Matters of Faith

musings, ,

I ended up following some members of the Jewish community on Twitter. Part of it is that they’re good people (there are of course Jewish jerks out there, including Jews who are jerks to other Jews for flimsy reasons), and part of it is that they regularly get into arguments with the more unpleasant kinds of Christians, people who are ill-equipped to handle the fact that Jews didn’t all convert to Christianity and stop being so darn Jewish. (I probably should cut down on Twitter honestly.) One thing that’s come out of it is the realization that my understanding of religion has been very Christian, in a way that’s oddly limiting. I’m not religious myself, but I’ve always found religion interesting. It’s impossible to fully comprehend human affairs without understanding religion, and that in turn helps make it an interesting and relevant subject in fiction.

Judaism takes scripture very, very seriously, but it’s more like a divine puzzle box to wrestle with than a source of absolute, unambiguous truth. There’s also the Talmud, a massive collection of commentaries from different authors who often contradict each other, and the oral Torah, which one Jew I follow on Twitter likes to call the Tanakh’s “user manual” that Christians threw out. God is, well, God, but also a being that Jews can argue with and sometimes even win against. (“I fill fight God in a Denny’s parking lot!”) They try to follow the 613 mitzvot insofar as they can when several are impossible without the Temple, but no one goes to hell for not following them perfectly, especially since Jews don’t have a concept of hell or even all that much emphasis on the afterlife. There are different streams of Judaism that vary a bit (though they’re neither as numerous nor as radically different as Christian sects can be), but in many of them it’s okay to be an atheist because the point is to show up, be a part of the community, and do the work. Even though Christianity uses a translation (or a mistranslation) of the Tanakh as the first half of the Bible, Judaism is more different from it than you’d expect, to the point where many Jews fiercely object to the term “Judeo-Christian” and don’t especially like being called an “Abrahamic” faith along with Christianity and Islam. (There are also a handful of other Abrahamic religions, such as Samaritanism and Mandaeism.)

(Also, following Jewish Twitter has shown me that antisemitism is depressingly alive and well, and still just as based on bigotry and lies as when Sartre penned that one quote about antisemites and their disingenuousness. But that’s a whole other topic that others can write about far better than me.)

I grew up attending a Unitarian Universalist church, which was what fit my ex-hippie parents who weren’t Christian and dabbled a little in Buddhism. Unitarians were originally a Christian sect that rejected the trinity and believed in freedom of religion. Universalists were another Christian sect, one that believed in universal salvation, the idea that God doesn’t condemn anyone to eternal damnation. Some of America’s founding fathers were Unitarians, and as niche as it is nowadays, the list of historical Unitarians is pretty impressive. The UU church today is essentially a community of people who want to be unspecifically spiritual and have something like a religious community that believes in social justice. They’re generally good people doing good things, and while I stopped attending pretty much as soon as my parents stopped making me, I do think I’m a better person for having attended all those years. I certainly still believe in UU principles like “We affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.”

What I didn’t realize was that even though UUs are very eclectic and count Buddhists and pagans and so on among their number, they’re culturally Christian. Being “culturally” Christian means that your understanding of the world and many of the customs you practice have roots in Christianity, even if you don’t read the Bible or attend a Christian church. It isn’t a bad thing, but it is something we could stand to be more aware of. Modern Unitarians tend to have a certain aversion to Christianity proper. They were supportive of the LGBT community earlier than most, and would happily hold marriage ceremonies for gay couples even back when those marriages had to be symbolic, which put the UU church at odds with all but the most liberal Christian denominations. Despite that, the church I went to as a kid still had Sunday services with hymns and sermons and celebrated Christmas and Easter, two holidays that are part of our broader society because they’re about Jesus. In hindsight that’s all extremely Christian, especially compared to what goes on in a Jewish synagogue or a Buddhist temple.

