At the prompting of my players in my “Demigods of Daelen” Dungeons and Dragons campaign, I bought and started reading the first five books in the Percy Jackson series. I’ve only made it through three of them so far (I have had a lot of other stuff going on since I ordered these a couple months ago), but each one wrapped up in a single reading session (not counting me reading a the first book a chapter at a time for exactly two chapters before I just dug in and read the whole thing). They’re light, fun books to read. There’s not a lot of tension in them, at least not yet, though there’s plenty of spirit. All of this combined makes it incredibly easy to get swept up in the story and the worldbuilding is light but deliberate enough that there’s never really a point that takes me out of the story, even when someone hops in an old plane that somehow has a gun loaded with live ammunition and uses it to shoot stuff. The whole series, up through book three at least, does a good job of brushing off the strange intersections of the fantastical and the modern without breaking my suspension of disbelief, and I can see why so many people have these books as a major influence in their childhood or teen years. If I’d read these books as a child, I’d probably feel similarly. Hell, I might even still like them because the author hasn’t done anything absolutely horrible like becoming the loudest, vilest, and most harmful terf currently living, unlike some other franchises from my childhood. Still, while I can absolutely enjoy some decent Young Adult fiction, I’m not sure this franchise is the helpful touchstone my players think it is.
Continue readingPercy Jackson
Developing Touchstones For Something New
One of the strongest aspects of the campaign I’m starting up to run in place of The Magical Millennium (which I wrote about yesterday) is the feeling of it I had in my head. Sure, I could talk about the core themes and how I imagined the general story of such a game might play out, but it’s a lot easier to build a set of touchstones I can refer to in order to indicate specific things about the game. These often come up in tabletop games, at the individual campaign level or at the ruleset level for games that are seeking to convey a particular feeling no matter the specifics of the game. For instance, one of my favorite games that I’ve never played (though I hope to change that eventually) is Beam Saber and the rulebook starts out with a bunch of references to various mecha anime to use as a touchstone. The general purpose of a list of touchstones like this is to get as many people as possible some idea of what the game being played should feel like. Beam Saber is a game about struggling to live during a massive galactic war that you can’t hope to influence, with an emphasis on either coming together or doing what you must to eventually get out alive, so all of the anime the referenced point in that general direction. It’s a good way for specific genre games to indicate what part of the genre the game is emulating. At the campaign level, it tends to get more specific about aspects of the particular continuity of a game that you’re playing through. Typically, I tend to start out with strong ideas that don’t necessarily need touchstones, images to help paint a picture of the world, some music if I’ve had the time to figure it out, and also some of my own writing if I’ve had the time and energy to put towards it.
Continue reading