Well, there won’t be my usual “Descent Into The Rotting Heart” post this week. We didn’t play last weekend, so I have no new story of adventure, horror, and the prices of each to share. What I do have is some thoughts about my approach to creating a “holiday special” since our next session was going to be on Christmas Eve and our previous session was in the middle of Hanukkah, both of which are major winter holidays and very good reasons for my players to not attend a session of Heart: The City Beneath even if I don’t really celebrate either of those holidays myself. So, instead of starting the next leg of the game and having to stop it partway through a Session for at least twice as long as usual, I’ve decided to take advantage of the fact that the party has gotten split up to do a bunch of smaller one-off sessions with each player. It will also help me solidify the narrative since we’re now about twenty percent of the way through the first (and possibly only) arc and I need to start pulling some of the threads a bit more tightly than I have been up to now. I’ve got a pretty solid base for what I think is going to happen and I’ve sprinkled in enough stuff for each of the players that I THINK I know where they want to take their characters’ stories, but it never hurts to solidfy this stuff hand-in hand with my players [the time between writing and posting this has proven this instinct to be correct since one of my player’s goals for their characters are super different than what I expected].
Continue readingMiradoon The Silent Sorcerer
“Miradoon, can you please take your stupid little toys and get out of the way?”
Continue readingBIGTOP BURGER Serves A Hefty Meal Of Absurd Humor, Plot Twists, And Foreshadowing
One of my favorite YouTube treats is watching the BIGTOP BURGER series by Ian Worthington (aka Worthikids on YouTube). There’s no real schedule for releases, so it’s always a delightful surprise to see one of my YouTube notifications telling me there’s a new video to watch. And while I enjoy all of Worthikids’ animations, the slow-rolling BIGTOP BURGER series is my favorite. This YouTube show features Worthikid’s incredibly stylized art, expressive animation, made-to-order music, and combined visual and spoken humor, making the entire show an incredible feat given that he does everything but the voice acting himself (and he even does some of that himself). While the story might seem incredibly basic, perhaps even looking like a mere formality required to create a platform on which the jokes of Season 1 are built, the recently completed (and even more recently compiled) Season 2 reveals a slowly building narrative that has been foreshadowed from the very beginning. I won’t say much about it right now, because I think you should absolutely take thirty-two minutes out of your day to watch both seasons before coming back here (because there will absolutely be spoilers below this paragraph), but I was completely caught off guard by how well-crafted the narrative is now that we have more of it revealed to us.
Continue readingI’ll Be Home For The Holidays
The holidays are here. Some are already happening and some are swiftly approaching and yet I have no idea what I’m going to do this year. Since I went no-contact with my entire family except my younger siblings, I’ve celebrated with two of them, observed it via discord calls during the start of the pandemic, joined my local friends’ family at their house, and then spent it with those same friends who had to cancel their travel plans due to the nasty weather. I thought I might travel to visit some friends (the ones on the east coast that I’ve drived to visit twice this year) but the thought of going anywhere far away fills me with preemptive exhaustion so severe I had to take a fifteen minute break from what I was doing when I idly considered doing another pair of one thousand mile drives. Sure, I’ve got my longest break from work in years thanks to some extra holidays my employer gave all the US employees and a few days of PTO I have to spend before January nineth (a whole twelve consecutive days), but I REALLY need to take some time to myself. I’m incredibly burned out and I could really use some actual rest. Sure, I’d love to see my friends and I’m sure I’d have a great time visiting them, but it would probably not be terribly restful, regardless of whether I drove or flew. Not to mention it’s a bit late in the year to be making plans like that.
Continue readingViolence As A Vehicle For Progression In Video Games
Over the past year, I’ve been thinking a lot about the place of violence in video games. Pretty much every game I’ve played this year requires some degree of violence in order to make forward progress. In my beloved RPGs, it is the central pillar of almost every game. Sure, there’s usually a story and some excellent character work, but almost the whole thing still revolves around violence. My favorite RPG from the past year, Chained Echoes, features combat as the main mechanic of moving around the world and the method of resolving every bit of story tension in the game (even if the story isn’t really about violence and is actually critical of how “the ends justify the means” style philosophies are almost always an excuse for power getting what it wants through violence). Perhaps the biggest game of the year, Baldur’s Gate 3, is incredibly violent, sometimes moreso than others because there are entirely legitimate, if digustingly evil, paths through the game that involve indiscriminate murder. Sure, both these games involve violence against monsters and people with little to distinguish the two groups from each other (and next-to-nothing to explicitly point out that maybe you’re the greatest monster of them all, in the case of Baldur’s Gate 3), but games with violence exclusively against monsters aren’t much better since they still require violence in order to progress the game. Even one of the cutest, most-delightful games I’ve played (Lil Gator Game) involved violence, albeit violence against cardboard “monsters” rather than against other people. There’s almost no escaping it, which is unfortunate because one of the things that drives my escapist desires the most these days is the amount of violence in the world.
