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@airborneham
Coming Soon: The Airborne Ham Game Lab!
Twice a month, I’ll be exploring the ins and outs of games, theory, and design as I take readers through my process and document my ongoing designs on their journey to publication.
I will also try to cross-post here for folks who prefer Tumblr.
Let's Talk About Games
New Game Lab!
This week's Game Lab is about toyetic games and how physicality and tactility adds to immersion and engagement.
New Game Lab Post!
This week's Game Lab post is about teamwork in TTRPGs and how Chris Sellers of Hectic Electron made it phenomenal in Raccoon Sky Pirates! I discuss how most games fall short and versions of collaborative actions that feel as interactive at the table as they do in the fiction. I touch on teamwork mechanics in Blades in the Dark by John Harper and Evil Hat Productions, and Stonetop by Jeremy Strandberg and penny lantern. Check it out!
New Game Lab post! Today I discuss Deathmatch Island from Old Dog Games and Evil Hat, and how the "competitive" genre of TTRPGs gives a new twist to the play-to-lose style of storytelling games that I love. Check it out on my Substack Now!
Best Frenemies: Dynamic Conflict in Social Deduction Games
That space-kitty has been taunting me for over a decade.
I’ve never played Twilight Imperium.
It’s not that I don’t want to, it just seems like an ordeal to get enough people to commit to a day-long, high-conflict board game. It’s a big investment. Several of my friends have talked about putting together a game for much of my adult life, but talking about it and doingit are very different things and it has yet to happen at a time or place that’s accessible to me.
However, I have played my fair share of other bigol strategy games that thrive on politicking and shifting alliances like A Game of Thrones, Root, or Cosmic Encounter, so I get the gist. Asymmetric factions, reluctant cooperation, unifying against the current leader only to realign when the dust settles; all great stuff that I love in my games.
These are traits of some of the highest-rated games of all time. However, they rely on the fact that there are more than two teams. It’s hard to have shifting alliances when it’s a good vs. evil situation. Even Batman and Joker set aside their differences sometimes, but usually only when they have a common enemy.
In my last post identifying some common problems with many social deduction games, I discussed how there are usually the two teams: werewolves and townsfolk, fascists and liberals, resistance and spies, etc. Go back and read that post if you haven’t so I don’t have to repeat myself much.
Are you back? Great, now let me pick up where I left off.
The gist of my argument is that once the lying team is found out, the social aspect of the game is over. However, what if it didn’t have to be? What if the social deduction part of the game was just the beginning?
Today I’m going to talk about some ways that social deduction games can learn from the Twilight Imperiums of the world, incorporating several factions with differing goals and creating the uneasy alliances as the hidden roles are uncovered. I’ll start with the LARP I designed in the past, move to some other games I have (and haven’t) played, and then get to how I am taking those lessons and applying them to one of my current projects: a new entry into the social deduction genre that I’m working on called Dreamland.
Hidden goals, not hidden roles.
Writing this is a nostalgia trip for me as I dig through Haunted Mansion files.
Before the pandemic, I designed and ran a LARP every single month called Haunted Mansion (no affiliation with Disney or Danny DeVito). The name was largely a holdover from its original inception as the theme and mechanics changed from month to month, but consistent (non-trademarked) branding is important.
One of the core mechanics that largely stayed the same through every event was some form of hidden roles. These came to a player in the form of a character name or title, a paragraph or two background, and usually two explicit goals involving the particular game’s mechanics or scenario.
Some events had explicit pre-made teams vying for one of a few possible outcomes of the event, such as Cyberpunk corporate employees wanting one of their own faction to escape with a data file. In other events everyone was largely on their own to form whatever teams they liked with certain restrictions involving their pre-assigned roles, like a pirate ship that needs all 4 unique role positions filled in order to sail, but there are limited vessels to escape on and limited capacity to boot.
In addition to the event’s unique story and the player’s primary goal that aligned the teams, of which there were almost always 3 or more and acted as our hidden roles like you would expect out of a social deduction game, the individual characters also had specific secondary goals that they wanted to accomplish. A secondary goal could be something relatively harmless like having a certain item at the end of the game, or it could be as nefarious as wanting to kill a certain number of other characters.
What all of this meant is that alliances would form between players working together towards a common primary objective, but there was always a certain level of distrust and uncertainty about the cooperation. Sometimes you have to identify your teammates and secretly cooperate. Other times you assemble a group you can trust to defeat the opposition. Either way, even if your best friend is on the same team as you, they could want to do something that doesn’t exactly help your situation or could be at odds with someone else on the team.
