Month: September 2025

Sage has this one covered.

Watched (TV animation): Knights of Guinevere pilot: Theme park dystopia, two down-on-their-luck mechanics find a busted princess mascot robot, or maybe the princess mascot robot, and adventure ensues. Seems like it has potential.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.2-3: The one with the plastic waste mogul and the one with the video game tournament. I’m glad they’re keeping Parker weird.

Read (manga): FAIL. I have no excuse, I just suck.

Written (game design): 135:

Now that I think about it, reducing all characters, or even just all
PCs, to a handful of numbers isn’t very anticapitalist, so a quarter
point for getting rid of stats and also fixed skill lists? Maybe an
eighth. Whatever, I’m good with keeping it. Put what makes your
character different on the sheet, not what makes them the same. (Okay,
and a fallback, characters aren’t that different.)

Which is not helping figure out what magic does and how to write it up
for characters, although it does kind of suggest magic should be unique
rather than D&D-pigeonholed (no classes!). So we need a system to make
all kinds of magic in a way we can actually play, which is either a
story game or reinventing Hero.

This is why people hate theory, isn’t it?

Got it covered!

No office today, I had to get my meatsack inspected. (That sounds way more risque than anything in my life ever has been.) Needs new chemicals, apparently.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.16: The season finale,which both follows on from the previous episode and explains why Harry isn’t there in the next season. And an actual OT3 moment, because measuring somebody for a robot body is true commitment.

Read (manga): The Essence of Being a Muse vol 1 (Aya Fumino): A failed art student finally cannot even with her mother trying to get her to be normal and the horrible people at her office job and feeling like she’s bad at everything, so she runs away, which works out surprisingly well so far.

Read (novel): Big Trouble, Little Earth (JN Chaney, Jason Anspach): The main character is a space trucker, but overall it’s a lot more like a crazed Feng Shui session with the GM’s homebrewed far-future juncture, with all the groundedness and realism that implies.

Read (manga): Succubus & Hitman vol 1-4 (Makoto Fukami, Seigo Tokiya): You know how I sometimes say something is lacking in redeeming social value? I didn’t know what I was talking about. I mean, I read this, but yikes. Content warning for everything bad that can happen to a human or small animal.

Read (short): Gorilla in the Groove (Murphy Lawless): Fated-mate shifters in Ireland, this time a gorilla DJ and a visiting dancer. There is some conflict, because it’s not Virtue Shifters, but mostly just mushiness.

Written (game design): 233:

If you’re thinking that I have no idea how to make a game
anticolonialist, anticapitalist, or antifascist without being Eat The
Reich, congratulations on being absolutely correct. Should I award
myself half a point for insisting that everyone has the same potential
to become touched, and forbidding special bloodlines? Should I take it
away again for making the creatures that stomp all over the land doing
things that make no sense incomprehensible ultrahumans instead of
people?

Is making the PCs mechnically distinct from NPCs (such as by having only
player-facing rolls, or even NPCs not have stats at all, like in FitD;
or by having some NPCs not have hit points) bad in this respect? Even if
the difference is allegedly only at the level of mechanics and not
reflecting anything in-character, it still lends the PCs a sparkle of
Extra-Specialness, which seems contrary to the spirit of the thing. On
the other hand, Eat the Reich is about literal vampires.

Story points or other metacurrency have a similar problem with forcing
the story in a particular direction, which seems wrong. This ties into
the thing with not rewarding PCs for being good (morally) since then
they’re not making moral choices, they’re just grubbing for points. I
have no idea where I’m going with this, I’m not actually an emergent
story purist, I don’t think, despite liking Play To Find Out What
Happens.

More honored in the breach, etc etc.

Went to the office, got blamed by customers for not knowing things they hadn’t told us, New Boss T sent LLM output to the customer but nobody except me noticed, ate a stroganoff of beef.

Read (manga): HoriMiya vol 1 (Hero, Daisuke Hagiwara): Apparently this has been sitting on my TBR shelf since the days I thought boys had any place in romance stories. Anyway, she is glamorous at school but practical to take care of her little brother the rest of the time, he is emo and boring at school but secretly pierced and tattooed, together they shop for groceries and entertain the little brother.

Read (novel): The Shattering Peace (John Scalzi): Seventh(?) in the “Old Man’s War” series. Not quite what it says on the tin, although side effects of Consu meddling come close. The main character is pretty awesome. Possibly excessively so, but I like her.

Written (game design): 252:

The name came later, but Harmony was one of the first mechanics I put in
to get rid of spell slots and ten thousand abilities each with their own
set of charges and recharge condition. Now I’m throwing it out? And even
before adding MP, I got rid of health-based HP and now I’m bringing them
back? What is wrong with me? Am I just not smart enough to break free of
the D&D paradigm, even when I have all these other games to steal from?
Am I failing by trying to keep some crunch and not going full
story-game? Have I really reached the point where living dungeons and
black powder masers aren’t enough of a distraction and I have to go back
to the beginning on the system?

And, how do I make any of this anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and
antifascist? Starting with the PCs being outcasts from society instead
of members of a community probably isn’t great. Arguably living dungeons
and meteor monsters are colonizing the world? And wicked people turning
into monsters is spot on as long as we define wickedness appropriately.
And the visitors from the higher realms are definitely colonialist,
showing up and paving over things without regard to the mortals living
there. Whoever recycles souls (I’m pretty sure it’s not the higher
realms nor the celestial bureaucracy that FTWs work with, but some third
group) is also not great in this respect.

