Northern Weird, Quixotic TRPG Vorthos

Hi, I am Elias, 29 years old geek/weirdo from Finland. This blog is where I post some of my ideas, jokes, headcanons, fandom speculations, and other ramblings of daily life or just reblog amusing, pretty or interesting posts. Asks and messages are always welcome! he/any cis. avatar by @samettimato

[rabbitkinglune777]

mirror of me (a piece on identity)

[rabbitkinglune777]

goddamn I'm proud of this piece

[cumdumpstiel]

so cool how advanced the algorithm has become, it literally only takes like a decade or more of spying on all my internet activity and then it can expertly curate a selection of 15-20 youtube videos that i don't really want to watch, and then keep showing me those videos over and over again for a week so i can scroll past them again. the future is now

[txttletale]

mtg's the hobbit set is fucking hysterical because as it turns out there are not enough things in one very short book to make even a small magic set and so they are literally having to make cards of every ranbdom sentence that was said in the book just to fill slots

[something-soup-something]

wouldn’t the Lord of the rings work better in that case?

[txttletale]

ah, well, you see, they already made a Lord of the Rings set in 2023. it was a huge success and so they decided that clearly iut needed a sequel, and what better to form a sequel adaptation of comparable scope than the hobbit, something which has never gone wrong before,

[txttletale]

it's genuinely baffling how literally the entire last three years of magic have been shaped by wotc being totally blindsided by the failure of one of the worst ideas of all time

[txttletale]

players wil love paying the same amount of money for less than half the number of cards, especially if there's a ton of duplicates. Im so sure about this that im going to plan our next three years of sets around this including signing contracts with outside partners that i cant go back on, which i would never need to of course because this is such a good idea that will be incredibly succesful,

[carrotchipper]

Team Touden

[punkitt-is-here]

i love that sakurai on two separate occasions has been like "what the fuck are those? i dont know. no one knows. they simply are"

[witchofanguish]

[mahead-ithurt]

Always remember that the EU did a study in 2013 about the effects of piracy on media publishers and found that there is no correlation between piracy and sales! (And then they tried to hide that study bc that's not the result they wanted)

So piracy is at worst not even a problem, and at best it's free advertisement.

Source: (the link to the actual study is in the article)

EU withheld a study that shows piracy doesn't hurt sales - Engadget

In 2013, the European Commission ordered a €360,000 ($430,000) study on how piracy affects sales of music, books, movies and games in the EU

[werewolf-usa]

[talentlesshuman]

🪷Lily Pad & Frog ✖️ Miku 🐸

[akeussel]

[datsderbunnyblog]

This comment was left on a post about making the most of the Libby app. "Excessive use of generous lending policies" is the most absurd phrase I've ever seen anyone use to discuss libraries.

[catboycommunist]

evergreen

[xxxxactly]

Brutalist maze, Seattle

[3liza]

its called Freeway Park and while it is one of the most interesting single examples of Brutalism in the united states and im proud of it, it is so poorly designed in terms of public safety that it has been renovated twice(?) but continues to be geographically troubling, as its design has facilitated a lot of murders over the years. it was the subject of a funny but gruesome article in the STranger in 2002 called Topography of Terror. the city doesnt keep official tally of how many murders or assaults have happened IN the park but two men in their 30s were stabbed nonfatally during a robbery there earlier this year, for example.

[commiemartyrshighschool]

Suspect that building mazes is perhaps not conducive to public safety, outside of minotaur isolation scenarios.

[itiitbbbd]

[itsmissing]

design comm for a "fashion disaster of a disco wizard"

[dizzyghoast]

every so often i remember how awesome the modern interconnected multicultural world is. i grew up getting to hear fairy tales from all over the world. africa, asia, europe, america. everywhere in between. i can have bagels for breakfast, curry for lunch, and ramen for dinner without even leaving the city limits. music and art and philosophy and technology that originated thousands of miles and years apart from eachother have come together and interwoven into something greater than the sum of its parts. its hard not fall into despair when thinking about the horrors but god. god the wonders.

[dizzyghoast]

you can have friends on the other side of the planet! neither of you even has to travel!!!!! you can just talk to them whenever!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I want to make a dungeon game but I'm not sure how I should handle the settler-colonial implications of "going into an Unexplored location, killing its inhabitants and robbing them". Any tips?

If I'm being completely honest, I just don't think I'm the right person to ask about it because, while I do have a bunch of thoughts about the underlying political implications of the gameplay structure of dungeon games, I'm not particularly inclined to try to fix them.

