#beans (experienced player who got me into the game) said 'Your character is such a mess. I love them' and yeah. shes a mess but i love her

[uniquezombiedestiny]

🖊?

oh hey. dusts this off. i have a new oc to write about :)

ive started playing fallen london recently so: say hi to maethyl fallow! a "devious and watchful individual of mysterious and indistinct gender." she also forgor (most of her lore is based around forgetting - her backstory is that she got lost in a cave of irrigo, an eldritch color that makes you forget when you look at it for too long.)

their story begins in fucking prison <3. all she knows is that her imprisonment is unjust - and, more importantly, inconvenient. so! they and an unlucky devil make their way out and become friends. she discovers that she's here in london for the wonder of the place - she has a lot to relearn, after all. on their escape, the devil leaves, but they're still friends :)

she decides to go to spite, one of four cities of fallen london. this is a place all about stealth, full of crime - mostly pickpocketing. they spend their first week or two here homeless and lost, doing both a lot of courier jobs and a lot of theft. i eventually learn how to travel (attributed to her memory loss of the world around her), and also get a home. yay!

after some mysterious communication with a benefactor, plus accessing the shops, she finally has better clothing than a prisoner's outfit. a maid outfit (and some shiny shoes!). this decreases their shadowy (stealth) stat but it was hilarious so i did it anyway

after some more stealing, a few courier jobs, and meeting a rat in her rented attic room, she makes her way to the carnival. she does just a little more theft, got her fortune read, and went to the mirror area. big mistake.

editing note: hey, this was right! she went on a journey to nightmare hell, and found plenty of mushrooms in her bath. the newspaper and poetry ones are kinda unknown, but the journalist storyline may fufill those.

for context: mae's discovered the joy of promenading - in the crowds of spite, a new location, you can go on trips and try stealing from various people. here, mae steals from a prison guard, gaining nightmares 1. she's also stabbed by jack for trying to steal from him (it was a like 20% chance), gaining wounds 2. hooray!

she looks into a mirror of nightmares, and upon looking closer due to the lack of a reflection, falls straight in. she is now in a world of madness, where all is red and gold and her nightmares increase to 8, described as "raving" (and right below "THEY'RE COMING THEY'RE COMING THEY'RE COMING," at 7).

bitch, you are trapped in the nightmare dimension.

anyway, it's like a hotel. they have rooms to stay, food and drink to serve, and other places for guests, reception, etc.. while mae has become paranoid, haunted by her nightmares in the form of encroaching mist in the corner of her eye, the guests are just as insane as she is. somehow, she cant help but find them welcoming, and has a few good interactions with some of them.

notably, without anything else to do (see: i was impatient), mae basically waterboarded herself for a day or two. you're able to drink from the fountain in the lobby if you like, which can decrease your nightmares stat. failing this will knock down your persuasion stat, though.

guess who reached 0 persuasion (but hey, nightmares 6!)?

after becoming a donkey a few times, she eventually stops waterboarding herself to find that she has forgotten how to speak and think properly, let alone eloquently. she does still converse with the guests a few times, but she's pretty much talking like a kid now.

during all of this, i also draw cards for some other interactions, among them being: met a white cat a few times, a lizard appeared in her room twice, fungal infestations in the bath, and the view outside her room being various things. she's been wanting to speak to the manager since day 1, damn it. and speaking of drawing, i also drew some art of maethyl gone mad!

although the guests (and water) are awfully convincing about how this place is better than fallen london - i mean, the red and gold is quite pretty, and the service is great, too - she eventually looks out of her window one last time before finding herself awake in her room. she's probably spent ~2 weeks in there. they are themselves again! as their nightmares stat dropped and mae became less paranoid, a melancholy took it's place, though (she just has melancholy 1).

well, on she goes. more promenading ensues, a few cards are drawn, and she regains some stats from the rat she talked to. she also befriends an urchin kid.

eventually, on intercepting courier routes, she snatches a brown letter containing blackmail on a journalist. he sells it for something more practical - the heartless route, where they gain 2 heartless (a quirk, similar to melancholy).

