🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Went to the office, train was delayed, did some work, ate some Impossible sausage, along with improbable mashed potatoes and entirely plausible sauerkraut.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.8: The one where Parker is on her own and down a limb, but solves the problem anyway because she’s the best.

Read (manga): Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 7 (Yu Yoshidamaru): They made it! Not without more worries, but they get all the way to an epilogue where Ogami says she wants more sex.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 3 (Hachi Inaba): Tiger and Dragon continue the quest for reduced mortality and encounter various beasts, including the ones they really didn’t want to meet again. Also a cut to Boy Tiger and the cheetah cub he adopted. This manga is kind of nerve-wracking, since I don’t care if humans get eaten by hyenas, but would be very upset if Baby Cheetah did, and they still might.

Read (short): “An Easy Mistake” (Glynn Stewart): Vignette to draw people to the newsletter, as is apparently the custom in our social-media-blighted dystopia of 2025.

Written (game design): 336:

I was thinking about how I want to have black powder guns and
grenades as non-magical counterparts to the big-damage limited-use
spells, but what even is “non-magical”? D&D has a fake-historical
setting with “magic” stapled on top, but it’s a distinct thing,
which leads to spells of detect magic and dispel magic, and even a
god of magic, when it’s the gods themselves that should be magic.
(We continue to reject the false dichotomy of divine vs arcane
magic!)

But is magic invoking the gods, or powers bestowed by the gods?
Maybe secret knowledge granted by the gods? Performed by servitors sent
by the gods? Are there even gods? Earlier I talked about MP being
attunement to the flow of the cosmos, and maybe that’s all there is; the
“gods” are just humans putting faces on different parts of it? Not that
means they aren’t real.

Not sure where I’m going with this. (I say that a lot, don’t I?)
We already knew all of D&D magic can be tossed out, but this isn’t
getting us closer to knowing what to replace it with. If we do have
guns and bombs, then magicians don’t have to be literal artillery
and can fill some other roles.

One thing I like from some OSR games is the “cleric” being the prophet
of some weird little god. There can be also be priests of big important
gods with temples and vestments and established rites, but the prophet
is directly connected to something that is highly specialized and not
even slightly good at dealing with human stuff. The quote I remember is,
“Whoops, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand live snakes through
your mouth? Sorry, it was an honest mistake!” This is somewhere between
magic-by-invoking-the-gods and magic-powers-granted-by-the-gods, but
presumably part of being an early prophet is establishing the rites so
the later priests can have magic-spells-revealed-by-the-gods or
whatever.

Also, maybe I want black powder lasers. The equipment list is fair game
for worldbuilding!