Some examples might help.
Heist was one of 30+ events we ran. They all blend together in my memory.
Our cyberpunk Heist game had 6 factions: Goggles and FaceBlock vying for Data Files, Golden Sacks and B.E.U. focusing on extracting Money Bags, and F.E.D. and The Syndicate trying to kill members of the other. These were represented in their Corporate Goals.
In addition, the personal goals for each player role were one of 3 things: Personally Escape with 2 Money Bags, Escape with a Knife, or Escape with both Slicer Tools and Decker Tools.
This created a pressure cooker environment as teams formed combining factions that didn’t have opposing Corporate Goals like Goggles and Golden Sacks. Being alone was dangerous as you could be killed by anyone, so getting allies was necessary for survival and there were plenty of allies to be found outside your opposition. However, there was a good chance that your new allies would be after the same personal goals as you, and there just wasn’t enough Money, Knives, or Tools to go around.
Click here to see some example roles from that event so you get an idea of the kind of energy we brought to Haunted Mansion and see how these goals looked on paper. We were pretty funny.
Nobody knew if the people around them would stab them in the back when it came time to divide up the heist’s payoff, so every team that formed was an uneasy alliance until the very end with uncertainty surrounding the goals each player had rather than a role may or may not have been concealing.
Infighting, splitting teams, players forced to pick sides, these were not uncommon scenes at Haunted Mansion. This is something I want to highlight because it can only happen at a certain point in a hidden role game that, as I wrote last time, most social deduction games end at.
Once players have found out who is who and who wants what, there is still so much excitement and tension that can come in the next phase of the game. The cards are on the table and everyone can start negotiating plainly. Opponents need to form temporary truces to stop another team from winning while conspiring on the side. Alliances are forged and broken. Decisions are difficult but imperative.
Was Haunted Mansion a perfect game? Of course not. But looking back now, 4 years later, we were very good at creating dynamic interactions between players’ goals that perpetuated an environment requiring uneasy and shifting alliances that I love from big-box strategy games but have yet to see recreated in the same ways in smaller social deduction games.
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But that doesn’t mean that others haven’t tried.
Dead of Winter, the cooperative zombie survival game from Plaid Hat Games, is the game I’ve seen that comes closest to this. It doesn’t always have a betrayer, but always gives each player a specific goal that could be at odds with the greater mission. It’s big and has a lot going on, but is really a pretty straightforward resource management game when you look past the clunky rulebook and extensive components list.
Sparky the Stunt Dog doesn’t even get a place on the cover.
That makes it the perfect vessel for the obligatory cooperation but warranted distrust that I like out of horror experiences, like my own tabletop RPG, as you have a limited supply of stuff that’s hard to get, there’s a lot of things you have to use it for, and you don’t know what everyone else wants or if they are even on your team.
It also does something else important if you want to force people to make tough decisions with inevitable consequences.
PvPvE; or, The Game Fights Back
Something not unseen in social deduction games is a semi-cooperative aspect where players have to work together to defeat a common enemy while keeping an eye out for the traitor amongst them. This is a part of Dead of Winter, as well as the classic Battlestar Galactica game, it’s modern Lovecraftian remake Unfathomable, the aggressively named Human Punishment: The Beginning, and I’m sure many more.
It’s not exactly an innovation in the space anymore, but what I want to touch on is how much the pressure of a common enemy adds to the multi-faction, shifting alliance game. Something that everyone, or most people, need to combat together gives a lot of space for setting aside differences to deal with a problem at hand.
I also want to add that these game are a lot. Unfathomable says it takes 2-4 hours on the box, which is a wiiiiiiiide window and likely still an underestimate for your first game. Human Punishment says 2-3 hours. I’ve not played it, but I have read reviews saying it is extremely complex due to all the additional mechanics for each faction and takes much longer trying to unravel the rulebook. Dead of Winter, the shortest, is still 1-2 Hours. All of these games have a complexity rating of 3 or more out of 5 on Board Game Geek.
This is a lot of stuff and that board has a lot of text. I still want it.
In contrast, pure social deduction games like Secret Hitler or The Resistance are 30 or 45 minutes and a weight of less than 2 on BGG, which is a far easier sell to get on the table and maybe even multiple times in a night.
