Traverse Fantasy

I’ve been talking with my friends and partner about this sort of thing. Often I’m not even the one to bring it up. There’s a preponderance of hustlers lately and it sucks seeing both suckers and bad-faith agents eating it up. These are some thoughts I’ve gathered from my conversations as well as from past experiences. Personal Persecution Hustlers often express paranoia that they are being personally persecuted by an institution, an abstract force, or some vague agent. It’s one thing if you’re fucking Fred Hampton and you’re doing work which materially (like, actually) threatens the order of things in a meaningful way. The feds aren’t coming for internet microcelebrities unless they were to post stupid shit which the feds always look into regardless of the poster’s online following. Usually the hustler’s apparent reaction doesn’t make sense given the stakes of the persecution. If the feds are actually coming for you, why post that online? Or if there was a knife-wielding psycho on ca...

From the hip. I’ve noticed for a few months that I’ve distanced myself from the label “socialist” and have even started using it to refer to some political position besides my own. I think for a while I’ve been bothered by the idea that there are true or false socialists, that Nazis and similar sorts appropriated the label to deceive an idiot general audience for whom ‘true’ socialism was actually attractive—but still, for some reason, couldn’t distinguish one from the other. It’s hard to square this narrative with the fact that fascism not only emerges from socialist currents such as syndicalism, but that these currents (and their associated tendencies like antisemitism and national chauvinism) predate Marxist “scientific socialism” and persisted throughout the history of workers’ movements. It’s not difficult to see why: workers’ own immediate interests are as sellers of labor-power, and the most common form of workers’ organizations function as cartels regulating the sale of that p...

( Previous chapter ) “I, Matteu, take you, Alessandra”—Matteu sighed with galaxies in his eyes—“to be my wife. I vow to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. You,” he broke, “are the light of my life. I will love and honor you all the days of my life. I love you, my dear Sandra.” “I love you too. And I, Alessandra, take you, Matteau, to be my husband. I’m sorry”—no apologies now; he would not accept it—“No. I vow to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I vow to be as good a wife as I can be for you. I will love and honor you all the days of my life.” “May Jieu strengthen the consent you have declared before the assembly. What Jieu hath joined together, let no one put asunder. Bless the name of Jieu.” “Thanks be to Jieu,” the assembly said. The ceremony proceeded from the altar to the reception dinner, and we found ourselves each with a cocktail in hand. I managed to pull myself away from dear Matteu, and began maki...

That's right. Naming this update for the Big Man himself because it's just that big. I almost considered naming it instead for one of my favorite tween boy-bands-slash-reality-television-shows, Big Time Rush, and the episode centered on their song Halfway There, because (let's see if I remember it correctly) we're almost kinda sorta close to being halfway there. Check out the widget below to download the game or visit the Itch page, or keep reading to learn about what I have in store after months of constant deliberation and anal-retentive bullshit. Resourciv by Traverse Fantasy Economy Good-bye to markets where granular goods meet granular needs. The angels revealed to me a new approach to economic simulation, one which sounds similar to how I had once envisioned this game would function much earlier on. Output yields are back and simple. You can allocate percents of a population in each city to each yield, using Cobb-Douglas to determine how much is generated each ...

This almost certainly has already been figured out by someone else, but here goes: D66 is really handy to index a radial hexmap, so long as it has a radius of 3 from the center. Then you can use a hex stocking procedure but—instead of rolling for the content of each hex—calculate how many features of each type are likely to be there, and roll their coordinates for each individual instance. If you use Luke Gearing’s , for example, that’s: six settlements, six lairs, and six weird spots. And later, you can use the indices to roll for locations of events or rumors!  Elmcat told me he did something like this for his Mythic Bastionland campaign, except he used 2D12 to index along horizontal and vertical axes. Not sure if that’s native to the game, but it’s also cool! But I think this could also help me out with difficulties I’ve been having with maps in my own home campaign. Region Generation I’ve been using an upside-down map of the Caribbean this entire time. I just don’t have a ...

I’m somewhat a connoisseur of cozy slop games. Ever since I played Harvest Moon (since renamed to Story of Seasons —don’t play games with me, kid) and Rune Factory via emulator in middle school, I’ve been trying to recapture the high of these Precious Moments looking baby farmer things. I followed Stardew Valley since long before it was published, and when it came out (though it was very impressive as a project and certainly fun) I wasn’t fully down with its aesthetic. Since it blew up, there have been so many takes on the formula that preteen me wouldn’t have had to download sketchy apps on my phone to scratch my itch, but a lot of them are lazy and sloppy and skirt by on there being now a massive audience for what have become known as “cozy games”. My favorite entry in the genre (far from being slop) is Fields of Mistria , but it’s in early access and PC-only, which means I can’t play it on my coral Switch Lite. So I was in the market and found a game which, though its premise doe...

I drafted an (unused) rule that players can sacrifice their characters to let the rest of the crew escape whatever situation they’re in. It was requested by friends online and offline because they think of moments in adventure fiction where that sort of thing happens, and it’s epic and gets at your heartstrings. But it wasn’t used in practice. I think it’s because on some level it interrupts the ‘game’: not in the sense that it’s non-random necessarily, but in that it bypasses standard play procedure and imposes logic external to the situation. I don’t think we really want to cause Boromir moments as much as we want them to emerge from the game itself. Another problem I encountered pretty regularly while playing is that characters with spells and magic items use their inspiration pretty quickly, and then are restricted from doing anything for the rest of the session. I don’t necessarily want to increase how much inspiration someone has or make it easier to restore. You’re supposed to ...