It’s important to put stuff in perspective, and I’m reminded of how people who don’t know any TTRPGs other than D&D saw 4th Edition as a totally different game, while from a wider perspective it’s not only specifically a version of D&D, but a successor to 3.5 that wouldn’t have emerged at any other time. The system of powers and the class roles might be new, but you’re dealing with twenty-sided dice, opportunity attacks, the six 3-18 stats, and so on when you could be e.g. building dice pools for a Cortex Plus game. Modern Unitarians aren’t Christian—and I’m sure there are Christians who would declare every UU to be hellbound—but seen from a wider perspective Unitarian Universalism is nonetheless derived from Western Christian culture. When you’re part of that culture it can be hard to fully understand how pervasive it really is, even if you’re not nearly as deep into it as some full-on Christians. My family celebrates Christmas and even has a little ceramic nativity scene that my grandpa made, and that’s convenient for us because Christmas is a federal holiday and society generally bends itself around the Christmas season. Jewish folks in contrast sometimes have trouble getting time off work for their important holidays, something your average Unitarian doesn’t have to worry about.

Western atheists also tend to not realize that they’re culturally Christian, and don’t react well to the suggestion that they are. This is especially true of full-on anti-theists, people who go beyond disbelief into vehement opposition to all religion. Their criticisms of “religion” are often actually criticisms of Christianity or Christian fundamentalism, which can create problems when they run into the fact that Christianity is somewhat of an outlier among religions despite being the most popular, kind of like how D&D is something of an outlier among TTRPGs despite being the most popular. Not all religions require believing in anything supernatural per se, few have a scripture that’s treated as sacrosanct in the manner of the Bible or Koran, and even fewer take ancient scriptures literally in the manner of Christian fundamentalists. While most religions have some concept of an afterlife, not many emphasize it in the same way that Christianity does, and the idea of a deity that knows and deeply cares what goes on in your head is unusual. Christianity and Islam both involve proselytization, but the majority of religions are tied to a particular nation or ethnicity, and don’t seek out new members. In and of themselves these aren’t criticisms of Christianity, but they are things that people from the Western world often aren’t aware of as being so different in other religions.

Naturally, this is all leading to talking about D&D.

For a while now I’ve been trying to unpack what the heck is going on with the portrayal of religion in D&D. Most D&D characters will have one patron deity that they follow, who matches their particular alignment. The main religious class in the cleric, which has healing and light-based powers, and can use a holy symbol to turn undead. It came about because a player wanted to make a new character specifically to fight another player’s overpowered vampire character. It’s essentially a templar archetype, except instead of being Christian, they worship a single deity from the game world’s pantheon. While many editions give them some spell and weapon options more appropriate to other kinds of gods, they’re still usually guys in chainmail and tabards with maces and holy magic suitable for a fantastical version of Christianity. The paladin is a holy super-knight who similarly comes from a Christian tradition despite worshiping a single god from a quasi-Hellenic pantheon. The druid comes from vague ideas about what the ancient druids of the British Isles were like, which makes them non-Christian but in such a way that they exist as a contrast from the other core religion-based classes.

Worshiping a single deity while allowing for the existence of others is called henotheism. The term dates back to 1860, so it’s not as though anyone thought of themselves as henotheists in antiquity. Scholars have used the term to describe Zoroastrianism, proto-Judaism, and some forms of Hinduism and Greek polytheism. Even then, real-life henotheism takes one deity as supreme for the entire faith and treats the rest as subordinate beings or aspects of that supreme being, rather than individuals picking out one from the pantheon to be their BFF.

I don’t know how things have changed in the ensuing years, but when I was in school, we learned about the Greek myths and covered various world religions as they came up in the context of history. Even so, I never felt like I had any grasp on the actual practices or psychology of other religions, which was why I was particularly grateful to come across Bret Devereaux’s Practical Polytheism essays, which lay out the fundamentals in accessible terms.

