#plus this npc is like....complicated

[killshotspectre]

sigh i love just feeling so so stupid and like i've done something wrong after every dnd game no matter what

[restrictedreadingtwst]

Playing video games with friends is always an experience, funny or aggravating. But when sharing a game with a special someone you can bond over all the little details and share the memories of learning and playing together. So what's it like playing a special game with your special someone like Idia, a mad gamer who has almost every game figured out, and Malleus, a fae who has no interest in learning about the technical side of modern society?

tw: none?

Gn!Reader at best, please excuse any mistakes.

Groups: Idia + Malleus

Since Idia is always cooped up in his room, when you come over to spend time with him you always end up watching him play his games but it gets boring being an observer. You can ask to try out whatever game he’s playing but sometimes they are a little complicated and leave you upset that you don’t get it. So when Idia mentions an old game that was getting an update, you have a look at it and something just clicked in you. I guess he took notice cuz next thing you know he gifted you a brand new laptop with Stardew Valley newly updated. 

✦ Idia is a try hard, he’s grinding and calculating every day with precision in order to get the most out of the early game. He’s pretty informative on the do's and don’ts; and with this new update he's looking into newly awaken forums on brand new intel to better get a good grasp on the game. And then there is you, the new farmer who likes to talk to the townspeople and take your time to fish and farm, discovering things as you go. So when Idia is off unlocking things, you are looking into the farm and making it pretty with what little guidance Idia gave you. 

✦ Half the time, Idia is spending his times in the mines or skull cavern to get you gems and materials for all the cute furniture you wanna make to decorate your home. The money he earns ends up spent on more seeds, more recipes, upgrading the farm and house, a brand new fishing rod to catch better fish and you always thank him with a kisses irl. And he doesn’t complain, cuz sometimes you do things absolutely hilarious that he can’t be mad at you since you’re a newbie at the game. Plus, you have an eye for design so he can come home to a cute house where you cooked some more food for him to take when he leaves for the caves again, he’s dying on the inside from just how cute you are. 

✦ Idia had his favorites in the past, he no longer considers romancing the npcs anymore since he has you and practically unlocked every achievement known in the past. But when he realizes that you’re talking with Alex or hanging out with Sam while on a walk to the beach, he gets paranoid and begins to pursue you in game. Gifting you diamonds, tulips and sunflowers, a whole ass prismatic shard. It isn't until you are given the bouquet that you laugh at how he’s trying to settle down in the game faster than he would in real life. He’s a mess but he won’t mention it. Plus when you return the favor with a mermaid’s pendant, he’s gushing and flustered in real life. He almost forgets to accept it. 

✦ When you come over for another gaming session, Idia whines that he missed you while you smother his head with kisses and a hug. Booting up your laptop and logging in, you find the farm decorated beautifully with flowers and enchanting sets. Idia had set up the whole wedding venue as a surprise before you got on. Come the next day you guys would be married in game, and you're gushing at how well he cleaned up the farm for you. He says it’s nothing but the sly smirk and the tint of pink brushing his features tells you that he’s more then happy to do anything for you!

When Malleus was introduced to his new console, it was a birthday gift given to him from both you and Lilia. Seeing as you enjoy your little video games and liked showing him the little things you’ve created on your switch, you had the bright idea to share this experience with him with his own green nintendo switch! With the help of Lilia, you showed him how to use the controls and how to take good care of it, seeing as it was different from his tomodachi. Once he gets a grasp on it, you then share with him a game you’ve been meaning to play with him, Animal Crossing. 

✦ Since the game is very slow pace and you guys can do whatever you want, He spends a lot of this time following in your footstep. You show him how to gather items, dig up fossils and the bell system. If you’re fishing, he’s busy trying to catch a bug nearby so he has an excuse to stay near your character. His least favorite thing is when he shakes a tree and he misses the wasps. If he could burn down the console he would, but you hurry over in game to cure him of his ugly bug bites. It leaves him all giddy to think that you would nurture him back to health so the upcoming thunderstorm outside subsides. 

✦ With decorating, he does his best to fit your vision for the island while also adding his own opinions. Sure you can place your favorite villages nearby as long as you guys can put your castle-like house at the very top of the island. Do you want beautiful waterways with a forest vibe? Of course you can, but as long as you have an enchanting rose garden that you both can sit in. And while you two share a house, he loves to decorate his room with historical art and the few gargoyles you’ve made for him in game. His eyes sparkle when he looks at your shared ‘Nest'. He loves when you make things for the two of you to spend time in, but if a villager gets in his way he will pout and plot against them.

✦ Speaking of the villagers, he adores them so much. For one, he loves how they are all so friendly and have the strangest of humor. Of course, they are characters in a game so none of them would be scared of him, but he loves how they all wave and smile at each other. His favorites are the deer and alligator villagers. He finds them oddly familiar as his starters are a sleepy deer and a loud, proud alligator. But other then that, he makes an effort to greet every villager they pass around the island and help them with their little task as a great king would. 

✦ When you both play together, you find yourself sitting in his lap and leaning back on his chest with your switch lite in hand. Malleus has a larger screen per request so that you can help him better, so he is able to hold you and play along. While fishing, he leans over and leaves kisses in your hair, smiling as you pout and complain about him distracting you as you watch the fish escape your grasp.

[ganondoodle]

been trying to do some pixel art bc after putting another 60+ hours into stardew valley the want to make a stardew like game but *my* way is strong again ... but i keep getting hung up on thinking about game mechanics (screenshot at the bottom .. sorry for makign this so long again ..)

at some point i thought the whole minecraft aspect is probably impossible to add into a 2d pixel game and im better off to cut that idea out of my head and instead make a dedicated area in which you can build stuff more costumizable and make the rest a more static thing id built so the worlds have more character and theres less problems with NPC pathing (since i dont want you to be able to escape Eadryas wrath if you overstay your welcome by building yourself into a circle or collision boxes .... though they would destroy anything in their path to you either way.. still)

but then i still want you to be able to change the ground in your little area (or maybe multiple ... idk im still conflicted bc i like the idea of finding a place and building your lil hut there ... unless i make it so you can build a hut anywhere but change the ground tiles only in certain areas ... ) and build little ponds and stuff ... so im back to the minecraft in 2d problem

i keep getting into these thinking spirals bc i dont want to draw all those sprites if im gonna scrap it all again anyway

the main point with this little ...... well, lets call it fantasy bc im not confident this 'project' will fare any better than any of my other projects (im a never finished a single project and keeps being haunted by it kind of guy and i hate it)

- is that i want a 2d game somewhat similar to stardew but set in my original story world and focused on the environment and nature, not on earning money, an intricate weather system and no time limit on your day, the twist being you are an ex-demon hunter and are on probation to prove you really abandoned the cause, given shelter and a place to stay in the demon world within the protective bubbles around gates into the human realm (bc humans cannot live in the normal environment of the demon world- this is an already long established thing but works extremely well to limit the space you are able to go in a game without making the world feel tiny plus allows me to give you several different environment designs bc those are gates and bubbles in different parts of the demon world) your task being to help clean up the poisoned land the celestials had caused and repopulating these parts with plants etc. ... there is a tracker that lets you know how well or bad it is doing and if you only destroy instead of restore (like chopping down all trees without planting new ones) you will be given warnings until Eadrya shows up and kills you since you are clearly still working to destroy their lands after all

i still really like this idea but im really doubtful it will go anywhere since i am so slow, need to learn at least two complicated new things (coding, music making) and already have so many things i want to do but never really .. do, the task is just too daunting and it keeps me from just having fun drawing pixel art bc i cant stop (over)thinking about mechanics

(see this is what i mean my brain just cant stop, it just keeps going and it keeps making me spiral into these thinking loops that prevent me from actually doing anything )

this is the same file i have been randomly doodling sprites on since april (by far not the only one, but the current one of multiple sprite tests i keep updating or changing)

(i appreciate feedback or thoughts on this alot, its a little fantasy that i keep comign back to, all my attempts to throw it out of my head in hopes of clearing up some space have failed no matter how little hope i have of making it a reality ..)