(steadfast is gained later - subtle is from drinking some healing stuff from a bottle and following the instructions exactly. this is what brought her wounds down to 1.)

later, she meets that same journalist, and does a few jobs for him with her stealthiness. she then tracks him down, growing suspicious, as his newspaper's never shown up anywhere, and what use does he have for the info she's getting? he's found doing some boring stuff, but she does overhear him at a bar, talking about his clients and other things, that basically proved mae right. she's then contacted by a different journalist for a different newspaper - she gets some findings, but what use do they have for this, either? in the end, she tracks both of them down to a fighting ring, where they laugh about their dimwitted employers... among other things (i forgor). she learns their secrets and plans to use the knowledge somehow, rather than blackmail them for money.

in the meantime, she's had a drink with someone, having a toast to the cheery man, ruthless but a man of his word. here is where she gains 2 steadfast!

she's currently area-diving, planning an escapade through the lower stairs for valuables. it's not done yet, though.

and that's all for her so far! personality-wise, they're quite eccentric, with a few friends both animal and human. they're outgoing and friendly (or at least polite), but their voice has an eerie quality to it that may turn some people away. they struggle with their words sometimes, too.

beyond that, though, she's quite stealthy, adjusting well to spite. she's even become a bit heartless, disconnected from those around her. honestly, that nightmare realm trip may have affected her more than it seems.

behind all of it, though, is... an odd melancholy. like the fog of her dreams that not even she can see through. perhaps it's something she's forgotten.

we all got that home with an indescribable sadness /ref

[lonely-space-egg]

I believe you've said in your puzzle game posts before that you enjoy puzzle games that have more restrictive, cramped environments, and I wonder if that's a factor in Baba not clicking with you - Baba is a much more "open" game to me. [infodump starting now] I'm something of a newbie to grid-based/sokoban-inspired puzzle games. Sparked by your posts on Bean and Nothingness, I downloaded the game, clicked with the format, and played it until I got stumped with the available levels [didn't make it past the first island]. I'd also heard of Stephen's Sausage Roll, so I downloaded that too. . . and I couldn't solve a single puzzle. The tight, physical controls were just baffling to me. So, I put that aside and started Baba Is You. I got completely hooked on Baba Is You, barrelling through the first two areas in ~a day. I felt like the game had so much room to explore and play around with its elements, even if it wasn't part of the solution. Baba raised my confidence so much that I ended up trying Sausage Roll again, and I actually finished a few levels. I felt like I could see the puzzles in a whole new light. This kind of just turned into me rambling about my recent grid-based puzzle game experience, but all that to say: I think that Baba is a much less tactile, "floatier" game. As I've gotten further into the game, I think the puzzles have also felt less like they flow from one to another - all the different mechanics can make them feel disjointed, like there isn't much of a linear increase in difficulty. Sausage Roll is the complete opposite - it's tactile and weighty, so much so that it almost feels like you're exerting physical effort to move your character. This made it very intimidating for me, but I could see it as a positive for a more experienced player, or just someone who prefers that style of puzzle [I'm certainly beginning to see the appeal].

I don't know where Bean and Nothingness falls on this floaty-weighty spectrum. Just from the game's aesthetic choices, it feels more grounded, but I'll have to reassess when I give it a go again.

i expect that a lot of people are gonna be asking me if i've played baba is you, and this is a little awkward because afaik its one of the only other puzzle games that does what bean and nothingness does (learn the ropes -> apply knowledge -> become a free agent and break the game) and is also far more popular, but i just haven't been able to get into it at all. complete destructive interference. ive tried a couple times and i keep running into the same walls.

[vaingloury]

Even more disparate thoughts on Fabula Ultima

Belated write-up: I finally got the chance to bring this game to the table last month...

...for all of one session. 

That’s one more session than most of the indie ttrpgs I own. Still, I bought a physical copy of the rules and I’m a bit disappointed to see it become yet another art book in my collection.

This post isn’t really a review or a judgement of the game’s quality, just some thoughts on why my group bounced off this game after one session and why it might not work for other tables like mine. This also isn’t in response to it winning the Ennie, I just couldn’t find the energy to write this sooner.

Praise first: The art’s great. I know not every project can afford consistent, original art but Fabula’s illustrations do a lot of the heavy lifting (not to say the written material isn’t also solid) in getting you interested in the game and imagining all kinds of characters you might want to portray. The game avoids stock dungeon fantasy classes with unique classes that don’t feel gimmicky for the sake of avoiding dungeon fantasy classes. Class abilities interact with each other, prompting teamwork. I really like the identity/theme/origin section of the character sheet because I’ve been in one too many games where the players want deep character drama but put the work of planting the seeds for that drama on the GM instead of themselves.

But now the criticisms.

This is not a game for the simulationists. Maybe that was obvious to others from the marketing blurbs, but I saw “J(T)RPG” and got excited thinking about how my character’s pockets were going to be overflowing with Mana Potion x99 in preparation for all the boss lairs we were going to be raiding only to be met with a Schrödinger’s inventory system (if you need an item, you just have it (within reason) except for HP/MP potions, which you can only hold a single digit number of) and a GM section on dungeon crawling that can be summed up as “Yeah, maybe don’t?”

