We Live!

Thomas Manuel

I. Spotlight

Not RPGs but I really enjoyed this essay about video games and chasing the feeling of playing them as kids. I have only the briefest overlap in the sentiments expressed — my childhood was just different. But I still was completely drawn into the words.

Video games weren’t something you played alone, then. I played Age of Empires II at my buddy Robby’s house after school. He was a nationally ranked chess player, so good he could beat me without his queen. That was how I learned the game. What we did in Age of Empires II wasn’t actual multiplayer, not really. We’d switch, but he was better than I was. I just liked to watch him play. That was how I learned that game, too. Sure, you might do a level or two of Super Mario 64 or play Pokémon after school or do a Star Fox run, or race a few tracks in Racer or Cruis’n USA, but that was prep work for the weekends when it would get too dark to stay outside on our bikes and we’d go inside to keep things going as long as we could. Multiplayer was something you did during sleepovers to kill time before Dragon Ball Z Uncut and Trigun and Cowboy Bebop on Adult Swim. Huddled around a CRT settled into a wooden media cabinet. Dark rooms, bright lights. Captain Falcon and Link and Pikachu and Kirby battling it out on Hyrule Castle, items cranked all the way up. Or nothing. Or sometimes just Poké Balls, no attacking allowed. Pokémon battles on our N64 before Stadium came along. Star Fox multiplayer until the sun came up.

II. Media of the Week

  • Sean Foer finished a series of short-form videos about his seven laws of GMing and they’re nice bite-sized principles of what he considers good play.
  • Vincent Baker released part one of a series looking at Apocalypse World’s history. The first part is about the game’s pre-history or influences and it’s lovely that the principle “play to find out” is attributed to a con game of D&D.
  • The folks at Weird Place are back with a slick new format where they talk about small indie games, starting with one of Storybrewers’ Little Box RPGs.

III. Links of the Week

Articles, Essays

  • There’s a blogging challenge going on about making RPG stuff based around Indonesia and I liked this post about how the country’s national language, Bahasa is cool.
  • Was it Likely has a fun retrospective about their latest campaign playing an adventure called fall of emermeraan by newt young: “there is a poem at the beginning and an evil mountain called the Mount of Woe and hexes titled “Where Hangs Weary Londir, First and Last of the Champions.” wherever you go it’s always worse than it was once in those golden days long ago… there are Winged Bulls and a Hydra in a Lake. there are Twelve Magic Swords!!!!!!!!!”
  • A new blog, Bare Nuckelavee writes about how playing RPGs in prison puts into context how you don’t need to spend anything to have a great session: “I know this is true because I played the most important game of my life in a place where I owned absolutely nothing. Not even my own time.”
  • Shannon Appelcline has published an interactive timeline of Cthulhu games as he works on a new about about the history of Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu.

Number schmumbers

  • Aaron Marks writes an interest post about the burst in million dollar crowdfunds that have been happening recently. Original games remain the smallest category of games to reach these levels compared to D&D supplements and licensed games, which goes a long way to explaining their preponderance in the current moment.
Credit: Aaron Marks/Cannibal Halfling

It’s okay to be mean sometimes

  • Malmuria writes about the problem of the grimdork aesthetic of Deathbringer: “I can’t help but feel that maybe it’s difficult to create something inspired when it comes purely from a place of ressentiment over deeply-held attachments.”
  • It Came From The Bookshelf writes about Killing Streets, a Kindred of the East book for Vampire: “Evidence continues to mount supporting the theory that White Wolf game studios was in truth an elaborate false flag psy-op by the Georgia GOP to develop a way to trick goths into saying the n-word.”

IV. What am I playing?

We missed a few weeks there as Rascal juggled a pledge drive, but I am now back. Our pseudo-Daggerheart game continues with a great session involving freeing two players from being mired with some nasty, nasty factions that had co-opted them. While those are getting into trouble, the other two have been rising up the ranks of the city’s society. It looked like they were all headed in different directions, circumstances having pulled them apart. So we decided to jump forward in time.

The idea is to let everyone have established new status quos and restart when there’s a new set of destabilizing circumstances that might bring them together again. Because this matched up with some real life stuff, we’re calling it a break before a “season two”.

But the bigger news is that my other group has decided what we’re playing next after fantastic AW: Warriors of A World Blaze campaign. We are doing Silent Titans, the mind-bending fantasy adventure about sleeping titans warping time and space in an alt-England. There’s a lot of cool stuff in this book — smart, funny, evocative. But it was missing some emotion. The OSR is often not big on writing that stuff into the text. But I wanted something that pushes more inter-personal relationships amidst all this gonzo adventuring because this group enjoys that. So we have decided to play the game with Ryne, a slow fantasy PbtA game from Furtive Shambles.

This continues my theme for this year of weird combinations and embracing the chaos and jank of mixing and matching. Ryne is a really beautiful game that has been in the works for a long time. It’s main thing is a focus on emotions — each character has different emotions as stats and so we’re always asking, “how do you feel right now?”. The whole game has this almost elegiac quality as the world is built around these giant, semi-mythic remnants (think Shadow of the Colossus) that roam the world and change the fabric of reality around them. That’s the overlap that allows me to run these two together. I’m excited!

V. 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.

  • Virtual Battle Mat is the easiest VTT there is. Drop a map, place minis, play. Voice and video built in, players join with one link. Free forever. vbm.games
  • Brass & Embers: TTRPG of exploration, change, and resistance. Tycoons splurge their fortunes. Nobles defend the status-quo. Religion says it’s heresy. Will progress destroy you, or will you forge a new path?
  • Kalusa: The Enchanted City – campaign set in a city of magic, centered around interesting NPCs and social play. Choices to make, hearts to change. Get a preview at our BackerKit!

This newsletter is sponsored by the wonderful Bundle of Holding. Check out the latest bundles below:

Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. If you’d like to support this newsletter, share it with a friend. If you’d like to know more about my work, check out the coolest RPG website in the world Rascal News or listen to me talking to other people on the Yes Indie’d Podcast.

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