#mysterious fortress

[zarla-s]

It's my birthday today~ so I drew Scout's birthday party, haha. He says in one line that he invited the team but no one came which is sad SO THIS TIME EVERYONE CAME

[patreon]

[theworkshopmann]

Mysterious Stranger

Who could he be?

Type: Misc/cosmetic

Class: Spy

Paintable: Yes

Accepted in game: No

This mysterious cosmetic was made by Steam users Tabby and Kowalo. Posted on February 13th 2023, you can vote for it right here!

[tf2incorrectquotes]

Medic: It’s supposed to hurt, it’s science!

[where-the-water-flows]

also like au where teenaged Li xiangyi runs into also teenaged di feisheng mid fight with a di assassin, li xiangyi finds out about the mind control bug via idk overhearing the two Di kids being like 'yeah neither of us want to do this really but y'know. it's not like we have a choice' or whatever, and thus li xiangyi, baby activist for JUSTICE ends up fully derailing his sort of vauge plans to set up a sect in favour of dealing with this terrible injustice because it's, y'know, pretty fucked up and also he's been in the martial world for about six weeks max and in that time he's seen one (1) sect fully massacred like his repressed trauma backstory, presumably thrown himself into a bunch of other unfair fights, and is now faced with a guy only a couple years older than him who's digging his kind-of sect brother's grave after being forced to fight him to death because of fucking mind control slavery

(because on the one hand he's still kind of an arrogant brat, and on the other hand this shit is fucked up and also super personal and kinda complicated in a way that 'just sword the problem to jail/death' can't actually fix, given the whole mind control thing, and he is very rapidly finding out that wow, turns out everything off the mountain is actually very extremely fucked up and way more complicated than he thought.)

shan gudao shows up after like, barely a week away doing idk, sketchy nanyin related things probably, and his arrogant brat of a shidi is immediately hey guess what shixiong new plan we can get back to sect building later, also this is my new best friend he's awesome at sword and barely socialised, also also he's crashing with us now or rather I'm crashing with him and his band of weirdos he's collecting!

[fioras-resolve]

"Is the Berlin Interpretation still relevant?" Part 10 - Results

So, I guess I should finally explain what I'm talking about. I promise I'll stop spamming these tags now.

The Berlin Interpretation of Roguelikes is a genre definition that was made at a roguelike dev conference in 2008. It was a handful of people who were inspired by Rogue to make their own procedural death labyrinths. This was just before Spelunky. It was before The Binding of Isaac, it was before FTL, and it was before Risk of Rain. In other words, this interpretation was made right before the definition of a roguelike radically changed. Before these genre fusions, roguelikes were mostly games like NetHack and Angband, games that were directly inspired by this RPG from 1980. They were roguelikes, because they were "like Rogue."

But let's talk about what this interpretation is actually doing. It is not, in fact, a set of rigid guidelines of what features a game needs to be part of the genre. It is a set of high and low value factors, that a game may not have all of, but the more it has, the more it is, well, Rogue-like. There isn't a game that purely embodies each of these factors, because there's doesn't have to be. Even Rogue isn't fully faithful to this interpretation. It's just that if your game has enough of these factors, then it's clearly working in the same design space, and part of the broader conversation. That's all it was doing.

So is it still relevant? Well, kind of, but not really. Sure, permadeath and procedural generation are still important to people, but for it to be turn-based and grid-based aren't necessary anymore. And I guess for the later polls, either people got tired of me posting these in their tags every day, or they just don't have an opinion one way or the other, because their vote counts didn't even hit the triple digits. It seems like complexity, resource management, and exploration/discovery are still important, while non-modal gameplay and hack-and-slash aren't as much. But I hesitate to give these results the same kind of credence because of how many people from the earlier polls didn't vote on these ones.

It seems like, these days, the roguelike isn't really about its base mechanics. It's a structural genre. You can graft any base mechanics onto it, as long as you start a new run after you die, and each run is made unique by randomness. It seems pretty straightforward.

Okay, what about Mystery Dungeon?

The Mystery Dungeon games these days are mostly known for being Pokemon spinoffs, but the series goes back to the 90s with games like Shiren the Wanderer. These games are directly inspired by the original Rogue, complete with grid-based movement, item discovery, and heavy resource management. It's more "like Rogue" than a lot of modern roguelikes. But because it's structured more like a Japanese RPG, with checkpoints, persistent progression, and a full-blown story, it would probably nowadays be called a "roguelite." Even though it precedes that term by decades!