My experience with video jrpgs is pretty synonymous with dungeons, random encounters*, and Mana Potion x99s, so not having those things makes me feel naked here. This is going to be a boon to groups who beg for bags of holding in D&D and find playing anything that’s not “the main story” in ttrpgs to be tedious. I get that Fabula wants a more cinematic experience, with the minutiae of adventuring relegated to happening “off-screen”, but without bean-counting to slow things down between set-pieces (Fabula cut the detailed overland travel rules in its conversion from Ryuutama, if you want travel scenes, just freeform rp it baby) I’m left underwhelmed with the remaining two game modes: combat and cutscene.

(*As a side note, Fabula does have random encounters. However, enemies matched to the party’s level can hit fairly hard, thus more than one encounter a travel day would be brutal in a mismatched tone kind of way. From this, I can assume that encounters are supposed to be few and scripted, keeping in line with the aforementioned cinematic experience. GMs experienced with multiple games will notice this but I’m curious about groups coming directly from video games or D&D. Tangentially, Fabula has an Appendix N, listing several games that are heavy on the dungeon/ multiple random encounter/ resource management trifecta. In hindsight, it finally dawned on me that Fabula doesn’t really simulate jrpgs, rather it simulates media inspired by jrpgs.)

This is also not a game for those of us who don’t run games in the small theatre company sort of way, that is to say your games don’t have a route scripted out in advance like three-night play or a television miniseries, where you gotta hit all the plot beats in sequence. When I said cutscene earlier, I meant it literally. The game wants the GM to interlude the narrative with visions of the campaign’s BBEG getting closer to their goal, enemies do that thing from video games where they can escape a fight you were winning because plot armour (which I find funny rather than frustrating, although that leads me to my actual frustration:). This all assumes that the GM has a grand, linear story to tell. Like the random vs scripted encounter thing, this isn’t addressed explicitly from what I can find in the rules. It’s just assumed you’re running this game because that’s your GM style (it is not my GM style). Lightning round of a few more things my group didn’t like:

Economy: I’m not sure how (much) to distribute money in this game. Because Fabula prefers that you didn’t dungeon crawl, you’re not finding money in chests. Turn in twenty bear asses maybe? Do you even need much money (if you’re not playing a Tinker)? Goods and services are dirt cheap, and most things don’t actually have to be bought. Rare weapons can just be dropped by enemies...

The Starter Scenario Boss: I’m willing to concede that I maybe just ran it wrong but the party didn’t stand a chance despite me nerfing the boss duo’s HP and damage. Also combat ranges aren’t a thing in this game, which I think contributed to the difficulty: the enemy can freely use close range attacks on targets they aren’t standing next to (again, “just freeform it”; they somehow run one football field in a few seconds...).

You Can’t Die: Again, I think this is going to be a boon for a certain type of group but mine felt like the risks weren’t real if you can’t die. I’ve already seen the defence of “just use a different consequence that isn’t death” but our characters found themselves in situations where things wouldn’t make sense if they didn’t die without the help of insane levels of deus ex machina.

I’m usually in the “play another game” camp but rather than trying to tailor Fabula to what I find fun, it’d be easier to just take the theme and bond mechanics from this game and graft them onto Pathfinder 2 or something.

[scramblednoodle]

Day 2 - Anxiety

This is a vent post; you have been warned.

I’m turning off the filters because I’ve been holding a lot of this shit in.  And here is a comment born of anxiety:  NO ONE IS GOING TO FUCKING CARE ANYWAY.

Please don’t message me that you do care.  Please don’t.  I know you do.  LOGICALLY.  But logic and anxiety DO NOT MATCH, and if you don’t grok this, then you need to think long and hard about what that REALLY means to people with this fucking malady.

Yesterday, at the end of the day, I was hit by crushing anxiety because of an incidental interaction, that I can’t even remember the details of, just that it called into doubt NOT ONLY the individual interaction, but the cascading tree of causality of all branches of my own personal Yggdrasil.

I have anxiety, pure and simple.  I worry about everything.  I analyze and I double analyze and I triple analyze, and even when I set a course, I do so full of doubt.  I think that people who don’t have to deal with this sort of anxiety lack even the barest hint of understanding on how deeply this affects those who do.  This is not to say that they have not experienced or experience anxiety; those with the disorder just experience it at an exponentially enhanced factor.

