New on Desk #63 — Week in Review

Good week, reasonably productive and productivity-adjacent. Which is how I measure my value as a human being, because I’m a healthy übermensch who spits on unconditional love.

Nothing else to report, so let’s review some shit

The week’s been routine, and I did consider simply telling you about how I’ve been editing/writing Coup Workbook Partials, but then I realized that I haven’t been as diligent as I could about telling you about stuff I’ve been reading lately. So that’s a thing now, get ready for some recommendations for and against.

Movie Club Sunday

Our movie club convened again on last Sunday; we’ve gotten some semi-regularity into this lately. Consistent, casual social activity, which isn’t a given for me. (I particularly enjoyed the “o hai i has high fever” from one of the cinemafiles later in the week, for all that it proved to not be Covid-related.) I don’t think that I have the time for doing this more than biweekly, but if we could do something like that, I wouldn’t mind.

The week’s lineup of candidates consisted of old entrants, plus we decided to each add one title to the pot:

Apocalypse Now (1979) 
Dangerous Liaisons (1989) consistent heat, will win one of these days
Ferat Vampire (1982)
Krabat  (1978)
Donnie Darko (2001) my own long-time obsession
Alexander (2004) nobody seems to think it's any good
Starship Troopers (1997)

The club has something of a relationship with the obscure animated movie Krabat on account of it a) having traumatized the young Sipi in the past, b) being based on a classic fairy tale fantasy novel I have a high opinion of, and c) because finding a copy was a surprisingly convoluted affair. Needless to say, now that we for once had the movie ready to play, it won the day handily.

I’d seen the 2008 German Krabat in the past, and wasn’t particularly impressed, so it is with pleasure that I can report that this Czech late ’70s film is a much superior treatment: it’s an animator’s movie on a modest budget, with the creators clearly putting everything into the aesthetics. This means following the book rather lavishly, rewriting hasn’t clearly been of any interest. Just get through this book and illustrate its poetic fairy tale fantasy imagery through and through, that’s the mission. I think it works great, movies like this do not need things like drama or psychological portrayal. Just transforming witches, laughing skulls, murder and Satanism galore. It’s not long, but feels substantial for how stable and arguably all-ages the storytelling is.

I am admittedly not very objective on the subject of Krabat & the Sorcerer’s Mill, but the jury in general was into it as well, so clearly there is some merit here. The generally positive feelings translated into an unusually high rating for the film. ⭐⭐⭐⭐🔥

Because the night was still young after the relatively short Krabat, we decided to go for a double-feature. There was a fair amount of uncertainty on the second movie, but I graciously broke the tie in favour of Starship Troopers; I’d seen the movie when it was fresh, but that’s over 20 years ago by now. Memory was positive, but does it hold up?

As it happens, I evidently knew a good movie when I saw this last, because Starship Troopers is pretty good! The extremely artificial production details combine with the fascist alternate reality (more that than “future”, really) for a charmingly alien science fiction milieu. The movie’s first half really feels like it comes from Heinlein’s world where democracy has failed in favour of militant fascism. The artificially pretty cast of characters works their way through situations and ideas that work perfectly well as propaganda for the political reality it presents while also running an entirely fair coming-to-age story.

So that part is rather faithful to the novel. The infomercial content that gets shown during act breaks gives the game away (a good thing, surely), blatantly showing how hollow the society of the movie’s world has been bored by the fascist government. It’s an interesting effect, as the primary narrative layer plays fascism straight, while the meta-narrative world-building material points out how you might not want to believe everything you see. Normally you’d do this the other way around, with the protagonist’s first-hand perspective showing the hollowness of the ideological propaganda.

The military space opera of the movie’s second half is a bit too extended, all in all; 15 minutes less of that and I couldn’t even suggest any improvement to this, really. The main issue is that while the military stuff is relevant for the movie’s two main themes (Rico’s growing into a good soldier, and the question of whether the fascist world government actually works), the convoluted marathon of gunnery and explosives would be more impressive and conclusive in moderation. The script-writer has been too faithful to the original novel’s plot beats where, for a movie, less would have been more. As it is, the business with the “brain bug”, which clearly interests the scripter a great deal, is entirely irrelevant to me as audience after we’ve already resolved Rico’s place in the world and the nature of the military government (incompetent and corrupt).

