May Mini-letter

Thomas Manuel

I. Dear Reader,

Scheduling this from the past because I’ll be mid-conferencing when this comes out. Enjoy the links and I’ll see you next week!

Yours refusing-to-just-miss-a-week,

Thomas

PS. I realized that since I don’t plan to actually release Olympus, the hack of Dallas, I can just use art from the videogames, Hades 1 and 2. Fun little treat for the 9 people who get to play this.

II. Media of the Week

  • Alfred Valley made a really fun little video about his favourite rule Mothership: the death save.
  • This isn’t particularly relevant to tabletop but was an interesting journey through the history of digital game design for anyone who has two hours to kill.

III. Links of the Week

  • Fun and funny read from Susana Polo on Polygon about wanting to play the silly D&D himbo but always ending up being the party leader:
    • “You know that one henchman whose job it is, when Batman bursts through a skylight, to yell, “It’s da Bat!”? To yell this as if it were not Batman’s successful aim, in crashing through a skylight, to alert all to his presence? To yell it as if there could be any other person who just smashed loudly through several panes of glass while dressed as a bat? To yell this in complete surprise, as if, in the face of all evidence to the contrary, this was not something that happens five times every night in Gotham City? Nevertheless, he persisted. He yelled, “It’s da Bat!” I want to play that, but for the good guys.”
  • In an excerpt from 50 Years of Dungeon & Dragons, Evan Torner writes a great essay about combat:
    • “In its design, D&D combat translates the fantastical into the mechanical and tactical. This moment of numerical diminution, of giving even gods “armor class” and “hit points,” shows how D&D renders all beings intelligible: as potential participants in a fight.”
  • On Eurogamer, a nice feature on Lawrence Shick, designer of famous funhouse dungeon, White Plume Mountain, who apparently coined the abbreviation XP.
  • Post45 has a series of essays about Disco Elysium that might be interesting to readers.
    • One, titled Reading Games, says, “Rather than plodding along a Kindle progress bar from 0% to 100% completion, reading is circuitous, incomplete, individual. The eye flicks back up the page rather than the finger turning it. The mouth voices a particularly resonant phrase repeatedly. The mind drifts after pursuing an associative chain of thoughts. These intrinsic reading acts are formalized into the game’s fabric: we get lost, circle back, repeat conversations, find strange asides.”
    • Another one gets into “save scumming” and why it’s interesting to do it in a game like Disco Elysium where failure is usually pretty interesting.
  • Layla Adelman has an interesting post about her challenge with playing Xenolanguage.

From the archive:

  • Rollwithme.xyz is my go-to dice room when playing online. (Issue 33, March 2021)

IV. Small Ads

All links in the newsletter are completely based on my own interest. But to help support my work, this section contains sponsored links and advertisements. If you’d like your products to appear here, read the submission form.

  • Final days to back The King’s Poisoner! A thrilling TTRPG of love, loyalty, ambition & murder for 3–8 players. Scheme unforgettable stories in 1–2hrs; no prep, GM or experience needed!

This newsletter is currently sponsored by the Bundle of Holding.

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend or buy one of my games from my itch store. If you’d like to say something to me, you can reply to this email or click below!

Leave a comment