This is Day 2 of my transition.  I felt great yesterday.  Almost euphoric.  And by the end of the day a little...weird.  I looked at the side effects of Spironolactone and Estradiol.  The former wasn’t of much worry, but one side effect of the latter burned itself into my eyeballs:  anxiety.  And like a hypochondriac, it may have been the very suggestion of this POSSIBLE mental shift that began the spiral.

I began to question.  Myself.  What I’m doing.  Who I am.  Lingering thoughts from work intruded.  Did I do the right thing?  Did I make a mistake?  Was my analysis of that DKIM question correct?  Was my reaction to a campaign vendor out of line?  Did I offend that random person in my last ticket update?  I could handle it, though.

And then someone in one of the various chats I’ve been in did something that I had been thinking about, and what’s more, they did some of the things I’ve already done.  And I think they did it better than I could, and they did it CASUALLY.  What took me tremendous amounts of mental effort seemed to be a casual thing for them, DESITE them claiming they were new to this.  What is wrong with my brain?  Why do these things become a herculean struggle for me, when others breeze through them?  Why can REVEILLE not be special?  Why am I so mediocre?  People must think I’m useless, worthless, a whiner.

What does anyone know me for, anyway?  The trumpet?  I suck at it.  I practiced my heart out at it, and still I was mediocre.  I couldn’t hack being in even a low-end, community symphony orchestra.  I can’t hit the high notes in the funk band I’m in the way the subs could.  The ESTABLISHED LEAD could not perform as well as the subs were sight-reading the parts.  What the fuck am I doing there?  I’m not a trumpet player, I’m a fucking hack.  And all of these synthesizer, this music shit.  I have such great ideas, and when I sit in front of these things, I stare.  Or I make something, and it feels mediocre.  It feels like I strayed from my original intent.

What else would anyone know me for?  Posting excessive amounts of pictures of VRChat on Twitter?  I can’t even get most of my fucking old friends to play the fucking game, so why would they fucking care about the “neat” things I do?  Neat things that other people have already posted about.  I’m retreading everyone else’s path.  I don’t know why I fucking bother.  Half the time in VRChat I’m horribly lonely anyway, and the great times that I KNOW happened are fully eclipsed by all the fucking times some asshole in that fucking rexie crowd stepped in front of me in a conversation as if I wasn’t fucking there. or the times in my protogen group that I said something that felt relevant, but turned out to be from an old fuckface that has nothing in common with these young, excited, optimistic kids.  that That’s ALL I REMEMBER.  I remember that I DIDN’T EXIST.

My art is awful.  I don’t practice enough, but how can you practice when everything you touch is shit?  I diddle, I dabble, and when I seek some sort of affirmation that someone appreciates my garbage, it’s always the same people.  It’s like drawing a stick figure and your mom putting it on the fridge.  At some point you realize she’s doing it BECAUSE YOU MADE IT, and that makes it special TO THEM.  It SHOULD be special to me, that I mean that to someone, but IT DOESN’T.

I surround myself with STUFF AND THINGS because each little item has a dream associated with it, each item, EVERY ITEM, has a story not just about what I’ve already done with it, but an even bigger story of WHAT I WANT TO DO WITH IT.  They will never happen.  Look at this 3D Printed Toothless.  “I will paint that someday” I say, but I won’t, because I would ruin it with my shoddy painting.  “Look at this dull knife?  I will learn how to sharpen this dull knife.”  But I don’t because I’ll just scratch it and make it worse.  Look at this Loopstation.  I’ve made some fun loops, but I’m going to get better at it, I’m going to practice.  But I won’t, because I KNOW that I can’t make it work the way it works in my head, in the story that I wrote for it.  Look at this fucking trumpet I bought that costs as much as a new car, 4 top end fursuits, or a year of mortgage payments for someone in a “reasonably” priced home.  The THINGS I COULD PLAY, but I FUCKING WON’T because I CAN’T.  Because I’m TERRIBLE.

I love to dance.  It makes me feel alive.  The music just moves me.  VR has been a blessing for this.  I can dance whenever I want, to whatever music I want.  And then someone shows up the other day and starts cutting loose.  They’ve never even been to a fucking club.  They watch YouTube videos.  They just started doing it.  Their energy is TREMENDOUS and overwhelming and I CAN’T COMPARE.  I realize that I LOOK LIKE A FUCKING CLOWN when I dance.  I preach to people that it doesn’t matter, that everyone looks goofy, that it’s okay, but I’m FUCKING LYING because everyone is looking at me and judging me and thinking how embarrassing it is that I’m even in the same fucking ROOM with them.  WHY DO I EVEN TRY?