[anim-ttrpgs]

February Patreon Rewards

Even though it’s only been like a week since the big public update on itch.io, there’s still plenty to be excited about for patreon subscribers. A lot of small tweaks, clarifications, and typo corrections for Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy as pointed out by the many people who downloaded the updated beta version last week, plus some rearranging and cleanup of sections. The Morale section is a hell of a lot clearer and easier to reference now, that’s for sure.

As for Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG, the crunch time leading up to and around the release of the big Eureka beta update has made progress slow, and it is still nowhere near finished enough for us to put it up as a public beta, but it has functional-er character creation now, and an unfinished preview of the Palace Generation rules.

Two of the biggest things that our early playtests revealed is that this is a game that really benefits from a set map, and that there needs to be more for the Drow to do. The palace generation rules will help you create a map for the game, and upgrade it as your Drow climbs the ranks. When that’s done I’ll be adding in rules to make skirmishing less of a thing mentioned in the background and more of a thing the Drow actually does during gameplay. I am really hoping to make more progress on it next week so that it can be released publicly as a beta like Eureka this month, or March, or April.

Full changelog for both games below.

Eureka: Investigative Urban Fantasy Changelog

CHAPTER 2

Edited a mistake in the Chemistry Skill 

Clarified that a character cannot have multiple instances of the same Trait 

Clarified that even with the Did You Know Trait, an investigator can still gain bonus Investigation Points from other Traits. 

Fixed a typo in the optional fears in the tiers of fear section

Slapped in a section that better explains how the character sheet works, will fix this up later

Clarified that My Glasses Trait gives a Contextual bonus and clarified Go With Your Gut

Moved “Creating NPCs” from Chapter 7 to Chapter 2.

Really cleaned up “Creating NPCs” and “Morale” and made it much more clear

CHAPTER 3

Clarified Epicenter Initiative

CHAPTER 7

Finished the “Setting the Stage” section

Cut “Connections (Optional Rule)” for now. We might put it back in later, but the thing that this rule does is something that most groups have little trouble doing on their own, and we really need to reduce page count.

Moved “Creating NPCs” from Chapter 7 to Chapter 2.

Reordered chapter 7

Removed “Character Moments (Optional Rules)” for now, might put it back in. 

Removed “Car stalling Out” Might put it back in. 

Removed “Clues direct the party” and “Clue redundancy”, might put them back 

CHAPTER 8 

Fixed typo in the Wolfman “Unstoppable” section

Fixed it so that the Wolfman “Just Built Denser” section does not make wolfmen inherently be super tall

Fixed typo under the Curse section of Changeling

Clarified how the Manifest Weaponry Mage Ability interacts with other Traits.

New hunting table entry added (this one was from a submitter, those slots are still open, you can email us about getting your own custom hunting table entry at anim.contactus@gmail.com)

Silk & Dagger: A Sensible Drow RPG Changelog

CHAPTER 1

Made it so that complications arise for chores on a Narrator rolling a 5 or a 6 instead of just a 6. 

CHAPTER 2

Added Reflexes Skill for servants only. Anything a Drow PC would do that would be covered by the Reflexes Skill would just automatically succeed. 

Added a bunch of Traits for both servants and Drow. A lot of them are just transferred over from Eureka, but we just had to get SOME Traits in there. The more we are able to flesh out the mechanics themselves, the more we can start to come up with Silk&Dagger-specific Traits that play with the rules in unique and interesting ways. We also plan to make a bunch of servant Traits based on famous maids and butlers from fiction. 

Started work on Palace Generation mechanics but they are not yet finished enough to really be used.

CHAPTER 3 

[beneathsilverstars]

@horatiocomehome replied

ooo how about jewelry taste. dangly earrings vs studs, do they wear bracelets, rings, flashy vs elegant, etc

mirabelle has so many cute trinkets! we know she loves accessories that go ding ding, and she'll layer a ton of necklaces so they knock against each other. sometimes they all match nicely, sometimes it's eclectic chic! she adores metal charms and carved beads, especially charmingly unusual shapes like an itty bitty fork, ducky, book, etc. as well as classics like lockets and bells! she tends to fidget with rings and lose track of them, so she avoids those. post-canon she decides to stop wearing earrings, so she turns her novelty earrings into bracelet/necklace charms! and gives her more basic studs to isabeau so he'll actually own some basics.

isabeau is all about shapes and contrast, so he likes chunky beads in materials like turquoise or jasper that have different shades marbled together, metal geometric shapes, wire-wrapped stone, and unique arrangements of elements. he likes funny noises too, but will go for one complicated necklace instead of multiple single strands. he definitely tends towards statement necklaces and earrings — he used to run into trouble because he only had statement pieces, so they would clash terribly, but then he started buying more matching sets. he loves bonding earrings as a romantic, but is a little torn because there's no way any two earrings could match all of his fits...

odile is the kind of person to pick a nice look and stick to it, so there's not much variety in her accessories. she has her glasses gems, a pair of pearl studs, a pair of silver studs, and a couple sentimental rings that she keeps somewhere safe instead of wearing. we know bonding earrings are popular in ka bue but not as universal as in vaugarde; i think it would be cute if ka bue had a whole language of earrings and rings, with different gem types/cuts/colors denoting different sorts of relationships and emotions. so she's got, like, a [daughter, you are the most important thing in my life] ring from her dad, and a [lover, we change each other] ring from an ex.

siffrin is all about sentimental pieces!! it doesn't really occur to him to buy himself jewelry, but isa or mira will see him looking at something in the market and buy it for him and suddenly the aesthetic appeal that sif had mildly enjoyed doesn't matter at all compared to They Gave This To Me. siffrin tends to be drawn towards solid shades or starry dots, and smooth, swirling shapes. isa also gets them stimmy pieces like a bumpy bangle or spinny ring, and mira gets them cute things that remind her of them like star pins or kitty charms. he's just so fun to give trinkets to, even bonnie and odile have gotten him some, so he's working up quite a collection! he carefully rotates through everything, and keeps some pieces in his pockets when he can't fit everything he wants onto his body or doesn't want to wear any jewelry that day.

bonnie's bracelet is smooth wood, and they're going to be very upset the day it no longer fits over their hand. they prefer non-rock materials like wood, shells, bones, and sea glass, because that's just way more fun! they made shell necklaces with nille all the time, so many that it doesn't matter how often they lose them.

loop goes full magpie! since they don't have to buy necessities like food, they're less careful about spending money than siffrin, plus they're more desperate to capture any scrap of joy. they also have a bit of "everyone else is an npc" brain and "i am both above and beneath normal rules", so they're more comfortable with stealing than siffrin is. they like drapey chains, black and white beads, and unusual pieces. they like the pressure stim of very heavy necklaces and the clack of many bracelets. once when one of their favorites broke they procured the tools to fix it, and started modifying the stuff they own and stringing trinkets onto chains!

