be reduced to a mathematical formula representing their damage output over time and therefore, inevitably, the greatsword won, 4e weapons have two different ways they can feel different. The first is just how the weapons work, period, where anyone who picks up a weapon of that type will notice this effect or feats that reference weapons by their category to indicate that the training for that particular weapon enables a different way for that weapon to work. In the first group you have weapon effects like Brutal or Heavy Thrown, and in the second, things like Hammer Rhythm or Axe Expertise. The result is that the weapon system is genuinely interesting to engage with and even though there is a clear hierarchy, the boundaries between the tiers of that hierarchy are not so steep, not so absolute.
There is nonetheless, an area where the weapon system does stagger, though, and that’s natural weapons. The base game features almost nothing with a natural weapon, and the one option you have for it in the starter set is the Gnoll, with a heavily errata’d mess of a feat to get your claws dirty. What’s more, the feat is a bit wonky and weird because, first, you’re spending a whole feat to get the weapon, but you’re also getting a weapon that is only about as good as a short-sword and it interferes with abilities that require you to not be wielding a weapon in your off-hand.
I think that’s dumb; I can treat my fist like a weapon at will, but the game doesn’t then say that I must always have a weapon in my off-hand even when that hand is empty. This indicates to me a simple hole in the way 4e handles natural weapons, and how it makes them available.
So I fixed them.
Continue Reading →Shirt 23.03 – Sandy Hook Monday
When you engage in a work of satirical criticism, you need to approach it with a clarity of purpose that indicates to your audience the moral framework with which you do it, so that at no point it can be construed as uncritical support for the thing you are satirising, even moreso when contending with media designed to be consumed extremely quickly and uncritically. This is on my mind as I put a lot of work into how to draw a stupid cartoon of Alex Jones as a Garfield character, who absolutely sucks.
I made this design to be a sticker. Alex Jones makes a bunch of stuff in the form of stickers, things you can place around the world to direct attention towards his shitty advertising stream. Alex Jones, let me be clear, is an abusive cult leader who is trying to exploit en masse a community that he also never wants to interact with. Right now, he’s clocking on with a tediousness that speaks of the ‘hilarious’ office garfield strips about hating mondays, and that was the genesis of this design. He sucks, and he’s banal, and the things about him that suck are also pathetic.
This design didn’t feature the background at first. The ‘Hate mon days’ logo used to be ‘HATE ‘MON DAYS,’ as in ‘hate them on days.’ There didn’t used to be as many stackies of paper, nor the big Sandy Hook bill. But I had to add to it to try and make sure it didn’t just look like I was at best neutral about how much this guy sucks.
I’m proud of it, I think it looks unmistakably like Alex Jones if you’re familiar with him, and if you want, you can have it as a sticker, a pin, a shirt, a hat, a coffee mug, or even a magnet!
A Game I Don’t Know How To Make
I was asked over on my patreon to consider how to make a game like:
A game that can, at least *sort of*, help people who may not be incredibly familiar with each other grow to know each other/grow closer.
Now, this is the kind of open prompt that can invite an answer that I think may feel a bit nice and homey but also, feels a bit of a bullshit dodge from me, the person providing the answer. Because, just as every game is educational, every game gives you an opportunity to understand someone, every game gives you a chance to grow to know someone else and get closer to them. And that’s true, but it’s meaninglessly true, it’s trivially true. If you asked that question, if you asked for that kind of game, then chances are telling you ‘the answer was inside you all along’ feels like I’m just avoiding the responsibility my implied expertise offers.
Plus, this person gives me money.
Which makes me feel decidedly assholey about bouncing on my responsibilities here.
With that in mind, I dedicated time to work out an answer to this kind of game idea, and I got an answer but it’s an answer my current skillset doesn’t really address. I think, knowing what I do about what webpages can do, that this is probably a game that a very skilled person could make run out of, like, a webpage, but I do not know how to approach it.
Let’s just talk about the game as a design and my mentality behind it.
Continue Reading →CoX: Riprap
Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose. This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.
“Ey! Ey you! What’s your matter, eh!?”
They say that Sharkhead kids bite first. It’s a rough town with rougher industries, overseen by outsiders from St Martial and Grandville. Fact is, Sharkhead’s people have to grow up quick and grow up mean, scavengers and scroungers, trying to find some way to wind up in one of the least bad lives.
Fallon’s day job was to shift crates. And the most common thing they shifted was coral from many mining operations around Sharkhead. Do it long enough, inhale enough, and you’d wind up…
Changing.
When Fallon found they could shapeshift into a coral-armoured coralax, they did what anyone else in the Etoile would do with deniability: Go smashing their enemies, while keeping it hidden.
Continue Reading →Prototype 23.02 – Bakarina
Okay, okay, I need to do another one of these posts, the ones where I talk about the monthly prototype for February, that was Smooch Month, okay, that means it’s a standard template at this point, complaining about how hard it is to make smoochy games. Oh wait, what do you mean this time I got inspired and had a cool idea and wanted to build on that? Well, snap, what did I make?
Inspired by My Next Life As A Villainess, All Roads Lead To Doom, I devised something that was really nagging at me as a problem. See, smoochy games don’t feel to me like they benefit from being competitive (mostly). I was stuck on the question of, hey, how do I make a romantic narrative game that focuses on a relationship and choices that lead to that, that doesn’t pit players at odds with one another? How then, do I make a cooperative game about smooching?
I did it!
Continue Reading →Shirt 23.02 – Steddie Things Shirt
First up, the design! On a shirt!
Second, the design on its own so you can look at it!
This design is something of a proof of concept. At first, the idea was that this was an idea I could port to a lot of different sets, where an identifying Ship Term (in this case ‘Steddie’, but I also considered Soriku) is surrounded by a love heart of phrases that are meant to relate to experiencing these characters in their lore space. And this is a design type I want to make more of (now I have this first one done), but at the moment, this design took a long enough time to make that my ambition to make a bunch of these ran into a wall.
The thing that may surprise you is how hard this list of text to add to this turned out to make. To make this kind of word clouding work well, I need a big variety of textwith different weights, and I had to construct this cloud myself. That meant that I also had to make the title in the middle the way I chose to. If I needed 300+ words with different appearances and weight, I was able to get to a whopping fifty.
I like this design! I like how much better I can make the next one, too.
If you want this design, it comes in three flavours, the mixed colour version, the pure red version, and a pure white version.
CoX: Astray
Time to time, I write up an explication of characters I’ve played in RPGs or made for my own purpose. This is an exercise in character building and creative writing.
Bryce Oxton was a biology nerd in the Kings Row Community College’s Access Program for supertech lab qualifications. After school, he volunteered his time at the Praetorian shelters as a social worker, using his niche expertise to help design containment and care for super science Powers Division problems. That’s why he was there in the lab that wasn’t his, dealing with the accident that wasn’t his fault. That’s how he wound up the host of the corrosive, toxic, aggressive STRAY symbiote.
He didn’t choose to be a tentacle catboy – tentacle catboy power was thrust upon him.
And, he has found, tentacle catboy powers bring tentacle catboy responsibilities.
Continue Reading →