Traverse Fantasy

There have been a lot of really thoughtful takes on magic lately, centering on significant ritualistic interactions (or even/especially transactions) with powerful beings—and I had just even gestured towards this being an angle for a tabletop Pokémon adaptation. Sorry to say that this one isn’t going to be particularly thoughtful. I realized that besides being sucky when my players run out of inspiration and can’t do magic anymore—for which my special game mommy inspiration has worked well—it feels weird for inspiration to work differently for magic than for the typical case. Magic is just fundamentally a tool, right? Tools make impossible tasks possible, and tasks already possible more so. I already have a rule that using an arcana (item which stands in for some D&D spell or school) as a normal weapon, basically like a cantrip, costs the user no inspiration; and rolling 20+ already gives a free enhancement (like casting at range or targeting all enemies in one area of effect). ...

We love to chase the idea of tabletop Pokémon, or Tablemon if you will. It’s like Pokémon but with your imagination. Who doesn’t want to escape the pixely grid of the video games (or the nasty-looking worlds of all the 3D ones except Arceus my beloved), step between those two-by-two trees blocking the world, and do fun things with those simultaneously cute/cool/lame creatures that only the realm of language can allow? Many such cases, of people trying to capture that feeling or outright adapting Pokémon (in its setting or even its rules) to a tabletop format. It just unfortunately never really pans out. I think this is because Pokémon is structurally difficult for a cooperative game. Pokémon is generically speaking a classical JRPG: you as the player control a party of characters in various situations (especially turn-based combat). Where Pokémon differs from similar games in its genre is that the player themselves has a representative outside of the party of characters: the Pokémon ...

I think I was halfway through a five-hour drive when my mind, keeping itself awake, took a strange train of thought. I’ve joked over the years (maybe not on this blog, but…) that if some consider themselves pro-life and others pro-choice, then Gxd might just be anti-life, in the sense of “fuck them kids”. Like yes, Gxd is said to know (certain) people before they are born and to even form them in the womb; but even besides (just like Adam) the point of personhood seeming to when his breath first enters them, and even besides the Torah considering the death of a fetus to be a crime of property destruction rather than murder, Gxd seems to be just fine killing people of any age cohort including adolescents, children, and infants. No judgment here. Walk with me. I wondered, then, about the plague on the firstborn in Egypt. Now, I do disagree with how most media depict the myth as specifically targeting children—since a firstborn son here is either a present or future patriarch, someone wh...

I’ve been talking with my friends and partner about this sort of thing. Often I’m not even the one to bring it up. There’s a preponderance of hustlers lately and it sucks seeing both suckers and bad-faith agents eating it up. These are some thoughts I’ve gathered from my conversations as well as from past experiences. Personal Persecution Hustlers often express paranoia that they are being personally persecuted by an institution, an abstract force, or some vague agent. It’s one thing if you’re fucking Fred Hampton and you’re doing work which materially (like, actually) threatens the order of things in a meaningful way. The feds aren’t coming for internet microcelebrities unless they were to post stupid shit which the feds always look into regardless of the poster’s online following. Usually the hustler’s apparent reaction doesn’t make sense given the stakes of the persecution. If the feds are actually coming for you, why post that online? Or if there was a knife-wielding psycho on ca...

From the hip. I’ve noticed for a few months that I’ve distanced myself from the label “socialist” and have even started using it to refer to some political position besides my own. I think for a while I’ve been bothered by the idea that there are true or false socialists, that Nazis and similar sorts appropriated the label to deceive an idiot general audience for whom ‘true’ socialism was actually attractive—but still, for some reason, couldn’t distinguish one from the other. It’s hard to square this narrative with the fact that fascism not only emerges from socialist currents such as syndicalism, but that these currents (and their associated tendencies like antisemitism and national chauvinism) predate Marxist “scientific socialism” and persisted throughout the history of workers’ movements. It’s not difficult to see why: workers’ own immediate interests are as sellers of labor-power, and the most common form of workers’ organizations function as cartels regulating the sale of that p...