[cantheykillmacbeth]

Skeletron from Terraria could kill Macbeth.

Yes, Skeletron from Terraria could kill Macbeth!

Though the lore of Terraria is a bit scarce, there are many heavy implications that connect almost every major boss of the game to the eldritch deity Cthulhu, who is referred to with either masculine or neutral pronouns. Skeletron in particular is said to be part of Cthulhu's skeleton that was ripped out of his body during a war, which then became animate through sheer force of rage. Skeletron (as well as the other bosses ripped from Cthulhu) is referred to as a separate entity from Cthulhu entirely, with it/its pronouns being used exclusively.

This definitely applies Skeletron for the Gender Clause and Birth Parent Clause at the very least, and while its initial inception would certainly count for the Unconventional Birth Clause (being a piece of a skeleton getting ripped out of your father's body and then becoming independently animate only after your father retreated to the moon sounds like a pretty esoteric birth to me), it gets a bit more... complicated with what we see within the actual game.

You see, in Terraria, when you want to fight Skeletron, you have to interact with an NPC who is simply known as the Old Man at the entrance to the world's dungeon. He explains that he is under a curse from Skeletron, and asks you to break said curse by defeating it. Agreeing (under the right conditions) will cause Skeletron to violently erupt out of the Old Man's body in a giant blood splatter, ripping him apart from the inside. ((The Old Man comes back from this somehow. It's never explained. Don't worry about it.)) Now, one could potentially make the argument that this... eruption would count as a "birth" under Shakespeare's definition of the term. And, unfortunately, if we deny this, then we're going to need to make a much more specific way to define "birth" for our purposes that excludes Skeletron and C-section babies while simultaneously including births that result in the death of the birthing parent.

Looking to previous posts I've made, a somewhat similar situation is the Xenomorph, with the whole chest-burster situation. At the time, I had quite confidently said that they apply for the UBC, and nobody seemed to really bat an eye at that; plus, I would probably still stand by that decision. So, while it's ultimately debatable, I'm going to say that Skeletron erupting out of the Old Man does not count as a "birth" for our purposes, and therefore Skeletron's initial inception will be counted for the UBC instead.

Sorry for that overly-long explanation that ultimately just led back to the same conclusion.

Thank you for your submission!

[tideveil]

furthermore, it's not even the fact that there are no ideas that could be seen as vaguely problematic, but that the world of thedas was scrubbed from it, just as if bioware is so terribly afraid of offending someone that all the complicated issues that they created (or rather, the writers before them), are just swept under the rug.

slavery in tevinter is a vague concepts and it's just good guys who want abolish it, and evil guys who want to keep it. if you create a society where slavery is so much ingrained into it, you should meet characters who consider slavery very much normal and very much part what should be normal. said characters may be funny, likeable, cool and whatnot. and personally, I think it's very important that we are faced with characters like that. characters that are outwardly friendly, kind, funny but still have problematic opinions at worst, and opinions you wouldn't agree with at best. it's important for understanding media and having media literacy that many people sorely miss. and we need to discuss those opinions ingame and get to agree or disagree. not the different options of agreeing with a character and not having your own opinions. but I digress. bioware takes this even a bit further, it's not just "the good guys hate slavery, the bad guys like slavery" - you don't even get to see any slaves, and slavery remains something that is vaguely mentioned sometimes, but of course, nobody actually goes in. (this isn't me trying to defend slavery in any way. fictional or non-fictional. slavery Is the prime example I use for established issues being ignored)

and as mentioned before, not one single elf you interact with says something like "hey we've been mistreated for so long, maybe it would be right to join the evanuris, they could help us" as in... desperate people do desperate things. or being so terrified of the evanuris that they join them out of fear. no, the "worst" you get is "wow i feel a bit conflicted about the fact that our gods are back but they are evil, but i won't have a crisis of faith and question everything i knew about my culture and origins, fuck the evanuris!" - and on the other hand, everyone knows that they are elven gods, and not once, you see even a designated hate sink npc even say "fuck the elves, that's their fault" - whereas in past games, elves couldn't even sneeze without the humans blaming them for a plague (or whatever the quote is).

plus the whole idea of "we are in the north, so the mage-templar war and the divine in orlais are irrelevant" is infuriating because the north =/= tevinter lmao. at least one character should have opinions on that.

i won't go into the whole bullshit bioware created in regards to the antivan crows and shifting them from an assassin organisation who recruit and abuse children and practice slavery to quirky freedom fighters who only want the best for everyone - as this topic has been talked about enough, lol.

it's just... the game only gives you the option to be good. you don't even have the option to be even slightly amoral, someone who is objectively good but wants to get the job done, and has no time or patience for every little issue your companions have. you're forced to be the good guy, but choosing the good options isn't worth shit if the bad options.

[newbiespud]

Griftlands: Three For All - Announcement

Over the past few months, maybe even the past year, I've occasionally mentioned an idea for a second big Griftlands mod, one last hurrah to cap off my time with the game after Arint's Last Day and Grift the Spire. But I haven't gone into great detail about what this mod idea actually is, have I? I've been doing so much pre-production planning that I haven't really had the time to go into the basics. Let's fix that!

The Grifters Join Forces!

Anyone remember the cinematic early access trailer for Griftlands? How it greatly implies there's a story where the three grifters are brought together by chance and team up? And that didn't really end up anywhere in the game because it was just to show off how the main characters operate?

Let's make this tantalizing concept a reality!

The story of Three For All picks up where the trailer leaves off. All three grifters - Sal, Rook, and Smith, some time after the events of their main stories - are in Pearl-on-the-Foam, figuring out what these strange devices they've all collected are and why every faction in Havaria seems to be after them. In order to survive, collect the rest of the devices, and get paid, they'll have to team up, utilize their connections and skills, and watch each other's backs. If they can trust each other.

Choose Your Character and Party Up!

Three For All is a story about all three grifters working together. But, you get to decide who's taking the lead. You can start the campaign as any of the three grifters and the other two will be your NPC party members. Instead of being three separate campaigns, it's one campaign that can handle multiple playable characters, plus different routes when the grifters must sometimes split up, and even altered dialogue in many conversations!

This extends to battle and negotiation as well! You can play through many of the same conflicts as any of the grifters and the other two will back you up! You're a proper party now!

Of course, this means that battles and negotiations will be a bit harder on balance. Many factions are after the same things you are!

("But what if the other two grifters die in battle?" You might ask. You're right, that would get very complicated very fast, and be anxiety-inducing to manage. So instead, they are what certain games would call "Essential" - they won't die, but reducing them to 1 HP will make them Panic indefinitely until healed. So if you want to make the most of their help, keep them defended and alive! But if they get knocked down, it won't be the end of the world.)

While not much has been implemented or locked down yet, there will most likely be special cards or mechanics for controlling your fellow grifters in battle and receiving help from them in negotiation!

As a bonus, there will also be a special "All For One" solo route with its own dialogue that any modded character can add to their list of campaigns! (Or you could even use the Cross Character Campaign mod to replace one of the grifters in the trio routes, who knows?)

What's Done and The Road Ahead

The reason I'm making this big announcement post now is that a lot of the quest planning work is finally done. The structure of the main quest is locked in, and I've got enough concepts for new side quests and random events to justify making a campaign where you're expected to play through it a minimum of three times, once for each character, while maintaining a high level of variety.