I have accepted that a lot of the elements of dungeon games whose underlying implications I find to be ideologically questionable are the exact same elements that make dungeon games fun for me from a gameplay perspective. The entire shtick of PCs in a dungeon game is essentially "get rich by plundering Uncivilized places and bringing that wealth back to Civilized places", and some of the most fun gameplay happens when you lean into that job description. The entire dichotomy between "wilderness" vs. "civilization" where Civilized places are small havens of safety in a sea of untamed wilderness, which is dangerous and unexplored and waiting for brave adventurers to plunder it and extract wealth from it which they then bring back to a Civilized place is like. Dripping with settler-colonial implications no matter how you slice it, and yet it makes for a very satisfying baked-in gameplay loop.

Simply put, a lot of the things that make dungeon games fun for me as *games* come from things that, at the core, don't align with my real-world politics, and will never align with them even if I were to try to spend all my creative efforts trying to hammer them into that shape. And I'm fine with that. It's not even like dungeon games are unique in that regard. You could say the same about like. The vast majority of shooters. Or survival crafting games. Or like almost every single action movie I have ever enjoyed. I choose to simply acknowledge this and sit with that discomfort rather than spending my creative efforts trying to square that particular circle.

Now, if you *want* to try to square the circle of making a dungeon game with Good Politics I think the most I can give you is advice about what NOT to do: A surefire way to end up with a game that has just as (if not more) fucked up implications is to acknowledge the fucked-up amoral nature of the actions the a standard dungeon game has the PCs engage in, and go "okay but what if they were targeting all those fucked up actions at people/creatures who Deserve It". You will *not* solve the problem of making a dungeon game with Good Politics if you go the route of trying to find the correct Ontologically Evil target, all you're going to do is show your ass about your unexamined ideologically questionable politics. Whatever idea you can come up with on this front has already been tried and turns out it had equally (if not more) fucked up implications, and we know this because unfortunately this is the route that most people trying to square the circle of Dungeon Game But With Good Politics end up deciding to go.

[impossiblepackage]

the closest you’re gonna get to a dungeon game minus the colonialist vibes is like. “there used to be a wizard and somebody’s gotta go clear out their tower before the fucked up wizard experiments get loose”. which is a perfectly fine premise, but also it’s one premise for a dungeon. and for a good dungeon game, you need lots of different sorts of dungeons.

but ultimately, you’re trying to find a woke version of breaking into somewhere in order to kill and rob the inhabitants. which uh. might be difficult. even if you cut out any intelligent or otherwise person-ish enemies, you’re still left with “break into a rare ecosystem in order to slaughter the local wildlife and plunder the resources available”.

[dwarvendiaries]

Decolonising the dungeoncrawl... Yeah, I think first thing you're going to have to do is let go of the idea of PCs being generally morally good (or even neutral).

Most deconstructions avoid the dungeon crawl structure altogether. For example in Spire(by Grant Howitt and Christopher Taylor), characters are a racialised Drow underclass in a colonised society, taking physical and mental damage to achieve their goals through political manipulation and paramilitary resistance.

Heart (also by Howitt and Taylor) takes a slightly different approach. It tackles the dungeon crawl head on by deliberately leaning further into the darkness. Character advancement is guided by amoral, immaterial Callings. While Heart follows the dungeoncrawl in setting and character classes, (like Spire) it is more a story-driven game than a challenge game. Scenes are connected pointcrawl-style. That said, Heart's survival horror mechanics still need players to manage their resources carefully if they want to make it. Heart also bakes the PCs' relationship with adventuring environment into its rules, with the mechanics for securing Connections between dungeon Landmarks.

There's still issues with these games of course, but I think they serve as a good starting point for where you'd begin to write an anti-colonial dungeoncrawler.

[zorbakpants]

A Torch In The Dark by NotWriting has a slightly different dungeon crawling premise of "the old Royals were cavorting with demons and now the Old Town district of the city is real fucking cursed. Go sort that out" which is like the wizard tower idea but different enough to me that I wanted to point it out (and plug a really fantastic game)

[imsobadatnicknames2]

I truly do very do much enjoy A Torch In The Dark, so don't take this as being rude or dismissive of you or the game you're trying to plug, but I think if we're talking about game tropes and genres with unsavory ideological underpinings, I think "our old political enemies were cavorting with literal demons" is kind of its own can of worms from a meta-textual perspective. And that's also fine, I like engaging with media with messy politics ultimately.

[jarfieid]

I was watching someone else play the new rhythm heaven game and I became so entranced with this little thing that I had to make it into a gif