But, does the mere existence of colonialist entities presented
unfavorably make the game anticolonialist?

Which, I point out, has been successfully preserved! We can do it, if we get the fascist oilgarchs out of the way.

Read (manga): Tetragrammaton Labyrinth vol 3 (Ei Itou): This one I had not read, so it’s okay that I don’t remember it. Meg’s alarming backstory, then back to the present for massive demon attack, but some secondary characters have been promoted to PCs.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. While everyone was talking last session, Everett was doing metalworking for his feelings. Melting things is apparently very therapeutic. Later, the group met up with Red and Badger at a coffeeshop to talk about fetches. Apparently Red and her fetch harass each other on Usenet. This reminds Theo to try to get a computer. Since she needs a job, having received the “thanks for your submission, expect a reply in 1d6+6 months” response to her stories, her brilliant plan is to get a job at a sketchy computer repair shop. Siddy also plans to go visit Sir Hiss again, since he may know King Mark’s backstory. Thessaly didn’t do much because her player fell asleep in lovely weather listening to cicadas.

Written (game design): 400:

If the wound die (plus hit margin, minus armor/toughness) isn’t
enough for a wound but kind of close, maybe it does a point of harm,
which stacks up and adds to any later wound die rolls? If it gets
to half the size of the wound die (so 5?) then it counts as fatigue
and if it gets to the full size (10) it’s a wound. Obviously we
could get complicated to let attacks add more than one harm, but
meh. Either it’s 1 wound or it’s 1 harm or it’s nothing. Take out
some blood to make cool red shades to protect from the gaze attack?
1 harm. Get some green slime on you? 1 harm per round. (Later I
may regret this.)

Let’s not get into psychic harm at this point. Psychic fatigue and
wounds are enough.

Does blood magic need more limitation beyond using your own blood?
Probably not if we set the costs appropriately.

Prophets are limited by the randomness of what happens when they try to
do the thing, and also by the horribleness of bad rolls. Unlike other
magical limitations, this could affect the whole party: biting snails
inside everybody’s armor! They also have some Psyche slots taken up,
though whether by mental problems or divine connections is probably not
answerable. Either way, if you somehow get rid of one, you stop
channeling that aspect of your god.

There should be some way for a prophet to eventually evolve into a more
controlled form of wizard, similar to a FTW but probably in a slightly
new paradigm, like foreign FTWs.

If we don’t have Harmony, what limits are there on the basic pushing that any
touched can do? Do we skip straight to psychic fatigue? That’s probably
fine for untrained usage like that, but martial arts and psychic powers
are like trained, specialized pushing so they shouldn’t be that
debilitating per use? Although, how bad is a slot of psychic fatigue?
Especially if you only get it when you blow a roll?

Because fuck Charlie Kirk.

Did some work, I guess. Weekly reminder I don’t hate Mondays, I hate capitalism.

Read (manga): Tetragrammaton Labyrinth vol 2 (Ei Itou): Apparently I read this before, but I didn’t remember any of it. Demons, murder, additional murder, additional demons, mysterious hints about demon-girl’s backstory. Also, murder.

Written (game design): 311:

None of these limitations are running out of Harmony. Do we need another
limitation? Do we need a pool of Harmony to spend, or is it enough to
fill up Psyche slots with the leftovers of spells (to be cleared out
when you rest and can make a recovery roll)? Probably there shouldn’t be
very many Psyche slots available to a character, even if they have Large
Mind or Strong Soul or whatever feat gives extras there, so they can’t
have a million magical effects active all the time, but then there isn’t
room for much psychic fatigue/wounds.

Regular physical wounds put you down if you have just a couple of them, there’s
no need to fill up the Inventory. Maybe that’s the difference between
wounds and fatigue. But this is even chunkier, so I’m not sure how to
handle small amounts of damage like pulling out some of your own blood
to throw as a blazing spear at your enemies. I still don’t like hit
points, but I can’t deny the utility of having small units of generic
damage to throw around with various mechanics. Ugh. Maybe we don’t
bother to track Harmony, but do track Blood? Or maybe track blood loss
as needed, and every N fills up an inventory slot because it’s a wound?
(Less than N still fills up the slot, but it’s only treated as fatigue.)

I guess we don’t have to actually have blood magic, but not having it
because it’s too difficult to express mechanically shows our work is
flawed and needs to start over from scratch. Which maybe it does, I
don’t know. Some kind of system for accumulating minor damage that adds
up to wounds, and a system for taking wounds directly? But I still want
to roll accuracy and attack power into one if at all possible.

Benny, Dani, Marmalade, Ghirardelli, Aspen. Broken heart emoji.

No gaming today, Jeremy is recuperating or meditating or attending to family duties or rethinking his life choices. I did not manage to find a replacement brain activity.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 7 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): The last volume I have physically. However, it looks like up through vol 20 is available as ebooks on Kobo. Sweet.

Read (short): “A Black Mile to the Surface” (Chris Bissette): Grim sword and sorcery delve into the depths of the mountain to get the thing, complete with fighterly grumbling about magic and unearthly monstrosity.

