Traverse Fantasy

When you're the only secondary character who's male and have no choice but to be yaoi bait. Returning to the topic of Sword Art Online ! A couple months ago, I watched the last two seasons of the anime adaptation for the first time since they adapted an arc from the novels that I only read half-way through. I ended up totally hating it, but couldn't put a finger on it. This is my attempt to figure out why. When you take the original novel as a standalone work—that is, as it was first composed—it’s clearly not very interested in “plot”. Although there is an overarching story as the game is cleared and, more centrally, as the romance develops (culminates?) between Asuna and Kirito, the work is far more fascinated by the characters, their sensations of virtual reality, and their implications for experiencing them as life. Kawahara weighs sword fights equally with cooking, fishing, marriage, murder, and even sex. 1 The plot, both of clearing the game and of the romance betwee

Smaller post! I've made a deranged change to the structure of Resourciv . Every team now acts at random intervals; initially, this can be once every 1 to 20 years, but the maximum possible frequency will decrease as individual teams discover communication technologies (not important yet). This means the game gets "faster" as time goes on, but not arbitrarily. I don't like the tendency of later Civ games to railroad history. I'm thinking especially of the three-era system announced for Civ VII , and even the global era system in Civ VI , where historical eras are global rather than entered by individual civilizations. I don't like eras in general, since they reflect a specifically European teleology of history. However, it's better when (at least) these eras are civilizationally specific rather than imposed globally. It's even worse when specific cultures are put into specific era-buckets in Civ VII . Combine that with the world literally expanding bet

What the hell happened to this, right? I think I like to rotate my hobbies every couple of weeks, so I've been back on this. I'm just going to walk through what it all looks like right now. First, I made a nicer-looking main menu from which you can actually pick a culture, a world type, and a world size. Each one of the 32 cultures has its own icon, now, which I pulled mostly from CC art (thank you, Game-icons.net !) and some obscure national flags. My partner offered to make splash art, which I would super appreciate (💖) but don't want to hold her to. In the meantime or either way, I used a random render of a ziggurat from Google Images as a temporary background. May add advanced settings for aridity, erosion, and geomass. Here's the 32 cultures, give me a drum roll... Akkadian, Algonquian, Arabic, Bantu, Canaanite, Celtic, Chinese, Dravidian, Egyptian, Germanic, Hellenic, Hindi, Igbo, Iranian, Iroquoian, Japonic, Korean, Kushite, Latin, Mayan, Mongolian, Nahuan, Numi

From my personal play packet! Possibly the laziest setting ever, but it’s honest. All the gorgeous art shown here is by the delightful Norn Noszka ! World of Faia Faia is the setting of my home campaign, a sort of cosmic crossroads between worlds. Portal-hopping dwarves meet star-sailing terrans on a planet otherwise populated by a species known as faians—some elves, others orcs. Though Faia is a usual fantasy world, it is written to explore realist themes about society and history. Cathedral of Light Elves are faians who were baptized under the Cathedral of Light, a religious institution established by the Snow-White Queen. The elves were initially unified by this swordseer to defend their continent against the dwarves of the Midgard Company. However, they eventually opted to split the Dark Lands of Faia between themselves and the Company. This coincided with the Crusade Against Darkness, a declaration of all uncivilized faians as demons (orcs) from myth-times. They worship Qesem,

Free adventure or whatever? This is my prep for the first two proper sessions of Turtle Island ( S1 , S2 ). There's only one statistic of note: that Bokor is a "champion". In my house rules, this means he is a figure who by himself is of medium difficulty in combat (a mini-boss, so to speak). That might make him equivalent to an ogre or troll? Idk. Locations These are the bare bones of the adventure site; it wasn’t until after the first session that I expanded upon the site’s story based on what seemed interesting. Entrance → Crop Fields, Big House Crop Fields → Entrance, Slave Quarters, Driver’s Home, Engines 3 farms: sugar, cotton, cacao. Actively being worked by 150 enslaved zombies, who go to “sleep” at night. No overseer to be found. Slave Quarters → Crop Fields, Provisions Gardens, Big House Not been lived in for quite some time. Some mementos of the once-living: Amulet of birth control (treasure). Bible overwritten with cultic depictions.

Zombies and vodou and marital drama oh my! Crew Roster Participants this session are in bold! Nicole: Elf arrested for bodysnatching, now a knife-hoarding edgelord; 4 experience. Nolan: Orc stand-user raised by elves, arrested on accusations of spying; 4 experience. Makandal: Orc maroon and voudonist ratted out while carrying out a raid; 6 (+4) experience. Queen-sama: Elf prostitute, arrested after being caught by a client’s wife; 8 (+4) experience. Xen: Amnesiac dwarf magician following strange dreams to the land of Flo’Rida; 6 (+4) experience. Downtime I let Xen spend 1 treasure so everyone present could do the research action (add 1 rumor to the map, or ask the game mother to ‘clarify’ 1 rumor already on the map). In the future, I think I’ll have individuals spend their own treasure; I just wanted everyone to participate this time. Queen-sama asked for clarification on the sea serpents rumor. I said that there have been multiple sightings of the sort of flying sea cre

No one understands Euphoria like I do. Obviously, I'm exaggerating haha. It was one of the most popular prestige television shows of the late 2010s / early 2020s. I actually didn't watch it until just last year, when a friend and I were drunk after going to Texas Roadhouse (they have really powerful margaritas) and she asked if I wanted to watch the show since we'd been talking about it. I tried watching it a couple years ago, but I couldn't get through the first episode because of the extended 9/11-based prologue (felt tacky) and the sexual assault scenes (more self-explanatory). Watching it with my friend, though, I could sit next to her and grip the couch and sit through it. That night I got totally hooked, and I finished the show later that month. Euphoria is a high-school drama written (hm) and directed (hmm) by Sam Levinson, who lifted the  premise from an Israeli show (hmmm) of the same name but reworked to reflect his own personal experiences of adolescence (h