Traverse Fantasy

I mentioned earlier I was using Gus L. and I’s dungeon from Fantastic Medieval Campaigns so I could be lazy and not have to prep much for my home campaign’s alien arc —isn’t that the point of a prewritten module, come to think of it? It turned out okay, but I didn’t write a session report because I felt dissatisfied. Everyone had fun, we had good moments, but from my perspective there was friction between the experience we were having and the thing we kind of passively accepted that we were playing. The skeleton of the dungeon is already not the ‘right vibe’ for the campaign but, where at first I was able to make it work because of characters’ own motivations, I struggled because the new characters lacked a reason to be there at all except that the ‘crew’ as an abstract unit had been heading there. The advice sometimes is like, players should invent their own characters’ motivations for being at a place or doing a thing, but I don’t subscribe to a framework of play centered on the se...

Joseph B. Tyson argues in  Marcion and Luke–Acts: A Defining Struggle  that the canonical version of Luke's gospel and the heretical gospel of Marcion, which was supposed by some proto-orthodox writers to have been a mutilation of canonical Luke, in fact both derive from some earlier proto-gospel from which Marcion omitted some things and to which the author of canonical Luke–Acts added other things as a polemic against Marcionite theology. Based on the book, which I found mostly compelling and an interesting companion to James R. Edwards’  The Hebrew Gospel and the Development of the Synoptic Tradition  (which argues that Luke is based primarily on a now-lost gospel written in Hebrew, rather than being a synthesis of Mark and the hypothetical sayings compilation Q), I tried my hand at reconstructing what a draft n -1 of Luke's gospel might look like . It was a fun exercise and one which resulted in a very satisfying and thematically cohesive gospel narrative. I...

The phallus is masculine in the same way a penis is masculine. I wrote a primer on Lacan’s concept of phallic desire a month ago, and I realize—although my blog is mine and my target audience is one at least superficially familiar with concepts from Marxism and Freudian psychoanalysis, so I don’t feel particularly motivated to write introductions for people totally new to those fields of discourse—I kind of did that XKCD bit about how familiar the average person is with niche obscure bullshit. Again, it’s not my problem necessarily, but then people talk about how literal or abstract the phallus notion is supposed to be from Lacan’s mouth or my own. Is the phallus masculine (to quote WFS ) “the way a horse [think equus in Latin] is masculine”? Is classic D&D more “literally phallic” (by way of being masculinely horny) than I had “intended” in my critique of it ? Is usage of the word “phallus” a mere birthmark of a discourse originally grounded in bioessentialism from which it...

The vocabularies of certain Indo-European languages encode a memory of a social taboo against speaking the name of the bear. Germanic languages famously (although not quite accurately) are thought to refer to the bear as “the brown one”. Slavic languages seem to use a term derived from the phrase “honey-eater”. Baltic languages call them “hairy ones”. D&D retroclones operate on a similar principle. They avoided speaking the name of the devil (that is, whichever particular D&D edition is being emulated) for license reasons, but signal euphemistically to the reader which edition is being lifted. Old School Essentials in one printing refers to itself as being “styled after the beloved games of the 1970s and 1980s” but it’s very specifically a retroclone of the 1981 D&D Basic/Expert rules. My own Fantastic Medieval Campaigns is “a new version of the ruleset for fantasy wargaming campaigns, first published in 1974”—but “the” ruleset in question is the original 1974 D&D...

A peek into my dark, twisted mind. I came across someone hacking OD&D for the titular Anglosaxonese setting of HârnMaster and seemingly adjusting the rules to be more Hârn -like (I’m only familiar with it by way of John B. waxing about his eventual midwife campaign—we’re waiting, John!). Everyone gives me unsolicited advice about random bullshit, maybe because I just have that kinda face, so I thought I’d also give unsolicited advice about how to develop dice functions so as to avoid giving the user headaches. This is in the spirit of Idle Cartulary’s series about dice , but less about dice statistics in themselves than presenting an intuitive order of operations. Let’s take the below HP calculation from the Hârn-D&D hack: Hit Points: Males start with 14HP, Females with 15HP. Fighters receive +5 HP to their starting HP Clerics/Shamans receive +3 HP to their starting HP Shek-Pvar receive +1 HP to their starting HP +1 HP per point of CON over 12. –1 HP per point o...

A friend forwarded me an email from a prominent left-Catholic journalist asking Texans, or perhaps by implication left-leaning Christian Texans, to contact her to chat about the recent ascension of James Talarico as senatorial candidate. I really thought about it—but then I was like, well, I’m shy, and I’m kind of a non-representational freak, and I don’t want to waste this journalist’s time. But I did want to reflect on it! So I’ll waste your time instead. The Republican Party is the only one of two national parties with a vision of governance; only, that vision sucks shit. A veteran comrade advised against referring to MAGA as a fascist movement because, unlike historical fascist movements which saw the national financial bourgeoisie revolt against the globalized financial bourgeoisies of Britain and the United States, MAGA is more like a revolt of our national industrial bourgeoisie against our globalized financial bourgeoisie. Still, I think there are deeper confluences between MA...

Feats are a big hit, turns out! I’m bringing back level 0 ancestry feats because I can tell my friends just wanted more to play with. “I don’t like complexity” mfs when they get to build their little guy. Some of these I had basically written years ago! Changling: Once per day, change the appearance of your face. Dwarf: You are immune to alcohol and poison, and can detect both. Elf: You are fully aware while you sleep; nothing surprises you. Hellchild: You have advantage at intimidating and seducing others. Hoblin: You can hide in bush or shadow, and behind bigger folk. Orc: Once daily at 0 hearts, restore 1 and attack with advantage. Nymph:  Spend 1 inspiration to call forth local nymphs of your type. Scalespawn: Spend 1 action to breathe fire for 1 dmg. Treat as arcana. Terran: Never suffer disadvantage from linguistic differences. Watcher: When you rest and heal, you also see visions of elsewhere. I’m also reworking “experience feats” (the ones you get at ...