#I wanted to explore WHY people might not want to screw the PCs over

[victorluvsalice]

AU Thursday: Valicer In The Dark -- Duskwall Slang

Since we did a VITD lookbook yesterday, I figured we might as well keep the train going today and talk a little bit about some of the worldbuilding I've done for the Valicer In The Dark version of Duskwall (the main setting of Blades In The Dark). Specifically, I've decided to share the short list of slang that I've come up with for people to use! Because that's always fun, right? :) The first entry on this list is taken from the book itself (page 42, specifically) and adapted a little bit, but all the rest are purely my own invention:

-->“Flashing a/their/your Coin” and variants – making an ostentatious display of wealth, to the disgust of everyone around them (the term "Coin" itself is in fact slang for a large sum of money, taken from the days when the Imperial treasury would actually mint large solid gold coins intended to cover major transactions; most people these days rely on small silver pieces called "slugs"). Example: “You spent all that money on THAT outfit? Really flashing your Coin, huh?”

-->“Moving to Six Towers” – indicates that the person said to be moving was previously rich and important, but has fallen on extremely hard times and is on the verge of ruin (referencing the fact that Six Towers USED to be one of the richest neighborhoods in the city, but has turned into a bit of a slum with most of the nobility previously living there moving into Brightstone). Example: “The Everglots’ leviathan ship hasn’t had a good haul in six months. Think they’ll be moving to Six Towers soon.”

-->“Scavenging in the Lost District” – indicates that the person said to be scavenging is taking an INCREDIBLE risk in the hopes of getting a high reward (due to the Lost District being an abandoned neighborhood outside the lightning barrier keeping the city safe and guarded by the Spirit Wardens...but also having many lost riches within its bounds). Example: “You want to rob Lord Mayor Powerwallet? Talk about scavenging in the Lost District!”

-->“Living Coin to Coin” – living paycheck to paycheck, as the average weekly wage in Duskwall is equivalent to a Coin’s worth of money. Example: “Poor old Tom – what with his sick mother and five children needing feeding, he’s living Coin to Coin.”

-->“Only good for mushrooms” – indicates that the thing being talked about is absolute shit. Example: “Don’t order the ‘special ale’ at the Withered Talon, it’s only good for mushrooms.”

-->“You want to call the crows?” – equivalent of “You want to get us killed?” in response to a risky course of action (referencing the Deathseeker crows that find corpses for the Spirit Wardens). Example: “You want to FIGHT Lord Mayor Powerwallet’s bodyguards? You want to call the crows?!”

-->“Barrowcleft approved” – indicates the item in question is homemade but of very high quality (Barrowcleft being a poor, rural neighborhood with one of the best, and fairest, markets in the city). Example – “You carved this yourself? Why, this is Barrowcleft approved work and no mistake!”

-->“Dust Day fare” – an extremely meager meal made from poor-quality ingredients, referencing the popular nickname for the fifth day of the week from Charhollow, which itself references the fact that poor people’s food stores are the thinnest on this day. Example – “Canal water soup with potato peelings. This is Dust Day fare, all right.”

-->“Crit Six/rolled a crit six” – means that something is exceedingly good, or that something that you have done has succeeded beyond your wildest dreams; references the most popular dice game in Duskwall, where rolling double sixes is an automatic win. Example – “I went to open the safe, and I rolled a crit six – the door practically came off in my hands!”

-->“Welcher” – a term for someone who hires a criminal or crew for a job, and then not only refuses to pay them, but actively tries to murder them (directly or otherwise) to avoid doing so. Only one of the highest leaders of the most well-known crews may declare someone a Welcher, and then only after receiving sufficient proof, as the term is a death sentence – the scoundrels of Duskwall do not take kindly to their clients trying to stiff them, in both senses of the word. Example: “All right, I’ve seen enough – I’m ready to declare that Lord E.A. Bethesda is a Welcher. Hope he’s prepared for every scoundrel in the city coming for his ass...”

Further updates to come if and when I think of more stuff! Which I probably will, as this is fun. :)

[dmsden]

Up from the Table - LARPing

Hullo, Gentle Readers. With a 5th Monday in the month, that can only mean a Freestyle article. And this week, I want to talk about one of my favorite sorts of RPGs that doesn't involve sitting around a table...yes, I'm talking about LARPing!

Now, I know plenty of folks who favor the Mind's Eye Theater/Rock, Paper, Scissors style of LARP, or the extremely RP-centric "Nordic LARP", and there's nothing wrong with those styles of LARPing. I myself, however, am a dyed-in-the-wool lover of "boffer" style LARPs, where you get together with your friends in the woods, wear silly and amazing costumes, and beat each other up with swords made out of plumbing supplies.