I'm honestly really surprised that Mystery Dungeon doesn't come up more in discussions about roguelikes. Like, it's a really obvious point of contention, and one that's worth talking about. But only one person in my replies actually mentioned Mystery Dungeon in their thoughts about permadeath. I suspect it's because most of the roguelikes people are invested in these days are indie PC games from the West, while Mystery Dungeon is a Japanese series on console and handheld. But I can't prove it.

Speaking of roguelites though, we have to talk about that term. I don't think that "roguelite" is an inherently elitist term, or that it's useless as a label. it clearly serves some purpose in conversation, even if I wouldn't use it myself. I don't want to prescribe my definitions of terms from on high. I want to understand how people are using these terms in daily practice.

And it seems like it comes down to two definitions. One is the Berliner standpoint. It's less common, but it sees some use. Basically, if you're not making a grid-based dungeon crawler, you're not really making a game "like Rogue," are you? Genre fusions like Risk of Rain and Slay the Spire play completely differently from the roguelikes of old, so it feels weird to just call them roguelikes. This is treating it as a mechanical genre, defining roguelikes by dungeon-crawling in the same way we define a shooter by shooting.

The other definition is a broader one, defined by two key features: procgen and permadeath. This is the most common one in modern conversations about roguelikes, because it takes it as a given that these genre fusions are what roguelikes Are. By this framing, a roguelite is any procgen game that features persistent upgrades. Something like Rogue Legacy, where your progression isn't just you as a player, but your character growing more powerful. Permadeath and procgen serve a very specific purpose in conjunction with each other, and there is a sense where either of these factors being diluted misses the entire point. But plenty of people don't put stock into the like/lite distinction, because they don't see it as mattering. No definition here is wrong, they're just all operating under different beliefs.

(sigh) Look, genre is a lot like gender. In fact, in some languages, they're the same word. It's vague, it's arbitrary, and it doesn't make sense if you squint too hard. But it's important to people, either to describe what they're doing or to understand what others are doing. There's never going to be a strict, clear definition of roguelike that perfectly covers all cases, because that's just not how genre works. Roguelikes are what we mean when we talk about roguelikes. It's very easy to poke fun at a genre label like this, but it's a lot harder to understand what it's doing, and what it means to people. That's the conversation that really matters here.

Is the Berlin Interpretation still relevant? Not as much as it used to be. But your interpretation is what's really important.

[beansforwhat]

Same vibe

original posts from @mozzcho and @lewvithur respectively

[ask-redsoldier-tf2]

Aɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ RED Sᴏʟɪᴅᴇʀ?

...ʟᴏᴠᴇʟʏ.

Sᴏ. I ᴄᴀᴍᴇ ʜᴇʀᴇ ғᴏʀ ᴀɴ ɪɴᴛᴇʀᴠɪᴇᴡ. Mɪɴᴅ ɪғ I ᴀsᴋ ʏᴏᴜ sᴏᴍᴇ ᴏ̨ᴜᴇsᴛɪᴏɴs?

-Ɲ

WHO'S ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH ARE YOU!!??

Questions, you say? The only thing you're getting out of this soldier is my name and serial number!!

[exitvelocities]

prince li xiangyi and assassin di feisheng fic meme fill from discord. requests are still open, please feel free to send some in!

*

assassination may be his trade, but killing itself isn't a skill di feisheng takes much pride in. death sorcerers are raised on it after all; no one is praised for breathing. given the choice, he prefers to be efficient — quick, clean, discreet. it's the circumstances around an assassination that often require greater skill, but this particular assignment seems straightforward. there's no extra lessons or briefings, just a time and date, a location. it seems this princeling has a habit of riding off into the woods alone. it's not di feisheng's place to speculate, but this hardly seems to necessitate someone of his quality. perhaps they simply wanted to get him out of the fortress; the less busy he is the more time he has to plot his next escape attempt. failure doesn't faze him, but he's too valuable to keep benched; it's his token appearance of obedience and ability to lie through his teeth that keep him from being chained up in the dungeon or outright killed.

