Traverse Fantasy

Alright, my babies. We need to talk about Attack on Titan . I’m not an anime head but, in 2013, the same friends who showed me Sword Art Online also showed me Attack on Titan which was that year’s big anime. I watched it, and so did a lot of others—cultural phenomenon—and I feel like a lot of us forgot about it (or, like me, just don’t follow anime bullshit) when the second and third seasons came out years later from 2017 to 2019. Ruben Ferdinand, months before the premiere of the third season in 2018, published a blog post about the story’s fascist aesthetics , as if the author was drip-feeding Hitler particles to his audience. A lot of us took it at face value, in my case because I wasn’t watching the rest of the show and the first season was already fascist enough in hindsight, with or without the analysis submitted by Ferdinand. Polygon picked up the baton in 2019 and extended Ferdinand’s analysis to the twist ending of the third season : that Eren’s father Grisha is a neo-fascis...

I've finally posted an updated version of my homebrew heartbreaker  Cinco!  having accepted that it is a living document and that there will always be gaps whether because I'm still working on a thing or because I wanted extra space in case it came useful later. I've been posting a lot lately about changes I've made while playing or thinking about stuff that's bothered me while playing; I may have missed something below: Lackey Rules Conversations Ancestry Feats Experience Feats Stationery & Maps   Have I mentioned that travel now sees the entire crew allocate their efforts to different tasks, instead of it being one person's turn to dictate what happens in a leg of travel? Similar to Ty's worker placement approach to skill challenges , except it's binary I guess. Oh, or how the document is A4 now so I can resize it and print it on Lulu as an A4 booklet? I've also switched to physical item cards totally separate from the character sheet, so the l...

Last night, Instagram showed me a reel by @roseistheart : btw, the b*blical Adam & Eve story was taken from the ancient Sumerian myth, the tale of Enki & Ninhursag around 2000 BCE. the man eats the forbidden fruit and was told NOT to by the goddess. they flipped it around when adding it to abr*hamic books to push a patriarchal agenda, turning powerful goddesses & sacred serpents into villains, and a goddess who HEALED his rib into a woman made from his rib instead. Eve wasn’t the problem or secondary. she was the *superior* main character. Rose links to a World History Encyclopedia article about the goddess Ninhursag which goes into more detail about her myth with the god Enki and its confluence with the myth found in Genesis 2–3. The former is a very interesting one. If I may paraphrase the article: Enki fucks Ninhursag who gives birth to Ninsar; then Enki fucks Ninsar who gives birth to Ninkurra; then Enki fucks Ninkurra who gives birth to Uttu; then Enki fucks Ut...

I got new rules, I count 'em. I liked my existing rules for conversations, being basically the same as in D&D Fifth Edition , but I felt like they lacked structure up to the final roll. I kept hearing about how intuitive the rules from Draw Steel were, but the team at MCDM are such maximalist rules writers that my eyes glazed over the constant weighing of situational permutations on the page—most rulebooks should really be like 70% shorter, huh? So I didn’t fully get them until I watched my queen  Ginny Di’s video where she boiled down the structure in a way that could be extended into principles beyond Draw Steel ’s verbose mechanic framework. It’s basically like: We should have an idea of where the NPC already stands. The goal of negotiation is to shift the NPC’s perspective towards yours. At some point, you have to stop pushing the question. So rather than having a unstructured conversation leading up to a climatic roll where the outcome is finally decided—not t...

Some more Resourciv updates! These are actually implemented in-game, but they have implications for how I design leading forward. Production I was giving myself a headache thinking about how, whether I increased the granularity of populations or kept it as unitary as it is now, I would need to deal with the most annoying part of economic games: allocating labor. Assigning peeps to individual hexes is stupid but so is giving them a list of jobs which give and take any amount of random resources; what if the numbers worked around me? There’s a nifty little formula called the Cobb-Douglas production function which handles that as well as diminishing returns: if you imagine, just because you have a bunch of cooks in the kitchen doesn’t mean you make more food, and the same if you have more kitchens than you have cooks. Labor is apparently more useful than capital since its diminishing returns (if it exceeds capital) are less so than capital (if it exceeds labor), and this is represente...

There was a viral comedian set where this nepobaby guy does microaggressions at a clocky trans woman who reveals she works at a defense contractor but is also a self-identified leftist who was radicalized by working as a barista (but no, not at Starbucks, you bigot; it was at a local coffee shop). I've seen discourse transform over the last few days from "fuck you bitch", to "that cishet guy has no right to criticize a trans woman for something he wouldn't criticize another cishet man about", to "pointing out hypocrisy is a mark of privilege against marginalized people without a choice" (the woman in the video even says she sold her soul, as if her only choices were to work at the coffee shop or the defense contractor—has she tried applying to Starbucks?). If that sounds fucking exhausting, it is. I wanted to talk about how frustrating it is that 'leftist' discourse—mind you, I don't even self-identify as a leftist because I think most ...

I’ve mentioned in passing my haven rules for my homebrew heartbreaker Cinco! but never took the time to describe it in much detail. Remember that I don’t really fuck with wealth; instead, each item of treasure just has the value of “1 treasure”, and you spend that during downtime to do an activity ( this is outdated, but you get the idea ). One of those activities is havencraft where you invest 1 treasure to build a town and populate with your favorite NPCs you’ve met and recruited throughout the game. These are called lackeys. Cost Type Population Ability Lackeys 2 Hamlet 100 +1 1 6 Village 900 +2 2 12 Town 3,600 +4 3 20 City 10,000 +8 4 Each season (generally speaking, or unless I fuck it up, a play-session), lackeys can either do a downtime activity on behalf of the governor or embark on an adventure. In the latter case, they can either accompany the crew on their own adventure and basically act like a back-up character, or they can be sent...