LARPing is a lot like RPGs in general. When people who aren't in the game view it from the outside, it looks completely ridiculous. I've been LARPing for almost 30 years, and I still chuckle and cringe when videos like the infamous "Lightning Bolt" video pop up. (https://youtu.be/j_ekugPKqFw)

I can watch that video and smile, seeing the way it looks in general. But I know that, if I were in that LARP, that would probably be an intense moment. It's just like, if someone's not in your tabletop game, and they try to listen in, it can be hard to get the drama and intensity.

And LARPing IS intense.

Why so intense? Well, it's a combination of things. When you have to make decisions in the moment, you don't have the luxury of carefully considering the options. You have to decide right now, or people might die...well, not real people, and not every decision has that kind of weight behind it, but you know what I mean. There's a very different level of adrenaline that you get when you're actually swinging a sword or running from a module than when you're sitting around a table rolling dice and describing the action.

There's also a level of intensity from the immersion. Most LARPs try to keep as much in game as possible from the moment game begins until the game off call at the end. For many LARPs, including the one I run, that means that, from Friday night at about 10 PM until Sunday afternoon around 12-1, you ARE your character, and you're keeping everything in character as much as possible. Sure, like any other kind of RPG, there's some screwing around, but this is usually quiet and private, done under your breath, giggling with a small close knit group of friends, rather than shared by everyone "around the table".

Different LARPs handle different aspects of combat and adventure differently. But you can generally expect to explore, go on "modules", pick locks, find traps, battle monsters, get involved in magical rituals, go on "fetch" quests, role-play with a wide variety of people, sing, and generally have a crazy time.

LARPing is like many things - you get out of it what you put into it. If you do minimal work on putting together a costume and props, you don't write any kind of character background, and you don't put yourself out there, then you might be in for a dull weekend. But if you write a cool backstory for your character and reach out to meet and connect with people, you're likely to have adventures and end up with people who'll be your friends for life. I've performed the weddings of many LARPing friends, and I'm attending the wedding of a LARP couple in just two weeks. When I go to my LARP, I see people I've known for over a decade. And I often make new friends every time I go, as new PCs and NPCs come through the game.

Before I sign off, I'll give you one final plea. If you've never LARPed, and you think you might want to try, jump on the Google and do a search for LARPs in your area. There are tons of them, all over the country. If you're anywhere in New England, you can even consider coming ot the LARP that I help run, The Isles (www.theisleslarp.org).

Is LARPing nerdier than regular tabletop RPGing? Perhaps. It's better exercise, though!

[juliusohcz625-blog]

Edit a picture with Windows 10 with the easy edit photo

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Edit photo for Windows

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As I was looking for a useful edit a photo, I eventually stumbled over this very awesome one All it needs is actually a lot of creativity and also an effectiveness of some of the greatest photo modifying program supplied on the market. Edit a photo performs possess several of the functions is well-known for, which happens somewhat helpful when you've determined you have actually like to make an effort your hand on something more high end than edit an image and also insert people into photos. Edit a photo may additionally import freeze frames coming from video, aside from various data. And when you are actually experiencing a bit idle or it is just plain unaware concerning how to take advantage of a few of the devices, a wizard can help you modification the principles just as lights, focus, shade, and also sharpening of images. For this people who like their photographs in different screen editions, the program aids you flawlessly assembled images to make a scenic picture. As well as when it's time to series off your digital photography abilities, you can easily pick one of the photo package layouts to immediately print all of them in a specific size.

When I was searching the web for a really easy edit a photo, I eventually tripped over this very awesome one

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Edit a photo for Windows 10 or edit an image software to edit pictures or flip photos

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Edit a photo for Windows 10 and editing photo software to edit pics and photo manipulation

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[terryblount]

Exploring In The Outer Worlds Is Rewarding In A Different Way (Spoilers)

Obsidian’s latest RPG The Outer Worlds is out now. And it’s oh-so refreshing to see this style of western RPG being handled this way. It’s not about the open world. It’s about the world, divided into smaller but dense chunks. But what’s the most interesting part of the world in The Outer Worlds is how a lot of the small stories, subplot, and what you assume to be just world-building lore, has major ramifications. And uncovering them all through curiosity certainly feels rewarding.

Not only does the many side stories and lore you can uncover on your own makes the world-building better, it serves a bigger purpose. In the various locations you visit in The Outer Worlds, all of these do tie back into the main plot. And these details are all found through genuine curiosity. Maybe you overheard a conversation. Or go down the rabbit hole and ask about an incident as seen through the various town folk. Or hack terminals and read logs not meant for your eyes. And it’s up to you to connect these dots together.