Read (manga): Tetragrammaton Labyrinth vol 1 (Ei Itou): A young, heavily armed nun and her tween-looking monster friend protect 1900s(?) London from the demonic crimes Scotland Yard can’t handle. There will doubtless be terrible revelations about everything in the future, and also yuri feels.

Read (graphic novel): A Bite of Pepper (Balazs Lorinczi): By the same creator as Doughnuts and Doom, this time pink-purple and black. A young vampire doesn’t want to deal with familial expectations or her horrible brother, she just wants to skateboard. Things start to look up when she meets a cute artist girl, but then, drama! It is very cute and pretty much nothing bad happens to anyone, although there is a lot of teenaged vampire angst.

Written (game design): 517:

Mortal casters’ experience of magic is always a metaphor. Fancy
Temple Wizards (that might have to be the official class name)
perform the rites to petition the Celestial Bureaucracy according
to the correct forms to get the results allowed by ordinances of
Heaven, but that doesn’t mean there are actually angels reading the
submissions or legal codes they’re being compared to, never mind
detailed reports in scholarly calligraphy being sent back. There
probably aren’t even minds in the way people are used to thinking
of it. That’s just a way mortals can think about it to get results.
Where did they get the idea to begin with? Probably by someone going
deep into the astral plane and trying to put what she saw there
into words.

Seeing into the astral plane is not a handy HUD that tells you what
objects are magical and warns of incoming ghosts and how to counter
spells. It’s the full metaphorical, allegorical, hallucinatorial
experience, and even after you come back, some of your astral inventory
slots are going to be full of Visions. Time and space aren’t direct
limits on what you can see, but to see things that are less directly
entangled with your own fate(?) you have to go deeper, which means more
Visions (or worse Visions, the difference between astral fatigue and
astral wounds).

When recovering from wounds, I think you have to roll to avoid
long-term complications. If you have proper medical care, it’s not
a big deal, but even though we’re not super-gritty, the injuries
from getting squished by an ogre shouldn’t just go away the next
morning.

Back to Facy Temple Wizards, what are their limitations? Time is a
big one, since they have to draw out their magic circles and recite
their petitions. The effect might be ongoing, but they can’t make
the initial requisition in the middle of a fight. Spell selection is
limited, since they have to be approved to even make the request. I’m
thinking they get ordained into a specific celestial ministry
(principality? do we want to get fake Christianity in our fake Chinese
mythology?), which gives them the possibility of getting authorized for
each of a set of spells. The ministries can’t be anything lame like
air/earth/wood/blah or conjuration/abjuration/blah. I’m thinking more
like the Ministry of the East, Ministry of the West, Ministry of Seven
Stars, Ministry of the Dunes and Waves, and Ministry of Oversight. Each
has one or a few areas of magic, and some random spells because if it
were a literal bureaucracy, larger departments would absorb smaller ones
based on opportunity, not logic.

(Different traditions may have different sets of ministries, different
certification requirements for the good spells, different ideas on
multiclassing, etc. Maybe this is where the idea that magic is different
in different places comes from.)

And, of course, the common limitation that active invocations take up
astral inventory slots. Which need a better name. Psyche slots?

I think that’s what the web page said today was, anyway.

Slept in too much, then was trapped by cats, then took a too-long shower, but eventually managed to do the regular shopping. Katalepsis is on hiatus, though.

Books Inc has been bought by Barnes and Noble. The people at this store seemed to think it might not be completely terrible, but I guess we’ll see.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 1.1-3: A crazed apothecary girl is kidnapped and sold to the concubines’ wing of the imperial palace as a maidservant, but her nosiness and medical knowledge bring her to the attention of certain powerful people. Detection and character bits ensue.

Read (novel): The Dark Lord’s Guide to Dating (and Other War Crimes) (Tiffany Hunt): The dark lord needs to marry a descendant of the ancient hero to activate his ultimate weapon, but the apparently hapless noblewoman he kidnaps for the role has way more potential than either of them expected. The dark lord isn’t as bad as he’s made out to be, but still pretty evil, but then the kingdom he’s opposing is pretty sketchy too, it turns out. Lots of boinking, lots of magic, lots of murders.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 6 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): Prison break episode!

Written (game design): 362:

Some story I read, maybe Clark Ashton Smith (who I normally don’t like
because he brought good and evil into the Mythos) had the blasted waste
at the edge of world, full of monsters and cratered by meteor impacts.
Meteors hitting a flat world (and delivering monsters from outer space)
is a great image, and I like the edge of the world in general. Maybe
some living dungeons fall from the sky like meteorites? Either as seeds
that grow and expand, or just a whole structure blazing down to embed
itself deep in the earth.

Living dungeons are a great hook for a game. People turning into
monsters is a great hook for a game. But are they hooks for the
same game? In one sense, sure; Nexus the Infinite City or any Marvel
RPG will show there’s no limit to the number of kitchen sinks that
can be stacked together in one game. Internal trouble from wicked
people puts it in the police genre, while external trouble from
living dungeons is more like war. Completely different genres.

There is a difference between “this person we know or at least heard of
has now turned into a monster” and “this monster was once a person”. The
latter feels like it fits better with external threats. We could go that
way, and save established NPCs (or PCs!) turning into monsters for a
special treat.

