New on Desk #106 — Feature Roadmapping

As we discussed on Sunday, I’m writing extra newsletters to make up for the lost January. Not even feeling guilty about it (despite a let’s say duty-oriented upbringing), so clearly this is a great way to compromise between the need for the occasional break from the routines and the need to be consistent in writing my diary.

A peek in the drawers

I generally pick my newsletter topics by timeliness and general interest. So far it’s basically been informal, but I did start making notes on good topics in the early winter. It’s not unusual that I come across several good topics during the same day, or just some timeless topic that would be worth writing about when a suitable opportunity comes up. Sometimes I don’t really have anything interesting going in real time; having some ideas in store would have been rather nice for those times, like one of those depression newsletters I wrote on the “featureless week” last fall.

So anyway, as part of getting back on a productive track, let’s spy on my future topics list. I’ll have to write double newsletters over the next month, and even though I will prioritize timely news items, I’ll probably be drawing on this list of ideas a fair bit. Some some of the following might feature soon in the newsletter:

Byronic Heroes — Paul has been pestering me to explain what the deal with existential anti-heroes like Byronic Heroes and Useless Mans and such is. Good topic, just waiting for the proper juncture.
Gloomhaven — It’s a D&D boardgame that came out as a computer game last year. I played the boardgame a fair bit a couple summers back, and revisited the game on the computer. I guess I sort of have opinions and observations about the game and the genre, but I could see this topic depreciating before I get around to it, too.
Gloranthan Dragon Mysticism — After years of on-off Glorantha studies, I think I figured out how dragon mysticism works game-mechanically. Just some basic broad strokes structural magic theory, but kinda potentially a big deal for a classic fantasy setting where canonical sources have consistently failed to provide gameable mysticism rules.
Hamilton the musical — I watched a teleplay of it (or rather half of one, but I’ll finish it one of these days) after having listening to the soundtrack for years by now. Maybe not just an entire feature article on that, but I could see listing some of my favourite musicals and giving some remarks on the genre and institution of musical theater in general.
Lone Wolf and other CYOAs — As featured last year, I’ve been revisiting the classic ’80s fighting fantasy CYOA playgrounds with a fresh eye. I have some thoughts about the structural design theory of these.
Middle school D&D — This keeps coming up in our D&D theory talks. I do have some basic conception of what the rules and processes for middle school style (’80s, ’90s AD&D) D&D should be in practice. A quick big picture view might make a good feature topic.
Investment tips — I’m not a stock market guru, but I do partake in your typical middle class savings investment lifestyle, so… Mainly it’s just that my friends keep asking me about it, and apparently genuinely do need some basics, so maybe writing the basics of the basics down would be useful. I do have a clear idea of how to set up a rational savings investment plan, I’m pretty confident.
Narrative superflat — I was reading some line claire comics and trying to figure out what people see in something like Tintin and such. Got some ideas about the similarities between European and American comics in the early 20th century, as well as a bit of theory on why these comics seem so dumb to me despite clearly being appealing to some people.
James Barrie’s Peter Pan — Surprisingly interesting topic when you go back to the originals. Did you know Peter Pan not only had a sequel, but a prequel? Also, Barrie was a strong writer, surprisingly so if you’re only familiar with the story from adaptations.
M.A.S.K. comics and other toy spin-offs — M.A.S.K. was one of these American ’80s toy-driven children’s media properties. It’s interesting for how it’s a late entry to the genre, so it’s incredibly overwrought.
Icicle sticks in dungeoneering — We’ve been developing a fun and practical way to build dungeon architecture in real time at the gaming table, combining operational scale (10 feet squares) with tactical play concerns. I’ll write about it in detail at some point, seems like a surprisingly powerful tool in the field.
Versus literature — The age-old “who would win a fight, Muhammad Ali or a bear?” hobby of speculative fiction has gotten instituted as what amounts to a geek subculture in the Internet. I’ve been reading the stuff over the last few years, have some opinions and ideas.
Recent superhero comics feminism — While looking up that “featureless week” post just now, I noticed that I’d done the groundwork on this topic there already. Outright said that I should feature it later at some point. OK, sure.