The best part is, no matter how you role-play and what side you feel like supporting, there’s enough evidence or cases to justify your character’s decision-making. You can definitely make these decisions on your whim and be the wildcard as most RPGs of this ilk allow, but letting you to discover nuggets of information to make more informed decisions, or to strengthen your convictions, is a small touch of masterclass world-building and player empowerment.

Vague spoilers for the first big choice in the game follows

The Power Generator Dilemma

The first starting area, Emerald Vale and the town of Edgewater, is such one example. As you get the lay of the land you should encounter the town mayor, Reed Thompson. If you never liked capitalism and expect to screw the hyper-capitalist that governs the outer worlds of Halcyon, you probably wanted to hate this person already. You meet him while he was interrogating potential companion Parvati over something. It looks serious, but the mayor seemed to be calm about it.

He then talks to you and makes a case on why you should help him. There’s a power regulator you need for your ship. The deserters who abandoned Edgewater has one (but there’s also one in the town). Redirect the power generator to only supply the town and you can go nab it.

He makes a strong case. In this time of need where a plague has strucked, these deserters decided to run away, making life in town even harder. He is calm, but wish you can talk sense to the them into returning back and help the Edgewater get back on its feet.

Now, you can either have a changed view of this Reed character right here, or feel like he’s just bullshitting and spitting out mandated corporate spiel. The writing here gives you enough reasons to view it as one or another.

But the plague is not just a random word drop. Snoop around town and you can find the affects of the plague. The town cemetery is huge and the grave keeper (or “Junior Inhumer”) is already collecting grave fees in advance, which you can go do for him.

From this side quest, you also get to meet Abernathy, who is old and suspected that he might have fallen to a plague, which opens another side quest to retrieve medicine outside of company rations. In this other side quest, you’ll discover that medicine is limited and is distributed on meritocracy, to the point that the mayor’s stance on the plague is for those affected to… go work harder.

This discovery would make a strong case to not support the corporate boot licker.

There is also the story of a recent suicide. Going down that rabbit hole just shows how ridiculous the corporates are treating human life. “Sick leave” and “closest living relative” have a very wild interpretation if you work for Spacer’s Choice.

Outside of town there is one other faction, the mentioned deserters. Led by Adelaide McDevitt, she is utterly unsatisfied with how Edgewater is being run and decided to make a home, with her followers, at the abandoned Botanical Lab. Curiously, these folks are all fine and healthy, and those infected by the plague gets treated and back being fit as a fiddle.

And of course, following the crumbs by asking people about this and you’ll uncover some hard truths that will change your outlook of the corporate Spacer’s Choice. And also the deserters.

While Adelaide seems to come off as the old lady that you probably instinctively be symphatising with, her attitude does no favours. She is very persuasive, saying that you will look like a hero if you divert the power generator to the deserters. And if Parvati tags along with you, she will use the tragedy of her father’s death as a bargaining chip to show how corrupt the suits are. While true, it comes off rude, and you can totally call Adelaide out for doing that. And it makes a good case to not side with her.

Dig more about her past history and you can uncover her true motives for deserting the town, which may or may not change your outlook of the character.

If you pursue this little observation, you will find the big reason why and it leads to some pretty interesting twists. If you feel paralysed by the choice of which side to support there’s plenty of detail you can snoop about to make more reasonable, or rational choices.

In my playthrough, I felt convinced that Adelaide does not deserve that power, and sided with Reed and the corporations. But I can see in a future playthrough where I can have a character choosing the other side, and have that decision justified as well. Siding with Caesar’s Legion in Fallout New Vegas always feels wrong, in my eyes. In The Outer Worlds, it’s not black and white – there’s always a catch or a flaw that you need to live by if you support one faction or the other, and there’s mostly a good reason to side with them.

Spoilers end here

The Outer Worlds definitely delivers the role-playing aspect in an RPG. It lets you feel like you’ve discovering a new path or choice that you should make, even though it’s probably not hard-coded into the game to allow so. It gives players enough information to fill in the gap and roll with whatever choice they make while feeling good (or at least less bad) about it.

The reward of uncovering these small nuggets of side stories is an illusion, but man, what a good trick Obsidian has pulled. The end result is one of the most interesting worlds I have the chance to be immersed in a while.

Edgewater is not just a specific case either. All of the major locales you will visit and for all the major decisions you need to choose, there’s enough details to work with and uncover on your own. The game may lack an open world, but exploring The Outer Worlds is still rewarding in its own way and worth your time. Because the writing is so darn good.

