Tag: anime

Hurray for Sage! She is the yelliest!

Played (Hero 6E): Kaiju Academy: Kidnapping, hostage-taking, partial but extremely biased villainous dialog, and horrible bug goo in the conduits!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 8: It’s not a city adventure unless someone goes undercover in disguise.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 8: Another cute girl, but this one is pretty sus. Also the main two are getting more yuri. And there’s some plot and stuff.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 9: Oh no, bad reviews and writer’s block! Queer(?) best friend to the rescue.

Read (comic collection): Getting Dizzy (Shea Fontana, Celia Moscote, Gloria Martinelli): A girl who just wants to be special randomly because a magical skater girl to fight against negativity goblins, but nobody can be that special. The characters are high-schoolers or even older, but I think the writing is for someone much younger.

Written (game design): 158:

What is a skill mechanically, though? Are we keeping the 3d6 roll-under
system? 9 plus the number of dice that have Skills? That’s 10- to 21-
for 1 to 12 ranks, seems reasonable. How many different things you can
roll for depends on how many times you bought Skills on that rank of
power, and we definitely need to establish some way of quantifying that
to avoid the Literally Batman 12d6 powerset being too cheap. I don’t
think we need to be as granular as individual Hero skills; maybe the
skill categories from 6E (Agility, Background, Combat, Intellect,
Interaction)? Is five enough? It’s a place to start, anyway.

Now we’re back to conditions and weaknesses, which are intertwined.
Weaknesses are also intwined with complications and limitations, since
we want one system that supports both PCs having interestingly limited
powers and character-building complications, and NPCs having exploitable
weaknesses.

Following Hero terminology, limitations are things you can’t do with a
powerset, or costs you have to pay, or requirements. Major limitations
only; fiddly little ones are covered by special effect. Once again, we
have to figure out how to have limitations give extra points. Doing the
fractions thing is probably fine, I guess? The limitations are
definitely per-powerset, and with variable-cost ranks, it doesn’t work
to give free ranks. Free points still run into the possibility of
negative cost powersets, so fractions it is until we come up with a new
paradigm.

Only one of those was invented by me.

Apparently I can drop directly into REM sleep in the nine minutes of an alarm snooze. I don’t think this is a good thing.

Socialized too much and only had time for one episode of Anime With Dave.

Watched (anime): Kowloon Generic Romance 1: Ew, smoking. But also, ??!??

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 11 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Genetic coup!

Read (novel): The Sundered Realms (Casey Blair): The start of a different series about a terrifying wizard lady with a traumatic upbringing and her impossibly hot, equally terrifying new boyfriend, in a fractured world where demons are trying to crawl in and eat everything and humans are entirely willing to sell each other out. Magic works by linguistics nerdery, which is always good.

Read (novel): Take Back Worlds (Casey Blair): Conclusion to the trilogy about terrifying lady wizard etc that I started before. Lady wizard manages to get enough people onside, including some of the asshole descendants of the people who caused the problem to begin with, to save three out of four worlds and not actually destroy the fourth (who would have totally deserved it). Marriage, wild magic sex, HEA.

Written (game design): 140:

Or is that only Human Body, and there’s also Human Mind, which
includes skills? It does make sense for powersets to include skills,
since Ninja Training is a canonical source of superpowers. How does
this work? We considered buying ranks in Skills earlier, but never
settled on anything. In most games, a character’s skills have both
breadth (how many things they cover) and height (chance of success)
and it’s usually not a rectangle. Sometimes it’s a triangle (some
FATE implementations), sometimes it’s just a scribble with every
bit of the breadth having its own height. A powerset only has one
dimension– wait, no it doesn’t, some capabilities can be bought
more than once for broader effect. So there are two dimensions
available. But what does it mean to buy Skills as a capability for your
Heat Subtraction 12d6 powerset?

“Mu.” Or, I don’t know, it’s your powerset, you tell me. Start with
the fiction, then buy mechanics to match. I don’t think Human Mind
is actually a powerset, though. Buy a background or training regimen
or whatever as a powerset that has Skills and maybe something else
or maybe not. Talents and Perks are now techniques that have
prerequisites of some number of Skills dice.

Also, For Pete’s Sake, Girls Already Know About Engineering Day.

This morning was full of all-hands meeting. I hope we aren’t betting the whole company on AI.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.10-11: The End! There is nothing to disprove my theory that Froppy and Uravity are married now.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 9 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Getting to the Foreign Dignitaries storyline, plus assorted random mysterious mysteries.

Read (essay): Why All Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Are Historians (Ada Palmer): It’s because they have opinions about how the world changes. Literary people on the slack (so, pretty much the whole slack) had many opinions on this when Marith posted it.

Read (novel): Saints and Monsters (Ellen McGinty): A disabled princess has to save her sister and her Japan-flavored country with the unwilling assistance of a dragon. It was not bad, but could have used 80% less heterosexuality, and probably 30% fewer words.

Written (game design): 192:

It may seem like we’re making techniques into Hero powers, but my hope
is that we aren’t, because techniques don’t let you do anything your
powerset doesn’t already let you do. They just let you do it with fewer
tradeoffs or outright penalties than maneuvers do. Also, they don’t
(usually) grind away at hit points, they inflict conditions, which we
still don’t have a good handle on.

Other vital things we have no handle on: weakness for NPCs/complications
for PCs, skills, normal human abilities, gaining experience. Well, human
abilities are easy: everybody starts with the powerset Human, with
whatever capabilities and dice are needed to get 2d6 strength, normal
vision and other senses, etc.

Also Chocolate-Covered Clam Chowder Day.

Did not go to the office, did do some work, failed to eat correctly.

Watched (internet): Some professional Minecrafters built a lake. It looked like a lot of fun, and makes me want to Minecraft a bit, but I do not have enough brain cells.

Watched (anime): Kill La Kill 1-2: I watched the first couple of episodes long ago, maybe even back when it was still a thing, so when Crunchyroll reminded me I still had plenty of episodes left to watch, I decided to start over at the beginning. Yeah, okay, it’s about as ridiculous as Gurren Lagann, but more naked. (The one male character who might be continuing also takes off his shirt and does romance-cover poses, at least.)