But aside from the bug war overstaying its welcome, the movie’s surprisingly remarkable. I’ve been musing on whether it’s maybe Paul Verhoeven’s best movie — I just checked and his filmography is actually so extensive that I don’t dare say. Starship Troopers is better than Robocop and Total Recall (the two movies I was initially thinking of), which aren’t bad movies themselves, so maybe? I should see more movies from him, he’s clearly had a hand in so many fun movies that there’s probably more good stuff in the oeuvre.

All of the above roughly aligns with the jury’s general opinions. Some liked the action stuff more than I did, but we all enjoyed the movie. The ratings ended up at the same ⭐⭐⭐⭐🔥 that Krabat got, which made this a night for good movies, apparently.

Read a game text: Blood Feud

I forgot to write about this last week, but I ended up reading the pre-release playtest text for a roleplaying game currently in crowdfunding, Blood Feud. It has apparently attracted attention by billing itself as being “about toxic masculinity”, which is basically why it got noticed in my not-very-networked world as well.

So the marketing is politicized, but surprisingly Blood Feud proves to be a a legit Forge diaspora style GMless story game. I notice like 30% influence from Nordic freeform as well, but mainly it’s a form-perfect formal rules closed scenario drama game, similar to e.g. My Life with Master to pick a landmark example. Creatively legitimate, too, with obvious care and thought put into the thematic details. Very much my kind of game, I could well see taking this out for a whirl when there’s time.

The topic of Blood Feud in a nutshell: the game is about social life and community politics in a preindustrial rural village, and particularly about the way the titular blood feuding works as a social phenomenon. The game doesn’t make the mistake of sermonizing, it’s up to the players to draw their conclusions. The viking age background is compact and informed, although there’s no particular reason why the game couldn’t be applied to e.g. 19th century Sicily or other similar milieus just as well.

So that gets a thumbs up from me. Let’s see, age of emoji… yep, of course it exists: 👍

Casual video game: Winter Falling

Because this is review week, a few words on this fun little video game I’ve played over the weekend. Winter Falling is bit of a demo for a game that’ll come out later this year, but it’s also streamlined and logically built enough to be a pleasant diversion for a few hours. I ended up playing it through three times (on all difficulty levels), scoring 453 points at the end, so there’s an achievable goal if you want to prove you’re better than me.

The conceit of the game is to combine clean strategy boardgame mechanics with pauseable real-time gameplay; a historically proven recipe, certainly. I like how the simple puzzle-like mechanics combine with controlled randomness to provoke the player into trying different things. For example: common fighting between units is a simple matter of both sides pinging each other regularly for points of damage, while a “charging” maneuver instantly crushes and enemy unit that gets underfoot. With the typical enemy having 7 HP, the contrast between the one-point ping and the qualitative crush is interesting, with charges being more valuable against undamaged enemies. As one might imagine, the game revolves around optimizing various tactical combinations for allowing your little medieval army to triumph against undead hordes many times their own size.

The game’s simple enough to try if you’re interested in this sort of stuff, so go there and see for yourself. I liked it enough to be likely to look it up when the full game comes out.

Let’s check my quest reading list

Moving on with the review agenda, something I should do on occasion is dropping my reading list on you. Focusing on forum quests now, let’s see what I’m currently reading. The literary genre of “quest” is also a type of forum rpg, but I’m just reading this stuff; I don’t really have time to participate actively. These are mainly published at the “Space Battles” forums, which seems like it’s where all the best stuff along these lines is published. (If you know otherwise, let me know.)

So without further ado, here’s the ones I have on active follow right now. Unless I say otherwise, all are good enough in some way to make for worthwhile reading; I wouldn’t be following them otherwise, of course.

The Bruce Quest is a long and slow Battletech saga; the author seems fully committed to documenting the life of a single soldier-protagonist from cradle to grave in exquisite detail. The serious commitment to setting (far surpassing the typical official product) makes for interesting reading. The author is big into psycho-social realism, which combined with their conservative worldview makes it funny and sometimes frustrating to follow along with their world-building choices and NPC behavior adjudication.