The Outer Worlds is out now on the PS4, PC (Epic Games Store, Microsoft Store) and Xbox One. It is also available on Xbox Game Pass and Xbox Game Pass For PC.

Exploring In The Outer Worlds Is Rewarding In A Different Way (Spoilers) published first on https://touchgen.tumblr.com/

[preserving-ferretbrain]

Detention

by Ronan Wills

Thursday, 11 October 2018

Taiwan's history of martial law makes for an excellent portable horror game

Oooh! This is in the Axis of Awesome!~

Horror video games are in an odd spot right now. With my beloved Silent Hill buried beneath the ashes of Konami and the genre dormant in the big-budget space (although Capcom might be giving it a sharp poke back into wakefulness, if Resident Evil 7 and the upcoming Resident Evil 2 remake are anything to go by), gamers looking for a scary good time have increasingly turned to the indie scene to get their fix.

But even that’s starting to stagnate, with a plethora of shabby titles ripping off whatever the latest big trend is. The

Amnesia: The Dark Descent

clones weren’t too bad, but things got really dire once

Five Night’s At Freddy’s

came along.

There is, however, another trend that’s flown under the radar. In recent years, indie horror games from south-east Asia have started to crop up here and there. Developed with an international audience in mind but touting their local culture and mythology as a selling point, these games stand out both due to their point of origin and because they tend to take inspiration from older, more well-regarded horror classics, instead of chasing the latest flash in the pan. The trend seems to have begun with

DreadOut

, a Kickstarted game from Indonesia heavily inspired by the Fatal Frame/Project Zero franchise, and over the last few years more and more have popped up on Steam and other digital platforms.

Jonesing for something spooky to play and realizing that I hadn’t dipped my toe into this particular corner of the market yet, I browsed the Nintendo Switch online store and spotted

Detention

, a Taiwanese game from developer Red Candle. I remembered hearing good things about it when it was released on the PC early last year, but I didn’t know much about it past the basic plot setup and that it’s a 2D side-scrolling game.

Now I’m just kicking myself for not playing it sooner. Everyone who loves classic horror games and who harbours hope for the future of the genre needs to play this game immediately.

Detention

takes place in the 1960s, during the period of Taiwanese history known as the White Terror. The country is under the rule of the nationalist Kuomintang, who use anti-Communist paranoia and tension with neighbouring China to brutally stamp out any hint of dissent among the populace. Our protagonist is Fang Ray Shin, a seventeen year old high school student on the cusp of graduation and adulthood.

Trapped in her school during an unseasonable typhoon, Ray finds herself in a nightmarish version of her familiar world, where ghostly creatures roam the halls and supernatural manifestations force her to confront the events of her recent past--events that she either doesn’t remember, or is trying desperately to forget.

If that setup sounds just a wee bit familiar, then you’ll understand why I sat up and gasped in delight more or less the moment I started playing

Detention

. It’s very clearly and obviously riffing on the older

Silent Hill

games, and unlike many horror games that have tried to do this over the years, it both successfully distills the essence of what made

Silent Hill

so memorable and also manages to retain its own identity.

Despite the 2D presentation,

Detention’s

gameplay is as familiar and comfortable as a favourite pair of slippers. You explore spooky, elaborate environments, searching for clues and items to help you solve puzzles that usually operate on some amount of dream logic. You’ll use items on environmental objects, you’ll hunt down keys, you’ll find statues that look as though they’re meant to be holding something but are currently not holding anything...it’s very familiar survival horror fare. The puzzles are uniformly clever and intriguing; as the game goes on they ramp up in difficulty nicely, eventually requiring the sort of lateral thinking that leads to satisfying “ah ha!” moments. Smart environmental design means that you’ll never fail to progress simply because you didn’t press A on the right piece of background; things you’re meant to interact with are clearly signposted as such.

Where Detention diverges from its inspiration is in enemy encounters. Realizing that combat was always the worst part of classic horror games, Red Candle decided to do away with it entirely in favour of light stealth mechanics. You’ll be looking to avoid

Detention’s

eerie monsters rather than kill them, although I don’t want to spoil the main mechanic by which you do that because it’s pretty original. Enemies aren’t very common--they show up just enough that you’re always worried about running into one, but the game doesn’t throw them at you just for the sake of creating artificial difficulty. Puzzles and plot are the main focus here, particularly in the game's second half.

Said plot is easily

Detention’s

greatest asset. From the very first scene, where a teacher is called away by the school’s political officer for unknown reasons, the game establishes a heavy atmosphere of dread. Its handling of Taiwan’s history really demonstrates the difference between people telling the stories of their own culture and an outsider doing it. A western developer would likely have gone much heavier on the White Terror angle, rather than taking the much more nuanced approach that Red Candle did.