Travelers from the higher realms coming to cause trouble is also more
like living dungeons than like people turning into monsters. There seems
to be a lot on that side of the genre scale, and not so much on the
other. Maybe the world is so messed up that people sometimes turning
into monsters is just not a big deal?

This is not really helping with magic. In fact, the opposite, since it’s
given me time to think that spells being astral tools doesn’t exactly
mesh with harmonizing with the flow of the universe. It doesn’t not
mesh, but needs some more work.

Still playing Shop Titans, I hope that counts!

Did some work, had an initial 1:1 with New Manager T, gave Nightvale some ‘nip so he freaked out. (I offered some to Sage but she didn’t care. Apparently food is her vice.)

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.14-15: The one with the train heist on the greenwasher, where Breanna gets to be gay, and the one with Harry’s ex-family and the alarming ending.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 5 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): The one with the zombies and the duel. Things are getting serious.

Written (game design): 396:

I don’t want generic zombies/skeletons, or even skleltons, because
there’s not much point to any kind of generic monster, let alone one
that’s just a bandit PCs don’t have to feel bad about killing. Maybe
corporeal undead are different depending on where their body was
abandoned? Or just always different, but it’s nice to have some thematic
consistency between monsters and their environment. D&D notwithstanding,
incorporeal undead are just various forms of ghosts. I feel like ghosts
should have more memory of their life, wandering corpses can be more
ravening.

Oh, but what about vampires? Are they even undead? Seems like a clear
case of monster-that-used-to-be-person, even if they were disanimate
for a while. I think it’s fine if they are kind of alive, even. Multiple
kinds of vampires! Multiple ways to become a vampire! All of them are
terrible, none of them are cool! And not all of them drink blood, this
is the category of wandering corpses that are fresh enough to still have
their memories and personality. Instead of draining your blood to turn
you, they can drown you in a bog until you mummify or set you ablaze
with the eternal flame or whatever.

What can ghosts do? I don’t think we have levels, so no level drain, but
whatever spirits can do, which is, um, well…

What even is a spirit? I strongly believe that a witch’s familiar
is a spirit, not a Disney princess cute animal friend. You can have a
cute animal friend, it’s just not a familiar, although maybe the
familiar could be possessing it, or manifesting in its form. So there
are spirits that bring magical knowledge from… somewhere. Maybe the
same place as answers to necromancers’ questions, which is to say the
accumulated memories of everyone dead? Which doesn’t tell us what
spirits are. I don’t think I want to go the Exalted route of everything
having a spirit that can be called up and talked to: that is not the
vibe I have for this setting. I mean, maybe there are spirits, but they
aren’t people, you can’t have a conversation in words. Unless they’re
ghosts and have a personality!

So apparently spirits can manifest in the form of living creatures, and
possess living creatures. What else? I really like the image of a wizard
with a bandolier of cages containing spirits that can be set loose to do
things, but maybe those are more like elementals? Are those different?

We’ve wandered far afield from figuring out how magic works. Maybe
that’s too hard for now and we should think about what kinds of magic
there are instead, or otherwise brainstorm weirdness. (Weirdness tends
to be specific, and show-don’t-tell, so it makes the setting less open,
but that’s fine.)

Different kinds of magic are probably practiced in different areas,
since communication isn’t that great? Maybe there are printing presses,
but is there a scholarly community that likes flaunting knowledge at
each other? Probably not, since magic is immediately useful. Do we have
nation-states that hoard military knowledge? Maybe not, I’m picturing
more like ancient scrolls of martial arts techniques, except not
necessarily ancient.

Does magic actually work differently in different areas? On the one
hand, that would definitely be weird, and entertaining to watch PCs deal
with, but on the other, it would be a lot of work to come up with
multiple ways for magic to work that didn’t just randomly hose different
characters in each zone. Maybe minor differences, though? Does magic
come from living dungeons, and that’s why it’s different in different
places?

Is everything living dungeons? Is everyone a monstergirl from a living
dungeon? No, probably not. If nothing else, things like people becoming
monsters should be global, so there’s some underlying world even if
there are plenty of additions (incursions? I think Trophy Dark took that
one) piled onto it.

It sure seems like all news is bad news, so I guess that would follow.

Went to the office, only Coworker K was there, did some work, ate some chicken nuggets.

Watched (animated TV): Helluva Boss 1.1: Not sure about the number, this is the redone pilot that is more like what happens before the first episode, but 73% less gonzo and funny. I’m not at all sure this is a better introduction

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.13: The one with the hurricane and Maria.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 4 (Sai Naekawa): Main character and her two monsters go to basketball camp, where of course there is more horror, and also the mermaid insisting she’s a monster and doesn’t like the MC at all.

Written (game design): 284.

Watch, by next year this will be National Charlie Kirk Martyrdom Day. Maybe we can stuff some Nazis into the LHC.

Went to the office, ate a sandwich, did some work, read some news. Poor Coworker D was stuck on a customer call until well past his quitting time. I only had a couple hours of customer call.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 4 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): More monsters, so many more monsters. Some can be defeated with Hime’s encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural, but a chainsaw is still always handy.

Read (manga): Throw Away the Suit Together vol 3 (Keyyang): I guess I see the appeal of billionaire romances, since any story that involves job-hunting in the 21st century is guaranteed to be a downer, but at least they still have each other, so it probably counts as HEA?