Continue readingSuper Mario RPG Was A Fresh Blast From The Past
Well, it took a lot longer than I expected, thanks to hosting a holiday and briefly losing all of my free time to Baldur’s gate 3, but I beat Super Mario RPG. It was exactly as I remembered it. Well, broadly speaking anyway. All the challenges were the same. All the secrets I could remember were in the same spots. The boss fights where more or less the same. I struggled with the same action commands I always struggle with and had an easier time with some of the ones that relied on mechanical operation from the less-than-perfect SNES controller. The story was the same, the world felt the same, and I got to enjoy my walk through it the same way I’ve enjoyed every replay of the Super Nintendo original. Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars is definitely one of those games that will always seem bigger and more beautiful in my memory from my childhood than it ever will from any of my replays. It was a big deal when it came out, taking Mario from the world of platformers to the world of RPGs while adding in a delightful cast of characters that never showed up again, and it was a big deal to me as one of the few games I got to play by myself. It felt different from everything else I’d ever tried before then and it was my introduction to RPGs as a whole (a style of game I couldn’t play much since most video game RPGs had scantily clad feminine character in them, something that would have gotten me banned from playing the game at least and probably grounded as well).
Continue readingThis Moment And Place In My Life
This morning, as I prepared to take my post-workout shower, my morning playlist cycled over to a song that’s been on there for a while. I added “Wherever We Are Now” (from the game “Cassette Beasts” and the EP Same Old Story (from “Cassette Beasts” Original Soundtrack) to my daily preparation playlist this summer, during July, when I finally had the time to make some decent progress in the game. I then promptly stopped playing it on the weekends where I could be bothered to turn my PC on because I developed a crippling addiction to Baldur’s Gate 3, which took over my life for quite a while. Still, I’ve really enjoyed the soundtrack for the game and plan to get back to it eventually, if only because I’m limiting myself to songs from the soundtrack that I’ve already heard in-game and I really want to listen to the rest of it.
Continue readingEmett’s Villainous Plans
Daisy plopped onto Emett’s bed. “Now that I’ve explained the entire saga, what’ve you been doing lately?”
Continue readingSensible Precautions In A Wisconsin Winter
It is snowing as I write this. It is not the first snow of the season–that came after Thanksgiving, falling after midnight in a powdery coating that lingered for days, even through warmth and sunlight that should have sent it away. It is the first snowfall that happened during what could generously be called daylight hours, though. A light, gentle dusting that will stick mostly to the snow left over from a week ago as the brined, salted, sanded, or grit-covered roads force whatever lands there to vanish swiftly. There will be more snow, soon, at least according to the forecast, and we have reached the time of year where it will likely stick until we get another mid-winter heatwave of temperatures in the fifties [which has already happened]. Snow in a brown winter can be a deceptive thing, lingering longer than you would think as the regional draughts isolate it so long that it has no choice for survival but to hide in unseen corners and mix with dirt until the muddy slush it becomes is finally melted down by the weight of its disguise. It can last weeks, maybe even months if its cold enough, but people who desire some semblance of the frosted winters they recall from years past will often seek it out and, like a flower plucked for a vase, bring a swift end to something that might have lived longer on its own.
Continue readingBack To Baldur’s Gate 3 Again
Larian, the studio behind the incredibly popular and much-nominated-for-game-awards Baldur’s Gate 3, released a new major patch to the game today (well, a week ago today). There’s a whole lot of stuff in that patch, but the thing I’m most excited for is the opportunity to return to my only complete save file and beat the final boss again so I can see the epilogue they’ve added! My main criticism of BG3’s ending was how abrupt it felt given that you sorta just get through the final cinematic, see a couple other scenes, and then it’s over. No idea who followed up on what and how anyone is doing since, like, the last I saw of Asterion was him running from sunlight as it slowly burned him to a crisp. So now I can go back and see how it all wraps up an appropriate in-game six months after the final battle! I’m very excited for this, which is important because I still haven’t gone back to playing ANY of my other BG3 save files since I stopped playing after hurting my own feelings with how evil and awful I was in my Evil Dark Urge file. I’m finally almost ready to get over that. Ready enough to update the game, anyway, though it might take a bit for me to actually play it since I’ve still got Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars and Spider-Man 2 to finish [I actually played it for too many hours the day after I wrote this and haven’t stopped playing it since]. And Armored Core VI at some point, though I might not make myself wait until after I’ve played that since it’s entirely possible that I might just not really enjoy it. I still haven’t played more than the first level and a couple training things.
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