Real-life polytheism is a pragmatic kind of religiosity, in a way that feels strange to modern, culturally Christian eyes. It comes about from people trying out different things and codifying the results into a system of rituals intended to achieve specific results by petitioning the gods. From a standpoint of modern skepticism we can say that Zeus most likely never existed and any efficacy of rituals intended to cajole him into making it rain or divine whether he approved of going to war was confirmation bias, but at the time it was the best people had figured out to cope with the chaos and cruelty of the world. Where Christianity is very concerned with orthodoxy (right belief), polytheistic religions are generally more concerned with orthopraxy (right actions). Where Christians want you to accept Jesus Christ as your lord and savior in your heart, ancient Greeks wanted you to not screw up their offering so they could have a good harvest. Rather than being henotheists, they would petition whichever god had dominion over the thing they needed help with, whether it was a heavy hitter like Zeus or the local god of the specific town. (Side Note: I don’t think any religion is exclusively concerned with orthodoxy or orthopraxy. There certainly are Christians who believe that they can petition God to affect the world, and a sufficiently vociferous denial of the existence of pagan gods would probably get you in trouble in societies that practice polytheism.)

A shrine to household gods from ancient Rome.

Christianity never gained a serious foothold in Japan the way it did in many other Asian countries. It’s hard to say how much of that was simply due to repression by the Tokugawa Shogunate, but the overall Japanese attitude towards religion likely plays a major role. While there are those who dedicate their lives to being Shinto priests, people don’t generally think of themselves as “Shintoists.” The average Japanese person goes to a Shinto shrine on New Year’s, attends funerals at Buddhist temples, and may have a wedding at a fake Christian church just because they like the atmosphere. While there may be some white guy somewhere who was so dedicated that he was accepted as a kannushi at a Shinto shrine, for the most part Shinto is more a part of Japanese culture, and it isn’t a religion that a person converts to in the sense that one might convert to Christianity or Islam. Where it can be deeply problematic for Christians to hold a Passover Seder, tourists at major Shinto shrines are invited to participate in simple rituals and buy omamori from the gift shop. The kami are evidently more concerned with the rituals getting done than the ethnicities or religions of the people doing them. It’s hard to generalize about polytheism—although monotheists are most of the world’s population, polytheism accounts for a massive number of religions—but the Japanese attitude is another example of polytheist orthopraxy.

One thing people have remarked on is that most D&D campaign settings are worlds where the gods are verifiably real and intervene in human affairs, so that there’s no need for “faith.” That isn’t wrong, but it does reveal a culturally Christian view of religion. While polytheists in the real world can’t point to undeniable instances of gods walking the earth in the same manner as the inhabitants of Faerûn, the pragmatic polytheistic model does posit a worldview where the gods are very real and distinctly interventionist, to the point where entreating them to affect the world is a routine part of not just religious practice but daily life. In that respect D&D’s depiction of gods is relatively authentic. Clerics and other divine characters have the ability to cast spells that their gods grant them, creating a very direct line of cause and effect between worship and affecting the world. Obviously Cure Light Wounds is much more direct than a sacrifice to Poseidon for calm seas, but it’s still power received from a god.

Where D&D parts ways with real polytheism—and I think misses out—is the question of the rituals that aren’t immediately useful for adventurers. We don’t really know what worshippers of the Faerûnian pantheon do when they want to ensure a bountiful harvest or fair weather. In real-life polytheism, the gods are in a certain sense an important part of the community. They make their will known via the results of divination and natural phenomena rather than through plain words or divine manifestations, but people take those things very seriously and work very hard at finding proper interpretations of the signs. In that respect I feel like I’ve been misled as to what divination is actually for. As the root word at the front implies, it’s not so much a way to see the future as a way to receive information from the gods. From a modern skeptic’s perspective you’re not going to find out much about how Jupiter is feeling from examining a bull’s entrails, but as with other rituals of the time, it was the best they had. Where divination failed, they could chalk it up to the temperament of the god in question or perhaps a failure on the diviner’s part.