Does adding an outside pressure like zombies or deep ones really have to add an hour or two of play? Does a third or fourth faction require so much added complexity that the rule book can be used as a booster seat?
I sure hope not.
Enter one of my current projects and the topic of these devlogs: Dreamland.
Or “The Fate of Dreamland” or something like that. I haven’t really settled on a name yet.
It’s often said that limitations breed creativity. When setting out to design a new project, I usually try to define what my goals for that game are to avoid scope creep and keep the game in a lane, while also establishing which parts I am not willing to throw out if/when inevitable redesigns happen.
With Dreamland, I have 2 things I am settled on.
It should play in under 1 hour. That’s the goal. It should say 45 minutes on the box.
The dynamic between the 5 different roles is the part I care about. Everything else is there to facilitate those relationships and conflicts.
I’ve already discussed play time as a factor, so let me wrap up this week by outlining my 5 roles and how they interact:
The Dreamer - The original creator of Dreamland has returned, seeking to protect the world from Terrors that torment it.
The Prophets - Followers of the Dreamer who have foretold their return and seek to identify the messiah, protect them, and assist in the defense of Dreamland.
The Cultists - Worshipers of Terrors and the Nightmare, these players want to help the Terrors plunge Dreamland into eternal darkness.
The Nightmare - A sleep demon that brought the Terrors to Dreamland, but must keep them from destroying it completely as they locate and defeat The Dreamer in order to use them as a vessel into the waking world.
The Wardens - Those who seek to root out the Nightmare and defeat it, but can only do so by defeating the Cultists that give it strength.
This dynamic is what interests me about the game.
The Cultists and The Nightmare are technically allies, but The Nightmare cannot allow them to succeed as it will end the game before defeating The Dreamer. However, they should be protected from The Warden to avoid The Nightmare’s defeat.
The Dreamer and The Prophets are keeping the Terrors from destroying the world, and The Warden wants to help them (and even protect them), but cannot allow them to succeed in defeating the Terrors completely as the game will end before defeating The Nightmare.
The Dreamer must blend in with The Prophets to avoid being singled out by The Nightmare, but if they are about to be defeated they may need to reveal themselves to ask for help.
The Cultists might need to help the Dreamer survive to avoid The Nightmare winning before they can destroy the world.
This all gets to the part of the game I want to see more of. A post-hidden role phase where the different factions are publicly supporting or opposing each other once their jig is up. The social deduction is still a core feature of the first phase, but there is still game to be had once people out themselves. I believe it hinges on there being 1+ parties outside of the core “good vs evil” dynamic.
Next time, I will spend the whole post explaining Dreamland’s current iteration, the lore and world building and why I chose a whimsical setting instead of a “cool” gritty gamer one, and the mechanics and how they specifically drive the experience.
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Let me know in the comments of any games that I might not be aware of that would be at home in this post or help inspire me while working on Dreamland, as well as your thoughts on conflict and teams in social deductions games.
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you next time.
Fascist Werewolves: Exploring Social Deduction
Dreamland Devlog #1
Great art from Mackenzie Schubert
I’m Hitler. A lot.
No, not the real-life Hitler. Thankfully he’s pretty dead, which is great since he was a fucking Nazi.
No, I’m Hitler a lot in the social deduction game Secret Hitler from Goat, Wolf, & Cabbage, where one player is randomly assigned the hidden role of Hitler, while some players are their Fascist allies hiding amongst the Liberals. Strangely enough, I’m spiritually Hitler pretty often in many other hidden role games, including Dead of Winter, The Thing: Infection at Outpost 31, The Resistance, Unfathomable, etc.
I love this box art so much.
Any game with a betrayer built-in or potential hidden opponent, through random chance I somehow disproportionately end up with that role. I’ve been Hitler so much that it became a problem with my friends. One night I was Hitler three games in a row. Then I was dealt the Hitler role a 4th time and I told everyone so we didn’t have to do it again.
Due to the frequency of being a betrayer, I’ve noticed some common trends in these games that can be problems for some players, as well as lead to stale, repetitive games for those more experienced with the genre.
Today I will explore what makes social deduction games fun for some and not others, why they have so much replayability, and in what ways designers like myself can innovate to create new, more dynamic experiences in the space.
Lying to your friends.