(That means something like 25 side quests so far, 20 opportunity events, and 50 random travel events! I've been trying to frontload as much brainstorming as I can, and I'm still not done!)

Now I can really start getting into code and scripts and start making the content that goes into the mod.

The plan is to create a Day One Demo, with all the content that could appear on the first day of the five-day campaign, and push that onto the Steam Workshop for testing and tantalization. Then it'll be on to finalizing the rest of the days and their special quests and routes.

Oh, did I mention that this mod will be adding 10 new bosses to the game? Yep. And the Day One Demo will also include a special Brawl mode for previewing and testing all of those bosses!

That's a Whole Lotta Content!

Welp, my big mouth has written a whole lotta checks that I'm gonna have to start cashing. But Griftlands is a very special and important game to me. Working on Arint's Last Day, my first mod ever, really kind of saved me and restored a lot of my working confidence, and I want to give back to the game with one last hurrah, one last injection of raw content.

The goal is to make this an intricate, extremely replayable campaign where there's always something new you haven't seen, while enjoying the indulgence of the gimmicks of partying up and swappable main characters.

I roughly expect the Day One Demo to drop sometime in 2025, and the full mod will come later, either very late 2025 or more likely sometime in 2026. I may also run a private playtest group as the mod approaches completion, no solid plans there yet.

If this sounds great and you want to support my work - none of which will be paywalled in any way - consider donating to my Patreon. It keeps me alive, and you get access to my quiet little Discord server, which is probably the best way to find out what I'm working on day-to-day. Otherwise, follow me here or on Mastodon and I'll post infrequently about my progress, though most days it'll probably just be "yep, wrote a lot until my brain fried today."

So that's Three For All, an ambitious plan to create what's essentially another free DLC pack for Griftlands and write some gloriously indulgent fanfic at the same time. Wish me luck!

[klabauters]

This might be like a weird ask, but like can you explain how larp works? I play ttrpgs so I know like the basics of roleplaying but like is it the same group everytime? But there seem to be so many people involved? Do you get assigned your character or do you create them? Is there some kind of a gm? I imagine the logistics are super complicated but maybe you could explain it a little? Also followed for db content, stayed for larp sideblog!

Not a weird ask at all! But oh boy, where do you begin?

Every larp is organized differently, and the things I'm about to say are by no means universal. I'll just explain this using the Mythodea campaign as an example.

Just like in ttrpgs, you've got one-off games, and long running campaigns. Mythodea is one of the largest german campaigns. There are several Mythodea events happening each year, the biggest one being Conquest with just under 10000 players. Then there's the Chroniken and the JdS, which usually have around 1500 players attending. There's a few more smaller events throughout the year, too.

These all happen in the same universe, with the same plotlines. Like sessions in the same game of DnD. Some players only attend the Conquest, others show up at several or most of the smaller events as well. All depending on how involved you want to get

Do they assign you a character?

No! There are larps that'll hand you a pre-made character, many don't. However, individual groups within the Mythodea campaign (say: certain nations, orders or camps) might have a certain design concept that they'd want your character to fit into if you want to join them. A knightly order wouldn't exactly want a random pirate joining their ranks. In the overall campaign, you can pretty much show up with any vaguely medieval (ish) fantasy (ish) character that you came up with.

Is there some kind of GM?

Kinda, yeah! The overarching plot is written by a team of organizers, who then brief the NPCs on what's supposed to happen next. The players, like in ttrpgs, then react to whatever gets thrown at them. Occasionally they'll brief "important" individual players, too, for logistical reasons. But as a player you ideally get minimal direct info from the game runners.

Since this is a giant campaign with all sorts of factions and groups, there is a fuckton of plot that isn't dictated by the game runners. A lot of conflict and storylines just evolve naturally, and you can attend most of the bigger events without necessarily having to interact with the given plot.

How are the players in such a big game organized?

The players are, in this case, split into groups. There's different kingdoms (in Mythodea you have four main kingdoms: southern, western, northern and the realm of roses. We don't talk about the east for, uh, a bunch of reasons. Plus a big number of independant kingdoms and groups). That's how the camps are divided. Within those big kingdom/group camps, you have smaller factions within said kingdoms. Like specific guilds, families or organizations. You'll usually have one or two people per small camp, and then again a few people for the umbrella groups organizing the logistics of who goes where, who's showing up, etc etc. If this sounds horribly complicated and like one mess of a snowball system, that's because it is. You just hope that whoever's directly above you in the chain of People Who Organize Things knows what they're doing.

[stemmmm]

Stem's Thoughts on Harvest Moon GBC3

Harvest Moon GB1 has a mechanic called “Harvest Sprite Help” which lets NPCs take over the work on your farm for you. I criticized it heavily for the way that it took control away from the player by encouraging a style of gameplay where you turn the help setting on and then leave your game for real life hours at a time to effectively play itself. What if there was a way you could have someone else work your farm while you can still have fun playing the game though? How could you make this mechanic work?

Generally my rule when I play a new one of these games is that I have to go in without knowing anything about it, or at least as little as possible, since I've absorbed some knowledge for the older games via cultural osmosis. I don't fully know why I broke that rule for this game, but I'm grateful that I did because everything you do here hinges off of one choice you make the instant you start your new file: will you play as a boy or a girl?

Gender selection in this game is not just an aesthetic or story choice, but a mechanical one, too. Each character is given access to different tools and is expected to do a different type of work on the farm– the boy has all the basic crop-farming implements, and the girl has all the tools for animal care, plus a few farming tools that lack the ability to be upgraded. This makes it pretty hard to do the work of the other gender from what you selected, but that’s not an issue because you aren’t meant to be doing that work anyways, they are. Whichever character you don’t choose will live on the farm to work with you.

Before you start your day, you’ll need to talk to your partner and tell them what you would like them to focus on. It’s not too complicated with the girl because you can just ask her to do general things like get milk and eggs from the animals or pet all of them, but when delegating work for the boy, it’s as complex as telling him what to do on every 9x9 section of the crop field. This isn't the first game to have work delegation, you could argue Harvest Sprite Help was the same thing, and Back to Nature had you asking Sprites to assist you as well, but this is definitely the most thought out version.

The story

The premise of the story is that the boy character and the girl character are coming together to save an old farm like usual. The difference here is each character's relationship to the farm. 

While HM64 was a sequel to SNES in that all the characters were the descendants of the original cast, this game is a sequel to GBC2 in a more literal sense. The boy character is literally the farmer who saved the farm in GBC2, called over to do the job again. He even makes references to characters from that game as if they're his old friends. It feels a little awkward narratively, since he saved that old farm from becoming new development just to abandon it again, like what benefit does that bring to anyone? Who knows. It doesn't matter here.

The girl on the other hand actually has a relationship to this farm. When you choose to play as her, the game opens with cutscenes showing her as a small child watching her father work the fields. In the current day of the game, her father has died and we enter on a scene of her arguing with the mayor that she can take the farm over, but to no avail. What wins him over is that someone else brings in the boy and proclaims he can save it instead. This is accepted without question, but at least he’ll let you live with him in your own house and pick up some of the slack. This game has somehow figured out how to turn sexism into a mechanic as well.