Another component of polytheism that’s mostly absent from D&D is the deification of mortals. Egyptian Pharaohs were living gods, Japanese emperors are descendants of Amaterasu, and many Roman emperors were deified. It’s a practice that seems silly from a modern perspective—surely people understood that all else being equal you could kill a Pharaoh with a knife as easily as any other man—but that reveals other aspects of polytheism that no one bothered to teach us. Polytheists generally have both big and small gods, from the ones that showed up in Deities & Demigods all the way down to the minor gods of a single household. Also, the kinds of mortals that people deified were typically so powerful and influential that relative to your average commoner they practically were gods of a sort. At the high end of humanity and the low end of the divine, the two start to blur together a bit. No one thought that Caesar suddenly started throwing around lightning bolts, but they did still think he was a worthy object of ritual worship. When Gygax was at the helm, D&D didn’t have a lot to say about encounters with gods apart from them being unsafe for all but the most powerful PCs. DMs and occasional modules would work in meetings with gods now and then, but they lack the element of participation that defines the gods of real-life polytheism. Your average cleric character worships and gains spells from a particular god, but only has insights into what their god thinks about things when the DM informally chooses to have that happen in the campaign.

Regardless, the “personalized henotheism” of D&D is certainly an oddity. If religion in D&D followed the pattern of real-life polytheism, you wouldn’t have a cleric of Tyr or Lathander, but a priest class who might perform rituals invoking any of the gods in the setting’s pantheon. Bane wouldn’t be a reviled figure worshiped only by evil cultists, but a dangerous god that people would try to appease and anticipate, not unlike Ares in ancient Greece. This doesn’t mean D&D has to change, but rather that it’s good for us to be aware of its underpinnings and the possibilities that sit apart from what Gygax intended. D&D is weird. It’s weirdness is one of the best things about it, but the tendency to leave that weirdness unexamined and unexplained is one of the worst things about how we collectively engage with it.

We know that Gygax was a Jehovah’s Witness for at least part of his life, thanks to a letter he wrote to a wargaming zine about how Christmas is a pagan celebration that Christians shouldn’t engage in. One of my best and oldest friends is a Witness, and I wonder if he could’ve convinced his dad to let him play D&D if he could’ve told him about the author’s faith. The fact that my friend was allowed to play other TTRPGs that had their own fictional occult elements was a testament to how little people know about the medium apart from D&D.

People mostly know Jehovah’s Witnesses as one of the flavors of annoying people who knock on doors along with Mormons and door-to-door salesmen, but they’re one of the more unusual forms of Christianity, to the point where some Christians claim that JWs aren’t real Christians. (Though given how readily some do that, you should take such accusations with a grain of salt.) Witnesses have their own interpretations of the Bible, which among other things is why they don’t allow Christmas, birthdays, or blood transfusions. They’re also particularly opposed to engaging with other religions, and never participate in interfaith activities. I can’t draw a direct line from their Watchtower magazine to D&D—especially given how freely Gygax drew on mythology and fantasy literature—but as we’ve seen, D&D’s treatment of religion definitely has some culturally Christian elements. Of course, that’s true of practically everything in Western culture, so I wouldn’t read too much into it in terms of Gygax’s personal proclivities.

D&D characters by default have relationships with single gods out of a pagan pantheon that are personal in a manner reminiscent of how some Christians talk about Jesus, yet it situates them in worlds where the gods are not ineffable and immaterial, but exaggerated reflections of humanity in the manner of Greek myths. While it’s certainly different from actual Christianity, it’s also decidedly Western and Hellenistic, such that it doesn’t account for possibilities like gods as immaterial beings not transcendently different from us (as in Shinto) or gods as aspects of a higher unity (as in some forms of Hinduism).

Where things get especially strange and a bit worrisome is in Gygax’s treatment of alignments. In OD&D, alignments were limited to Lawful/Neutral/Chaotic, and represented allegiance to cosmic forces rather than personal morality. AD&D added the Good/Neutral/Evil axis, but when you get into the things Gygax has written about what they mean, they start to sound deeply strange, and not in a charming way. In his view a paladin would be perfectly fine getting a villain to convert at sword-point and then killing them immediately so they went to a better place rather than having a chance of recidivism. If you come at morality from a more modern, humanist standpoint, the paladin is clearly just coming up with an excuse to murder people. To Gygax good apparently isn’t something you do, but an allegiance you have. I’m reminded a bit of how the Spanish regarded natives when they came to the Americas, in that they only really saw someone as a fellow human being if they were a Christian. Christopher Columbus would stop friars from baptizing the natives specifically because that meant he couldn’t enslave them. Gygax’s version of “Good” in D&D isn’t all that different from how conquistadores might’ve used the word “Christian.” For my part that isn’t the kind of world I want to play in, but fortunately D&D has moved away from that in successive editions. It’s a view that parts ways with both real-life polytheism and mainstream Christianity in a rather ugly way, and not unlike in Harry Potter it posits a world where there are bad sides but not bad actions per se.