I get a lot of practice pretending to help while lying about details of the game, so I’ve gotten pretty good at it. At first it was novel, but now that it’s become a meme in my group, I don’t really look forward to it. Being a betrayer is more stressful than being a good guy as it takes more effort to keep up the facade, and sometimes it’s just tiring to be the opponent to everyone else at the table.
Conflict, even in a game, can be exhausting. This is especially true in games with longer play times. Honestly, sometimes people can tell when I’m NOT the betrayer because these days I get more engaged in the game when I’m not trying to disrupt things for everyone else.
Don’t get me wrong, I still enjoy a good game of Secret Hitler. It’s a very well-made game that innovates on the structure set up in The Resistance and fixes many perceived flaws of that game in a lot of ways. I just ran into some repetition with the basic social deduction games like Secret Hitler, The Resistance, or your Werewolf Mafia and that ilk:
Most of the game is simply players lying and trying to not get caught.
Sure, there’s other stuff going on, each game bringing their own twist to the mechanics of revealing or hiding information and how to effectively sabotage the goals of the rest of the players while they hunt for the betrayers. But their core, these games are about lying to your friends and getting away with it. Nearly all have only two teams, so even with special roles with unique abilities, you’re either
A good guy trying to spot the liars -or-
A bad guy trying to not get caught in your lie.
If you have friends who are bad at lying—their face turning red or their giggling giving them away—and they end up a Fascist or Hitler or Spies or Werewolves or pick your bad guy, the game effectively ends there.
Even if you’re experienced and don’t break easily, the game is about sussing out the liars. Once that’s been done, there’s little else to do even if the game doesn’t immediately end.
You know who Hitler is? Don’t elect Hitler to be chancellor.
You caught the werewolf? Kill them.
Game over.
The meat of the game, the deduction part with all the unique mechanics and interactions that each game brings, ends once the roles are uncovered.
Twists and turns.
Now, I don’t want to sound like I’m not giving these games credit. There are many different ways that it can play out after that point:
Sometimes you have to keep playing, avoiding the person you suspect as a betrayer. They can shout all they want but you don’t let them on the team and you are fine. They don’t really get to play the game anymore, but they can keep voting “no” and spewing nonsense. Maybe they have another ally they can protect that can win for them. Or maybe you were wrong and the Cylons were tricking you into thinking your ally was one of them.
Or maybe you just guess right and kill Hitler.
There are actually a lot of interesting paths the games can take, all sorts of dynamic tricks and social maneuvering that players can do to change the way the game plays out, which is why the games are so popular with so many people, why there are so many different variations of the same core experience, and why they keep people coming back to play them over and over.
Remember, I was dealt Hitler 4 games in one night. We didn’t keep dealing out games because we hated the experience. Coming from LARPs, my friends and I love getting into our roles and getting to push and pull alliances and trust knowing that the lies are part of the game.
For us, they’re great fun, but they rely heavily on that one core factor.
Liars are assholes.
The deep experiences and most exciting moments rely on the social aspect: the deception, the manipulating, the trickery, the interpersonal conflict. These are very much negative social experiences if they were outside the context of a game, and some players struggle with that. There can be a lot of valid reasons to not enjoy being purposefully lied to, tricked, and manipulated, and some people find it difficult to separate the interactions of the game from real life.
We often use games as a way to simulate certain types of situations and emotions in a safe environment, something I plan to write more extensively about in an upcoming post, but for some people, even in a simulated or safe environment, this is not fun.
Some people don’t like being scared, so they don’t watch horror movies. Some people don’t like lying or being lied to, so they don’t play social deduction games. There are lots of different types of people in this world with lots of different tastes and preferences, and that’s okay.
For that reason, most social deduction games are very reliant on specific play-group dynamics in the same way tabletop RPGs are. You can’t really go out of your way to design your game to accommodate people who don’t buy into the premise, however, I do think you can broaden the appeal by shifting the focus while retaining the appeal.
Other viewing.
No Pun Included has a great review of Blood on the Clocktower, another social deduction game that’s made a lot of buzz and seems very cool, and he goes into the topic in impressive depth that I would recommend checking out if you’re interested in learning more of the history of the genre and the way different types of people experience it. It’s a very good video even if you already own and love BotC.
This theme might be a bit too edgy for me, but it does look very pretty.