Lex Sedet in Vertice is a slice of life empire management quest set in the DC superhero universe, starring Lex Luthor as the audience-controlled protagonist. Very much a DC comics hobbyist thing, as the interest mainly stems from the extensive amount of playing pieces (DC superhero universe heroes and villains) the author models for the audience-players to interact with in various ways, with overt rules the players can use and understand. I don’t read it for the writing, but rather for the insanely ambitious GMing process and the raw gambling factor; many quests are more like serial novels, but this one’s legit tyranny of the dice. The expertise on obscure DC comics history is charming, though.

Doofquest is similar to the above, except with the even wackier premise of following mad scientist Dr. Doofenshmirtz (from the Disney cartoon Phineas & Ferb — better cartoon than you’d think, btw) as he struggles for supremacy in a dystopian crossover reality where all Disney franchise villains have been victorious in their respective stories. (If a setting that involves Flintheart Glomgold from Duck Tales interacting with I dunno Cruella de Vill from 101 Dalmatians sounds insane, well, yeah, it’s apparently based on some community world-building project that’s also a tabletop rpg?)

Marked for Death is “a rational Naruto quest” which means that it’s a rational genre world-building take on the ninja fantasy shonen manga Naruto. It’s been going on for ages, and the GM-authors flaunt their rational world-building and the merciless wargaming nature of the quest to a degree that’s sorta amusing if you’re actually into wargaming (hint: 400 chapters, zero player character deaths), but I like the intensity of the player base who really, really believe that the main character is legit going to die if they make the wrong choices in maneuvering the lethal world of magic ninjas.

Forge/Threads of Destiny is a xianxia fantasy quest with particular literary flair; the author is actually publishing the quest as a serial novel. The story’s started meandering over time, as happens with serial fiction, and the quest decision-making hasn’t been that interesting as the content’s moved away from time management gaming and more into literary chapters, but I find that it’s still easy to stick with this as a regularly updated serial novel that just happens to have some detail decisions made by the readers in every chapter. The work is a bit of a western-deconstructed xianxia, so the world-building and character drama are much better than you usually get in the genre.

Hmmph… this junior is a good seed is also a xianxia thing, but much weirder as a construction: it’s sort of a combination of a quest and a community writing project, producing loads and loads of amateur prose. The actual attraction is that the author/GM runs a very solid wargaming scenario about sect power politics in a xianxia fantasy world; the decision-making is often very tense and thought-provoking.

A Simple Transaction is, well, an old Exalted GM’s original fantasy epic focused pretty uniquely on character optimization as the quest’s central element: the author presents an adventure storyline interleaved with character build choices in their own original rules system, and the audience debates and votes on whether the main character needs to increase STR or DEX to survive what’s ahead. Very unique, to the extent that I’ve found the structural ideas relevant to my own game design.

Equestria: The House of the Sun is a cross-over scenario between the My Little Pony cartoon and the horror fantasy video game Cultist Simulator. It offers a fair balance of game and literary focus; anybody familiar with either of the inspirations can probably appreciate the combination, even if I think most of the appeal comes from the author/GM knowing how to construct playability. They are successful in capturing the core gaming conceit of having to manage an illicit occult cult in secret from family, friends and society.

Money and Power, Boxer Quest and It’s a Girl’s World are also on my current list, but they update so slowly and irregularly that I don’t feel like discussing them in any more length here. Suffice to say that they have sufficient merit for me to not have dropped them despite the slow progress.

And that, dear friends, is why I don’t have time for anything else — too busy reading serial trash fiction in the Internet. The above aren’t all the readable (for a certain value of) quest stories out there, but I tend to be pretty bad about following stuff in real time, so series get dropped whenever I feel like they’re no long interesting or regular enough to bother with.

What else…

I guess that’s enough reviewing things for today; that’s not everything I saw this week, but I’m apparently too busy consuming culture to bother with reporting back on everything I see. One wonders what the point of reviewing even is. One of those things we humans do.

With supreme irony he says that, then moves on to reviewing his actual play experiences of the week.

Monday: Coup de Main #37

Sometimes the the game likes to remind us of how it’s not a nice “just so” experience of participating in an adventure story. No storyteller would set up and execute like this.