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 8 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Finally the Lakan thing is resolved. He still sucks, though.

Written (game design): 370:

Let’s try this again. Capabilities for a powerset:
– Affects the environment – sounds like it should be mandatory, but
something like Telepathy that only affects people, or Healing Factor
that only affects the character wouldn’t need to pay for this.
– Affects the environment in many different ways – it’s up to the table
to judge this, but we should have examples. Maybe counts double if the
powerset can do almost anything.
– Usable as an attack – anything that affects the environment can do
damage, but that doesn’t mean it can be useful with a half-phase
action.
– Many different attack modes – you get the picture.
– Movement – dice give speed, techniques give things like not falling.
– Normal defenses – everything that would be PD or ED in Hero, plus
whatever the powerset should counter (cold vs heat, etc).
– Unusual defenses – Power Defense, Mental Defense, Life Support, etc.
– Senses – individual senses are bought as techniques, and have a
prerequisite number of dice in the powerset.
– Affect self – for shapeshifting, regeneration, etc. Again, might count
double if it’s versatile.

I don’t know that all of these should cost the same, but that’s a place
to start. We have to handle the Cosmic Variable Power Pool I mean D&D
Wizard, but it should be extremely expensive to have a powerset that
does everything and even more expensive to do everything in a variety of
ways.

When I said individual senses have to be bought as techniques, I was
wrong. If you buy Senses for your powerset, you can half-assedly detect
whatever your powerset involves by spending some time. Techniques will
get you the upgrades like (in Hero terms), Sense, Targeting,
Discriminatory, or 360. Having more than one die of Senses is still a
prerequisite for some techniques, but it seems like it should get you
more than that. Maybe range or general Perception bonuses?

By that logic, being able to attack shouldn’t be a part of the powers.
If you can affect the environment, or some’s psyche or whatever, you
have the ability to inflict conditions on your enemies, but if you want
to bust out the attacks as half-phase actions at full OCV in the middle
of a combat, then you need techniques. This is even more consistent with
multipowers, where the plain 12d6 EB is as much of a slot as the 8d6 AP
EB, etc. However, attacking is a much more significant action than
sensing something, so maybe it needs to cost more? That could be handled
by making the techniques more expensive, though.

(We’ve come back around to my early thought of buying hexes of generic
movement, and then buying movement modes separately. Apparently I will
never not be on my bullshit.)

How about Defenses? If you can affect the environment, presumably you
can put together some kind of defensive measures as appropriate to your
powerset, but maybe not while leaping around in combat. Also, not all
powersets are going to provide generic Def, although hopefully that’s
less of an issue when it’s not just grinding at people’s Stun through
their PD/ED. Maybe Defenses are techniques instead of a powerset
capability as well.

Fortunately Sage was already spayed when she came to live with me.

No office this week, since I can’t miss morning handover due to transit failure. Stayed at home, did some work, learned a little TLS.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1.7: Flum is doing pretty well at filling her house with cute girls, but there are still criminal lowlives and classism causing problems. Also monsters.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 1.7-8: Teenagers are difficult! Adults are difficult! Grief is extremely difficult!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1.7: Another weirdo, also shopping and ninja attacks.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 7 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): The large metal beam!

Written (game design): 231:

Setting that aside for the moment, these either let you get something
without the tradeoff, or get more for what you trade (like putting Area
Effect on a power gets you more than just spreading to fill hexes).
Earlier I mentioned needing one to effectively attack, but is that
covered by whether you pay for your powerset to include attack powers?
Probably something as general as that should be at the powerset level,
but maybe those should be techniques instead? If you don’t have the
ranged attack technique, you have to improvise to attack somebody or
something at range, which gives some kind of penalty, I guess? Or you
can’t use all your dice? It would be a maneuver, trading off something
in order to do the ranged attack at all.

For whatever reason, it seems like getting areas of capability in a
powerset should cost per die, so a flat-cost technique shouldn’t be able
to completely make up for that, or maybe not make up for it at all. Of
course you can always save up and add a new capability to a powerset if
you really want to be able to do the thing.

How do we divide up capabilities? And what do you get for each one
as a base without maneuvers or techniques? I still think
offense/defense/movement/chrome is too coarse, but we can split those
up. I don’t think ranged/melee is the right divide for attacks;
normal/special (NNDs, drains) seems better. Defense I’m less sure about
splitting, maybe it stays as one capability. Are mental powers part of
special attacks, or a separate thing? Based on how many special rules
Hero has for them, they probably are their own thing. Movement also
tricky, since the obvious division is speed vs movement modes that give
you extra stuff like Flight. And chrome is not only a grab-bag, but has
things that don’t really correlate with how many dice you have in your
powerset, like Extra Limbs or Enhanced Senses.

What do you mean you don’t have a pangolin to read to? (Although my pangolin a) is plush, and 2) has an advanced degree in Animal Feelings, so probably can do their own reading.)

I had horrible heartburn all night after staying up too late, so have not been very useful today. I’m not sure whether the burritos were less easy on my insides than wheat tortillas and chicken should be, the chicken that seemed fine despite being in the fridge for ??? days was not fine, or finally getting organ juice again after being off it for a while (thanks, American health care system) was a bit steep.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.23-24: End of the second season! Does Maomao not know what she wants, or does she know and it’s to frustrate Jinshi to death? It’s a pretty definite end to a lot of plot threads, so I’m curious to see where the third season will go when it comes out.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 4 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Back at the departure of the concubine after the garden party of poisoning and intrigue. Apparently this is the end of the first light novel volume, which I could read but haven’t and may not. But may yet!

Read (novel): Azarinth Healer vol 5 (Rhaegar): OP MC is so OP she’s making the system invent new classes. Also saving entire alien species, gaining a third class of her own, etc.

Read (collection): Consequences (Moe Lane): Four short stories about Edwardian monsters, cryptids, aliens, obnoxious gods.

Written (game design): 231:

We need some kind of tables of environmental stuff, like Hero has Def
and Body of various materials, to provide guidelines for how much
Entangle you do get from six inches of water or waist deep mud, how many
dice of zapping a power substation has, etc. The tricky part is that the
environment has to be enough to matter, not a world of tissue paper, but
shouldn’t overshadow powers at whatever level they’re in play.