the sound of hoofbeats pulls him out of his thoughts, the lines of his body shifting from stoic boredom to barely restrained flight in an instant. the horse is white, because of course it is, and the boy on its back is dressed all in red, hair streaming behind him in a tail. if he's younger than di feisheng it's not by much, but people die the same regardless. the moment he's in range, di feisheng launches himself out of the treetop, palm extended with enough force behind it to kill. the fist that meets it is enough to surprise di feisheng into leaping back if the impact wasn't, the horse wheeling off into the forest with a squeal and its rider whirling off its back almost too fast to follow. interesting.

no less arrogant on foot than on horseback, the prince laughs, peering at di feisheng with bright eyes. "who are you?" he asks, dancing nimbly out of the way of di feisheng's hands. "so bold, to be attacking an imperial prince in broad daylight."

di feisheng doesn't reply, eyes narrowing behind his half mask. perhaps this is why. they trade blows, crisscrossing the road, throwing up leaf litter and dust, sunlit in patches. di feisheng's heartbeat picks up speed to match, rushing blood through his veins to the air in his lungs. something dim and nearly dead roars back to life inside of him, singing in harmony with the nameless blade he unsheathes from his back. he hasn't needed it in so long, but this... this is different.

"li xiangyi," he says, because he did read the dossier, "i will kill you."

"oh?" says the prince, catching di feisheng's blade against his own with an ease that belies the strength behind it, "shouldn't you at least tell me your name first?"

he should not. but, "di feisheng," he says, because here, here is a worthy opponent. here is someone he could spend his life chasing, were things different.

"ah," says li xiangyi, leaping lightly up onto a tree branch. "and may i ask why you want to kill me?"

di feisheng stays on the ground, staring up at li xiangyi backlit by the sun through the leaves. so cavalier with his life, this boy, smiling and breathing fast like this is a sparring exercise. "i don't know," di feisheng says honestly, because it's never been his business to know, "but it's your life or mine."

[ink-the-rat]

The power of Oingo Boingo was flowing through my veins as I drew this no click bait 😱😱

[pinkiexneomorph277]

I have my own MLP (My little pony) Freaks /Tf2 Freaks and my fav is Mi Amore Cakehole which was a clone i made of an old friends Cakehole Cadenze mlp freak who has the soul of the Tf2 Sniper freak Piss Cakehole

who also has a clone.

Though i don’t have an Gmod model for my character sadly it just gives me a chance to keep on building character and so far my lore has evolved to Amore possible having somehow ended up with two souls that haven’t merged properly resulting in a third Piss Cakehole/Cakehole Piss, though of course i’m a try think of a name instead of reversing such a thing that’s common in the Freak community for clones and alternates

[basicallyanotherwitchesthing]

John Stevens Kerr - The Mystery and Magic of the Occult - Fortress Press - 1971

[jevilowo]

Right I've decided I need to expand the Heavypyro collection on ao3 quick someone give me a prompt

[tf2incorrectquotes]

Spy: *snootily* Well, I've been in better prisons in my life.

Ms. Pauling: That's...not really something to brag about,

[where-the-water-flows]

how does di fortress interact with the local economy and what the fuck do their logistics even look like, and other incredibly normal questions to be asking here at 3pm on a work day

[uberchain]

“What should the TF2 update add?” They should add the Super Top Secret Agent for the League of Urgently Needed Cohorts, Haranguers, & Metrically-Enhanced Algorithmic Tacticians (AKA Mystery Woman from L.U.N.C.H.M.E.A.T) as the 10th Class

Based on Liz McCarthy’s character exclusively from the TF2 voice actors’ web-series “ TF2WTSFTS / Search for Sandvich”!

twt mirror: here

[pony-central]

SMG4 in 12 outfits

Outfits from

Casual clothes (blue shirt, blue hat, white overalls and brown slip-on shoes)

Winter outfit (blue sleeveless jacket, white undershirt and gloves, black pants and dark maroon shoes)

TF2 Casino clothes

The Blue's Clues outfit was thought of by me (her white overalls, brown slip-on shoes, blue hat and a blue striped shirt to fit her colour scheme)

Scooby-Doo (as Fred)

Clothes Swap with SMG3

As Po from Teletubbies

Witch from Once Upon an SMG4

BRUT4L SMG4 Genderswap

As a vampire

In the dress from Don't Hug Me I'm Mario

And her WOTFI casino clothes