Written (game design): 317:

Actually, lots of terms, if we’re going to have multiple kinds of
magic (whether distinguished by what it’s like to cast them, what
kind of effects they get, or both), and each needs at least what
its own practitioners call it and what everybody else calls it.
Which brings us back to the unresolved question from weeks ago,
“how does magic even?”.

There’s at least invoking the powers that be, and channeling your chi.
Turning your blood into flaming spears to fling at your enemies? Begging
the god of snails and sunsets and palindromes to give you a protective
shell? Letting the conjured phoenix out of the little cage you keep it
in? Breathing fire like the dragon you’re descended from? Growing spikes
like the mutant porcupine you ate the heart of? Monstering out by
drinking a mysterious potion? Calling up the spirits of the dead to drag
their shameful descendants to the grave?

How does necromancy (either D&D-style armies of undead, or OG divination
by spirits of the dead) work if souls get reprocessed? Are the parts
that know stuff or animate bodies reprocessed, or discarded back into
the environment, or what? What even is a soul? Egyptians had multi-part
souls, it’s not that much of a stretch.

For that matter, what is a spirit of the dead? Is that the same as
an individual ghost, or a more generalized vat of soul (which, not
being a physical substance, can be accessible everywhere)? There’s more
exciting friction (ie, the PCs are more boned) if you have to go where
somebody died to ask their spirit questions, but the Greeks did okay
with random locations and vats of blood, right?

And what’s an undead? I prefer the dead rising from their graves
to cause trouble as an omen of worse things to come over necromancers
calling up stupid shambling comic-relief zombies, but neither has
to be very common before cremation or sky burial or woodchipper has
always been everyone’s mandatory funeral custom. I guess if it’s rare
and there’s a very strong preference for burying intact bodies, maybe it
could still happen? Nothing horrible a PC can do is going to stay rare,
though. Some number of bodies get lost, though, so those could still
come back. Of course the bodies of wandering weirdos are most likely to
not get recovered, so maybe that’s another reason normal people don’t
like the touched. That gets us both headless horsemen and ghost ships,
which are vitally (hah) necessary part of undead stories.

I suppose bodies don’t need to get woodchipped to be safe from returning
from the dead if they have proper funeral rites. They could still be
animated as objects, though.

Also National Teddy Bear Day.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. These wonderful weirdos definitely need teddy bears. Instead Siddy stress-cleans for 24 hours straight, with only one break to build some crow houses, while Thessaly plots dozens of murders on Lily. Theophania tries to write, but there are too many feelings in her warehouse, so she experiments on Thess and Siddy with her emotion magic. Yep, those sure are a lot of feelings! However, although she can give people feelings, she can’t take them away, so it doesn’t really help. Longfingers is hiding in the walls and misses all of this, but later she goes out looking for Mary, who she heard can teach her the dream magic to investigate the golden apple mystery. She doesn’t find Mary, but she does find Eve the vampire, who promises to help her find Mary in exchange for going dancing with her. None of the rest know anything about this, since they’re still at home wallowing.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 2-3 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): More movie monsters, more doom. Vampire who flies wearing a skirt. More doom.

Written (game design): 300, because I haven’t made up my mind to either restart the other project now that I know the emotional arc, or abandon it entirely because I’ve restarted it too many times. (Never mind the other other project, which has languished in complete neglect since I planned it out in more detail than ever before.)

It is one of my favorite punctuation marks, although I like most of them.

What’s not my favorite is knowing I have to get up special in the morning, instead of according to routine, so I wake up early and lie there wondering if my alarm didn’t go off and I messed everything up and have to go live in a cardboard box under the freeway overpass.

Read (manga): Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon vol 4 (Shio Usui): They finally admit their feelings for each other (with some encouragement from others), the end! Yay ace representation and all, but them both being ace makes it feel like the author was trying to distance themself from the idea of women having sex. Still very cute, and the little sister is definitely going to take over the world.

Read (novel): Heretical Fishing vol 4 (Haylock Jobson): More OP cultivator fishing adventures, this time with a boat, and then also some plot monsters introduced in the last like third of the book. I know what happened to the world has been hinted at for a long time, but I’m not sure it’s as interesting as Corporal Claws gaining nigh-infinite power.

Written (game design): 222:

(We have to pretend that the 13th Age module Eyes of the Stone Thief
didn’t finish the idea of living dungeons and put a bow on it. Maybe we
can find a better name.)

Of course after writing that, I read Kickstarter updates for a
far-future science-fantasy game, and now I want ancient wonders and
cities built around still-functioning services from before and
everything. This is because I have no actual thoughts of my own, I just
read the Internet and remix it like an LLM.

Thinking about cities built around ancient wonders reminds me to wonder
how mythic this should be, and then what I mean by “mythic” except “like
Glorantha”. I think it means the supernatural being personified: if a
wizard casts a spell to make a wind blow, that’s whatever, but if they
chain the North Wind in their basement, that’s mythic. This definitely
includes direct works of named gods (eg, the Forge of Hephaestus). I had
been leaning away from that, though, with gods as nameplates hung on the
impersonal natural flow of the universe, people turned into monsters by
their own fates and not by snotty deities, etc. D&D, despite having
multiple lists of gods in the back of the book, is also like this,
possibly because all divine quirkiness has to be flattened out to fit
into the power-by-level curve. Also, having a specific god that
does/has specific things is a non-generic setting element.

