story-threads

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thank you to person who left a comment/review on my game! I apologize that I can only write in essays and I’ve been starving to talk about this game for years with anyone! I promise I tried to edit it down.

the solution is obvious. everyone leave me more comment/reviews so I can practice writing replies more like a regular cool human writer

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looking for public domain art of mechs is basically impossible but in the process of looking found: this thing.

(thanks to LOC's public domain collections: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.rbc/rosenwald.0007.1 Valturio, Roberto, 1405-1475. De re militari.)

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ohhhh that would have been a great idea! I ended up going with medieval mishmash cause I knew one of the mech votes was me and it seemed like a decent “vanilla” starting point, but I did want to do another short demo to focus on genre adaptation, so maybe mechs with caparisons in that one!

Plugging away with Squire, my game about trying to work for a knight and become a knight and decide if you even want this, all at the same time! Thanks so much to everyone for your support.

I’ve been wanting to make a demo game for Squire and the trouble is I keep getting distracted by playing the game. So: let’s pre-make some setting & character decisions so I can hopefully streamline a demo!

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ohh that would have been such a good idea! I went with medieval mishmash because I knew I voted for mechs but I do want to make another demo to talk about genre adaptation in more detail so. maybe that one will have mechs in caparisons.

Plugging away with Squire, my game about trying to work for a knight and become a knight and decide if you even want this, all at the same time! Thanks so much to everyone for your support.

I’ve been wanting to make a demo game for Squire and the trouble is I keep getting distracted by playing the game. So: let’s pre-make some setting & character decisions so I can hopefully streamline a demo!

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Ok, have been thinking about trying to film or record this demo and wondered what the preference actually was for checking out something new, cause for me it's a complicated math of when I would actually watch a video vs. listen to a podcast vs. read.

In your own personal opinion, if you were kind of interested in a new game and wanted to find out more about it and get comfortable with the mechanics before playing, what kind of presentation would you opt for?

Assume there are written and illustrated instructions available already, there's no other podcast/video options for observing a playthrough, that all these versions are available, and that you are interested in the game.

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Just learned about Bull Press, a tabletop publisher that focuses on games that are prison compliant (no hardcover, no dice, no maps), and their catalogue seems sick as hell. Def gonna pick smth up when I get paid next. They do a lot of donation work with books for prisoners programs!

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California Relief Bundle

Hello game designers, Necrosoft Games is currently running a game jam to collect game submissions to raise funds for California Fire Relief.

They are looking exclusively for paid games, and are only collecting contributions for a week, so if you have a game that you'd like to contribute, please sign up here!

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The photo is not very good and I still need to wash and iron it, but I couldn't wait to show my first ever big cross stitch project;

Love how it turned out, especially with the green embroidery thread (cotton thread on linen)

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I launched a Patreon after a couple years of dithering at patreon.com/storythreads . It’s just a tip jar for now, for funds to put back into creative work, commissions, etc in the future. Process notes, demos, more personal reflections might end up there long term but for now, it’s just a jar. If you want to support my creative work, I’d be very grateful! I’m not in dire need though; this is only if you want to support the work. Especially if you have limited funds, there’s zero pressure here, give where it matters.

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THE GREEN KNIGHT (2021) dir. David Lowery

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In the past fifty years, fantasy’s greatest sin might be its creation of a bland, invariant, faux-Medieval European backdrop. The problem isn’t that every fantasy novel is set in the same place: pick a given book, and it probably deviates somehow. The problem is that the texture of this place gets everywhere.

What’s texture, specifically? Exactly what Elliot says: material culture. Social space. The textiles people use, the jobs they perform, the crops they harvest, the seasons they expect, even the way they construct their names. Fantasy writing doesn’t usually care much about these details, because it doesn’t usually care much about the little people – laborers, full-time mothers, sharecroppers, so on. (The last two books of Earthsea represent LeGuin’s remarkable attack on this tendency in her own writing.) So the fantasy writer defaults – fills in the tough details with the easiest available solution, and moves back to the world-saving, vengeance-seeking, intrigue-knotting narrative. Availability heuristics kick in, and we get another world of feudal serfs hunting deer and eating grains, of Western name constructions and Western social assumptions. (Husband and wife is not the universal historical norm for family structure, for instance.)

Defaulting is the root of a great many evils. Defaulting happens when we don’t think too much about something we write – a character description, a gender dynamic, a textile on display, the weave of the rug. Absent much thought, automaticity, the brain’s subsconscious autopilot, invokes the easiest available prototype – in the case of a gender dynamic, dad will read the paper, and mom will cut the protagonist’s hair. Or, in the case of worldbuilding, we default to the bland fantasy backdrop we know, and thereby reinforce it. It’s not done out of malice, but it’s still done.

The only way to fight this is by thinking about the little stuff. So: I was quite wrong. You do need to worldbuild pretty hard. Worldbuild against the grain, and worldbuild to challenge. Think about the little stuff. You don’t need to position every rain shadow and align every tectonic plate before you start your short story. But you do need to build a base of historical information that disrupts and overturns your implicit assumptions about how societies ‘ordinarily’ work, what they ‘ordinarily’ eat, who they ‘ordinarily’ sleep with. Remember that your slice of life experience is deeply atypical and selective, filtered through a particular culture with particular norms. If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing – because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

We... need worldbuilding by Seth Dickinson

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Ok, done gathering setup rolls for a demo Squire game! There were a lot of ties so I rolled for a winner on those. I might reserve them for an alternate version to demo how these prompts might work across settings. So the main winners are:

Setting/genre:

Medieval Mishmash, Ren faire style world

The Squire:

Middling Your family are skilled artisans or merchants in the new and tiny middle class, powerful despite their mundane bloodline. What do they do? Are you proud or embarrassed of them? What are their hopes and fears for you? Better With Horses Than People You’re very good with horses, true, but not quite so good with people. What about people is challenging? What’s different when you’re in the stables? Strange It’s certainly not going to be hard to tell you apart from the rest.

The Lands:

Diverse, bustling with trade and travelers from far and wide

The Liege:

A recently ascended young heir, untested

The Knight:

First impression: Beautiful They are striking in appearance; people gravitate towards them Oath: Protect To be a shield for those who have none (or to those who paid well) Coat of arms: Turnip and leaping fish Holdings: A couple of hog farms sliced off an argumentative noble’s traditional lands Priority: Responsibility The knight feels a burden of care for you and all who answer to them Failing: Idealist They do not know when to quit, they hold nothing back, and they will drag you along to tilt at windmills. Dying nobly is almost as good as winning to them.

and most importantly

The Steed:

Outer appearance: Skrunkly Inner nature: Friendly

as one last plug this is to make a demo for Squire, a solo storytelling RPG that is out for playtesting now!

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Now rolling for the Knight the squire is assigned to serve: