#James Mendez Hodes

[campaignosn]

New Skyjoust!! Episodes Next Week

The wait is finally over! Our feed finally caught up to the unaired episodes of Skyjoust!! as we move on to follow The Frog Princes.

Serafina Honore (Rashawn Scott,) Dimitri Hyaku (Nathan Blades,) and MC “Trance” Trancephorm (James Mendez Hodes) are last year’s champions but this year they barely made it through the regular season. Their coach, Hildred Gusstar is trying to help them get their groove back while giving them the skills to live up to immense professional and family pressure.

You can refresh yourself on the first episode of their story on the Skyjoust!! feed right now and prepare for new episodes next week!

You can also binge the re-edited Burning Tails quarter-final episodes which feature new monooges and a wonderfully maudlin new Arne Parrot closing theme!

There is more Skyjoust!! news to come next week, so stay tuned!

[whotookcheesuschrist]

#Even Tolkien came to be ashamed of how he had literal a Race of Evil #Never mind progressivism - *Catholicism* is supposed to be more open and generous about human potential!

fuck tolkein and fuck dnd for being the originator and modern popularizer respectively of the race science tropes that have glued themselves parasitically to the fantasy genre and refuse to come off

[theresattrpgforthat]

A really excellent article about the origins of the X-Card, and how it wasn't originally meant to just cover triggering material. I recommend giving it a read!

[jamesmendezhodes]

When someone reacts to something more strongly than you expected, sometimes they’re not reacting to what you said or did. They’re reacting to the thing they’re worried you might say or do next.

[open-hearth-rpg]

Hearts of Wulin Now at Age of Ravens

Hearts of Wulin, a PbtA game of wuxia romance and melodrama is now at Age of Ravens Games. Written by Joyce Ch*ng and Lowell Francis (me). This game and its expansion, Hearts of Wulin Worlds, offers a range of playstyles by focusing on the powerful heroes trapped by a web of obligations and personal desires. 

It’s pretty awesome IMHO. It draws on the literature of writers like Jin Yong and Gu Long, in particular adaptations of those stories in dozens and dozens of TV series (Laughing in the Wind, The Proud Twins). It also works to include things like more recent web novels and their adaptations, with rules for xianxia and the fantastic. The core book includes ideas for various genres, narrating fight scenes, building entanglements, and handling historical/courtly games. 

Hearts of Wulin: Worlds includes several settings: 

Shadow of Joseon, set during the Korean Joseon Dynasty. (Yeonsoo Julian Kim)

1905: San Francisco, presents a Chinatown just emerging from the shadow of the Chinese Exclusion Act. (Banana Chan)

Cour de l'Eppee transports Hearts of Wulin to swashbuckling France. (Cat Evans)

Academy of the Blade offers a dueling academy inspired by Revolutionary Girl Utena. (Alison Tam)

Fight Me IRL is a unique take on cyberpunk. (James Mendez Hodes) 

Silk & Steam gives you a wondrous silkpunk setting. (Kienna Shaw)

It also includes two major rules add-ons:

The Villain, a new playbook. Not all wulin "Heroes" are heroes with a capital H. Some start in a darker place... 

Numberless Secrets, a new set of rules for telling mystery/investigation stories in Hearts of Wulin. 

These can be found on Drivethrurpg– both are part of the ongoing GMs Day sale happening right now. 

Personally I’m really excited about the future for Hearts of Wulin. Though I never learned the print run, I do know that the last of the physical copies recently sold out at Indie Press Revolution. I have a short list of things I’m hoping to accomplish. 

Get it up on itch.io. I know some folks prefer to get their ttrpg pdfs via that site. 

Figure out how to get Print-on-Demand versions up on Drivethru. I’ve been told this is a challenging process to get right, so I’m hoping to talk to some folks who have done it before. 

Publish the Names & Entanglements deck. This was a self-print add-on for Hearts of Wulin. It's a useful resource for character creation and I’m hoping to have physical copy available for sale. 

I’ve always said folks should feel free to hack and rework Hearts of Wulin as they wish. But I’d like to get a clear Creative Commons license out there for everyone and encourage folks to play around with the system.

Eventually I might do a 1.5 version bringing some of the HoW: Worlds material over into the main book, as well as a couple of rules updates.

I want to publish a collection of Numberless Secrets mysteries along with guidance for running detective wuxia games. I love the series Ancient Detective and this is the best way I get to play out those kinds of stories. 

Get an online keeper which has easy to use set ups for all of the expansion worlds. We have a solid one– newly automated thanks to Agatha– but it doesn’t have all the expansions. 

Some folks have done from amazing things with HoW so far (inspired by media like Scott Pilgrim, Cobra Kai, Star Wars and beyond). It would be great if I could assemble a collection of new hacks and settings, maybe with some additional play options.

Finalize the one translation agreement I’ve been offered. 

I want to thank everyone who has read and/or played Hearts of Wulin. It remains a game I love to run and it would be amazing to have more people try it out.

[dunmertitty]

my mum was googling for an article about why everyone in the lord of the rings film is white (like to be clear she was annoyed by this) and the google ai was apparently like “everybody in the lord of the rings is not white. gandalf is grey.”