( Previous chapter ) “I, Matteu, take you, Alessandra”—Matteu sighed with galaxies in his eyes—“to be my wife. I vow to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. You,” he broke, “are the light of my life. I will love and honor you all the days of my life. I love you, my dear Sandra.” “I love you too. And I, Alessandra, take you, Matteau, to be my husband. I’m sorry”—no apologies now; he would not accept it—“No. I vow to be faithful to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I vow to be as good a wife as I can be for you. I will love and honor you all the days of my life.” “May Jieu strengthen the consent you have declared before the assembly. What Jieu hath joined together, let no one put asunder. Bless the name of Jieu.” “Thanks be to Jieu,” the assembly said. The ceremony proceeded from the altar to the reception dinner, and we found ourselves each with a cocktail in hand. I managed to pull myself away from dear Matteu, and began maki...

That's right. Naming this update for the Big Man himself because it's just that big. I almost considered naming it instead for one of my favorite tween boy-bands-slash-reality-television-shows, Big Time Rush, and the episode centered on their song Halfway There, because (let's see if I remember it correctly) we're almost kinda sorta close to being halfway there. Check out the widget below to download the game or visit the Itch page, or keep reading to learn about what I have in store after months of constant deliberation and anal-retentive bullshit. Resourciv by Traverse Fantasy Economy Good-bye to markets where granular goods meet granular needs. The angels revealed to me a new approach to economic simulation, one which sounds similar to how I had once envisioned this game would function much earlier on. Output yields are back and simple. You can allocate percents of a population in each city to each yield, using Cobb-Douglas to determine how much is generated each ...

This almost certainly has already been figured out by someone else, but here goes: D66 is really handy to index a radial hexmap, so long as it has a radius of 3 from the center. Then you can use a hex stocking procedure but—instead of rolling for the content of each hex—calculate how many features of each type are likely to be there, and roll their coordinates for each individual instance. If you use Luke Gearing’s , for example, that’s: six settlements, six lairs, and six weird spots. And later, you can use the indices to roll for locations of events or rumors!  Elmcat told me he did something like this for his Mythic Bastionland campaign, except he used 2D12 to index along horizontal and vertical axes. Not sure if that’s native to the game, but it’s also cool! But I think this could also help me out with difficulties I’ve been having with maps in my own home campaign. Region Generation I’ve been using an upside-down map of the Caribbean this entire time. I just don’t have a ...

I’m somewhat a connoisseur of cozy slop games. Ever since I played Harvest Moon (since renamed to Story of Seasons —don’t play games with me, kid) and Rune Factory via emulator in middle school, I’ve been trying to recapture the high of these Precious Moments looking baby farmer things. I followed Stardew Valley since long before it was published, and when it came out (though it was very impressive as a project and certainly fun) I wasn’t fully down with its aesthetic. Since it blew up, there have been so many takes on the formula that preteen me wouldn’t have had to download sketchy apps on my phone to scratch my itch, but a lot of them are lazy and sloppy and skirt by on there being now a massive audience for what have become known as “cozy games”. My favorite entry in the genre (far from being slop) is Fields of Mistria , but it’s in early access and PC-only, which means I can’t play it on my coral Switch Lite. So I was in the market and found a game which, though its premise doe...

I drafted an (unused) rule that players can sacrifice their characters to let the rest of the crew escape whatever situation they’re in. It was requested by friends online and offline because they think of moments in adventure fiction where that sort of thing happens, and it’s epic and gets at your heartstrings. But it wasn’t used in practice. I think it’s because on some level it interrupts the ‘game’: not in the sense that it’s non-random necessarily, but in that it bypasses standard play procedure and imposes logic external to the situation. I don’t think we really want to cause Boromir moments as much as we want them to emerge from the game itself. Another problem I encountered pretty regularly while playing is that characters with spells and magic items use their inspiration pretty quickly, and then are restricted from doing anything for the rest of the session. I don’t necessarily want to increase how much inspiration someone has or make it easier to restore. You’re supposed to ...