The biggest reason I keep ending up writing about D&D is the sheer scope of its reach, which I’ve found is much larger than people realize. Nerds who played D&D went on to work extensively in video games, which helped propel several elements of the game into mass consciousness around the world. They subtly communicated Gygax’s violent, mercenary libertarianism, but I think they may have also carried some of his culturally Christian (and in some cases explicitly Christian) ideas about religion as well. Despite having had to travel by way of the Wizardry! and Dragon Quest games, the strange quasi-Christian personalized henotheism of D&D pops up all across the Western fantasy genre as created in Japan. Religious characters in JRPGs and fantasy anime tend to have distinctly Christian iconography, even if their beliefs and religious practices aren’t especially Christian. In the Zelda games there are mysterious temples with statues of strange creatures, but also the occasional cathedral with stained glass windows. The manga and anime Sleepy Princess in the Demon Castle features a “demon cleric” who wears a an oddly Christian outfit, even though he’s a literal demon with horns. (Though to be fair that’s kinda the joke with him.)

It’s difficult to trace the reasoning behind the decisions that went into D&D, partly just because as prolific of a writer as he was, Gygax seldom bothered to explain the why of things, so that we have to piece things together long after the fact with the available evidence. D&D came about as a haphazard accretion of elements, from David Wesley’s Braunstein to Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor to Gygax’s home games until they finally got around to putting it into a tangible form, which then proceeded to morph and mutate further over the ensuing years and editions. An early issue of The Dragon had an article with stats for angels, and the following issue’s letter column showed it as surprisingly controversial, with gamers arguing over whether it was respectful to Christians. This was despite the fact that the quasi-Christian cleric class had been a part of the published D&D from the original white box. D&D isn’t flawed simply because its fictional portrayal of religion is so different from real life religious practices, but it is one of the many elements of the game that we need to understand and examine, because there are countless other possibilities out there.

Podcast From Another World

Design Journal, games, ideas, My Games, projects, ,

A while ago I tried out the (now defunct) premium podcast service Howl.fm, which is how I discovered the podcast Hello From the Magic Tavern. HFTMT is about a guy named Arnie who fell through a magical portal behind a Burger King in Chicago, and found himself in the magical land of Foon. Since he was still getting a shaky wifi signal through the portal, he roped his new friends Usidore the wizard and Chunt the shapeshifter into doing a weekly podcast. Although Arnie Niekamp plays an exaggerated version of himself, the podcast is of course fiction. Specifically, it’s what has become very long-form improv, going continuously since 2015. Each week Arnie, Chunt, and Usidore have a guest, some inhabitant of Foon, whether a quirky human, a fantastical creature, or something in between. It’s not the only narrative improv comedy podcast, but it’s one of the most successful and long-running, having run for more than eight years and gone through a shift to Patreon.

Naturally I had the idea to design a role-playing game along the same general lines as HFTMT. It’s been an interesting challenge, because the premise naturally leads to the game being more of an improv exercise with some light TTRPG elements. I’m hardly an expert on improv, and some RPG people really struggle with moving away from immersive RP into an improv mode where they’re helping shape the story on the fly. Improv is also just more intense to do per unit of time, which is why the text recommends starting off with half-hour episodes with a break in the middle.

A lot of the important changes I’ve made because of playtesting have been more in refining and clarifying procedures and guidance. For example, in podcasts there’s normally an introductory section before the hosts introduce the guests, and it helped to add a bit saying “A polite Guest character should wait for the regular hosts to bring them into the podcast in Part 1, though not all guests are polite.”

Since the game is meant to imitate an audio medium, it takes a little adjustment purely for that. I included some hand signals for indicating certain things (voicing an NPC, pausing the game, making a sound effect), plus players need to get into the habit of only speaking in-character, and not narrating what they’re doing (unless the character is narrating). You don’t have to be super-strict about that, but it helps get you into the proper headspace.