The girl is only expected to care for the animals, a very simple task compared to the hard labor of working in the fields. There is also only one way to get married in this game, and that is to marry your partner on the farm. If you’re playing as the girl and decide to get married, your game ends. Playing as the boy, you can keep going and even have children, but marriage for a woman is game over.

All that said, my choice was actually to play as the girl, and I think it was the superior option, at least in terms of having a good gameplay flow. You may only be supposed to care for the animals, but you still have all the tools you need to grow crops, they just aren’t the best. At the beginning of the game, your partner usually isn’t very good at their job. For me, this manifested in the boy doing effectively nothing. The game started with me doing every last bit of work on the farm– planning the field, buying seeds, weeding and clearing the field, plowing, planting, watering, caring for the one cow you start with… It was basically just the same as every other farming sim. The difference is that by the time I was sick of that grind, the boy was competent enough with his work that I could just tell him what to do and go about my business. 

A management sim

It took a minute for the management part of the game to kick in, but once it did, it ran like butter. Sure, I would have had better tools to work with had I picked the boy, so it wouldn’t be so labor intensive once I got to that point in the game playing as him either, but I still much preferred assigning him the work rather than actually going and picking every single crop. It feels a lot nicer to go out and buy the seeds while I know he’s harvesting the grown crops so I can tell him to plant them himself the next day. It also meant that for the first time, I was giving almost my full attention to the animals. They don’t have any more nuance to them compared to the usual, but I did feel inclined to keep more of them and actually try to care for them the way you’re told to. On top of all that, the boy has nothing to do in winter because there aren’t any crops that season, so at least the girl has year-round work.

I really think that to play as the boy and have to take care of all the crops actually would make the management part of the game a little overwhelming, because there’s a lot more to it than just delegating work. Your farm is located on a small island off the coast of a city, and because of that, the only way to get to any shops to buy things for work is by taking a boat to the mainland. This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if it weren’t for the boat only running two days of the week, assuming good weather. This means if you’ve got five days left in the season and you want to buy a crop that’ll grow up in four, if it’s raining on the last day you can go to the island, you’re straight out of luck. If you make good enough friends with some people in the island village, one of them can let you use his old fishing boat which lets you access the mainland whenever you want, but you’re unlikely to get that until you’re a year or so into the game. This limit makes the start of the game really complicated– in a fun way.

Shipping your produce isn’t limited by boat availability, thankfully, since your produce can rot in the storage shed. The shed is where you can hold up to 99 of every type of produce for about a week until it starts to go bad. No one automatically comes to pick up your goods like in other games. Instead, there’s a phone in your house that you can only use to call into the farmer’s union and tell them that you want to ship something. This works for one item type at a time though, so you’ll have to make a whole lot of calls if you have a lot of different things to sell. I tended to try and leave things to sit as long as I could just to make fewer phone calls. It also only works while the union is in business hours, but this is a problem I ran into more often very late in the game when I ran out of work to do early in the mornings before the union even opened.

The goal

Speaking of work, the goal you’re aiming towards isn’t something that you know straight from the beginning. In fact, for a short while playing the game, I was under the impression that there was no “goal” or real endpoint at all, because it seemed to be the case that the farm wasn’t in jeopardy at all with the two of us in charge of it. It turns out my feeling was true, because this is one of the few early games where there is no failure state. There is a winning state which is presented to you once you’ve gotten a little bit better of a relationship with your partner. You need to have three of each of the four types of animals (you have room to keep eight of each type), and you need to ship 300 crops. By the time this was brought up to me in the first summer of the game, I’d already shipped well over that many crops and had the requisite number of chickens. 

The more challenging part of the goal is definitely the animals, as they all cost money which can be a pretty limiting factor, especially early-game, but I should also note that when I’d already destroyed the crop goal, that was without any help from my partner, because he still completely sucked at gardening at that point. The game is made pretty easy to play though the task management system, but it’s also made a lot easier thanks to the way its menu works. It’s the first time I’ve seen a Harvest Moon game use a Pokemon-style menu with a dozen different options that let you check everything from your tools, to your inventory, to the individual statuses of all of your animals. Actually, this might be the first Harvest Moon to actually let you know how well your animals are doing in detail, which is really handy. The menu also lets you choose between tools on the fly without having to go back to your house for a toolbox, which makes working the field way faster than other games, at the cost of having to constantly go in and out of menus because there’s no quick-swapping function. The inventory is also the biggest it's ever been from the beginning at nine slots, including whatever you’re holding in your hands, so you’re able to carry a full seed bag’s worth of harvest back to storage at once. All of this mixed with the fact that you aren’t time-limited to make sure everything is shipped before 5PM means you’re free to work both more efficiently and more calmly to get way more work done than in previous games. The only risk is that the storage shed only holds 99 of each item, so you can lose a lot of harvest if you don’t pay attention.

The rest of the game

Other than that, there really isn’t that much else in the game. This is the first entry to have no character portraits for anyone, so even if there are other NPCs that you can build some small relationships with, it’s very hard to connect. The game exists on a tiny island with a small village of about six people you’re able to talk to every day, and you’re able to boat over to the mainland where you can talk to people and shopkeepers in the mall, but the relationships are pretty limited to only a few events for people in the village and a quest each that can be given to you by the shopkeepers. Don’t get me wrong, there is some story you can run into with a couple ongoing narrative threads, the biggest being something to do with a mysterious mermaid who you correspond with through messages in bottles found on the beach, but for how big the world is, I personally expected a fair amount more than there was.

The island that you live on has five different zones that you can visit via map selection: your farm, the village, a cliff where you can see the mainland from, a mountain path, and a labyrinthine forest. The cliff really only comes into play for a fireworks-watching event with one of the villagers, the mountain exists mostly as the only place where you can find forage to sell or gift, and the forest hides a good lake for fishing but also comes into play for one late-game event, if you manage to run into it (I couldn’t get it to trigger). The mainland works the same with its five shopping areas: the port with a weekly farmer’s market, the Farmer’s Union, the shopping mall, the movie theater, and the aquarium. Each of these areas has a good deal more going on than the island, though.

The port is obviously where you go to take the boat back to the island, but off to the right there’s an entrance to a farmer’s market area that’s only available to enter on specific days– notably, days when the ferry doesn’t run, so this isn’t something you can experience until you’ve gotten your own boat. It doesn’t work how you’d expect. The idea is that you’ll be standing at a stall with everything in your inventory on offer and people will come up looking for something very specific. If they don’t find that one thing, they’ll be disappointed and leave. Their requests aren’t locked to any season either, so someone can ask for corn in the winter, and you’ll just be out of luck.

The Farmer’s Union sells and buys animals, sells farming tools and specific seeds, and can give you part-time work which usually is a specific request to ship a certain number of a given item. It also has a bank to store excess money, which is easy to have in this game. Anything that you can’t find at the Union you can find at the mall, which sells seeds for vegetables and flowers, food, special tools, and books which teach you special tricks. The books are mostly there to teach your partner new ways to do things. For instance, I could buy a book that taught my boy to plow in a U-shape, but by the time I had the kind of money I could throw around at things as frivolous as books, he was already competent enough to handle a field full of 3x3 squares without issue.

The theater is just a place where you can watch short movies, but the aquarium actually gives you something else to do. It’s empty, much like the aquariums of the Animal Crossing series, so the owner requests that you go to all the different areas you can find and catch a variety of fish that he can populate his tanks with. This quest was a life saver to me when I completed all the goals given to me well before it was time for the game to end. There’s the river on your farm, the lake in the woods, the beaches, and the open ocean to fish in with a decent variety of fish to catch. It’s tedious and random, but the fishing mechanic is the usual timed-press type, so it wasn’t too hard, and once you’ve filled up the tanks, you can see whatever fish you caught swimming around in them which felt very rewarding!