The YouTuber Shelfside has a great breakdown of the genre’s strengths and weaknesses as well which I will be referencing more next time. In particular, he brings up the more complex game Human Punishment: The Beginning and how adding all that extra weight and complexity makes the hidden role dynamic more interesting, but bogs down the experience. I admittedly haven’t gotten to play it yet, but I really look forward to it despite that very obvious hurdle. It appears to do exactly what I want to see more games in the genre do, albeit burdened by a steep complexity rating on BGG that makes it less accessible to a broader audience.
The title certainly is… something.
Finally, the Think Like a Game Designer Podcast from Justin Gary, a great listen in general, has an episode with one of the designers of Two Rooms and a Boom: Alan Gerding. Listen to the whole episode as it has a lot of fun stories and Alan is great at telling them, but around the 40 minute mark they discuss some of the same issues with social deduction games that I have here and how each of them have tried to solve for them in their own games. Justin is a phenomenal interviewer and you can subscribe to his Think Like a Game Designer Substack to get more insights from tons of more designers.
A game with a player count of 6-30 is something to aspire to.
This is a devlog?
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Social deduction games, especially the popular low-complexity ones, are highly dependent on player social behavior above all else and, because of this dependence, can turn off or completely exclude certain types of players.
But there is something we can do to change that and we’ll find inspiration in an unlikely place.
You might be wondering why I’ve written over a thousand words about social deduction games in a post that’s supposed to be a devlog without even discussing my own game.
Firstly, I wanted to set up what the current landscape of social deduction games look like. I also intended to make it clear that I really do love them. It’s my love for the games that make me want to push the boundaries a little bit.
Next time I’m going to change focus to games I’ve made in the past, as well as the social deduction game I am currently working on, titled Dreamland, that looks to solve some of these problems while remaining on the lower end of complexity. I’ll discuss the LARP I used to run, the difference between hidden roles and hidden goals, and how I have made shifting alliances in hidden role games that are dynamic and uneasy even after roles are uncovered.
Keep an eye out for that, and please share this with people you think would be interested. I appreciate it a ton.
Also, feel free to let me know what you think about social deduction games. I’m interested in your thoughts and opening up a conversation.
Welcome to the Game Lab
Let's Talk About Games
Hey folks.
Welcome to the Game Lab.
Despite being a spry young Millennial (or crusty old Zoomer depending who you ask), I’ve never been too good at posting on social media or keeping up with news feeds. Having run LARPs for nearly a decade, I’ve done a lot of good and successful work in analog games, but don’t much to show for it but friends, memories, and boxes of props. Those are all great, but it turns out cheap leftover costuming isn’t very marketable.
With my first physical game printed and released in 2023, I’m finally changing that, and this post is the start of me putting something regularly out into the world that has permanence, that others can gain some insights or enjoyment from, and that allows me to gather my own thoughts and form new ideas in a way that engages with the games community online.
I’ve been meaning to start writing longer form posts to talk about game mechanics and theory I find interesting, share games or creators I discover, and keep a design log of the many games I’m always working on. Substack seems like a good place for me to do that in a format that’s more my speed, and as I’ve been writing the first few posts and putting my thoughts into words my mind has been swirling with exciting new topics and ideas to explore.
I’m thrilled to see where this takes me and I am happy to have you along for the ride.
Who am I? Why should you care?
That’s a really good question I’ve been convincing myself to answer for some time now, and I’ve finally got it figured out.
That’s Abe chewing on my antler.
I’m Eric Faber, a game designer on the shores of Lake Superior. I’ve designed analog games for over a decade, primarily Live Action Role Playing Games, but dabbling in TTRPGs and board games as well. In 2016 I met one of my best friends who was running a LARP at the local college, and I fell into helping run it when he graduated and we moved it off campus.
Learning on LARPs.
We ran that game and grew the community around it for almost 3 years, designing a new game with unique mechanics, story, and characters from the ground up every month.
Some group photos from the Haunted Mansion LARP. Don't tell Disney about the name.
We were essentially live-playtesting a game for 20-30 players each month, which taught me a lot about iterative design. We molded the framework that was originally cobbled together by college kids from an online forum game into a solid and consistent ruleset. In doing so, we built a deep toolbox of mechanics that we could add or remove in order to craft the experience we wanted for any particular game.
From mummy curses that players had to discover how they were acquired and what they did, to cyberpunk gadgets with unique mechanics that could be freely exchanged to give players agency over what role they filled on a team, Haunted Mansion explored a wide spectrum of settings and experiences that kept the game from getting stale for returning players and forced us to continually push the boundaries of what we thought it could be.