[void-botanist]

James Mendez Hodes on worldbuilding religion

https://jamesmendezhodes.com/blog/2019/9/1/best-practices-for-religious-representation-part-i-check-for-traps

[thestorycrab]

I have finished my cultural sensitivity consult with James Mendez Hodes (check him out here: https://jamesmendezhodes.com/bio ). 10/10, would recommend. I was super pleased/relieved that pretty much all my major themes and plot points got the go ahead. There was none of the dreaded ‘this is terrible, scrap it’ and the suggestions for research starting points are fascinating. Like my MC’s fighting style is heavily based on aikido (which I studied for a long time). So Mendez is like, ‘Aikido is very recent and kind of weird as Japanese martial arts go. Why don’t you lean into that?’ and ‘How about drawing from the Meiji period?’ I was worried that focusing on trying to write diverse cultures in a non-awful way might be limiting, but it’s kind of the opposite? I have all these new ideas to pursue to make the setting richer, like including yakuza and maybe a version of the Shinsengumi, that I wouldn’t have thought of on my own.

[tealursa]

All this 100% yes, BUT that being said, a couple things for storytellers:

1) "Why?" isn't a bad question to hear from your audience, and it's not often asked in genuine bad faith. An audience asking why and wanting to know more is a good thing, it shows they're invested. And often, the answer they actually WANT isn't a literal one.

Q: "Why is the alien language atemporal?"

The literal answer could maybe be something you as the creator know, but it probably isn't, because it's probably just a plot device. A lot of creators stop here with "I don't know, because it is" or "because it needs to be for the plot."

The answer your audience actually wants is to know what themes and ideas went into the plot device. "I wanted to showcase a species, a culture that goes so far beyond humanity it's almost inconceivable. Time is human-made, but also not, and is so enmeshed in our world that this other mysterious and endless world had to exist outside of it in order to get the point across. The aliens are the universe, their language is unchanging, because change is another so-called inevitability we take for granted."

Q: "Why is it rude to eat before the ambassador eats?"

A: "Almost every culture in the world has historically – if not presently – had etiquette rules surrounding dining. In this scene, I found an opportunity to showcase the value this society places on their ambassadors and incorporate that into the world."

2) I do believe storytellers have an obligation to analyze WHY they make the choices they do. No, you don't need to reinvent DNA to give your alien green skin, you don't need to explain anything at all in your content or to your audience, but think about it yourself.

I think this is especially important in sci-fi and fantasy, which usually includes creating entire cultures with different – often conflicting – norms and expectations. The amount of times I've seen, in worldbuilding, people come up with their "Original Idea" of the "Good Country with grasslands and a monarchy" with a "desert-like Evil Country of nomadic people ruled by a dictator – oh and this country is to the East" ... I have a lot of eurocentric, islamophobic nickels.

And of course we all know about the problems that arise with creators projecting their internal bigotry onto their worldbuilding without analyzing their intentions, most notably with fantasy orcs and goblins. My favorite article on this is 'Orcs, Britons, And The Martial Race Myth' by James Mendez Hodes. An example I always look to for this are companies like Wizards of the Coast (D&D) and Paizo (Pathfinder), who will add all sorts of progressive content like polyamorous deities, diverse art and characters and cultures, to their universes, which only serves to highlight the shortcomings that are still there.

Q: "Why are orcs and goblins either inherently evil, or 'one of the good ones' who must resist their evil impulses?"

I really want to believe most people who throw a bunch of goblins in a cave for their heroes to fight aren't actually racist, but they just don't think about it. And when people of the minority group made into villains in these stories speak up, they're always met by resistance from people who use the arguments above.

"Quit asking questions."

"It's not that deep."

"That's just how the society works."

So no, you don't need to reinvent DNA to explain why the alien's skin is green, but you need to know why YOU'VE chosen to make the alien's skin green, and what your AUDIENCE might glean from that information. Because you might catch yourself sending the wrong message.

I think an important instinct you have to build up when you read/watch sci-fi is discerning which things are givens. If Arrival tells you that the alien language is atemporal, it is, that's not a puzzle for you to pick apart, it's a prerequisite to getting the rest of the story. When I talk sci-fi with people who don't consume a lot of it this seems to be a thing they get hung up on.

[technoskald]

Thinking about low-level monsters

The racist history behind some elements of #DnD means that we have some additional considerations when thinking about low-level monsters, especially orcs. What are our choices? What do you like to use?

What low-level monsters are both interesting and not problematic? The pendulum swing between tiers of play means that we occasionally want to focus on those early levels, as Matt Colville has talked about. And in D&D, that usually means undead, orcs, goblins, and kobolds. I won’t worry about undead too much here; the major problem with them is potential overuse (of which I am first among sinners).

[equalseleventhirds]

good fucking take from this panel: lovecraft was super racist, and also a big fuckin idiot

[dunmertitty]

it’s time yet again to bring up my favorite 2 part article!

I saw this mentioned as a bit of an aside on another post but since it was a little bit besides the point of that post decided to make my own post about it instead of derailing that one.

It IS very interesting how in Lord of The Rings orcs are the soldiers of a (compared to the rest of the world) highly industrialized and technologically advanced military force, yet pretty much every high fantasy media that has borrowed the concept of orcs since then has instead given them the "tribal savages" treatment, and i don't know how I failed to realize that difference until I saw someone else bring it up.

Like of course this is not saying that the depiction of orcs in LoTR is not problematic for a lot of different reasons (there have been years of discussions unpacking that) but it IS an interesting change and I think a pretty ideologically loaded one.

Thinking about it makes me remember this article I read a few years ago about how, regardless of genre trappings, a lot of high fantasy (especially in ttrpgs and videogames) actually has a lot more in common narratively and thematically with wild west ""cowboys vs indians"" films and shows than it has with its aesthetic inspirations. Like once you look at it with that lense in mind it becomes really conspicuous how much these works like giving the "tribal savages" treatment to any sapient creature that exists for the heroes to fight.

[rgf-populace]

Siphonophores

via James Mendez Hodes

[kimabutch]

A really interesting article I stumbled on about depictions of religions in fantasy TTRPGs! Also has a video/audio recording for people who’d prefer it.