Criticisms

If I had to criticize this game, I would say that it’s a little bit too easy and it doesn’t have enough going on narrative-wise. This is a pretty light criticism though, because at the very least, because of how easy it is, it never overstayed its welcome. This is probably the fastest I’ve ever managed to beat a Harvest Moon game and that’s definitely because it does half the work for you through the management aspects. Given my complaints about GB1’s help mechanic, it’s easy to assume that this would be a massive downside to this game, but I think the reason why it works here is because it never takes the control away from the player. It never encourages you to put the game down and let it play itself. Instead, I’m still an active participant who’s in control of everything going on on my farm. That feels good to me!

Between the management aspects and all the new things the game is playing with like the irrigation and scarecrows and new crops, I feel like this game was actually interested in doing something new and different with what farming mechanics are and always has been.

For lack of better way to get to everything in a succinct manner, here’s a list of things that show up which, as far as I'm currently aware, never return in mainline Harvest Moon: 

Pet selection that includes falcons and pigs (or either being things you can have on your farm at all)

Digging out irrigation

Sprinklers (that use this irrigation)

Scarecrows

Produce rot

Fertilizer (that’s made from the rotted produce)

Boating

A bank to store excess funds

Buying books to teach you new skills

Snowboarding minigame

Male animals and animal breeding that requires having one of each gender

Fish collection on the level of the Animal Crossing museum

Multi-seasonal crops (wheat, rice)

Things that are new here that I know come back: 

Horse breeding

Farmers market

No shipping bin (manual selling)

Part-time work

Saving the game anywhere you want

With all these crazy mechanics, this is the type of game where you need a manual that comes with it to tell you what to do. Fortunately for me since there was no chance I'd get one, this is the first game I've seen with a dedicated fansite detailed enough that I think it actually covers every single aspect of the game accurately, and that's obviously because the mechanics actually have something going on for once. If you’re curious about what all of this is, I highly recommend either playing the game or at least checking out the site to see what’s up with them.

I am infinitely charmed by the sheer quantity of weird stuff this game tries out. Truthfully, it makes me a little sad that none of it seems like it ever went anywhere based on the state of modern farming sims, not just because I wish more games would reconsider what farming mechanics could be, but also because some of this stuff is really cool and fun to consider!

I think the path of progression through this game is fascinating, and could work magnificently if it was just tuned a little bit better. The beginning of the game is incredibly hard between the lack of energy, incompetent partner, mess of a field, and hard time limit on when you’re able to get seeds to earn some money with, and I think that early game struggle is truly the most fun part of farming sims. The number of barriers keeps you in that state of constant fighting a little bit longer, but I do feel like as soon as you get a little bit of leeway, everything cascades into becoming infinitely easier. The point where you finally have a perfectly clear field, a partner who can actually do some work, and a boat to get to the mainland on your own can hit all at once, and once you’re there, the challenge is all gone. I don’t think that this point shouldn’t exist, because it’s part of what makes this kind of game satisfying in the end, but I think it could have been reworked to keep some of the challenge a little longer. At the bare minimum, they could have added some expensive items to buy at the end of the game that aren’t just stuff that generates more money like cheese makers and such, because I have no reason to try making more money when I already hardly have anything to spend it on.

Conclusion

In the end, I just think this game is neat. I don’t think it’s the best game out there, it’s certainly lacking most things I look for in farming sims (narrative), but it’s still a lot of fun to play, and even if you don’t like it very much, it’s over in a flash. If you’re the type of person who wants to make a farming sim of your own or someone who’s just interested in weird farming mechanics, I seriously insist that you should check this game out because it tries so many different things. It’s a fantastic thing to study if nothing else.

[nickiemoot]

ok dark souls characters i can't even pretend to be normal about:

solaire of astora

no listen to me i know he's the funny praise the sun meme guy. but listen. hes possibly the strongest non-hostile npc in the game. he can go through the entire game and fight the final boss with you. but if you get his gear, it's not that good. both his armor and his sword are just ok, and has no special blessings or enchantments or properties. which means he is going through the entire game (and he does, you meet him early on and then several times in various areas) on pure strength and skill. hes just that good. plus hes a literal ray of sunshine ass golden retriever of a guy, he's so sweet and jovial <333

rosalia, mother of rebirth

honestly i don't know how to explain myself here. you fight these horrible flesh slugs called "man grubs" in the area she's in, but when you actually enter the room she's in... it's a nursery. full of empty cradles. and a big bed in the back, where you see this woman lovingly cradling a man grub. if you speak to her, she turns her head toward you but the dialogue box just says that she cannot speak because she has no tongue. her covenant is a pvp covenant, where her followers (called "rosalia's fingers") cut out the tongues of their fallen opponents to gift to her. for some reason i was instantly captivated by her and wanted to gather tongues for her despite not even being into pvp. i can't explain ok. let's not psychoanalyze me and move on instead.

malenia, blade of miquella, goddess of rot

malenia seems to be a living avatar or vessel of the outer god of rot, and i think that's fascinating. because as devastating as the scarlet rot is, there's beauty and even life and growth in it. caelid, the area infested with scarlet rot, is full of flowering mushroom-like things and insectoid creatures. its strange and alien life but it is life. when malenia transforms into her goddess of rot form, its with an explosion of butterflies. its complicated, though, because we know the rot took her eyes and three of her limbs, and causes constant pain and restless nightmare-filled sleep. and yet she is one of the strongest empyreans, the only time she didn't succeed in battle was against radahn, the guy powerful enough to halt the movement of the very stars, and that was a stalemate not a loss. shes strong, shes tragic, shes beautiful, shes literally falling apart. i love her so much.

and last, no image because i can't look shit up without tripping over dlc spoilers:

kindly miquella the unalloyed

twin brother of malenia, also cursed from birth but in a way almost opposite of his sister: he is in a permanently youthful body. he is considered the most fearsome empyrean, because he is so kind and loving that he has no enemies. hes described as being able to "compel affection". some people are put off by this but i see his deeds and i think, is it so strange? the lands between are a harsh place and he is the only one being kind and fair to everyone. when his mother's religion fails to alleviate malenia's suffering, he rejects it and finds a solution himself. when the golden order outcasts and subjugates people, he welcomes them with open arms and promises a future where they will all be equals. i don't think there's anything manipulative about how he compels affection, i think he's just so genuinely good and kind that people follow him willingly. i would. (i haven't finished the dlc so i can't remark any further, but this is my impression just from the base game)

anyway. if theres a pattern here of the types of characters i am extremely un-normal about,

i don't have a conclusion. i don't know

[moonpool-system]

How's system travel work? Like, what's your& process for performing it, or for performing astral travel? How might one learn to do something like that themselves?

I'd also like to know more about the experiences you've had that corroborate your belief in system travel. For full transparency: The concept of systemhopping does sound very unbelievable to me, but I'm always curious to learn more and be proven wrong.

Excited to learn more ^_^/) !

Hi, thank you so much for the ask! (re: this post) Infodumping ahead!