We continued our astral adventure from last session, the one where Rhett the Cleric was spacelost in astral space and trying to know himself enough to find his way back home. A red dragon (now with a name: he’s called Grand Meshashole) was hunting for Rhett, having been sent by the Lords of the Abyss to capture them a live Cleric. The rest of the PCs were a party drawn together by fate to aid Rhett in finding his way home. It was all very YA fiction, really.

Except the part where the party starts moving again, happens to go to the encounter area where Grand Meshashole is camping while waiting for its own intrigue actions to carry fruit, and procs the 1/3 chance of an encounter with the adult red dragon. More or less a random encounter.

The scenario was a bit like one of those monster-hunts-protagonist things like the Predator or Terminator movies. The big difference is that there’s no plot shield in the game, so the Grand Meshashole notices the party, drops in on them from the astral sea and demands them to relinquish Rhett. Said mission goal jumps off the floating astral island, planning a risky escape to a lower-hanging astral domain, only to miss and fall uncontrollably towards the Prime Thicket (a psionic barrier between the material world and the astral; 20d6 falling damage on contact, no exceptions).

The red dragon, a skilled flier, managed to grab Rhett before his fall terminated, and Rhett even survived being captured. However, by then his party had already bailed on the astral plane (not being spacelost themselves, they had much less difficulty escaping back to their bodies), and Frida the teenage witch got to the inevitable climax of daggering Rhett’s comatose body to death before the demons of the Abyss would get their claws on him. Had this been a horror movie, this would actually have been a somewhat intelligible climax. As it was, it was a bit of an abrupt end for an adventure that I’d been planning to be a bit more expansive than what we got to see.

The adventure having ended so quickly, we had plenty of time to figure out our next moves. The players by this point have quite complex character stables, and they’re luckily self-directing in managing their campaign calendar, so they can tell me what characters they have available and when (in campaign time). It happens to be the case that the group’s main characters, including Rob Banks and Phun Eral, haven’t yet figured out what they’re going to do in the month of Flocktime (June), so that’s what we started working on next.

The probably most important event of the campaign for the last ten sessions occurred in passing, as Phun finally managed to set aside a couple of days for doing magic item identification. The party’s book-keeping on this stuff is rather atrocious (I think they’ve outright lost a magic wand, for instance), but perhaps the event will encourage them to take more care about this stuff in the future: Phun discovered that the party was in possession of a rare set of magical footwear called the Boots of Sure Step, worth near 4k GP. Characters gain xp for personally useful magic items they gain in the Coup campaign, which meant that Rob Banks reached 5th level. Goes to show that you should maybe identify the dungeon trash you carry back home, once in a while!

(Note to self: I’m not going to relitigate something like this, but I probably shouldn’t have taken the adventure module’s claims about the item’s value unquestioned when it comes to personal use XP rewards. I’ll need to write down some concrete math for it, but the xp value of a magic item for a character shouldn’t track directly from its market price, I think.)

Meanwhile, Rob’s inching closer and closer to personal bankruptcy despite being a mighty mid-level character by now; he’s been plowing all his money into this grand Thief gang hideout project in Yggsburg, which combined with his ever-expanding personal hats-and-codpieces budget (he now eats up 5 GP per day) keeps Rob hungry for adventure. A less ambitious man would have enough saved up to live comfortably for the rest of his life, I’m sure.

The sad fact is that the Yggs region has been getting tapped out of adventure hooks. There are still adventures out there, but at this point even considerate adventurers are finding difficulty in discovering entirely new prospects in Yggs. (This is basically planned: the campaign features a limited amount of adventuring opportunity per region per year. Either wait for new opportunities to appear, or move to a new part of the map to find more adventure. Or invent your own heists, of course.)

What this meant in practice was that when Rob went looking for adventure prospects and critted on the streetwise check, he didn’t actually find a new adventure, but he did find a new adventure hook: the party is aware of the abandoned Wrenwald Manor deep in the Mist Marsh, they just haven’t had a good reason to go there before now. That is to say, they still don’t have a good reason, but at least they have a dumb one: Donmas Kaapu, the local Thieves’ Guild rep, wants to pay the party 200 GP for a pailful of milk from the Wrenwald cows. Presumably the ghost house has cows, like zombie moohs or something.

