Traverse Fantasy

A lot of people who are culturally Christian are often surprised, I’ve noticed, to learn that the so-called “seven deadly sins” do not originate from the Bible. Certain Catholic monks from late antiquity—or the early Medieval era, take your pick—took it upon themselves to enumerate fundamental evil thoughts or wrong-doings. I know some of y’all love that shit. Can’t stand it. Enumeration. Love to put things in your little boxes. Well, here’s the history of the pursuit . I’m not going to recount it. Go be a monk if you want to! I think the idea that there could be any fundamental set of sins, some eigenspace of evil, is deeply misguided if not entirely missing the point. Chairman Paul loved to list the many ways in which people tend to be harmful or stupid, but he never did he suppose there to be any base “sin” except perhaps for idolatry (which contains more nuance than being the literal worship of idols, being more about how humans project artificial laws onto Nature , becoming blind...

I wanted to have a pseudo-lifepath thing in the appendices for Cinco! to help players conceptualize characters if they’re at a loss with where to get started. Below is what came of that! You’ll recognize a lot of material from my original draft, FIVEY , but I tried to condense everything into providing just enough information to contextualize a character origin without pigeon-holing individual characters. Thanks to Alex from To Distant Lands for providing really helpful feedback on that front! Without further ado… If you’re playing a character, pick or roll on the table below for your character’s origin; keep in mind, though, that the Game Mother might disallow certain origins just to make the setting more cohesive. If you’re the Game Mother, considering building your setting around the characters your players create; otherwise be upfront with expectations and don’t surprise your players with them! A setting handout helps everyone. Changeling (1–2): A fairy snatched a baby to pay...

  New cookie recipe! Wanted to simplify things and use more unit measurements. Ingredients 1 cup flour 1 tsp baking powder ½ tsp salt ½ cup butter (whole stick) 1 cup sugar (½ white, ½ brown) 1 tsp vanilla 1 egg (Optional) ½ cup semisweet chocolate chips Directions Mix dry ingredients: flour, baking soda, salt. Put aside. In separate bowl, mix room temperature butter, sugar, vanilla, and egg. Incorporate dry ingredient mixture, mix until well combined. (Optional) Mix in chocolate chips. Chill in refrigerator overnight. Preheat oven to 350° F. Bake cookies for 10–11 minutes. Let them cool. Be patient!  This makes 12 cookies (I kept making them too small at first)! Going to experiment with this recipe as a base to make my favorite cinnamon cocoa cookies.

The Lord of the Rings is strange. This is not going to be particularly insightful or thoughtful. I hadn’t seen the movies since over a decade ago, and I think my mom was telling me that the anniversary of their release was coming up, so I had the brainworm that—you know—they feel like winter movies. I just ran out of Sex and the City . While I’m frozen inside, why not put on nine hours of fantasy epic turned hack-and-slash blockbuster? Not my cuppa, as they say over there, but it’d probably still be fun. Tolkien liked his pizza with extra sausage, and his books too. The Hobbit has basically no named female characters except for Bilbo’s mother who’s just mentioned at the beginning and not really a full-fledged character. If The Lord of the Rings is a threefold improvement over The Hobbit , some quantifiable evidence might be that it has three female characters: Arwen, my stunning half-elf queen and DL girlfriend of exiled human heir Aragorn whom she loves to the point of forsaking h...

I’d like to be so bold as to suggest that we have a problem. Trans-females are obviously having a moment in political discourse, and their characterization has shifted in emphasis over the years: from stealthy homosexuals trying to deceive heterosexual men, to perverse straight men masquerading as lesbians to infiltrate women's private spaces. Both of these notions have existed for a while. As Julia Serano notes in her seminal manifesto Whipping Girl , these stereotypes in fact mutually construct each other, and were also reified in Blanchard’s transsexualism typography as the heterosexual transsexual versus the autogynephile. However, the latter has become a convenient angle for fascists, whose self-avowed motive is often to protect women from various masses of predators in the forms of black men, Muslims, and (in this case) trans women. 1 Each case yields baseless accusations and demands proactive retribution. But what happens when the benefit of the doubt serves as a cover for...

Sorry, I just need to exorcise a thought real quick to convince myself why it’s a bad idea. The impulse is I realized that Cinco! doesn’t have swords +1 and I was like, oh, how sad—even though by all means it’s a good thing that it’s not a fucking number-go-up game. It’s intentionally all very discrete and non-granular, reducing as much as I possibly can to pure structure (not necessarily in terms of procedure but, in general, of dynamics). But let me just give this a try. Come onnnn. It's like my 2023 post but easier. Split Bonuses Your aspect bonuses can only go up to +4 now (start by allocating 2 points), but now you can add a bonus from an item you use, also from +1 to +4. Bonus Item Quality Rarity (D20) — — 1–10 +1 Junk 11–4 +2 Common 15–17 +3 Rare 18–19 +4 Legendary 20 Your starting items are common (+2). You can get rare and legendary items on adventures. The above rarity roll might come in handy (results 1 to 10 are nothing). Dura...

Swear to Gxd I was working on this before the previous post. I just waited to post until it seemed less topically timely because it was a genuine effort and something I had wanted to write as a reflection on where I’ve been and gone over the years. Happy New Year and, if you celebrate, Happy Logos Incarnation Anniversary! Or solstice or whatever. Fuck. This is also nice to post on the blog because I can actually include links to things here. Cinco! is mostly inspired not necessarily by Dungeons & Dragons, Fifth Edition (2014) as much as by the McElroy Brothers’ podcast The Adventure Zone and my experience playing D&D as modeled on that media. This book is a tribute to that subculture which despite being centered on D&D also elevated it through play to something more than a tactical skirmish game. It’s inspired by tumblrinas, gamer girls, and theater kids who strove to redeem creative sparks from boring prisons. Ben Milton’s Knave (2018) inspired me to seek simpler r...