Do we also need a system for which penalty and how much of it to apply
when someone’s using an application they haven’t bought, to seem fair
and objective? Or is it enough to have a list the GM can choose from, so
they don’t have to make up something new every time? And possibly some
guidelines for how much of each penalty corresponds to a minor, medium,
or severe penalty. Extra penalties for using multiple
maneuvers/applications?

Speaking of dice and powers, do we need to charge more or less for
broader or narrower powers? Every power is effectively a variable power
pool, so the breadth of the special effect does matter, unlike Hero
where it’s only the powers you actually buy that matter regardless of
what your special effect could possibly justify with unlimited points.
Is this where the idea of cost per rank comes in? Powers are now the
only thing we’re buying in ranks, it looks like.

Check! Also Clean Out Your Bookcase Day, which is not going quite as well.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.7-9: The End! Then some epilogue. More people survived than expected.

Read (manga): My Dress-Up Darling vol 3-4 (Shinichi Fukuda): More cosplay buddies for Doll Boy to dress up. They are cute girls, but Cosplay Gal is clearly the main, and so far only, romantic connection.

Written (game design): 132:

Leaving that alone for a minute, what kind of penalties can there even
be? The first few that come to mind are:
– Reduce dice of effect
– Reduce OCV/skill roll
– Require a skill roll, or flat activation roll
– Lose some Stun/gain some Exhausted or other condition
– Reduce DCV
– Can’t use other powers at the same time
– Takes extra time
– Side effect on you, or backblast on people around you
– Drain the power you’re using

There could also be requirements that you have to provide, like water if
you want to make ice manacles but didn’t buy doing that as an
application. If there’s not enough of it, the amount of effect you can
generate might be capped, like if there’s only six inches of water, you
can only get so many dice of Entangle on somebody’s feet.

No work today, but I did have to get up to let the cleaners in (they were late), and ride the bus (it was also late) to go shopping, and then do laundry.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 6: Six episodes, three demon lords down! Also, for those who were worried whether this might be a pervy anime, Teoritta briefly takes off her coat.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 6: There is some kind of actual problem with corruption and human experimentation (in the FMA sense), but Flum is busy dealing with petty criminals. At least she has a house now.

Watched (anime): Journal with Witch 5-6: Makio is not free of problems herself.

Read (short): “The Teleporting Disaster Fairy” (Rati Mehrotra): Inexplicable events cause lots of trouble for someone.

Read (short): “Unfinished Architectures of the Human-Fae War” (Caroline M. Yoachim): Alien temporal architecture from beyond the gates.

Read (short): “The Millay Illusion” (Sarah Pinsker): Men who said a woman couldn’t be a good stage magician get what’s coming to them, probably.

Read (short): “With Her Serpent Locks” (Mary Robinette Kowal): Don’t fuck with the gorgon, no matter how hot shit you think you are.

Read (short): “10 Visions of the Future; or, Self-Care for the End of Days” (Samantha Mills): So many dooms.

Read (short): “Six People to Revise You” (J.R. Dawson): Yeah, capitalism would absolutely charge people a fortune for the privilege of being brain-edited into social conformity.

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 2 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): It’s hard being Maomao. But it’s also hard putting up with Maomao.

Written (game design): 152:

Speaking of balance, the effect of using a power cleverly on someone
should probably be proportional to the active points/ranks, just as
(presumably) the amount of Grind Down or KO is. But greater cleverness
should also increase the effect, and different effects are going to get
quantified differently if we aren’t just chipping active points/ranks
off. And then there’s defenses against conditions, or maybe against
maneuvers, which also need to have an effect according to cost, however
that works. Maybe there are weak, normal, and strong conditions that are
different divisors on the level of effect, just like moveby and
movethrough need different amounts of movement to get +1d6? That at
least gives something to come to an agreement on, instead of the GM
making it up out of whole cloth. Or possibly it’s split along some other
axis, but we should definitely have a short list to pick from instead of
having to guess at the magnitude of effect from first principles.

Monday is a holiday, so I didn’t go shopping today, I just pulsated grotesquely.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.21-22: All the conspiracies and rebellions and other national-level politics are coming to a head around Maomao. I wonder if anyone will make it out alive?

Read (novel): Take Back Demons (Casey Blair): Sequel to Take Back Magic, main character is actually doing pretty great at restoring Earth, making friends, defeating enemies, getting a hot husband, etc.

Read (comic collection): Gotham Academy Second Semester vol 1 (Brenden Fletcher, Karl Kerschl, Becky Cloonan, Adam Archer, MSASSYK): I thought I read the first arc of this, but I don’t remember any of these characters except Batman. Everything is creepy and haunted and half the adults have questionable fashion sense and obsessions they’re willing to kill for, so it checks out as being in Gotham.

Written (game design): 133:

Hero, like other games from that distant era, treats hits to locations
as things that just happen while hit points are being lost, or if
you somehow have a reason to aim for one location over another, it
boosts the Roll To Confirm You Wasted Your Phase probability. If
there are effects beyond loss of hit points, then they’re similarly
incidental and based generically on the body part. But we don’t want
“oh, I guess you hit her in the leg” because we’re deemphasizing
grinding away at hit points. We want, “you successfully slowed her down,
now maybe your teammates can do something”, so conditions should be
created from that point of view.

If we’re demphasizing the hit point grind, then it shouldn’t be the
standard result of a combat round, maybe not even the default. “Wear
them down” can be a specific maneuver. Maybe it’s the same as “KO them”
(when they have few enough hit points or whatever), maybe those are
separate maneuvers and you can skip straight to KO if you outclass them
by enough, otherwise you have to wear them down with clever maneuvers
and/or emotional damage I mean moral suasion.

Went to the office, did some work, ate some carbs and some chicken guys, skipped out slightly early to get home in time to watch anime.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.4-6: Wow, they did it! Well, half of it, leaving five episodes for the other half.