Disclaimer: This is our belief and our method! This doesn't reflect the view of all astral travelers

Our process for performing system travel ties deeply into both our belief in chaos magick via the collective subconscious and our own hyperphantasia & synesthesia. Chaos magick generally hypothesizes that the living subconscious as a plane of existence is a well of energy, from which manifestations spring forth upon intense belief in or focus on them. For example, a single person hypothesizes a deity; this person believes in the deity deeply and spreads the concept to other people, whom then begin to believe in the deity deeply as well. The devotion of time and energy allows the deity to manifest within the collective subconscious, gain a sort of consciousness if this is how they're believed in, and communicate with/enact on the physical realm around them. This is how both a lot of "collective thoughtforms" work, and how most pop culture paganism works, plus some string theory a la fictionsourced past lives or soulbonding. It's also the basis for both spiritual and psychological(check out Jungian theory) shadow work. (yes this is where Persona™ came from) (this is also why we consider our tulpamancy metaphysical but thats a WHOLE nother post)

So stemming off of this concept of manifestation based on intense thought & belief, we personally work with those in our headspaces that used to have outerworld powers in their past life memories. Many of them can still use these powers to an extent within headspace, and luckily for us, our partner system has many members that utilize a magic realm known as the "Warp", a perfectly useful representation of a physical manifestation of the collective subconscious. This is ideal because it means my dearest friend Magnus is used to working with a tangible representation of metaphysical sub/conscious energy- exactly what we'd need. To locate us, he hones in on the bonds we share, similarly to how a soulbonder connects with their soulbond. (This is made easier due to the fact a few of us across the system are canonmates, not just sourcemates) Once he's got the connection established, he opens up a shortcut for other members to travel through. This takes a lot of the work of learning astral travel off of every individual member, instead letting someone skilled act as a sort of manager and "flight" attendant. We know someone has either left or arrived due to our synesthesia, since the colors and other sensations we experience when the member leaves/arrives will disappear/reappear. Since then though, we've also transferred back and forth metaphysical artifacts that perform the complicated part for us so we can initiate travel as well. We have a couple members that perform astral travel outside the system often for other reasons also, so it's not like we're relying completely on our partner system's skills or anything. The connection goes both ways.

Since I know I'm gonna get a follow-up ask about this from someone: yes we have tried to communicate with people that've left, halfway just for shits and giggles and half because we have a bunch of scientists in this system. What happens is essentially an "impression" is left behind- it's kinda like an NPC, where you can sorta communicate with them on a set list of dialogue but there's no real conscious will behind it. It kind of feels like communicating with an old, broken record player or tape deck. It keeps skipping back, moving tracks, repeating the same things over and over again, warped and out of tune. It's pretty unsettling and creepy so we don't usually do it, especially because if we were to accidentally form someone new and then the original person came back, that'd be uh. A Unique Problem™

We're run by a logically minded system manager, so of course we're always looking for things to support and substantiate our spiritual beliefs. Our goal is not necessarily to have a proveable theory for how metaphysics works, but at least something that doesn't starkly contrast reality and science as we know it. (That's why we often cite string theory, the theory of ten dimensions, and Jungian psychological concepts in our spirituality) As such, we look for evidence to believe our travel has actually occurred, and the brain is not just creating long lasting phantoms while the original member goes uncontactable. What we've seen here are throughlines and consistencies lining up with how members' memories seem to grow muddled when they've either been in back for too long or when recalling exomemories. If something doesn't happen in front, we often have trouble telling the details of exactly what happened- it takes focusing pretty hard and going through to piece things back together to get a solid picture. However, we know that things Do Actually Happen in headspace out of front, because we've had members corroborate each other separately on manners such as the layout of headspace, personal relationships, etc. Similarly, we've seen the same thing happen with system travel, including: two members getting into a relationship while they traveled and then acting romantically with each other upon returning without needed to affirm to each other what had happened, members recalling the product of physical training with their mindforms taught by another outside the system, one member pranking us by dumping a bunch of stuff through without telling us first and us receiving them before we were informed in the outerworld, and more.

There does tend to be one problem though, and it's something we've dubbed "the Missing Word problem". It's something that happens with our past life memories too. (This is presumably partly because our memory retention and processing problems affect names and other proper nouns extremely intensely, but it affects our partner system too in reference to system hopping.) Essentially, the Missing Word problem arises when a member goes to say a word they're aware they know, are certain they know - however since the brain doesn't, they can't speak it clearly, and all that comes out is the vague shape of a word. This is the biggest problem when it comes to information transfer- most memory is stored in, y'know, the Brain, and spiritual memories can be hard to hold onto. (If they weren't, knowing about your past lives might be commonplace!) Along the same vein, we've had members with fictionsourced past lives predict canon in uncanny and obscure ways with their memories, but they're always more broken and fragmented unless they have canon to gague themselves off of.

- in conclusion/TLDR: We rely heavily on visualization and shared mental costructs in order to establish connection and send people through. We base our metaphysics on Chaos Magick as a base metaphysical system. We've seen our headmates corroborate emotions and concepts separately as well as experience travel effects without front being notified first, and while it's not perfect, it's okay for us. System travel is no more shocking or different than a long-distance or visiting soulbond, it's just that people become way more aware of the unproven nature of spirituality once you involve multiple bodies on this Earth engaging in the practice.

[veilkeeper]

2 and 48 from the round one questions?

(questions from here)

2. How did Rook get the nickname? What do they think of it?

partially answered here. corentin doesn't mind it, but he also has a complicated relationship with his sense of self as it is. in more intimate settings and with the people he's closest to, he prefers his actual name—it's grounding. but elsewhere, in casual conversation or with allies? rook is fine.

48. A color, flower, animal, and weather to describe Rook:

colour: orange. i've associated it with him from the very beginning. it's why i spoiler tag for this game with orange and why i swapped the subtitle colours so that rook is orange and npcs are purple (the default has it the other way around). it's warm and energetic but not hot and harsh the way red is. like embers and open flame. sunset and sunrise. soft like peaches or hard like pumpkins. flower: bird of paradise. freedom, opportunity, faithfulness, joy. it evokes a bird in flight, is brightly coloured and tropical. animal: coyotes. sorry, i get to actually talk about this so i'm going to. like with the colour thing, coyotes have been associated with corentin since the beginning, because from the second i made him i knew he was a shapeshifter, and i knew i'd need to pick a go-to animal form for him, and it's coyotes. some of the earliest posts in his tags are these funky dudes. they're intelligent, adaptable survivors, they're chatty, they're tricksters, they hunt and scavenge, and they often travel in familial groups. plus. look at his face. he already has the puppy dog eyes. weather: warm rain. the kind where the sun is still peeking through the clouds and your hair is soaked but you can smell the grass and it kind of reminds you that you're alive.

[pommunist]

I do wonder a little if the very different reactions to Pomme and Dapper's beds being included in the stream might in part be like... a difference in people used to seeing a new admin play an egg? The situations are very different and that should be acknowledged and looked at and even if as is likely the case QStudios owns all rights to the NPCs created for QSMP it would feel extremely icky to me to give Pomme especially a new admin. But at the same time... I do wonder if people more used to say, Chayanne, who has had 2 different main admins and been played by 4 or 5 different admins regularly enough the different forms have nicknames are more... accepting of the idea? Because the idea of an egg belonging only to the one actor is less comprehensible to them, as it's not what they're used to? Ramón's situation might be closer, but again 2 admins at least. Im almost certain I've seen Tallulah played by someone else when her admin was sick, and I've no doubt some of the other eggs have occassionally been played by others due to admin illness even if not long term.