Another way to look at it is that in a mythic world, you can negotiate
with every natural phenomenon, or that everything is a phemonenon with a
person behind it you can bargain with. The moon is Selena’s most
precious jewel, not a place you can go or even a gravity rock. This is
definitely a great basis for a game, but it’s not at all the way I
normally lean, at least for worldbuilding, so let’s not do that. This
time.

An exception might be the afterlife. I want to avoid the D&D thing
of souls getting sorted into planes according to alignment (which
doesn’t even exist in our game) and then staying there. Reuse!
Recycle! Upcycle! Reduce? I mean, just because it’s fantasy doesn’t
mean there has to be an immortal soul. Minds are plenty good enough.
On the other hand, this is fantasy, and surviving beyond death is
a very popular dream. But if there’s recycling, there should be
processing. Grinding. Melting. Reforging. And, naturally, some
sort of celestial apparatus (probably not the mechnical kind) to
do it all. An imperfect apparatus, which is why sometimes memories
of past lives seep through. Maybe it’s decayed, maybe it’s become
corrupt (villainous eunuchs of heaven?), maybe humans just don’t
understand what it’s actually doing; in any case it’s another source
of trouble. Bonus trouble if there are multiple factions of soul
processors who want different things and get the brilliant idea to
manipulate society in different ways.

This has implications for resurrection, namely that you have to get the
soul before it enters the hopper, but that’s fine. If somebody claims to
have come back from the dead after a thousand years, that should
definitely be sus.

Do only people who can spend Harmony have souls? Nah, that seems rude.
Being able to spend Harmony might be something desirable in a soul,
though.

Still need a good short in-world name for that. “Touched”? I think most
people who speak US English understand that it’s both “touched by the
divine” and “crazy”. Actually, we need multiple terms.

Yum, squash!

Went to get some Thai lunch to fuel up for very minor errands and accidentally got vaccinated for the latest fashions in Covid and influenza. There was some kind of festival with bicyclists and tents occupying the street, but none of them seemed very interesting, so they could not stop me.

Read (manga): Girls’ Last Tour vol 5-6 (Tsukumizu): I’m not sure what other ending there could have been, but yikes.

Written (game design): 232.

I guess this was the wrong day to wear my pro-procrastination shirt.

Slept way in but then was able to save some time on shopping because there probably haven’t been any new books delivered since Tuesday.

Watched (anime): Bungo Stray Dogs 4.11-13: more villains who have always existed yet were written into existence days ago, finally someone willing to monologue about the villains’ plan, but then the end of the season! Although this is 13 episodes and where we should be at the midpoint, so it’s probably annoying marketing splitting season 4 into two.

Read (manga): Spy Classroom vol 2 (SeuKaname, Takemachi, Tomari): The girls still have not gotten one over on their teacher, but it’s time for the suicide mission anyway! After hearing about the great spies who failed at it before.

Read (novel): Any Minor World (Craig Schaefer): Same setting as most of Schaefer’s books, a hardboiled private eye gets mixed up with the criminal cartel that tries to control the multiverse and a dame who is already entangled with some of the less pleasant parts of it (think Gotham but with more supernatural horror). Colorful villains, desperate chases, redemption, betrayal, subway trains to hell.

Written (game design): 409:

My bullshit definitely includes people becoming able to use magic
after getting exposed to the supernatural or otherwise traumatized,
and this coming with some kind of curse that makes normal people
not want them around so they’re pushed to the edges of society. At
least part of the curse is susceptibility to turning into a monster,
either through one’s own wickedness or through being cursed or
whatever. (Note that meeting a vampire’s cursed eyes is definitely
exposure to the supernatural, so one is immediately vulnerable.)
Every person is equally susceptible to this; there’s no lineage
that has more or less magic than any other, although in-world that
may not be apparent. In fact, I’m pretty against any plot tokens
being passed down by blood, even if characters want to be weird
about it.

PCs can have whatever role in society they’re permitted, but
fundamentally they ain’t right and are going to end up, sooner or later,
as the ones dealing with problems that ain’t right. So what are those
problems and where do they come from? Monsters that used to be people,
obviously, and monsters that are still technically people (the wealthy
and powerful, insert Leverage intro here), and sometimes the two working
together. I mentioned interdimensional incursions as a source of
monsters before, and still like strange creatures from the higher realms
(although I’m less sure about PCs being able to do much about them,
because, higher realms). Living dungeons are also good, although they
need some kind of different spin than in 13th Age. A good source of
problems, though, possibly as good as pre-apocalyptic ruins? Also
there’s probably something about dimensions trying to invade and
corrupt each other with vacuoles (completely independent of anything their
inhabitants might want).

Living dungeons don’t have to be interdimensional. Maybe the ancient
layer of fallen heavenly palaces is rebuilding itself upward. Maybe it’s
just the regular D&D Underdark expanding upward in search of water or
plants. This might be the kind of thing that needs a list of 1d12
anticanon possibilities.

There’s a particular kind of player (I heard, from a friend) that will
want to play a monstergirl from a living dungeon. I should probably
figure out what to do about that.