Read (comic collection): Sweet Paprika vol 1 (Mirka Andolfo): Everyone is devils or angels and named after seasonings, although that seems to be purely cosmetic since everything else is the real world with NYC and cell phones and publishing companies and all. Our MC, Paprika, is extremely horny and repressed and rules her department with an iron fist but neither chill nor work-life balance. She falls for guy, continues to make poor life decisions and terrify her underlings, there are R-rated makeouts but not the right ones, etc. Paprika is kind of a terrible person, but a good character.

Read (novel): The Forest at the Heart of Her Mage (Hiyodori): F/F romance in a secondary world with an actually slightly non-generic magic system. One of the last survivors of a marginalized group from a terrifying magic forest wants to go home to properly bury her aunt and friend before the dominant culture nukes the entire island, somehow gets a crazy hot mage to go with her as bodyguard if she’ll marry her, there’s military intrigue and zombies and gradual revelation of shared traumatic backstory and also girlsmooches.Apparently a spinoff of a series set in the same universe but a different culture that’s differently D/s with their mages and mage massagers.

Written (game design): 221.

Although that may be a little weaksauce in these days of Epstein Files. Maybe it should be Revile and Ostracize Men Year.

Since I had to stick around home yesterday, today (after the cats let me out of bed) I had to do three shopping expeditions, each of which ended up being heavier than the last. Oof. I guess it was better than spending another day as a gelatinous blob, though.

Watched (anime): Burn the Witch 1-2: Much the same as I remember the manga. Was the guy that much of a dipshit in the manga? Probably. What even is the point of male characters?

Read (novel): Threads of Fate vol 1 (invayne_): A schoolgirl in magic AU gets tested for magical power at the beginning of highschool and secretly gets nigh-infinite power, with which she defeats the hardest entrance-exam dungeon. Whatever.

Read (collection): Alien Horrors (Tim Curran): Pretty much what it says on the time. Probably all the stories are in the same universe, which is very 70s blue-collar space travel, and leaving Earth is a great way to find horrible monsters to get murdered/haunted/eaten by. Some are just alien beasts, some are alien ghosts, some are from beyond the Singularity. There are not a lot of plot twists; the exact form of their destruction may not be obvious at the beginning of the story, but it’s never that surprising. Just dreadfully creeping.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 100 exactly, which is literally the bare minimum.

But I wrote no kitten words, because I am way too stupid. Instead I got up to start my on-call shift and immediately got sucked into an hour-long customer call. That was annoying, but did get resolved and I went back to bed to read for a while and got trapped under cats (I and I tiny brain, we never learn). Eventually I become functional enough to connect my new computer to my old computer and let it suck out the brains, but that took hours and hours during which they were both unavailable, so I was forced to watch anime. Forced, I tell you!

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 5: Okay, there’s a “hero” who should not be left to wander the world on his own. Still probably better than the people in charge of things. But that’s all there is so far, so I have to wait to find out how they get out of the stupid plan!

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 3-4: Orphan girl doesn’t even know what she feels, she doesn’t need people knowing about her parents and expecting her to perform emotions! Good thing they don’t know she was able to work on cleaning out her parents’ stuff without breaking down.

Watched (anime): Roll Over and Die 1-5: The girl with all stats at 0 and one apparently nonfunctional ability gets pushed out of the hero’s party and secretly sold into slavery, but just as she’s about to be fed to monsters for being unprofitable, she figures out the way in which her ability actually makes her OP and escapes to become an adventurer. Sadly she cannot escape the turmoil of what the hero is questing against. I can’t tell if her declarations to the other escapee are platonic or romantic. Possibly they can’t tell either. Also being simulcast, so I have to wait to find out the shape of her doom.

Read (graphic novel): Bounce Back (Misako Rocks!): Japanese middle-school basketball star suddenly has to move to America and learn English and try to make friends and deal with the basketball team being mean girls and generally suffer as middle-schoolers are supposed to. Feels like it’s aimed at readers for whom middle school is imminent.

Written (anything): NO COMPUTER.

Not sure what to say about it, though.

No anime with Marith, she has to work a hundred days in a row.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 3-4: More weirdos! I dunno, the convict heroes seem to be a lot better than the legitimate authorities. But, they’ve taken out roughly half a demon lord per episode, so it’s not surprising the legitimate authorities are terrified of them.

Read (manga): Tsumiki Ogami’s Not-So-Ordinary Life vol 2 (Miyu Morishita): After seeing werewolf culture in the first volume, the second is mostly just school stuff, with some other mythfolk being slightly weird.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL.

Written (game design): 156:

Are we back to figuring out what “damage” means? I still really like
conditions instead of hit points, but they definitely aren’t as simple
and therefore fair-seeming as a simple number or track. We can make it a
track by having conditions ranked (even if it’s just 0 or 1) and having
X ranks of conditions at one time knocks you out, but what is the effect
of the conditions? I guess we need a list of common conditions described
loosely enough they can cover most interactions of powers and special
effects, and then let the GM make judgement calls which one applies when
someone uses Hermetic magic on the alien slime monster.

What set of conditions will do this? How specific do we want to be? We
don’t want Sprained Hand and Sprained Elbow to be completely separate
conditions, but do we need to note which one it is when we mark the more
general condition? What is the more general condition for each?
“Temporarily injured limb”? “Sprain”? “Temporarily injured
manipulator limb” vs “…locomotor limb”? “Temporary physical damage”?
How do we divide up how permanent the damage is? Is two categories
(corresponding to Stun and Body) enough? Sprain is intermediate
between a bruise and a burn, do we make a third category, or tag every
condition with the step on the time chart you get to make a recovery
roll at? That last one probably has the most Hero DNA but is another
number to keep track of for each condition.

Do we have to have ranks on conditions? It’s probably easier to have
Clobbered:5 than five different clobbery conditions. Maybe the rank is
also the step on the time chart? That would be twice as simple. But then
how do we add up multiple instances of similar conditions? The usual
thing where it’s the new value if that’s higher, or increment the old
value by one if not is probably good enough. How similar do conditions
have to be to stack like that? Going around and around, we come back to
the huge variety of terrible things that can happen to a Hero character
being a good reason to abstract, but I don’t want to abstract
all the way to hit points, because bah.

Sounds like a disaster!