Unfortunately, LARPs don’t leave behind any way for the people outside of that building on that night to see what we made. Each event is a singular experience that players and event runners get to share, which is both the beauty of the medium as well as one of its many obstacles.
Into the game industry and right back out.
Due to the fleeting nature of LARPs, I was designing board games and TTRPGs as well in hopes of one day publishing something and getting my work out into the world. In 2020 I had decided to get serious and try to pursue publishing a board game.
I planned trips to conventions, started researching the process of pitching to publishers, and then… well, we all stopped doing all that stuff for a while. A lot of my game design stuff went on hold during the pandemic. Our LARP stopped and without momentum the community dispersed. Life got hard for everybody.
But I’m back, for real this time.
When things reopened and we got back to in-person events, I got back to LARPing. A friend of mine runs the Wisconsin branch of the post-apocalyptic LARP Dystopia Rising and hoodwinked me into writing for and helping to run it. If you are in the US, chances are there’s a branch near you and I recommend checking it out if you like horror, boffer combat, zombies, or just a weekend away from real-life problems. If you’re in the Midwest, the WI game would love to have you. We have heated cabins.
Some pictures from Dystopia Rising, or DR as we call it. Kill zombies. Build a community. Be weird.
I also designed, wrote, and used Kickstarter to publish my first game, The Last Hand. It’s a play-to-lose horror storytelling game that uses a deck of playing cards with rules emulating Texas Hold ‘Em to create tales of survivors being pursued by an unknown horror which you learn about as you play. Inspired by games like Dread, Ten Candles, and Fiasco!, the structure of the game guides you towards an inescapable building of tension and cathartic release as you move from scene to scene on the run, facilitating a warranted distrust and obligatory cooperation that is a staple of the horror genre.
It’s quite good.
Look. It's a real game that exists.
The Game Lab
I believe games are an art form that can be engaged with in the same way that our culture discusses films and literature. I love thinking about and talking about games, game design, and game mechanics, as I truly believe it helps us as players understand and find the fun in games and me as a designer find new ways to innovate in the medium.
In this newsletter, I’m going to explore the types of mechanics I think are interesting and why, games I play or that I am excited about, and parts of the craft of game design and decisions I make in prototypes I’m working on.
This is partly a design theory blog, partly a devlog, and partly a way for me to take the knowledge I have from years of designing games and put it out into the world in a way that helps both my creative process and hopefully yours as well.
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So yeah, that’s the idea. Stick around and let’s talk about games.
Absolute Bait Image
Sale on The Last Hand because it's Friday the 13th.
Maybe I'll write that setting for the game and release it one of these Friday the 13ths.
It's Spooky Season, Time For a Spooky TTRPG Sale!
It's Friday the 13th, which is going to mark the beginning of Spooky Season for me! Real life has calmed down quite a bit for me, wedding season is over, and I have a break from writing for my monthly Trivia and LARPs. So I am going to get back online, try to market The Last Hand a bit, and encourage people to tell more scary stories with horror storytelling rpgs.
A bundle by AirborneHam, $18.00 for The Last Hand, It Is Out There
Get 'The Last Hand' and the settings add-on 'It Is Out There' at a discount for the next few weeks to tell scary stories about survivors struggling to escape an unknown horror that stalks them.
I'm very proud of the unique mechanics for storytelling and generating prompts that emulate aspects of Texas Hold'em, using playing cards from your hands and a central lineup of community cards to guide the narrative. Its pacing is comparable to Fiasco! but for horror movies, so get your friends together and tell your own stories this Friday the 13th, and through the entire Halloween Season!
The Last Hand: A Horror Role Playing Game is a standalone, GM-less, no-prep RPG for 2 to 6 players intended for a single session of play.
Taking on the role of struggling survivors, you must work together to escape an unknown horror that slowly reveals Its true nature as It pursues you, while hedging your bets to be the one to make it out alive during the Last Hand.
Emulating aspects of Texas Hold 'Em, you will take turns as the Dealer leading scenes, deciding how the cards affect the story, and adding details to the creature to realize what has been released upon the world.
The game facilitates the combination of warranted distrust and obligatory cooperation that is a staple of the horror genre. You can survive, but you must work together and there will likely be casualties.
It is out there, and It will stalk you relentlessly. Don't be one that gets left to die.