This answers the question of whether to apocalypse, at least. We have
weird stuff from other places, not other times, at least mostly.

How about my own funeral?

Did some work today, but not too much.

Read (manga):  Girls’ Last Tour vol 2-4 (Tsukumizu): Reread vol 2-3, in which our wandering halftrackers see a lot more disintegrating cityscape and meet a tiny number of people (and only murder some of them), and then after many years read volume 4 in which many discoveries are made. What are those things, anyway?

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.11-12: The one with the old grifter (I figured out the twist before any of the old characters), and the one with vampire golfing (I recognized the guest villain).

Written (game design): 153:

I don’t want to make a game full of my own bullshit that nobody else cares
about, but trying to create based on guesses about what other people
like (even guesses backed up by polls or focus groups) leads to
live-action remakes of the fourth episode of an animated series that
should never have had sequels. Nobody wants that, so maybe my own
bullshit it is, terrible as that will be.

It also occurs to me that D&D now has the openness of setting because
it has fifty years of people hacking it to work with their home
games. I can be a little tighter than that. (Realistically, I can
be as specific as I want because this is never going anywhere, but
the mission statement was to take all the stuff I didn’t like out
of D&D and replace it with stuff I did like, so I’m sticking with that.
Mostly. Kinda.

Hi Sherilyn!

Had a dream about the main character of the project I haven’t been working on. It had name-brand superheroes and wasn’t anything like the situation she’s in, but still. Maybe I should work on that. I figured out the emotional arc of the main character, but it’s getting to the point where I should be starting over to include all the stuff I’ve figured out and that would be the 3596th time I’ve started over because I don’t actually know how to write.

Went to the office, ate some pork and veggies and rice but had to leave the rest to call a customer, learned about a new product, gave some advice to my coworkers.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.9-10: The one with the librarian and the one covered in bees. Are Harry and Sophie going anywhere with this?

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 1 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): I remembered liking this a lot when I read it in 2012, enough to hunt down pirated scans of the volumes that didn’t get published over here, but apparently I remember it too well now. Will probably finish rereading what I have, and then we’ll see.

Written (game design): 291:

The creation could be ongoing: surprise, there’s a new god! Or a
new school of magic! Or swinging back the other way, a new curse. Or
every month, in the dark of the moon where no one can see, the gods add
a new hex to the edge of the map.

Being able to explore new regions can come in many forms. Maybe the new
regions are actually newly created, but maybe the gods have provided a
gate to another world, or a bridge over the sea of corrosive mist to the
next island. Maybe someone has invented a new kind of transportation
(boats! riding moose! bigger boats! flying carpets!) or protective gear
to travel across the Vast Deadly Desert surrounding Oz (or maybe just
shoes).

If the PCs have better travel ability, but everyone they meet is better
at murdering, then they aren’t likely to be colonialists, but might have
to worry about being colonized. That would be a different game than
fantasy adventure, I think. More like fantasy Star Trek, which is not
bad, but are we digressing from the original goal? We could be
discarding it as unworthy, but I think we’re just digressing.

Back to bad things happening, what if instead of new gods, we lost the
old gods? Any pantheon can drift off into space, but should these ones
plummet to Earth, leaving mountain-range-sized bodies of divine flesh
and lakes of holy blood, none of which leaves things unaltered? Probably
not; I’m stealing that from a smutty webcomic. Also I already did a game
where the entire landscape was smushed beneath the fallen palaces of
Heaven.

Which brings us back to not knowing what to do or how much to do it, but
at least it was an interesting tangent.

Like takeout boxes full of brains!

Went to the office, tried to eat a braised pork bowl but it was too fatty, did some work.

Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 4 (Syu Yasaka): Despite each still not realizing the other is gay, they spend Christmas and New Year’s and into the school ski trip getting closer and closer to either making out or dying of heart attacks.

Written (game design): 338:

We’re not making a time-travel game (I hope), so the present of whatever
our vague setting is does depend on its past. What are our options for
the general trajectory?

Post-apocalyptic and ancient world were already mentioned. They are
similar in that most good (valuable or interesting) stuff comes from the
past, but the aesthetics are different: in one, everything is “normal”
just busted up (nuked, dehydrated, zombie-infested), while in the other
the beaches sparkle dazzlingly because they’re a billion years of wear
from structural diamond girders, the landscape is covered with huge
circular lakes from the Age of Relativistic Bombardment, that mountain
range is a buried arcology, etc. Post-apoc is usually SF because the
previous world is supposed to be relatable, meaning usually our world,
but I don’t think that’s strictly necessary. A sufficiently
well-understood fictional setting (generic D&D) would probably work just
as well, and a novel setting that’s fallen apart is just part of the
current setting, which people are fine with being novel. Probably.

Ancient world/deep time settings tend more to be science-fantasy,
with the fantasy usually being psionics and other dubious
science/technology with Clarke’s Law (Numenera), but sometimes real
magic (Ultraviolet Grasslands). The science part is almost always there,
because pure fantasy deep time can be anything, and isn’t more engaging
that pure fantasy that was poofed into existence. Black powder masers
notwithstanding, I don’t think I want to go the science-fantasy route,
but maybe that’s wrong of me. Apparently it’s how D&D started.