Tried some rain and thunder noise instead of fan noise for sleeping. Not sure it worked as well, but it was nice.

Still coughing when I woke up, so I didn’t go to the office to share my potential germs with the office party.

I forgot how to eat food, but Marith saved me with cherry tomato chicken. I put it over microwave rice and ate it and did not die even a little bit.

Watched (anime): Sentenced to Be a Hero 1-2: The worst and most powerful (and often craziest) criminals are sentenced to the battlefield as expendable special forces units, because their souls can be dragged back mostly intact from hell when they die. Human civilization with Euromedieval aesthetic and some magitech is being driven back by monsters, ancient magical superweapon in the form of a little girl, etc. Lots of gore and explosions and general violence.

Read (comic collection): Harley Quinn and Power Girl (Amanda Conner, Jimmy Palmiotti, Justin Gray, Stephane Roux, Paul Mounts): Power Girl has amnesia due to something in another series, so she’s hanging around Gotham with Harley Quinn when some low-level Batman villains use an alien artifact to teleport them to the Planet of Groovy 70s Free-Love Aliens, who are in a war with the forces of repression. The jinx that ensue are definitely high.

Read (novel): The Initiate (James L Cambias): A man whose family has just been killed by a demon is recruited to infiltrate the cabal of sorcerers who secretly rule the world with absolute power and absolute corruption. It’s pretty traditional magic, calling up spirits by chanting in ancient tongues on the right day of the week, etc, and also traditional is the problem with going undercover in an evil conspiracy. I saw the twist well before the main character did, because he didn’t pay attention to the error messages.

Written (game design): 289.

Also Brown Dog Day, so extra treats for Bella.

No treats for coworkers K, N, and C and remote coworker S, only pink slips. “Aligning skills with the company’s future direction”, my ass. That leaves two people in the North America team from before Boss³ M showed up, so “not here to fire everyone” my other ass. Not sure what I can do about it, though, and this is a terrible year to end up out of work by making a doomed stand anyway. This is why all workers should be unionized, I guess.

In better(?) news, the package containing my new computer escaped the Memphis Blizzard and was finally delivered, but I don’t know when I will have enough brain cells to move all my 1s and 0s over to it. I recall it being kind of a pain last time.

Marith brought sundried tomato feta chicken and root vegetables to eat while watching anime, which was very nice of her and definitely better than me trying to feed myself.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 8.2-3: Well, that’s one way to restart a heart!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Black Mould (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): Wait, Peter’s dad is white? I’m sure we knew that, but I never pictured him that way. Also, further evidence that jazz is the most magical of musical genres.

Written (game design): 133. Also doinked around with trying to rewrite my character sheet adder-up.

It me, although I’m probably not as freethinking as I think (freely).

Went to the office, did some work, ate some chicken and rice, learned some kubernetes.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.19-20: Two very dramatic episodes, Dabi vs multiple Todorokis and Uravity vs Himiko!

Read (comic collection): Rivers of London: Body Work (Ben Aaronovitch, Andrew Cartmel, Lee Sullivan, Luis Guerrero): A short story about a Falcon incident. I had not pictured Peter as wearing a suit and tie to work every day, but Aaronovitch signed off on it, so it must be so. I did not like the art at all, though. It is murky and rough and bleah and I am a Philistine.

Written (game design): 257:

Are we coming back around to my earlier idea of conditions, but
making them actual conditions instead of hit points with post-its?
As previously realized, that needs a lot of judgement calls for
what conditions a character (PC or NPC) can take or not take based
on their powers and special effects, but it’s 2026, we aren’t
actually expecting the GM to use their infinite power for TPKs.

A lot of this can be done in stock Hero, by giving characters
appropriate complications and limitations, but then we’re back to the
players guessing what weaknesses the GM prepared. Maybe NPCs can just
have “Weaknesses appropriate to being a magical goo monster (30)”? Or
“Weaknesses to be established in play by the heroes (30)”? It’s still a
little vaporous as to what they are ahead of time, but once they’re
established, they should be written down. Possibly there needs to be a
rule (more like a guideline) about when in the fight the GM has to have
spent all those points.

The GM can predefine some weaknesses, but leaving some for the players
to “discover”, although possibly lacking in verisimilitude, might help
with the problem of coming up with a whole new suite of complications
every session. Not sure it helps with limitations, though, so we may
still want a more freeform approach. Or perhaps this is a reason to
revisit the idea of having limitations be accounted for separately from
the base power cost? But probably just writing “susceptible to PC
cleverness as established in play (-1/2)” is enough.

More important now than ever, somehow.

The cats kept me in bed forever, which on the one hand is fine because I have only a little shopping to do today, but on the other hand just makes my sleep schedule worse.

Watched (anime): Journal With Witch 1-2: A suddenly-orphaned 15-year-old is taken in by her estranged weird aunt (novelist, probably neurospicy, doing her best). No hijinks ensue.

Read (graphic novel): Whistle: A good-hearted schoolgirl gets drawn into a life of crime because her family needs money and crime is how you get money in Gotham City. No Batman or Joker, but she meets several lower-tier canonical villains.

Written (game design): 190.

Hey, maybe that’s what Sage was yelling about! I sure don’t know what else it might be.

I just missed the bus to go shopping, so instead of waiting half an hour, I walked to the store. I really need to do that more when the weather is suitable (ie, not summer).

Lady on the street corner by my apartment was with a sign about increased ICE in San Jose, handing out fliers for the Santa Clara County Rapid Response Network. The number is 408 290 1144 if you see any anonymous masked kidnappers.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.15-17: And now all the plot threads are coming back to life at once! Conspiracy! Betrayal! Eunuchs! Genetics! That one guy!

Read (manga): The Apothecary Diaries vol 1 (Natsu Hyuuga, Nekokurage, Itsuki Nanao, Touco Shino): Trying to make the move to reading manga on my pad. It works well when I remember to do it, although I have to hold the pad in landscape mode, so maybe I should get used to doing all my other timewasters that way too. Anyway, the anime follows the manga very closely. There is a translator note when Gaoshun starts calling Maomao “Xiaomao” which tells us that the “xiao” means “little”, so he’s basically calling her Mao-chan, which is pretty adorable.