This Saturday at 6:30pm EST, I'm playing @airborneham's The Last Hand with 3 very exciting guests! First is Angela, who I have had the absolute pleasure to play both Mausritter and Monsterhearts 2 with, and I really can't wait to play this creepy western with her!
The first time I ever played Vampire: the Masquerade, I was lucky to get to play with Cadence, and I've been wanting to have them on my channel ever since. The time has finally come! They may or may not have mentioned something about how their goal in a game is to be crying by the end of it. That's probably fine!
And to round out the players, I get to play with Extell again! He's such a fun performer, and I've been lucky to have him on the channel once before to play Babes in the Wood, and I'm very glad he agreed to come back for The Last Hand!
Last month I put out a call for indie designers to submit their games to be played on stream and this month I'm excited to announce the first two games in that series!
First up is The Last Hand by @airborneham, a GMless western horror game inspired by games like Fiasco, Dread and Ten Candles. Who will be left standing when The Last Hand is dealt? You can back The Last Hand on Kickstarter now!
Next is Bloodless by @enniogoes, a vampire survival solo TTRPG using the Caltrop Core system. From the Itch page: "You've messed with the wrong person, and they’ve been hunting you down for days. You’ve lost a fight, you’re badly injured and, you’re exhausted. Chances are good that you won’t see another twilight. If you can make it to your haven, you might survive; but that’s a big if."
I'm very excited for this series! These two games are great, and there are many more great games lined up for the future!
The Last Hand is Live on Kickstarter!
A GMless, no-prep horror game about doomed survivors attempting to escape an unknown horror. It's like Fiasco for horror movies, heavily inspired by play-to-lose games like Dread and Ten Candles.
Check it out on Kickstarter if you're interested!
The Last Hand in Space
Since the Kickstarter pre-launch page currently has 80 followers (thanks so much for the interest!), I'm teasing some of the other settings. With each milestone of followers until the launch on Monday the 13th, I'm showing off a new teaser. First, we have The Steel Aurora, written by me.
And second, we have The Dungeon written by Declan / HorsepondMine.
As we get more followers on the pre-launch page, I will be adding to this list! Share the campaign around to get more teasers and help me fund on day 1!
You know those aesthetic image posts that float around tumblr? I'm . . . starting to see a lot on my dash that are obviously ai-generated. Are non-artists having trouble telling the difference between AI images and real photos, or are people starting to stop care about the stolen art that gets fed into those programs?
I have no actual art training, so I want it known that if I ever DO reblog some ai stuff please let me know. It was unintentional and I would like to know. Thanks~
Yeah, I figure this is the case for most people. I’m going to put up a guide to spotting AI images after work!
I think people know by now how to tell if an image of a person is AI-generated. Count the fingers, count the knuckles, check the pupils, yadda yadda. I've seen several posts circulating about what to look for. However, I think people are a LOT less educated about backgrounds, and about the specific distinctions between human error and AI error. So that's what I'm going to cover.
Now, don't feel bad if you've reblogged or liked any of the images I'm about to show you guys. This is just what's crossed my blog, so it's what I have to work with. (Actually, thanks for providing the examples!)
I also generated a few images from crAIyon purely for demonstrational purposes, because I didn't have anything on-hand to show my thoughts.
Firstly — Keep in mind that AI has a difficult time replicating "simple" styles. Think colorless line-drawings, cartoony pieces with thick lines, and pixel art.
Looks unsettling, right?
Why is this? Well, when a human makes art, we're more prone to under-detailing by mistake than over-detailing, because adding detail in the first place place is more effort. A skilled artist should be good able to capture an idea with minimal, evocative shape language.
But when an AI makes art, it is the opposite. An AI doesn't understand what it's looking at, not in the way that you or I do. All it can do is search for and replicate patterns in the noise of pixels. As a result, it is prone to mushing together features in ways that a human artist . . . wouldn't intentionally think to do.
It also over-details, replicating what it knows over and over again because it doesn't know when it's supposed to stop. Blank spaces can confuse it! It likes having detail to work with! Detail Is Data!
Again, this is why we count fingers.
These general principles still apply when we're looking at styles that an AI is better equipped to imitate. So . . .
Secondly — AI's tendency to over-render details makes it easier for it to pick up heavily detailed styles, especially if the style will still hold up when certain details are indistinct or merge together unexpectedly.
Scrutinize images that utilize a painterly, heavily-rendered, or photo-realistic style. Such as this one.