The White Terror is both ever-present and distant. Like all people who live through history, Ray isn’t aware that her experiences will one day seem extraordinary to future generations, or that the society she lives in will come to be viewed as a transient period of darkness between relative stretches of light. This is just her life; she and her classmates and family and teachers have the same daily concerns as anyone else living at any other time, they just happen to exist in an environment where mundane actions and worries can get people killed. Feeling stifled by her surroundings and her home life and yearning to escape, but not knowing what that would look like in practice, Ray takes the kinds of reckless actions that young people the world over are prone to. The fact that her life is engulfed in tragedy as a result isn’t treated as remarkable or even unfair; it’s just the reality of the time and place she happens to live in.

If you’re familiar with

Silent Hill

-inspired games, you’ll know that they like to have Big Plot Twists of a certain nature. Very early on, I figured out what I thought was going to be

Detention’s

Big Plot Twist, but it turns out that the developers were one step ahead of me. Obviously anticipating this reaction from savvy horror fans, they de-twist the twist by basically giving the game away well before the climax. The suggestive symbolism littered throughout the personalized hell that Ray finds herself in lays out the basic fundamentals of what happened to her and the other characters and why she’s in the situation she’s in very clearly, and then a combination of cut-scenes and documents makes it explicit if you’re paying any attention at all. This turns out to be a smart move on Red Candle’s part, as trying to conceal the truth for a Big Plot Twist would likely have failed, and the exact specifics of why everything happened is more interesting than the mere fact that it did happen.

Ray herself is one of the best-written videogame characters I’ve seen in years. Initially encountered through someone else’s perspective, she comes off at first glance as the sort of timid, helpless heroine that horror likes to go in for. But as you peel back the layers of the plot, she turns out to be something very different altogether, both stronger and weaker than she appeared at first, and heart-breakingly relatable even as she’s caught up in circumstances that most of the people playing as her will (hopefully) never experience.

More than just well-written, Detention is subtle and intelligent. Visuals, music, plot and dialogue weave together in eye-opening and unexpected ways, forcing you to constantly re-examine things you saw earlier in new light. It really does reach the heights of meaningful, subtle symbolism that Silent Hill achieved at its best. At times, it might exceed it.

I’m enough of a

Silent Hill

mega fan that that’s high praise indeed. In case it didn’t come through clear enough, I loved every single second of

Detention

, from its mysterious, foreboding opening to it's heart-breaking conclusion. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the successor to the throne of the top tier of videogame horror that Konami relinquished when they started farming Silent Hill out to inexperienced studios, and my anticipation for Red Candles’ next game is physically painful.

All that aside, the game has a few irritating flaws. The English version is plagued with a number of typos and grammatical errors, including the occasional straight up missing word; judging by Red Candles’ English website, it seems like they don’t have any entirely fluent speakers on staff, and it shows. The problems aren’t enough to be a deal breaker by any means, but the mistakes are jarring given how well written the dialogue is, and it’s disappointing to see these errors uncorrected in a version of the game released well over a year after the initial PC release.

At one point, the game brings up a student/teacher relationship which (reading between the lines) appears to have become sexual. Taken at face value, the way the story leaves off this plot point could be read as alarmingly positive. Thinking about it a bit more deeply in context, the rose-tinted way the relationship is portrayed is being filtered entirely through the perspective of the student--who has understandable reasons for feeling that way and wildly mis-interprets other adult dynamics--rather than any detached authorial voice. The only third-party opinion we get on the situation comes from another adult who's generally portrayed as an empathetic type with her head screwed on straight; the fact that she basically calls the teacher involved a predator is, I feel, a pretty clear indicator of where the developers' own feelings lie (there are also some horror elements of the game that don't exactly paint the adult party in a positive light).

Still, I wanted to bring it up in case readers may be uncomfortable with the idea of playing a game that tackled this subject matter at all. Other than this plot point, the game stays entirely away from sexual violence and abuse, which I thought was an admirable bit of restraint given how dark some of the other topics handled are (this is, again, somewhere that I feel a western developer might have tripped up).

Also, the Switch version of the game chugs and drops the framerate during visually busy environments. I’m assuming this issue isn’t present in other versions of the game, but it’s something to be aware of if you’re considering where to play it.

Regardless of how you play it, I recommend you do play it.

Detention

is the best horror game I've played in years and easily one of the most nuanced, mature stories in the medium as a whole. I have no hesitation in making it my inaugural

Axis of Awesome

entry on Ferretbrain.

Themes:

Computer Games

,

Horror