Read (from the shelf): FAIL. But if I can stop adding more paper to the shelf, that’s good, right? Except then I feel like I’m betraying my buddy Doug at the bookstore by not buying anything in paper.

Written (game design): 112:

Now we have three ways to deal with opponents: find their
weakness/overcome their strengths, talk them down, or just punch them.
But, by the nature of dominant mechanics, alternate approaches can’t
coexist: if grinding down their hit points is an option, that’s the one
most players will take unless the other options are so much better than
the complexity is worth dealing with, and then one of them will be the
preferred one. Even if they’re mathematically equal (unlikely,
especially since different opponents will probably have different
susceptibility to each), there’s probably going to be one that looks the
best to players.

Not to buy in to the “dominant mechanics” theory uncritically, but that
does sound a lot like how players work. Having them carefully work out
which approach is best in each scene is also not ideal, since there’s a
bunch of pondering and calculating, and then only one approach getting
used. Although I guess as long as it’s not the same one approach every
time it’s not that bad? But a combination would be better.

It’s an important part of Hero that NPCs and PCs are made using the
same rules, but that means the NPCs should be working on overcoming
all the aspects of the PCs, who also have only 1HP (each? between
them all? hardly matters). This doesn’t work as well because the
GM has only one brain against all the PCs, instead of many brains
against one villainous plot (even if it has many individual villains).
On the other hand, it’s also unfairly easy for the GM because while
every villainous plot can have at least somewhat different obstacles
to overcome, while a team of PCs generally stays very similar from
one adventure to the next (if they’re like typical Hero characters that
have most of their points spent on their own capabilities that can’t be
changed quickly).

Another difficulty is that whatever the GM prepares needs to provide
something for every character to do, or else the players have to be able
to define enough of the situation that they can make opportunities to
stick the opposition with quills.

Put on my One More Chapter Club shirt, did more work than I expected although maybe still not a lot.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 10-13: She punches her way through a war and a dungeon and a flirtation, all the way to the end!

Read (artbook): Magic Knights (Dames Productions): Pictures of magical girls, now with swords! Also spears, dashing uniforms, guardian spirits, fancy dresses, mounts, comrades in arms, etc. Every page is by a different artist, but the styles are in the same genre.

Read (novel): Murder Medic vol 1 (EC Krueger). Someone who manages to die of rabies is isekai’d, steals the demon heart a cultist was hoping to use himself, makes some friends that then find out she’s a demon, gets harrassed by the cultist and various other people, does a lot of murders and LitRPG leveling up while her demon nature heckles her.

Written (game design): 264.

Sage has many questions, but I don’t know what they are!

Had a meeting with our new colleagues in Australia, but we did the lame American thing of just talking about sharks and giant spiders and drop bears. Also I embarrassed myself by forgetting which way the planet rotates.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.17-18: More characters from past arcs make an appearance! Some of them even survive!

Read (novel): Shadow of Mars: Book eighteen, back with the current action heroine on the conquered planet. Action and heroics ensue, mostly unsanctioned.

Written (game design): 202.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 7-9: Religious intrigue! Divine intrigue! Treason, betrayal, crushes! Also punching. Lots of punching.

Read (graphic novel): Stutterhug vol 1 (Sam Davies): Brightly colored animals, some anthropomorphic, many stylishly-dressed, dance and flirt and meet and part and sing, usually lovingly, sometimes sadly.

Written (game design): 430:

I’ve been complaining about hit points since at least the previous
game design document, and off and on since then. It would definitely
be better to defeat enemies (and overcome adversity in general)
through in-game action. The one approach I know of is the 1HP Dragon:
the dragon is so large that a sword is but a mosquito bite and its
scales are as impenetrable as an inch of iron plate, but instead
of abstracting those into a large number that you have to grind
down with endless dice rolls of the one optimum power on your
character sheet, they’re factors you have to deal with by planning
and in-game action, just like the dragon’s power of flight, and the
way its lair is hidden deep in the mountains, and the surprise army
of kobold ninjas. (This is phrased in D&D I mean “generic fantasy”
terms, but what is a supervillain but a dragon in spandex?)

The problem with this is that it requires a lot of prep by the GM to
establish all the components of the opposition. Is it too much for
anything except a boss fight/master villain? The amount of detail for a
master villain is probably too much for anything else, but the minor
villain robbing the local bank probably doesn’t need that much. They do
need some detail, though, and every aspect needs to be at least somewhat
interesting, so that’s still work. Also, if one of the aspects is that
the villain has a gang of henchmen, does each of them need to have their
set of aspects to overcome?

(We’re only talking about the end stage of the adventure here, or
at least the combat encounters. The first part of a superheroic
adventure is usually investigation, which works the same way as
before, peeling away secrecy and resources from the villain. Sometimes
those resources are minions, who would have hit points, so do we
fractalize them? What if they’re normals?)

As always with games where the characters aren’t baseline humans
in a mundane world, we need some way to ajudicate what they can do
to or about each other where intuition fails. How does a biotech
suit of powered armor interact with the opponent’s runic array? For
that matter, can this particular rail gun shoot through that
particular adamantium-plated robot? With time to plan and flexible
powers (gadgeteering, magic, any kind of VPP) many things are
possible, but sometimes supervillains are attacking right now.

Even if the players come up with a plan, are there any mechanics
around executing the plan in a rush under field (ie, horrible)
conditions? What if the plan is “get them”? Even Squirrel Girl
punches villains pretty often, so we still need a combat system of
some kind, better than the 1HP Goblin. Have we just put the hit
points inside a puzzle box? Do players want to always open a puzzle
box? I’m sure the GM doesn’t want to make a new puzzle box every
week. It’s 2026, nobody has time for that.

It’s like Monday, only different. I’m doing handover and on-call this week, so I don’t have to get up early to go into the office, I guess that’s something.

Watched (anime): May I Ask For One Final Thing? 4-6: More punching! Also various people falling in love with Scarlet, which is legit because she’s awesome, but also boys are gross.

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 6 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Wow, S finally got it! But I bet they have a lot more mismatched feelings coming in the future, especially once T finds out.