Thirdly — An AI piece that looks pretty good from a distance falls apart up close.
The above image looks almost like a photograph, but there is architecture here that you wouldn't find in a real room, and mistakes that you wouldn't find in the work of an artist that is THIS good at rendering. Or most beginner artists, even.
Can you see what falls apart here? Hint; we're counting fingers again.
Check the window panes. Isn't the angle that they all meet up at a little off? Why are the panes sized so inconsistently? Why doesn't the view outside of them all line up into a cohesive background?
Count the furniture legs. Why does the farther-back case have a third leg? Why does the leg on the closer case vanish so strangely behind the flowery details?
Examine the curtain(?) fabric at the top of the window. What on earth IS that frilly stuff?
Another mistake that AI will make is drawing lines and merging details that a human artist would never think of as connected. See the lines crawling up the walls? See how some of the flower petals glop together at hard angles in some places? Yeah, that's what I'm talking about.
You can see more strange architecture in the outdoor setting of this image.
A lot of the AI's mistakes are almost art nouveau! We recognize that buildings are consistently angular, for stability reasons. An AI does not. (Also look at the trees in the background, and how they tend to warp and distort around the outline of the treehouse. They kinda melt into each other at some points. It's wild.)
Fourthly — An AI will replicate any carelessness that was introduced into its original data set.
Obviously, this means that AIs will make fake watermarks, but everybody already knows that. What I need you guys to look out for is something else. It's called artifacting.
Artifacting is defined as "the introduction of a visible or audible anomaly during the processing or transmission of digital data." To put it in layman's terms, you know how an image gets crunchy and pixelated if you save it as a jpg? Yeah. That. An AI with lots of crusty, crunchy jpgs fed into it will produce crunchy images.
Look at the floor at the bottom of our original example image;
See the speckles all along the glass panels, table legs, and flowers in shadow? Artifacted to hell and back! This shit is crunchier than my spine after spending half a day hunched over my laptop.
Again, legitimate art and photography may have artifacting too just because of file formatting reasons. But most artists don't intentionally artifact their own images, and furthermore, the artifacting will not be baked into the very composition of the image itself. The speckles will instead gather most notably on flat colors at the border of different color patches and/or outlines.
Cronchy memes; funny. Cronchy AI art; shitty jpg art theft caught red-handed.
That's probably all the lessons I can impart in one post. Class dismissed! As homework a bonus, consider these two sister images to our original flower room. Can you spot any signs of AI generation?
@wolven-writer I hope this helps!
All of this.
My biggest tip is to also look at decorative patterns. Since AI's don't know what they're actually making, things like a relief pattern on a throne or etchings on a piece of weapon will just be messy noise with no rhyme or reason to it.
Even though portraits often result in less artefacts since there's less variables for the AI to try and process, the overly crisp, highly rendered style can be easy to pick out after a while.
AI also cannot recognize text as anything other than shapes. See an art where a shop is weirdly names “SSDFYUURKPK”? See a sign that you can’t figure out if it was a supposed to be a Japanese letter or a mush of lines? It’s probably AI.
When looking at people, AI tends to get three major things wrong: Hands, eyes, and teeth. The hands are obvious -- seven, eight fingers, blobs, horrific horror shows. Eyes are rarely set properly, often look in different directions, and are sometimes outright the wrong artstyle for the piece. Teeth with be, horrifically, all front teeth, or molded together.
[This post] came across my dash the other day and the OP is actively removing the replies of people pointing out that it’s AI. But look at this one.
1) Every single fish in this piece is mangled. 2) The obvious hands 3) One of the fish is actually an enormous lemon for some reason 4) AI also rarely gets jewelry correct -- look at the earrings and how they are molding to her face 5) Look at the way all of her facial features seemed like they were pasted from a different place.
1) These fish, again. 2) Her hands, again. 3) Her body just molds into the weird conglom of sea stuff. Her top is actually pulled allllll the way back, follow it under her arm. 4) This one isn’t even actually a mermaid she’s a horror construct As stated above, AI can look really good from a distance, but once you start to see the tells, you won’t be able to stop seeing them.
I had a great time talking with Santa about The Last Hand on Roleplaying as Smart People! Check out the interview in video, or the podcast anywhere you listen to podcasts.
Get notified when the campaign goes live on Kickstarter!
I do like this website but the primary thing I do on it is block and report spam accounts and I don't think I've had that issue anywhere else on the internet.