(This is not to say it's main the issue (even without eggs being acted Sunny's admin should have known what was happening just for bigger issues with the stream alone - admin health and treatment is far more important than what they provide) I'm just. Trying to think of reasons why reactions I saw were as polarised as they were, with half my dash treating it like parading a corpse in the street and the other half like this was entirely expected and normal.)

Oh that’s a good question anon !!

First, the ownership of the characters is a tricky point that I don’t have an answer to as intellectual property laws are extremely complicated and not something I know much about tbh.

And on the topic of admin change, I think public reception depends a lot of the cause of said change : For example, when Ramon switched admins, huevitos were perfectly fine with it as it was assumed that the OG had taken a break for studying purposes so it was not a problem (turns out they were fired 🥲). It’s the same whenever an admin steps up to punctually or long term play another character because their admin is too busy with irl stuff, other work within Qstudios, is sick…. (like what I assume happened for Chayanne)

Pomme’s situation is different because of Lumi’s circumstances and the fact that she asked for her character to end with her leaving. Plus the fact that CCs have said before that they didnt want her to be replaced, even before that whole situation, I remember at least Antoine saying he would rather have Pomme dead than be played by someone else. I’d say the french speaking side got quite attached to her as, with all the sidelining we went through, both her character and admin were our only beacon of representation within Qstudios/QSMP 🥹

Also something that makes me kinda ehhhh about saying that there are people who are completely fine with admins changes because their fav character went through at least one is remembering the whole Pepito/otipep mess that had people go mad because Pepito had an admin change for a few days and they didn’t like the "new personnality" or whatever ? (Couldn’t tell the details of it as my spanish suck and Roier often streams in the middle of the night for me, but I remember the twitter shit storm)

Finally about the eggs being like kidnapped and in a coma (I think ? didn’t watch the stream) I guess it’s an okay way to put them on hold while sorting things out + an opportunity to explain in lore if you have to kill some because no more admins ? Or at least it would have been okay if all the eggs admins still working would have been made aware that their characters was being put on hold 😀

[obsessedwithkirby]

Continued thoughts on ex astris:

[initial thoughts here]

-fought the first boss to really use complex attack patterns and it is really fun to counter/dodge those kinds of attacks

-the enemy designs continue to be really really good, said boss is my favorite so far

-the combat system keeps getting more complicated (this is a very good thing)

-the game is surprisingly lowkey about there being side quests, and about informing you about the rewards for doing side quests. I found this a little confusing. The quests themselves have been strong so far though, with them fitting in naturally with the context of the world and providing some extra background to the world

-localization may apparently be getting a fix-up which is very good news

-the story has started to complicate a bit and I’m interested in where it’s going

-the journal is great, especially for someone like me who loves logbooks and bestiaries in games, but I have noticed that it occasionally gives information slightly ahead of what the player has actually experienced in-game. It’s not super egregious though

-starting to think about how I might want to replay this game in the future like I do with a lot of other rpgs I like, which is certainly a testament to how much I like the game so far. Specifically, I think the amount of tutorials could be a bit of a pace-breaker for the earlier game if you already know what to do, and it seems like most of the customization options appear gradually as you progress through the game, meaning the first hour or so on a replay might be a bit repetitive. Then again, the first hour also has some unique locations, events, and enemies that you wouldn’t have seen for a while, plus a lot of unexplained terms and concepts that you would now have context for, so that might be enough to keep it interesting (this is so long-term that I’m not even sure why I’m thinking about this, I’ve basically barely started the game)

-the story has a very different approach to that used in arknights and I find that very interesting. Arknights has a deeply personal story that treats each character as a realistic person and uses these nuanced, complex characters to tackle tough societal issues. Ex astris feels very detached in comparison, most of the side characters feel more like representations of what the people in its world would be like rather than complex individuals, and it feels like the player is then left to imagine for themself what a real person in this world would be like. The npcs feel like how they would be in older rpgs where they act mostly just to serve a purpose for providing a specific bit of extra worldbuilding, facilitating a side quest, or hinting to gameplay mechanics. I think this works just fine for the tone of the game, I think I like it even, I just thought it was interesting

[l-llavellans]

i have soooo many complicated thoughts about veilguard (and dragon age in general) but i will say that overall i really enjoyed playing it (but i would enjoy anything bioware released and slapped a dragon age logo on, lets be real)

I could go on and on all day about what’s good about it and what isn’t so good but here are my main thoughts - yall ain’t got to read all this it is mostly just for me to get all this out and stop bouncing around like a marble in my brain lol

Potential Veilguard spoilers under the cut! And also my rambling thoughts no one wants to read haha

okay let me get the bad stuff out of the way first. these are my biggest complaints about veilguard:

first, it really does feel like a lot of decisions from previous games either don’t matter or are completely disregarded. i really would’ve liked to see more consequences and choices integrated into the story, which i know is complicated because of the change in setting and everything but at least in the form of codex entries or something. just some kind of acknowledgement of oh, you played three games before this that involved making choices with big impacts on the state of the world and here’s how that’s still felt

secondly, i feel like a lot of stuff happens “off-screen” in veilguard. like it almost feels like certain scenes are missing in some places. not even just with the romances, but in characters’ personal quests i just feel like there could’ve been some more detail thrown in there or even just added cutscenes of characters talking to each other or working things out. i really feel this in harding’s case like did we all just forget she can’t touch anyone without her new magic affecting them. how did she resolve that…is it ever acknowledged again…

third and this is my main complaint: a lot of it felt too sanitized. i was sooooo excited to get to play as a crow knowing how characters have talked about them in the past and how controversial they are - zevran literally spends a whole game talking about the child abuse, exploitation, etc that the crows put people through and then you get to veilguard and it’s like oh now they’re noble freedom fighters…the crows rule antiva…where’s the grit!!! it would’ve been really fun to be able to play a character that’s loyal to the crows even after everything they’ve gone through at their hands or a character like zevran that’s disillusioned them and their methods and have that actually acknowledged in game. you can also just freely walk around as a qunari or an elf in tevinter and anywhere really and nobody says anything. even in inquisition npcs would remark about your inq’s race and I know fantasy racism is its own monster. don’t even get me started there. but if it’s already been established then why erase it when you set this game in an area notorious for it? i just feel like my qunari rook would not be able to stroll through minrathous with no acknowledgement whatsoever. it would’ve been fun to see how these issues were talked about in game by the companions and other npcs instead of just ignoring it entirely

okay now the positives!

i loveeeeeeeeeee the different regions. treviso my beloved…arlathan forest…they’re so beautiful. it was really fun to get to explore places that the franchise has spent so long describing and referring to and i LOVE the necropolis that’s literally one of my main positives of the whole game lol

the characters are another huge positive for me. i think the companions are really interesting in veilguard and their personal quests, though i did mention how they sometimes feel lacking, were all really fun to do and reflected each of their personal struggles and character arcs well i think. plus i was so excited to have Harding as a companion lol she practically never left my party so that was a bonus. also manfred. need i say any more

damn if you read this far you got brain worms as bad as me but overall i did really like veilguard. if i sit and think about any dragon age game for too long of course i (and anybody else) can come up with a million things to complain about but at the end of the day it was FUN!! it’s a video game!!! it’s just for fun!! and im going to keep replaying it until I can’t stand the sight of solas’s shiny bald head anymore