The players have actually been prepping for this adventure with some eagerness even. Rob’s all for easy money, and he assumes there’s probably some stuff in the manor that the party can loot to make more more moolah. Phun has this theory that the Wrenwald family are the magical remains of the Veren Valos house of Suloise magicians from the old Maure Magocracy, so he’s into going to poke around the place as well. Beautiful how a plan can come together. I understand the party will include, in addition to the dynamic Thief/Cleric duo, a boatsman to take them to the swamp, and a milkmaid to deal with the cow.

Tuesday: Coup in Sunndi #12

The face-to-face crew convened in Iisalmi again on Tuesday. My prep has recently been off vis-a-vis what the players actually want to do, but this time I was prepared: I had prepped both the court intrigue adventure with the royal inquisition, as well as the overland journey to the Temple of Doom, depending on if the players wanted to play the “good party” or the “evil party”. So of course they decide that they just want to do more dungeon delving in this provocative goblin dungeon at Habavaara, a forlorn place two days away from the base town.

(Habavaara is, of course, Dyson’s Delve, an absolute classic dungeon. I love running it, so no complaints on my part, even if it means that I wouldn’t really need to prep as much as I do.)

This is the third time the party has gone to Habavaara, and it’s all been in a row, so clearly the players like the place. The first time the party lost captain Bootsie to the goblins, and last time the new Basic Sunndian adventurer party successfully avenged him. Boldened by their success, the Basic Sunndians decided to have another go at it out of greed: they’d seen some promising sarcofagi in the dungeon last time, but hadn’t dared open them, so now would be the time.

After losing captain Bootsie, Antti rolled himself a new character who had the talent to become a Paladin. We brought the new character in as part of the royal inquisition, only for them to join the Basic Sunndians in their dungeon delve incognito. These are the things royal agents do — do you know that your adventuring pals aren’t really government agents? I’m going to call the Paladin “Sparrow”, as per his anonymous royal agent identity; he would be relevant for the adventure to come.

The adventure was fairly straightforward in that the party went into the dungeon, messed about in some crypts, encountered a lone goblin, and decided to retreat before the goblins come out in force and kill them all. The important part was that the Paladin decided to let the party loot the tombs. This admittedly resulted in some pretty sweet extra XP (the Paladin has the option for 100 xp per HD on evil supernatural monsters, such as skeletons and zombies), but also… isn’t grave-robbing Chaotic? Paladins aren’t mandated to prevent Chaotic acts (only to fight Evil), but still…

There was a significant consequence to the grave-robbing: the first sarcophagus the party forced open had an active zombie inside. The zombie near throttled the party forester to death, injuring his neck in a way that made moving him around a somewhat dicy prospect. Extra fun because the party had left their wagon like 20 leagues away due to fears regarding the local peoples.

So the decision to rob the tombs was carrying consequences already, but it would get better: while the Paladin and other sane people were not looking, the inevitable Chaotic Stupid contingent of the party decided to open the sarcophagus of Saint Ulther, an apostle of the Hopping Prophet who was apparently buried here. They decided to chop up the body, put the head into a sack and take it with them as a memento(?). They did this in full knowledge of the nearest village, which they’d have to cross on the way home, being full of worshippers of the Hopping Prophet.

I’ll just summarize the strategic decision-making here, it was one of those moments you just have to consider carefully afterwards:

1. The party is very concerned about the hostile relations they are developing with the local village, near to the dungeon at Habavaara. The locals clearly aren’t very happy with the adventurers traipsing there every week or so.
2. The party learned earlier that like two thirds of the villagers are worshippers of the Hopping Prophet. Not quite demon worship, but it’s not a politically correct religion in the elf-ridden modern Sunndi.
3. The party discovers that in the dungeon near the Wastri-worshipping village, where the villagers apparently visit occasionally, is a burial mausoleum dedicated to an apostle of the Prophet.
4. The party decides to desecrate the tomb and bring Saint Ulther’s head with them as a souvenir.
5. ???
6. Profit, I assume.