So that’s what, 13 topics in the store right now. And then we have the actual on-going events on top of that, so the odds are that I won’t be running out of things to write about any time soon. Like for example, my next newsletter is going to be one of those cheats where I just order my thoughts on the last leg of Muster in newsletter format, doing something I would be doing anyways.

AP report pile: Coup in Sunndi #44

So, we’ve been continuing our face-to-face D&D exercises with the local group over January. The subject of concern has been B1, In Search of the Unknown. In the last session we’d worked out the strategic context of the assault on the dungeon: how the adventurers found out about it, where it is, what equipment they need to reach it. The strategic context is otherwise simple, but the on-going civil unrest in the principality of Dhalmond causes two strategic concerns of note:

Food’s kinda expensive: Not only is countryside fairly empty of population these days, but what villagers can still be found don’t have limitless amounts of food to sell to adventurers. The capitol of Dhaltown tends to have food for sale, but it’s on the expensive side there. All in all, we’re adventuring in a land beset by famine.

Loot sales are hinky: Much of what adventurers tend to achieve for loot are basically luxury items. The markets for those are best in places that have large wealthy classes and fair certainty for the future. While the adventurers can try to sell loot in Dhaltown, the prices probably won’t be the best.

These concerns were mainly in the future at this point, of course, but we’ll come to see how they affect the big picture.

The actual Quasqueton bunker-palace, the central concern of B1, wasn’t that difficult to find thanks to the soft-ball adventure hook. (The group had cynically plied me with promises of new players coming to try out the game, so I’d set up B1 here as a dungeoneering-oriented intro to the game. Still waiting for those new players to show up to this day, by the way.) We soon got into dungeoneering, mapping the place and meeting the natives. Some basic things became clear quite quickly:

I’m enamored of the icicle stick dungeon mapping: I’d gathered some icicle sticks and bottlecaps last year with the intent of using them for tactical tabletop gameplay. Trying them out for dungeon scale play with 1 stick = 10 feet scale, I find that it works great! The sticks are quick to lay down on the table, so the GM can basically just replace describing the dungeon geometry with sticks if he feels like it. The bottlecaps are nicely in scale to represent adventurers in those tunnels, you can fit as much dungeon on the table at once as the visibility generally reaches, and the lack of a grid keeps things informal. Lots of potential here, although I think we should dedicate an entire table to the dungeon representation and have a tablecloth to make it easier to move the representation around. There’s a potential here for a kind of “scrolling” effect where we pull the current view to whichever edge of the table and continue building the view to the direction the party is actually going.

B1 is so easy as to be a joke: It’s interesting because I think this is the earliest TSR dungeon module I’ve seen that’s clearly been authored with the intent that the adventurers should win. So it’s both written for a small party (no hirelings) and with a mind to ensure that nobody dies and everybody has fun. Surprisingly wimpy for how old it is. For my play purposes it’s all fine, I’m OK with the occasional easy adventure sneaking into the mix. Just, it’s a weird little thing.

Our first excursion into Quasqueton mainly concerned the adventurers looting one of the preserved bedrooms in the premises. The main pieces of interest were a full-body mirror and an intricate tapestry that would probably fetch some nice prices in a less famine-ridden province.

There was also some monster activity in the form of random encounters. This place no kidding mostly involves encounters that are so small that they’ll only attack the adventurers by mistake. Like, “1 orc” is literally on the cards in this random encounter table. I can only imagine how this is kinda nice on the player side of the table.

The adventurers founded a camp site by a small shadowy pond downhill from Quasqueton, where they stashed their mirror and such. Next session would no doubt involve more exploration of Quasqueton, although… food was running kinda low. Fortunately it wasn’t an easy day’s march to the nearest semi-functional village, Quasqueton isn’t super-far into the wilderness.

January Movie Club Night

We had a movie club night again in late January! As the long-time reader might remember, the members pick a movie each that they think the others should see, and each night we vote to watch one of the candidates. It’s usually a nice time, and everybody’s in general agreement that we should try to do this more regularly than we end up actually doing it.