Written (game design): 198:

Leaving attack rolls and damage rolls alone for the moment, the effect
of emotional damage has to be somewhat cumulative, but preferably not
just filling up a track like physical damage. Maybe a Presence attack
has whatever effect it has, and also gives a -1 to defend against
similar moods but +1 against opposing moods. If it reaches an effective
Presence 0, then the target should adjust their psychlims accordingly,
although possibly not until after the fight.

Of course NPCs should be able to do this to PCs, but Hero characters
don’t change unless the player changes them, so any adjustment of
psychlims would need to be optional and compensated with XP.

(Since we’re using points of effect, fka Body on the dice, it’s now Pre,
Pre+3, Pre+6, etc for the steps of effect, rather than +10, +20.)

What effects could be worth doing Pre attacks instead of just grinding
down hitpoints. This is not a novel observation, but players tend to go
for options that are simple, immediate, and reliable, which is why so
many games have combat that boils down to taking away as many of the
enemy’s hit points as possible, even if there are other options. Clayton
Notestine called these “dominant mechanics”. Skill rolls are another
one: when you can get rid of the trap with a roll, instead of describing
how you carefully use your ten-foot pole to pack the gas vent with mud,
what are players going to do more often? A skill roll isn’t reliable in
the sense of always working, but you have X% change of succeeding even
if you don’t baffle the GM with bullshit.

This works fine in a low-tech, low-magic dungeon crawl, but a
superheroic, SF, high-magic, or even just modern game is going to have
characters that are experts in things the players aren’t, or things nobody
in the world is actually an expert in because they don’t exist. At that
point, what can we do except abstraction, or nonsense (technobabble)?

Also known as MLK Day.

No work today, mostly (I was backup to the backup), but I had to get up early to let the cleaners in, and then I was up so I went shopping and did laundry and died in a pit. My computer spontaneously rebooted, so I finally gave Apple a huge pile of money for a new computer and some peripherals.

Watched (anime): May I Ask for One Final Thing? 1-3: The rotten prince publicly breaks off his engagement with our heroine in favor of some chickie who accuses her of awful things, but instead of fleeing the country or dying and reincarnating, she puts on her punching gloves and beats the everliving crap out of the side piece, the prince, and all the members of his faction who are at the party. She then goes on to help her brother the investigator and his boss the crown prince with their work by beating the everliving crap out of a bunch more extremely deserving people.

Read (novel): Demon Queen Wants to Paint vol 1 (Amber Atlas): A young artist from Earth is reincarnated as a baby in the demon realm, which is pretty frustrating because she has tiny baby limbs and all while having her teenage mind, and also the demon realm is creepy and everyone is scary, but she does her best. Things are actually explained

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 5 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): Wow, A is really not dealing well with her feelings being different than S’s, or maybe just her feelings at all. Too bad therapy isn’t a thing in Japan, because she could really use some.

Written (game design): 163. Not very much for a holiday, but it’s more than 100.

I guess that’s using AI instead of paying for a support contract.

Monday is a holiday, so I’ll do my shopping for next week then. Unfortunately, this means I had no reason not to let the cats keep me trapped in bed until noon. I spent the afternoon reading journalism about Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) and his Scientology-spawned abuses, which is probably not any better a use of time than slowly dissolving into mulch.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.12-14: The romance plot isn’t going anywhere, but it’s more of a big deal that it’s not. Also, the hot springs bath episode. We passed the halfway point of the season, so there are new credits, and Shisui (bug girl) is a lot more prominent…

Read (manga): Adachi and Shimamura vol 3 (Moke Yuzuhara, Hitoma Iruma, Non): S still has no thoughts of romance, but that doesn’t mean this childhood friend isn’t competition!

Read (journalism?): The Cuddled Little Vice (Elizabeth Sandifer): A side piece to the author’s main current work, which is a metaphorical(?) description of Alan Moore’s and Grant Morrison’s comics careers as a magical war a la Crowley. Neil Gaiman (fuck that guy) came out of that same British comics scene and was a big deal, so he also gets a long piece on his works (mostly Sandman) and also how shitty he was. I read it all, because my ability to not read things is very weak, but I don’t feel like it has improved my life to read such extensive commentary on Sandman even though I liked it thirty years ago. I also do not feel compelled to read the rest of the larger work, although I bet there are people who find it right up their alley.

Written (game design): 158:

Back to emotional damage! Letting an opponent be defeated by filling
either of two damage tracks is a strong incentive to focus on one,
although which one depends on what the players think that particular
opponent is weakest against. Depending on how much variation there is in
that, PCs might specialize in one track, and let’s face it, that’s
always going to be punching.

Even when a villain gets talked down, there’s often punching first, so
maybe both tracks have to be filled? Although there are plenty of
villains that need only punching, or only talking, so maybe one track is
sometimes zero, or very small. But now we’re back to the players guessing
what the GM set as the way to defeat the villain.

So is there just one track, emotional damage counting the same as
clobbering damage? But then there needs to be emotional Def and
emotional Res, and this is getting further and further away from Hero.

Sadly, I had my hat off while eating the bagel, since it was indoors. Also my arm robot complained extensively about the bagel.

Went to the office, ate a bagel, did some work, ate Mayan rice and chicken and veggie and plantain, learned some kubernetes, got embarrassing praise from one of the guys I helped yesterday.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.15-16: Just as things were starting to look less bad for the good guys, the bad guys get a major asset back in play. But, the heroes can also bring back some characters from earlier arcs!

Read (manga): Sachi’s Monstrous Appetite vol 6 (Chomoran): It would be wrong to say the mysteries around Makie’s mother are dispelled, but a plot thread is resolved. Actually, a lot of plot threads are resolved, The End!

Written (game design): 160:

The other difficulty with external complications is that the GM might,
entirely legitimately and without any intent to show favoritism, find
Hunted: Evil Magian Fire Worshippers to be a more interesting
complication than Reputation: Atlantean Spy and have it come up more.
Obviously the GM shouldn’t do that, but multiple characters with
multiple complications can be a lot to keep track of, and who wants to
do the extra bookkeeping to make sure all those complications come up
equally. (I mean, maybe somebody does, but we can’t count on every group
having one.)