Step 5, the “???”, proved pretty exciting, though: the party decided to return home via the road that would take them through the nearby village, what with having to carry this neck-injured party member and all that. The locals were, as usual, gathered alongside the road to watch the adventures go by, suspicious and hostile towards these strangers insistent on delving into what very well might be a holy place for them. The surprise was total when Saint Ulther’s head started screaming in its sack, blaming the adventurers for thievery and desecration. Made them drop the sack right quick.

To their credit, the locals took a bit of time to gather and arm an angry mob, or as much of one that their little village could spare: 25 armed and angry villagers pursued the adventurers as they continued their agonizingly slow march towards safety. They couldn’t run, of course, not with the neck injury on the man the Paladin inconveniently refused to abandon to allow the rest to escape.

This was starting to look like a particularly dumb total party kill. Impressive to cause a divine intervention like that (I rolled for it specifically), and it was kinda obvious in hindsight how that would turn out, but it would have been nice to understand what the head was for. The players sent their best guy off to “run for help” (code for “escape alive”) as the mob slowly approached. It was nice for atmosphere of the whole situation how the party’s time-keeping had resulted in them making their retreat at night, in clear moonlight.

The party started with I think 8 members in marching condition, but what with the one “running for help”, the head grave-robber “going to distract them” (running off to save himself; trips in the dark, decides to stick in place, gets eaten by goblins in the night) and two others running off without a nice pretext, the party ultimately ended up consisting of the neck-injured lead anchor, the Paladin insistent on hauling the anchor around, and three characters too dumb(?) to run while the running was good.

So what the Paladin does is, he draws his inquisitorial mask and seal of authority out, revealing to the remainder of the party his high political office. Touching the royal agent is, of course, a death sentence, but would the crazed hillbilly cultists care? No matter, for Sparrow would sell himself (and anybody foolish enough to follow him) dearly should it come to that.

The party stops, confronts the mob coming after them. 25 against 4, all 1st level. Charisma-based threats, reaction checks — no dice, the mob decides to attack. Initiative checks, the mob flubs! Their assault is ragged, the Paladin manages to control the numbers reaching melee a bit with judicious foot-work. The others support him with thrown weapons and a bit of melee, but this is clearly going to be up to the heavily armored Paladin wielding a crazy anime style blade. (Yes, yes, your weapon is an authentic medieval Indian two-handed sword.)

Over 20 seconds of ferocious combat, the adventurers put down 10 angry village men foolish enough to attack a Temple Protector of the Royal Inquisition. His hands were bloodied today! After the first melee bout, a morale check — and the mob breaks after losing over third of their number in first clash! We were understandably pretty excited about the party going against 6:1 odds and emerging victorious. The dicing luck was crazy, characters who are usually completely ineffectual in combat kept getting hits. One of them broke his bow on the first round, picked up some rocks to throw and still killed two during that whirlwind of death.

The party was understandably pretty swole after this feat of heroism, and there were ultimately no further complications about getting back to town. Thing is, Sparrow the Paladin will have to decide whether to drag the inquisition into this; it’s not entirely obvious if it’s the responsible course of action, what with royal authority surely demanding the whole village to be put to the torch for daring to attack an inquisitor. Such bad guys, those villagers, wanting to defend their holy places against random grave-robbers.

At the end of the session I got to drop a pre-resolved event, too: while Sparrow had been off dungeoneering, an unknown party had assassinated Raven, one of the other agents in the inquisitorial team. There were four of them to start with (the rest are NPCs), plus 50 soldiers, and now somebody’d done the unthinkable and taken a shot at one of them! I think we’re going to have a bit of a whodunnit next session, or maybe we’ll just start the inevitable civil war and get it over with.

State of the Productive Facilities

I dedicated this week’s productive time to developing the Coup Workbook Partials series, the half-assed rules text dump from our D&D campaign. Finished CWP #15, Oathbound Classes, and most of the #41, Near Planes. Early days yet, I expect that these’ll happen faster once I have all the layout stuff and such streamlined. Also, my precious writing time got gnawed on this week a bit by firewood-chopping and writing a memo on tourist information center design for the municipality, so not the most distraction-free I’ve ever been. Still, a good week nevertheless.