#letters are running together so guess i'm done editing

[xavidotron]

Recent Game Activities

We're in a bit of a hiatus, but a while back I started running The Far Roofs for folks from the remarkably-complete backer draft. It's very much a Jennagme, but the dice and letter tiles give it a very unique feel. Jenna's other games, being diceless. can lend themselves to a certain predictability or feeling of being planned, since the stuff that happens is mostly going to be the stuff that makes sense to the folks at the table in a "yes, and" sort of way. Sure, the other players can surprise you, but it's a very authorial sort of surprise. Whereas in The Far Roofs, any time you try to, you know, connect to someone, you might fail and y'all need to figure out what it means. Or you might critically succeed at giving an owl a vape without really meaning to. And with letter tiles, you can decide that the way you get where you need to go is by KAIJU and I guess that's what we're doing now. It definitely creates room for more swerves without being as chaotically zany as Dreampunk, and I like it at all. Plus the way it handles miraculous powers is much more concise and manageable in a way that works very well for me.

I also did a Wanderhome one-shot with some online folks. I definitely like Wanderhome a lot for a chill time, and doing the location/kith creation collaboratively rather than someone doing it in advance was fun even if it took up a lot of our time. We also focused on baggage from the war more than past Wanderhome games I've been involved with, which resonated well.

Since cat herding hasn't been lining up lately for The Far Roofs we've done a couple of sessions of Yazeba's Bed and Breakfast. It's a very unique setup for a game, with so many pregens to choose from, a bunch of pre-framed short chapters you can play in any order, and framing a lot of the content as stuff you have to unlock (with stickers!) I'm a huge fan and it's even more fun with the physical edition. It's nice to have something that you can hop in and play very quickly without anyone needing to prep and without anyone really needing to take a GM-like role during play, and the dynamic of "canon" characters that develop over time does have a fanfic-y Steven Universe-y sort of dynamic that's fun. And it's nifty to see different players gravitate towards different characters organically. The Possum Creek folks really put a lot of work into this game and it really paid off. I may host my own one-shot-day of this sometime when I feel together enough to organize or host stuff again.

It is quite wonderful to be in a time with such a great selection of indie ttrpgs!

[wildwoodsgames]

The Chariot

The Chariot — What is the next project you’re planning to start OR What is the next project you’re excited to finish?

There's a real smorgasbord of possible answers to this, depending on how we define that slippery devil of a word "finished".

The simplest is that Grand Guignol and Harvest are (in the main) done with edits and now we're solving the puzzles of layout: balancing function and aesthetics, period vibes and contemporary sensibilities, etc. All of which is to say that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, even if PDFs are still a ways off and then there's print logistics to deal with after.

I'm currently working on a revised draft of The Bitter Litany, my generational game of historical intrigue and hard choices, which is coming together very nicely. That will be more or less playtest ready soon, and I have a friend lined up who'll be running an external playtest and I'm considering another campaign myself.

The second edition of Heaven in the Dust is ticking along nicely; the playkit revision (playbooks, community worksheet, the new chorus sheets) are effectively complete and all that separates it from publication is, you know, finding the voice of the rules text and writing it all out.

And then Tales from the Low Cantrefs, my love letter to the coming-of-age hearth fantasy classics of my youth which I've been working on since 2018, is finally set to come off the backburner and become an active priority again as I start thinking about possible publishers and such.

This is a rambling and unsatisfactory answer, I'm sure, for which my only apology is that I am currently caught in a web of existential angst over the difficulty of finishing things and the difficulties of making art with a day job and the cruel algebra demanded by the limited hours in a day.

So uhhhh I guess I'm most excited for Grand Guignol and Harvest to be done and out in the world, and for Low Cantrefs to be actively in motion (and eventually out in the world).

[bumblewarden]

Bouncing off my last post of substituting what will probably happen in DA:D with my own stories (not required reading),

I try and fail to keep my tangents contained to the indented sections. If you are reading this and not already familiar with my canon worldstate: Novhen Tabris is the HoF, he underwent the Dark Ritual with a romanced Morrigan, he did not go through the eluvian, and he reunites with Morrigan and Kieran after the main story of Inquisition

By DA:D, Kieran should be somewhere around 20, so imagine him as a companion!

Given, even with the differences between OGB Kieran and human Kieran being rendered mostly null in Inquisition, BioWare would still have to account for world states where he does not exist at all. Companion is a rather big role to leave to chance like that. I cannot see them allotting a different number of companions based on previous worldstate choices like that (Unless that happens in Mass Effect? I’ve only played a few hours of the first one, but based on some spoilers i’ve read, that might be a thing? idk), and even more, i seriously doubt BW would be willing to do a Genealogy of the Holy War-style replacement for him

Now ignoring all that: Companion Kieran. He's a mage, obviously. He could bring back the Shapeshifter specialization, maybe make it worthwhile this time. Since this is [my city now], he can also get some rogue flavorings. Maybe he can't use daggers or a bow with any combat effectiveness, but my boy sure can sneak. He deals full flanking damage too, so if you fail to notice the charging bear on your 6, you're likely to end up on the pyre

In the linked post, i mention how the DA4 protag could possibly be the one to conclude the research for the cure to the Blight and has to decide which of the warring Warden factions to give the cure to. Kieran has a clear side in the conflict and would be heavily gunning for the new protag to give the Blight cure to the Hero of Ferelden and the southern Wardens. He would be open about having spent the past decade or so living at Vigil's Keep. I'm not sure how open he would be about being the son of the HoF himself

I prefer to ignore the canon that the result of unions between humans and elves are always 100% human, biologically or otherwise. Alistair has to be human-passing for his Origins plotline to work as written sure, but that doesn't have to extend to all elf-blooded characters. Yeah sure it’s probably because of the elves being originally spirits or whatever fine, but i’m not compelled.  Kieran specifically would have looked mostly human to have survived the scrutiny of the Orlesian court without being outed during his childhood, but his elven features can become more pronounced as he grows older

In the case of Kieran being visibly elf-blooded, he has little to lose in the racist Thedosian society from revealing his parentage as it was a forgone conclusion, but he might be worried about how it would affect his father's reputation. (As we’ve seen with Soris’s epilogues, the elves of Denerim are likely to take poorly to the news.) After spending so long in Orlais hiding both side of his family tree, i don't know if he'll be able to properly internalize that he's allowed to tell people if he wants

Once Novhen's told the rest of the Tabris family, i don't think he any longer cares about keeping it any tighter than an open secret

If the protag presses, they can find out that Kieran's da father is a Fereldan Warden who is taking part in the rebellion. He won’t say which of his parents is elven, and he won’t spill all the details on his father’s position within the Wardens. It won't be until the party goes to Vigil's Keep that they realize that by a Warden, he meant the Warden. Forget about the advantage this will give HoF's side in the conflict should the player wish to support him; this cure means that Kieran might get decades more to spend with his da. Who would deny a friend that?

If the protag gives the cure to the opposing faction (the First Warden’s) instead anyway, it probably won’t cause him to leave the party. He’ll have his own reasons for following I’m sure. But it will cut off friendship and, if it was on the table, romance alongside a heavy, heavy drop in approval.