PFAW has a set of archetypes for characters. By default you have the Human and a Guest, and if you have more than two players, you can pick from the other archetypes. The Wizard and Talking Animal give the game approximations of Usidore and Chunt, while the Adventurer, Demon, and Weird Monster fill in some other fantasy tropes. The Atomic Ranger meanwhile is a sci-fi weirdo from a shiny alternate future who wound up in the fantasy world due to the business with portals. The canonical setting of PFAW is the town of Portaly, noted for being lousy with unstable portals, hence it can have weirdos from other genres along with the fantasy stuff.

The Guest is a particularly flexible archetype, with a couple dozen examples of answers to the question “What manner of being are you?”, from adventurers to monsters to outworlders.

The bulk of a PFAW archetype is a set of checkboxes and blanks to develop the character (my favorite being the Guest has the question “Are you evil?” with the answers being Yes, No, and Eh), and the only mechanics are a set of “Power Moves,” which are essentially things that are distinct for the character albeit with a potential to annoy or challenge the other players. Each player gets 3 “Power Points” to use on Power Moves, so for example the Wizard can use magic to fix a problem (rather than creating problems or messing around), and the Talking Animal can pester another player for a list of 5 things related to something they were talking about. I’ve had the idea to include some way to gain Power Points during play, but I haven’t been able to work out a good way to do it, plus I’m not entirely sure it’s necessary. How much players actually use Power Moves has varied a lot so far, and it seems to depend a lot on how eventful the interview gets, whether they decide to wield strange powers or mess around with NPCs.

Although PFAW is turning out to be really good for quick one-shots, the source material has naturally led to adding stuff for longer campaigns, since podcasts are after all normally serialized. The major thing there is the “Developments” rules, where you have a table with checkboxes and ideas for happenings around town and in the world, often with blanks where you can fill in the name of a character. There are also “Threat Developments,” which come as a set of d6 tables in five “phases,” and guide you through the eventual defeat of the Dark Lord (or whatever it is that at the start of the game is distantly threatening the land).

I also included an appendix on “Segments,” to make it easier to integrate things like listener questions, reviews, etc., each with a d66 table to roll on for ideas. I drew on podcasts like The Gargle and My Brother My Brother and Me for these, and it was a lot of fun to take these concepts and give them a fantasy spin.

One kind of interesting thing I came up with is an optional Producer archetype. My inspiration for it was the roles that the producers of The Bugle (Chris) and What a Time to Be Alive (Shelby) play, where they only occasionally chime in (and Shelby of WATTBA now only chimes in with the sound board and text-to-speech). That makes it pretty much an ideal way for a facilitator to be a part of the game while letting other players take the spotlight, especially for convention games.

When I design games based on a given piece of media, I inevitably look for other titles in the same general vein. Unless you count the premium spinoffs they’ve done, I haven’t found any narrative improv comedy podcasts set in a conventional fantasy world, but there are shows like Good Morning From Hell (set in hell), Dispatches From the Multiverse (where a guy who invented a dimensional portal visits various parallel universes), and Mega (a somewhat more grounded podcast set at a fictional megachurch). That made me realize that with PFAW I’ve created something easy to reskin for other settings. I already have a first draft of “Hellcast,” where you play a damned podcaster, his demonic cohost, and guests who are either damned souls or various demons. It was a lot of fun to write, though of course threading the needle of doing a game set in hell without making it unpleasant to experience was a challenge.

I quickly ended up with a long list of other possible settings for PFAW:

  • Red vs. Blue-inspired
  • Star Trek-inspired
  • Modern supernatural slackers (inspired by Less is Morgue)
  • Kagegami High
  • Superheroes
  • Time travel
  • Post-apocalyptic
  • Planescape-inspired

There are all sorts of possibilities, and I’d like to eventually do a series of supplements or maybe a Kickstarter so I can rope people into doing settings as stretch goals. Regardless, the game has been a lot of fun in playtesting, and I’m looking forward to getting it out into the world once it’s ready.

