Traverse Fantasy

One common complaint about feats or even class features is that they foreclose particular actions from characters in general by cloistering them within specific character options. For this reason, I tend to like what I currently have going on in my home game  CINCO , where a character's equipment in combination with their aspects determines their capabilities, which feels both more flexible and more natural. But I had a thought: maybe the foreclosure is the point? Sure, it keeps things simple one way to not have character builds, but the trade-off is that all rules apply to everyone all the time. I realized in the shower that I wouldn't necessarily like to have every possible rule in the back of my mind even if I only use a subset of them. It's nice in typical  D&D  to know that you're a whatever, and to have your special rules in your character sheets where you know what you need to worry about (and you don't need to open the book to find rules that always appl...

I like fluxcrawls , but there's little choice involved as such. Instead of rolling for a random event or the quality of an event, check D20: on 9–, pick 1; on 10–19, pick 2; on 20+, pick 3: Avoid an encounter! The Game Mother will not roll for a random encounter event. Bypass some danger! The Game Mother will not roll for a random disaster event. Complete your journey! You arrive at your destination after resolving travel events. Discover a location! You spot someplace new, and have the choice to detour there. This is just a sketch, not tested yet, but I wanted some way to reintroduce the mini-game feeling of travel without giving the appearance of choice via granularity.

Guess it's. Never. Really. Over! Although I thought it'd be neat , I didn't like the feel of rural hexes being both home- and work-places. Just felt difficult and nonintuitive more than anything. I've reverted to the previous (unreleased) system, where all peeps live in a habitat hex and work at a non-habitat hex, with the working-time system now in place (yay!). But I'm not really happy with it. Right now, there's no way to reassign peeps between different hexes, and honestly that's not the problem. If I had to actively reassign peeps to work hexes I want, that would suck. If it were automatic, it would still suck because it means I need to make the AI smart enough to know where to assign them (and this is true regardless). What I liked the most is what I have going in the released version, where you don't assign labor until you build buildings, and otherwise you don't worry about it and are even incentivized to improve rural hexes. So I had another...

Hi all! Hosting The Icon0clastic Ball on Itch. This is a jam for Fantastic Medieval Campaigns , a free version of the original role-playing game, published under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Although it functions on one hand as a “retroclone”, what distinguishes it from other versions is its unwillingness to compromise the confusing and fractal nature of the text, as well as its willingness to criticize that text and its authors. This culminates in a project to situate the original role-playing game within its socio-historical context, to illuminate the perspectives of its original authors and also reveal the extent to which the text is distorted by our own perspectives. It is neither traditional nor old-school nor war-game, and yet here we all are merely grasping the legs of this elephant. As for this ball, the category is ICON0CLASM . Most readers and players of the original role-playing game, even in the form of FMC , attempt to envision and emulate the game as it was originally played. Res...

Put this together! My partner's grandfather, since we reconnected, keeps sending me crackpot stuff about climate change being fake and the ice caps reformulating (if you're curious: the ice caps grow and melt seasonally, but a lesser rate than which they're melting due to increased global temperature). Although I had an idea of why climate change occurs, I didn't know specifics or how I would answer if someone asked me to explain how it works from top-to-bottom (or perhaps, as a good dialectician, from bottom-to-top; i.e., from fundamental principles to emergent dynamics). So I did my due diligence and wanted to share what I learned in case others also found it useful! Of course, it turns out my GIL owns stock in oil and gas, so there's no convincing him (and, to be clear, this was more for me than anything). Print version on Itch ! 1. Clearing the Air Beijing, China hosted the Olympics in 2013 and 2022. During that first year, the city’s air was infamously smoggy...

Okayyy this is going to be a lot. Had a breakthrough so I don’t feel quite done yet. Hex Assignment One of the original benefits of discrete peeps was determining where they lived. You could hover over a city or suburb to see how many peeps live there, and whether there was any surplus housing or homeless vagrants (due to lacking housing). This felt mostly great, but it was missing something: the system presumed from the onset a division between one's home and one's workplace, as well as a division between the urban and rural (in that peeps, from the get-go, live in urban centers). So I made a weird decision. To start,  no one  lives in the center. You can imagine it as a sort of ritual meeting place such as Catalhoyuk is theorized as having been. Instead, peeps start out filling rural hexes, 1 peep per hex, and that rural hex serves both as their 'home' and as their 'workplace'. Peeps only live in the city when assigned to an urban workplace (which can't se...

There was a certain graffiti during the attempted 1968 revolution in France: " Structures do not walk on the streets!"  Žižek summarizing Lacan (haven't read Seminar XVII  unfortunately) submits that the opposite is true, and this is where one might appreciate his relative conservatism: that the street fights between the student revolutionaries and the police were in fact expressive of and overdetermined by the social order, which is in a constant and dynamic process of self-definition (comparable, I think, to Marx's analysis of the circuits of capital in Volume II   which I summarize here , specifically in that the circuits represent logical moments of a process which really occur simultaneously; that being said, my interpretation is heterodox because many Lacanians act like discourses are individually constitutive of a symbolic order, which I feel like is analytically stupid and useless but whatever). Prismatic Warren (the guy) posted today on  Prismatic...

This isn't that interesting! Just noticed that I have a sort of schedule throughout the year: January & June:  Reading February to April:  Programming July to December:  Writing  I don't know why. I guess that's how my burnout is. Anyway! I'm both looking at  The Brimstone Gospel  again and write-doodling something else. We'll see if I feel like it's good enough to share.

This is a paper I wrote for my first semester of undergrad in 2018. I actually wanted to expand it into a thesis about the economics of online platforms (business people say stupid shit about it) before I shifted my research wholly into Greco-Latin poetry, but I still like the analysis and sometimes wish I could refer to it. So, here it is! Sorry for any eighteen-year-old bullshit. Also I removed the footnotes because they were annoying to reformat, but the works cited section is still there. Shout-out to my professor who was an English literature guy forced to teach engineers how to write. He was very entertained by me, I think. And he was a great professor! Very patient with the STEM freaks.  Introduction Social media is a mode of discourse specific to the information age, an evolution of the personalization of commodities and the commodification of personality where users relate to each other in a manner not unlike celebrities and brand images. As a new means of communication...

Updated a zine I wrote last year during the pro-Palestine student protests. Printout on Itch . 1. Current Day In April 2024, hundreds of students at Columbia University began peacefully protesting the school’s investments in companies (Israeli and American) that support the war in Palestine. As they were met by repression from the university, which sicced upon them riot police, they were joined by faculty and New Yorkers. Police arrested over 100 protesters, enabled by the admin revoking students’ enrollment to mark them as illegal trespassers. Students across America took to their schools’ streets to protest in solidarity, demanding their admins disclose and divest pro-Israel stock. Why were they protesting in the thousands, and why were they met with violence? 2. Creation of Israel Zionism is an ideology that Jews must create a nation-state to ensure their existence. It was inspired by European nationalist ideologies, the same which oppressed Jews and other racialized peopl...