If it’s post-apocalyptic but the good stuff is new, and the old bad
stuff has been rejected, I think that’s solarpunk. I feel like that
needs more a link to our world than regular post-apoc, so that we
understand how bad it was. We can tay the ancients’ magic was innately
cursed and that’s why they fell, but do the players care? I guess maybe
if there’s a point in the campaign where they discover what’s in the
basement of the ruins of *m*l*s.

Even though I’m an extremely basic sucker for the OSR Aesthetic, not all
settings have to have apocalypses. That doesn’t mean peace; I’m thinking
of like early China where it was a heap of little kingdoms constantly
conquering each other. It wasn’t much fun for people in the way, but not
everything everywhere was destroyed all at once, so civilization as a
whole carried on. Lower-intensity would be Celts/Sartarites and constant
cattle-raiding skirmishes. Or, everything could be a peaceful utopia,
which is why PCs have to go Anywhere Else. (But that may lead to
colonialism.)

The world could even be improving (see Frieren, where they actually
develop new spells), which again just means less atrocity, not none,
although the improved state does have to be enough better for the
players to appreciate it. Also, if things are already getting better,
what do PCs do? Obviously they help improve things, but this implies
(does not require?) them to be more a part of society than murderhobos
usually are. That might not be a bad thing, but it’s probably more
limiting than D&D.

And of course, on the other side, maybe there’s not an apocalypse yet, but
everything is deteriorating. Probably not what people want to play in
this year 2025, but on the other hand, if the PCs play their cards
right, they could be the apocalypse! Requires a height to fall from,
probably.

Going up one level and then going to the other side, what if something
good happened (euapocalypse? I think that means something different, and
has calamitous koalas)? That can be just as disruptive and exciting as
an apocalypse, although not always as murdery. The biggest one would of
course be the creation of people, by the gods or space bats or whatever.
Maybe the world was created at the same time, or maybe it existed
earlier and didn’t matter because no one was around to see it. This
lends itself to an exploration campaign, which could be light or dark
depending on what they find out there in the world or what people at
home do with it.

Less drastic, but still a pretty big deal would be a sketchy titan
offering mortals a light around the back of the temple, the goddess
Etain bringing the secrets of writing, the wheel, and the double-blind
experiment, or the Okay Sage discovering Zero so you don’t have to herd
pigs any more. People having existed before this and probably gotten used
to how things were, there seems likely to be some social strife, even if
it’s good overall. Also exploration-oriented, but maybe more
competitive, and again, dependent on what possibilities in the world
have opened up.

Speaking of opening up, maybe the new thing is a region or world to
explore. If it’s not inhabited, though, it might not be very
interesting, and if it is, that can lead to colonialism. Maybe that’s
interesting to navigate?

A popular arguably-good change is magic appearing or returning.
That’s almost always in a modern or future setting, but what if a
psuedo-historic setting suddenly becomes a fantasy setting? Nobody
knows what kinds of magic there are, or what the limits could be. I
think this would need a stronger magic system than a settign that had
always had magic, even if only the GM knows it to begin with. Either
that, or some meta-system for discovering the magic system in play, like
the emergent mystery systems from Brindlewood, Ex Tenebris, etc. This
wouldn’t be a general fantasy-adventure system, but it could be
interesting.

A twist on that would be, surprise, there’s gods now! Could be very
similar, could be more social upheaval depending on what people think of
these gods and whether they had preconceptions.

In case you need to intimidate Monty Python, I guess.

Still on vacation today. It’s like a mix of Saturday (shopping), Sunday (impending work), Monday (laundry), and the Tuesday the calendar claims.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. More time is spent at King Mark’s court, but not much more is learned. Hopefully everyone now has a good impression of Theophania and crew, though. Since Jack of All Asses has already butted in, Lily takes Everett and his friends to a good diner to meet her boyfriend. Apparently she has a type because her boyfriend is (big reveal music) Everett’s fetch. Bogglement ensues. Both of them are Everett, though, so they sit down and calmly discuss having a shared legal identity and how taxes will work and when they diverged. In the meantime, Thessaly, who was interested in Lily and then wanted to set her up with Everett and she’s dating Everett’s FETCH, and Siddy, whose fetch is known to be out there living her life with her family, flee outside for some therapeutic wailing and gnashing of teeth. Eventually, Theophania calms them down enough to go back inside and eat fries and fume while watching to make sure Everett and other Everett don’t explode like matter and antimatter. When Everett-2 has to go back to work, the real Everett goes off to have feelings on his own, and the rest head back to the warehouse to have their own feelings.

Read (manga): I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 8 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): Everybody already knew who was gay, but there’s a lot more coming out in this volume!

Read (novel): The Demon’s Due (Deborah Wilde): 5th and final book, MC and her boy get together, the world is almost destroyed but then saved, etc. HEA!

Written (game design): 306.

Slept in a lot, eventually managed to go to the protest. Hardly anyone was there compared to previous events, probably because of the heat. It was only 91, but there wasn’t much shade on the big open concrete white-people courtyard.

Read (manga): Girls’ Last Tour vol 1 (Tsukumizu): Reread before sending to the used bookstore, since I found the rest of the series that I hadn’t read before. Two girls and a halftrack motorcycle trundle through an abandoned multi-tier industrial wasteland.

Written (game design): 420.