Traverse Fantasy

There's a really good post by Elmcat about prepping settlement-based adventures by designing neighborhood blocks and representing buildings (etc.) as people! But it also has a petty desire table that I felt like would be nice to generalize: that although people's relationships are often overdetermined by their relative positions in a social matrix (in TTRPG terms, we can refer to these as factional allegiances), it's interesting when a socially determined relationship is complicated by a personal one, whether mutual or one-sided. To that end, I came up with a D20 table similar to Elmcat's, with just 10 results; the idea is that results [11–20] are straightforward and fully overdetermined, whereas [1–10] are complicated: D20 Relation 1 Aspiration: X wants to be Y 2 Competition: X wants to outdo Y 3 Fear: X personally fears Y 4 Grudge: X feels Y wronged them 5 Hatred: X outright doesn’t like Y 6 Infatuation: X desires after Y 7 Je...

Following Lich Van Winkle's post about dee-five-six , I wanted to post about a realization I had that I'm sure others know but thought would be nice to record: 2D6+X where we take the sum PbtA-style approximates (X+1)D6 where we take the highest roll. Below is a table of result brackets: Result Sum of 2D6+X Highest of (X+1)D6 < …6 1–3 = 7–9 4–5 > 10… 6 Below is a table of results with increasing X ∊ [0, 3] for 2D6+X: 2D6+X < = > 2D6 41.7% 41.7% 16.7% 2D6+1 27.8% 44.4% 27.8% 2D6+2 16.7% 41.7% 41.7% 2D6+3 8.33% 33.3% 58.3% Below is a table of results with increasing X ∊ [0, 3] for (X+1)D6: (X+1)D6 < = > 1D6 50.0% 33.3% 16.7% 2D6 25.0% 44.4% 30.6% 3D6 12.5% 45.4% 42.1% 4D6 6.26% 41.9% 51.8% I think this is where we get the BitD and Trophy variations on the original PbtA roll, and I prefer that version because the results feel less obscure? Or just on the basis ...

Feminism has a metaphysics problem. This isn't specific to feminism: it's just that feminism is a label applied to a variety of discourses which all claim to have the same political premise or subjective vantage, while differing in both respects—usually this is visible when describing white feminism, bourgeois feminism, liberal feminism, cishet feminism, in contrast to some idealized black feminism, proletarian feminism, radical feminism, trans feminism. It's a hall of mirrors no matter where you look. But I'm interested in the discursive function of "essentialism": a theoretical term which encapsulates a critique of naïve materialism, that one can't reduce social phenomena to a superficially materialist basis, which became a cudgel against any materialist analysis in general. "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman." Simone de Beauvoir in  The Second Sex  first distinguished between sex and gender, not as objective scientific reality versu...

Put some thoughts on a Discord server: was actually going to sleep last night thinking about whether it’s dissonant to have racism/nationalism but not sexism in my home campaign but along similar lines i feel like sexism generally requires women to be relegated to a private sphere that makes them less prevalent in the world (even if the PCs are exceptional) unless the campaign is specifically about sex and that public/private division I don’t know. Maybe I need to self-criticize about this. It’s like I subvert race and sex in D&D orthogonally: I handle race in a realist way which problematicizes the way it’s taken for granted and used as a short-hand for moral nature in fantasy, usually flipping the monster lens onto “races” usually considered good or normal (while emphasizing the symbolic or social basis of that lens); whereas I handle sex by eliminating patriarchy and placing women in socially prominent roles, whether ‘good’ (world-protagonistic) or ‘bad’ (world-antagonistic...

Wrote a minizine about A.I. because people outside of tech often ask me what the deal is and why I’m so anti-passionate about it. Printable version on Itch ! 1. A.I. Revolution The rise of artificial intelligence or A.I. has been compared to the invention of the calculator as well as the start of the industrial revolution. These social and technological shifts, A.I. supporters say, had their doubters at the beginning, but have since made our lives easier by letting us spend our time at tasks more worth our while. That’s the selling point of A.I. which all the major finance and tech companies have been peddling. But... is it true? Over $350 billion has been invested in building new A.I. data centers in 2025, driving 20% global (or 50% in the U.S.) increasing demand for electric power. The world economy put all its financial eggs in the A.I. basket. Why? 2. LLMs Before asking why A.I. is being pushed by the world economy, we need to ask what A.I. does and how it works. Many technol...

This is partly my attempt to modularize more complex rules from Cinco! (I can’t decide how to type that) as opt-in rules for characters, as well as coming up with additional ones because they’d make more sense as special abilities than as general (if complex) rules. The following subsystems would be impacted and restricted only to characters with the appropriate feats: Critical attack moves Travel options Arcane enhancements Healing at havens This isn’t my first time doing this, but I was never fully happy with my initial two attempts (wow, one year apart, in 2023 and 2024 ). I feel happier with these because they feel more potentially abstract and reskinnable based on who your character is. My plan is to have 20 "experience feats" that you gain from your levels, and 20 "origin feats" which I've written before and I would actually be really happy to play with. So, these are the 20 experience feats! As a treat, here's the optional "unified...