(This is a point in favor of complications that give points up front, I
guess. There’s your 15 points for a common, strong psychlim, with no
need for the GM to devote brain cells to it.)

One thing we can do to help with this is give the player more
involvement. Instead of Hunted, it’s Nemesis, and the character can
decide to take action against them. This gives the player more GM power,
though, and not everybody wants to have to come up with their own plots:
they just want to hit villains provided by the GM. The worst failure
mode here is if everyone is not on the same page.

We could keep experience even by having a cycle last until everyone
has maxed out on the XP they have coming, so they all get the same
award. There’s still an incentive for each character to suffer for XP,
but it doesn’t give them an advantage over other characters. Or, along
the same lines, all XP goes into a common pool, which is split evenly
among the PCs at the end of the cycle (leftover points stay in the pool
for next time).

How important is it for XP awards to be the same across the team?
Usually all characters start with the same number of points, and points
allgedly express game balance and that’s important in Hero, but is it
really? If you have to be in the adventure to get XP, then once people
start missing sessions, characters are going to have different point
values. Nobody seems to have a problem with it in Hero, so probably it’s
fine.

Of course it’s possible to give XP to characters even if they weren’t in
an adventure, but that’s moving even more away from getting XP for
specific bad decisions/revolting developments. I really like that, but
obviously it’s not the only way to award XP.

It me.

I did two whole shoppings today, wheee.

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.9-11: Is the romance subplot finally getting somewhere?!

Read (manga): The Guy She Was Interested In Wasn’t A Guy At All vol 1 (Sumiko Arai): High school girl with taste in music gets a crush on the ccool assumed-boy at the music store, not knowing that it’s actually the girl who sits next to her in class. The secret is revealed by the end of vol 1, but neither of them is thinking about romance yet. Printed with acid-green backgrounds, for extra cool artisticness.

Written (game design): 280:

Using the (1+A)/(1+L) system inevitably leads to fractional values,
which means rounding (unless you keep all fractions, which I have no
intention of doing), and rounding 7.5 to 7 is a lot more of a bonus than
rounding 15.5 to 15, never mind 32.5 to 32. Obviously this is just math,
but psychologically it seems like even more somehow. Do we like that?
Maybe not.

Leaving that aside for now, since we will definitely return to it sooner
rather than later, I was reading theory blogs on being mindful of what
kinds of activity a game supports, because players are going to do the
thing that has firm mechanics. Superheroics (or action
movie heroics) is never not going to have punching, but we should have
other ways of solving problems as well. At least Hero has Presence
attacks, which is a lot more than most systems. It might be nice to have
even more support for moral suasion, though. You can’t talk Doom out of
exerting his rightful authority over the whole Earth, at least not
without a lot of leverage, but apparently you can dissuade Galactus from
eating the planet. (And of course criminals are a cowardly and superstitious
lot, but that’s mostly covered by Presence attacks.)

I might be basing this too much on the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, but it
seems like the main ways for a superhero to defeat a villain are
straight-up punching (especially for agents or minor villains), talking
them down, or finding their weakness/coming up with a clever plan to get
an advantage. Hero combat is usually only the first, and very rarely the
last since unless the GM specifically prepared a gimmick fight, it’s
very difficult to have any tactic be more effective than hitting them
with your main attack. (If you only paid for a 10d6 attack, why should
you get to do more than that? And if they paid for 40 Def, why shouldn’t
they always get it?)

I play like ten word games every day, so hard to deny it me.

Did not go into the office, did get sat on by cats.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.13-14: More fighting in the Sky Coffin, heteromorph riot on the ground.

Read (novel): Cold Eyes (Peter Cawdron): This book annoyed me so much! The entire story hinges on the aliens not being able to get into space because their planet has too high an orbital velocity for chemical rockets and limited uranium, and obviously  what humans knew about in the 1960s is all that’s physically possible. Gaaah! Read a book! Or a journal!

Read (manga): Monthly in the Garden With My Landlord vol 5 (Yodokawa): Landlord resolves her troublesome backstory, HEA, the end!

Written (game design): 191.

I typed in a chair instead, which is definitely not as classy.

Went to the office, did some work, learned some kubernetes, ate some beef stroganoff.

Read (graphic novel): Family Force V vol 1 (Matt Braly, Ainsworth Lin): The somewhat (but not very) delinquent daughter of a family sentai team struggles with life, the alien spaceship that gives the sentai teams their powers, new aliens, etc. There is of course a cliffhanger ending.

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.11-12: Meh, surely that guy wasn’t an important character or anything. Certainly not compared to Tintin-Face Lad, who has returned to the fray.

Written (game design): 286.

Also, Earth is at perihelion, which probably doesn’t matter much given the poor quality of spaceships available locally.

I meant to get up early and do all the things, but instead slept way in and did a few of the things. Dave is back in town, so we were able to watch more anime, after getting the AV equipment back in working order (bad cable).

Watched (anime): The Apothecary Diaries 2.8: Time to investigate a curse!

Read (artbook): Bleeding Edges (Danni Shinya Luo): Pretty girls and watercolor. Reminds me of Olivia.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 3: Siren’s Reach (C Peinhopf): Oh god, now there are three of them. Or maybe four. Also ocean-based monster attacks, politics and warfare, excessive pranks, restoration of the proper order of the universe, etc. Not the end, though.

Written (anything): FAIL. I have no excuse, I just suck.

Hey, I wrote a cats of science fiction that one time! And that other time!

Watched (anime): My Hero Academia 7.9-10: Fights! More fights! Maiming! No murders yet, but it’s coming.

Read (graphic novel): Watersnakes (Tony Sandoval): A girl meets a mysterious girl, they become friends, but when they try to kiss, everything is weird and more mysterious and they have a dream-like adventure. Distinctive art style, extremely peculiar, not actually about kissing.

Read (novel): Fallen lands vol 2: West Peak (C Peinhopf): The kitsune sisters continue the fight the demons started, with an ever-growing band of allies (including a giant beetle) and the odd volcanic eruption here and there. They remain overpowered and mischevious.

Written (game design): 184.