We had a few new options on the table this time; I try to pester the regulars to offer new suggestions when the tray starts getting stale, i.e. the candidates we have up have been sitting unpicked for several rounds. This is how the voting shaped out this time, with the new candidates in bold:

Apocalypse Now (1979) ➖
Dangerous Liaisons (1989) ➕➕
Ferat Vampire (1982) ➖
Donnie Darko (2001) ➖
Alexander (2004) ➖
Streets of Fire (1984) ➕➕➕
The Thing (1982) ➕

While the voting patterns tend to be fairly neophilic, such that we often end up watching the newly added stuff, I don’t mind carrying the long tail either. Well, Alexander seems to be something that nobody has any intention to watch, but otherwise hope springs eternal. I don’t pick bad movies, they’re just special and need to be appreciated on their own time…

Streets of Fire is a fairly unique movie that I checked out some years ago due to an urban legend claiming that it was a central inspiration for a seminal work in the video game genre of beat’em ups. What I discovered was a movie with a delightful visual style, great soundtrack and extremely plain and plodding plot. But the music scenes are so cool that it sticks to mind nevertheless. I suggested it to the club because of its lopsidedness, thought that it’d be interesting even if not very good.

On a rewatch here, with the club, I was basically of the same mind as before: the movie starts really strong, you get excited for it because it’s so quirky and cool, but then the plot fails to captivate, and it drags horribly, so around midway through I end up bored. I’d love it if this movie was better than it is. I think it’s trying to carry itself with adventure movie cast chemistry logic, but while I liked the cast in general, the writing was so horribly flat that they didn’t really get anything interesting to do in the movie. As one of the theater kids in the club remarked, it’s amazing how they could go on and on with the main cast talking at each other solely in shouty exclamations.

While for me it seemed a fairly clear-cut case of a 3-star movie (one of the worst we’ve seen so far!), the team surprisingly liked it much more than I did. This is strange, as I would have expected my personal obsession with Jim Steinman rock musical to make me the biggest fan of this sort of thing; I guess the club in general just didn’t feel like it drags as much as I did? Anyway, with ⭐⭐⭐🔥🔥 the movie ended up with a fairly respectable rating.

We’ve often settled on just one film a night because we’re old and weak, but this time there was energy for a second movie on the same night! No doubt had to do with new participants coming in midway through Streets of Fire. With added manly men voting on the second round, The Thing (the other new film in the palette) won handily for the second round. No doubt a good movie for later in the night.

I’d seen the movie about half a decade back, but it’s the kind of film that doesn’t get affected by that much. Unfortunately it’s because the movie is kinda… well, dull. Slippery and dull. It’s clearly a New Hollywood thing, and I actually like the camera work and general production philosophy a lot. The plain documentary colors and realistic depiction, small scenes and generally kinda tv-show like aesthetics are the very opposite of Streets of Fire. That part works great, I’d watch an Antarctic nature documentary (with lots of sled dogs!) from this team.

However, there’s not much in the way of emotional hook, and the plot is more of a sequence of events than something providing thematic unity. The intellectual gist of the movie is provocative, but I and others in the club sort of end up working this doppelganger merry-go-round regularly in D&D anyway, so it ends up in this awkward halfway place where it’s too basic for a hardcore Among Us enthusiast, while being too emphasized for general audience.

Thinking about it now, it occurs to me that my reaction to this movie is kinda similar to many other New Hollywood era movies. I like the grounded, realistic aesthetics, but the sensibilities in terms of how to tell a story are often kinda dull. Plots can be more intelligent technically speaking than they’d ever be in modern Hollywood, but the way the story is portrayed is very low-profile, and doesn’t keep attentions easily.

The club was generally of a similar mind here, and The Thing ended up receiving the worst rating ever at ⭐⭐🔥. It’s easy to watch, but difficult to care about, so you just kinda end up mildly bored. It’s not even faulty in an interesting way like The Producers (which we watched last year) or Streets of Fire.

State of the Productive Facilities

I feel like I’m getting back into a productive pattern here, what with writing these newsletters and all. The next newsletter will be about the Muster editing — I’ll try to put down a clean to-do list, basically — after which I imagine I’ll actually start implementing that alongside this newslettering.