Oh my God. That’s her. How about a double feature, baby? Black Athena It’s hard to explain to people how fucked the field of Classics is. There’s a guy who almost exclusively writes articles about how the Metamorphoses does not depict rape on the part of the gods and is actually about art and how it captures its object (uhh). There’s an article from I think 2015 which goes back and forth about whether we should see Greece/Rome as exceptional or not, because they obviously are (mhm), but it’s not woke to say that; and it’s written by a guy who argued that the Greek alphabet was invented (i.e., modified from Phoenician) specifically to record Homer’s poems. I was grateful to have had professors in college who weren’t freaks and saw that corner of the ancient world not as exceptional but as prototypical, and not because our “civilization” originates from them, but because they dealt with the same problems and questions as us—as did other people throughout the world at different points...

It’s not like I don’t have a VPN, but it’s not like I always have that shit on either. If BlueSky is going to comply in advance with the Texas government’s threat of internet censorship, I’m just not going to open it. Like, oh no, less social media for me! One less passive time sink. I’m not going to delete my account because I may log on occasionally but, besides that, you’ll know why I’ve gone quiet.

A specter is haunting elf-games… the specter of WORKER PLACEMENT! (Please, God, don't let people read this as if I was suggesting this was actually a manifesto and am not just playing to the theme.) Many years ago, I posted about an assumption of the original Dungeons & Dragons which was eventually forgotten: that characters are supposed to cooperate on difficult tasks and doing so is the only way the game makes sense . Think especially about opening doors or searching for secrets in a room. The likelihoods of those tasks are 2 / 6 or 1 / 6 for little folk, which means you don’t have a snowball’s chance of relying on the dice as an individual to get what you want. I think this, combined with the (fair!) advice that you should not allow infinite rerolls on a task, contributed partly to the so-called “old-school” play-style where dice are not your friend and you need to work outside the rules to get anywhere. That’s not OD&D , though. In OD&D , since three persons can...

I followed an independent tech journalist for a while because I don’t trust most big news firms to report on technology (or, really, most things) without falling in lockstep with the demands of the spectacular economy—that is, to manufacture demand because someone needs to buy all this shit to keep the lights on. And I liked this particular one since frankly I trust women in the field far more than men. Vocal fry has a disarming effect on me. But over the past few months, I noticed how she became increasingly cagey towards so-called artificial intelligence. Even in a video about how LLM firms are starting to target women, because the adoption of a technology by women is a sign of its adoption by wider society (which LLM firms had thus far failed to attain), she awkwardly gestured towards the poor average consumer who just uses LLMs to search and summarize online information, and that this is a genuine use-case which LLM firms prey upon (sure, why not?). I like to think of pop punk ban...

I’m considering this post to have been co-authored by my partner. She had seen the movie closer to when it had come out, and she told me it quite frustrated her because it felt like a movie gesturing towards a big statement—about school shootings in particular—without actually committing to a statement and doing something totally different instead by the end of it. All I had heard was that it involved children being turned into actual voudon-style zombies, and was surprised that what I thought was part and parcel with its premise was more like a twist out of left field. She didn’t spoil the whole thing in case I wanted to watch it later, but it took me a while because I am not super into horror movies (I would say except that now since horror has become the statement genre, but…), and I only just got around to it this weekend. Oh boy. So, it’s certainly trying to gesture towards school shootings, right? The narrator’s opening monologue clearly evokes the community trauma of a classroo...

Sorry in advance for shooting from the hip. This is a ramble. My friend Ènziramire shared with me a quote by some liberal economist or philosopher—can’t find it, so bear with me—that Marxist critics and politicians alike have all failed to consider the question of freedom, except for Marx himself. I said then that I would take the L on that because, yeah, [Mr. Liberal] got me there. But then we were talking about Reconstruction. There was a certain abolitionist, Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, who at first sided with the Radical Republicans in hastening emancipation, but during Reconstruction began siding with the Liberal Republicans because she believed that southerners should not have been deprived of their rights. Then the Compromise of 1877 hit, and Dickinson was so dismayed by the South’s reactionary barbarism that, even when she had gained the right to vote as a female citizen in 1919, she chose never to vote. It’s the basic bitch question of liberalism: how much freedom should be sa...