Hi all! I've been sneakily uploading changes to my home game  Cinco!  over the past month. Here's a changelog: Armor items act as a virtual +1 heart and give resistance against certain damage types until hit (represented by flipping over the card). Damaged armor resets during downtime. Supply is now a discrete item which fully restores a character's hearts and inspiration during travel or exploration; in the latter case, it requires 1 turn to consume. Expanded guidelines for opponents, including a framework for damage resistances and vulnerabilities. Expanded rules for travel into a " pick-your-poison " minigame (this has been a hit!). Renamed "readied" to "packed" items on the character sheet since it confused even myself. Renamed (unnamed?) "bashing" to "bludgeoning" damage so it didn't rhyme with "slashing". Created worksheets for havens, ships, and optional cardless characters. Hope you enjoy! :) Below are ...

This is a paper I wrote for a seminar on archaeology (specifically on the field's philosophical premises with respect to the relationship between history, the past, and artifacts) in 2020. Not perfect, and I adored my professor for that seminar, but fuck OOO! Object-oriented programming is a useful paradigm to organize data and model an interactive system. In A Theory of Objects, Abadi and Cardelli enumerate three components of a mechanical model to simulate a system: analysis, design, and implementation (Abadi 7). All three aspects involve the use of objects, in different senses. The authors illustrate this through a mechanical model of the solar system. Analysis involves the modeling of the sun and its orbiting planets, floating in space. Although it is understood that the planets orbit around the sun, the behavior to rationalize this is not innate to the planet-models themselves. Design involves the modeling of planetary orbits using mechanical tracks and gears. There is no suc...

Had such a fun session of my home campaign! Got to use my new travel rules and (due to the all-you-can-roll nature of them) honestly I had to convince my friends to end each leg of the trip to actually play where they were wanting to go... But we love it when journeys aren't about the destination, right? The rulebook for  Cinco!  now has all the latest updates I've been using to play if you're curious :) I'm tired and a little buzzed so I'm gonna summarize this session with bullet points. Roster These were the characters in play: Enkidu: Amnesiac dwarf following strange dreams to the land of Flo’Rida; 9 (+3) experience. Makandal: Orc maroon and voudonist ratted out while carrying out a raid; 9 (+3) experience. Nolan: Orc stand-user raised by elves, arrested on accusations of spying; 7 (+3) experience. Queen-sama: Elf prostitute, arrested after being caught by a client’s wife; 11 (+3) experience. Queen-sama leveled up! I need to remind her player. Summary Pr...

( Previous Post ) I’m going to invoke the death of the author here before anyone else does (never mind). It’s easy to talk and argue about intent when discussing texts, especially when the question is whether a text contains contradictory perspectives or priorities. At least we don’t know what either author thought on the topic, so we can’t take that as a faulty basis. Anyway, when I refer to authorial priority, I want to determine if the passages attributed to either author have different notions of play or its telos —or perhaps, if we didn’t know which passage could be attributed to which author, if such differences in the text would still be manifest in predictable ways. Any reference to intent per se here is a heuristic for the text’s own significance (in the Lacanian sense, of a meaning generated rather than given). Hypothesis I: Differing Priorities Now that I’ve cast this protection spell against bullshit lit-crit pedantry, I can submit my hypothesis that OD&D alternat...

I did the oopsie of assuming that a controversial, or at least non-consensus, position was actually a non-controversial consensus. From “ Inaugurating the Icon0clasm Ball ”: Not only was OD&D interpreted (i.e., read or played) in various contradictory ways by contemporary readers, but its two authors encode contradictory visions of this game within its source text. Did you catch that? In other words, “Gary and Dave had different priorities collaborating on Dungeons & Dragons , and this is apparent from the text as received.” I promised myself I wouldn’t do any more exegesis of this fucking thing, but that’s a big-ass claim. Is it true? Back when I was working on FMC , I was interested in the development of the OD&D text which consisted of a back-and-forth between its two authors. I’m indebted to Dan Boggs’ Hidden in Shadows blog which I read and internalized years ago, and the timeline below is from his original 2012 post on Beyond This Point Be Dragons : In 1972, ...

The true picture of the past whizzes by. Only as a picture, which flashes its final farewell in the moment of its recognizability, is the past to be held fast. “The truth will not run away from us” – this remark by Gottfried Keller denotes the exact place where historical materialism breaks through historicism’s picture of history. For it is an irretrievable picture of the past, which threatens to disappear with every present, which does not recognize itself as meant in it. Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History It's August, so submissions for The Icon0clasm Ball for  Fantastic Medieval Campaigns  have opened! I'm genuinely excited to see what y'all come up with, because the discursive universe of  OD&D  needs something new (and, dare I say, it deserves a better reception than as the germ of brand-name  Dungeons & Dragons  or of old-school revisionism). I've made steady progress on my major project for this, and I'm hopefully (hopefully!)...