Do you have ANY IDEA how life is when EVERYTHING YOU DO is worthless in your eyes?  It’s not that I THINK it’s worthless, it’s that I KNOW it’s worthless.

You want to argue?  Fine.  Logically, you are correct.  There is a rebuttal for EVERY SINGLE ONE of these admissions, and a rebuttal for the hundreds of other issues.

My hair looks dumb.

I look stupid with painted fingernails.

I can’t drive very good, and people notice.

My musical taste is awful.

I’m doing a bad job raising this new kitten.

I did a horrible job raising Bean.

I did a horrible job raising Harley.

I’m terrible at physicality.

My cooking is mediocre and samey.

I’m fat and gross.

I’m ugly as shit.

I look stupid in a dress.

My makeup looks like a kindergartner with a sharpie.

I suck at all video games.

No one likes the books I read.

I like the MCU and that’s horrible.

I like Apple products and that’s horrible.

My taste in computer hardware is shit.

My taste in clothes is shit.

My taste in cars is shit.

My glasses look dumb.

I made a mistake the last time I got my eyes checked because I’m stupid.

Only morons have as many knives as I do.

My voice is awful.

My photography was a joke, and I was a fool to have ever thought anyone gave a rat’s ass about my photos.

People think I’m a useless stoner.

I drink too much and am a fucking drunk that no one wants to hang around with.

My various bands have me there because they don’t know how to tell me to hit the road.

My VRChat characters are unremarkable and beneath notice.

DO I NEED TO CONTINUE???

These are the random thoughts that went through my head in rapid fire in the past 5 minutes.  It took me longer to type them, at over 100wpm, than it did for them to fill my brain with their toxicity.

Do you have any idea what that’s like?  To have everything you’ve done, ever done, and will do be called into question ad infinitum?  To second-guess everything you say, everything you do, even every thought that goes in your head?  Now wrap your head around this part:

Every one of those thoughts goes through multiple iterations of “Is it real?  No it’s not real.  But what if it is?  What if you’re wrong?  It’s probably real.  Yeah, it’s real.  But is it real?  What if it is?  Maybe I’m wrong?  Yeah, I’m wrong, it’s real.  But what if you’re wrong about it being real?  Maybe it’s not real?  Yeah, it’s probably not real.  But you could be wrong about that, too.”

Every.

Fucking.

One.

*deep breath*

I started this post with the intent to write a little bit about the anxiety I’d been feeling.  Turns out, I was wrong about how much was in there.  I have anxiety dreams on a regular basis, more times than I admit, and likely even more than I can remember.  I was at a convention last night.  As usual, I missed every event.  As usual, I missed every friend.  As usual, I was late to every party.  As usual, there was an elevator.  Usually the elevator goes tot he wrong floor, or dumps me off either at the top of a maze of hotel rooms, outside a giant building with multiple staircases, or in the service tunnels beneath the building.

This time to elevator fell.

And it fell.

And it fell.

I legit thought this was it.  I was going to die in this dream.

The brakes snapped on, and I woke up.

I never got back to REM.  Tossed and turned for a few hours.  Tried my usual trick of counting backwards form 100.  I would lose count at about 94.  My brain just...disintegrated.  Over and over, it fragmented, then reformed back at my anxieties.  When I don’t sleep, I’m especially susceptible to anxiety and depression.

Case in point.

========================

I’ve been mulling over what I just wrote.  I felt all of that, in the moment.  It looks silly now, on paper, as it were.  But that’s just another aspect of the anxiety.  A coping mechanism, if you will.  “You’re just being silly”.  And as usual, I’m already getting brain-foggy over the things I said.  I forget about it again, because that’s what the brain does:  it suppresses trauma.

All I know is I was near tears when I wrote all of that stuff up there; I remember that much, very clearly.

That memory will fade too.

And anxiety says to me, to write “It will fade, just like everything about me.”

So I wrote it, and I pretend to myself that I don’t believe it.  That I don’t feel that I am all of those things I wrote about above.  That everything...is fine.

And, at least for a little bit, it will be.  Those scores of thoughts will reduce to, oh, maybe 10.  Not all will be toxic, but most will be a worry of some sort.  A question.  A question to myself, of myself, about myself.

Anxiety and Depression and ADHD and Mania and other “Mental Misfires” are not things that ever “go away”.  I may wake up, and the dream may fade, but the harsh reality is that, no matter what meds, no matter how much therapy, if you have this stuff, the dreams will come back.  The severity will come and go., but...

The dreams always come back.

========================

I’m out of steam.  The fire is cooled.  I’m done writing for now, and no one wants to hear anything else about this, anyway, least of all me.

Peace, y’all.