Honorably Honoring My Honor

Gamer Culture, Japanese, musings, , , ,

I’ve been working on my 90s anime comedy fantasy RPG Dragon World off and on for nearly a decade now, and I really need to finish and publish it, for a variety of reasons. When that’s out of the way I want to do some supplements, including alternate settings. One that I started on a little bit is “El Kazad,” which draws on weirder bits of fantasy like Bastard!! and the Elric stories. I also want to do an Asian fantasy setting, and there’s just no way I’m going to do that on my own. From basically every standpoint I need actual people from those cultures to contribute, because threading the needle between authenticity, colorful fantasy, and comedy is hard enough with things that come from something like my own culture. Needless to say, not everyone cares that much.

TSR put out the Oriental Adventures setting book for AD&D in 1985, and unfortunately it set the bar for Asian settings in TTRPGs in the Anglosphere going forward. I can cut Gygax a little slack simply because it was the 1980s and good information on Asian cultures was harder to come by, but on the other hand it seems stupid that apparently no one at TSR thought to e.g. write to the publishers of the Japanese editions of D&D for assistance. TTRPG books that badly misrepresent other cultures never stopped in the internet age though, and aren’t limited to Asia either. White Wolf’s portrayal of Italian culture with Clan Giovanni in Vampire: The Masquerade is also just plain inaccurate while trivializing the very real threat the Mafia represents to the people of Italy. On top of simply being a poor attempt at portraying Italian culture, the book has a lot of wasted potential. Venice could be a fascinating setting for vampire stories, but you’re not going to get there if you don’t even understand the basic premise of the city enough to know why there wouldn’t be any catacombs there.

I was thinking about this because of the announcement that a Japan-inspired third-party supplement for D&D5e would include “Honor” mechanics. This seems to come almost entirely from the fact that Oriental Adventures had Honor rules, regardless of whether they were any good. Looking at that bit of OA again now, they’re very Gygax, adding yet another number to keep track of and potentially punish the players with. The DM has to go over the events of each session and dole out bonuses and penalties to each PC’s Honor score, as though the game didn’t have enough bookkeeping already. The score creates NPC reaction modifiers, potentially triggers a PC getting rewards if it goes high enough, and if your Honor goes below zero your character is out of the game and “The player should crumple up the character record sheet and toss it away.”

In typically Gygaxian fashion there’s no explanation for what exactly happens when you reach negative Honor. It doesn’t say that the character becomes a pariah or gets executed; it’s as though someone in the Celestial Bureaucracy decides to delete them from the world. While he uses the word “honor,” it’s really more of a reputation system, though the way Gygax wrote the rules, it’s as though some supernatural force is keeping a tally. If your character did something “dishonorable” in a dungeon and no one in the party told a soul about it, by the rules as written the character’s Honor score—their reputation—would suffer somehow. It’s possible to write this off as one of the many abstractions in the game’s rules, but it’s exactly the kind of thing that Gygax wouldn’t deign to explain in the text. I’m sure at least some people actually played D&D games set in Kara-Tur (or Rokugan, in the 3rd Edition version of Oriental Adventures), but I’ve never actually heard any accounts. That leaves me wondering how the Honor mechanics (among other things) worked out in actual play, but looking at it today it doesn’t seem like something that particularly enhances the experience.

Although vanilla D&D has a few classes that have fictionalized chivalric codes to follow, even for the likes of the paladin Gygax didn’t feel the need to give them any sort of reputation system. Whether a paladin is following their code or is going to fall and lose their powers is left up to the DM’s discretion. The Pendragon RPG, which explicitly emulates Arthurian stories, is one of the few TTRPGs I know of that pins such concerns on Western fantasy characters in a mechanical form.

D&D has massively influenced Western fantasy, and Oriental Adventures’ fingerprints are all over Asian fantasy as created by Western nerds. There are a lot of examples, but one that comes to mind is how the Asian book for Werewolf: The Apocalypse was called Hengeyokai: Shapeshifters of the East (which was nowhere near the worst or strangest choice in White Wolf’s Year of the Lotus books), apparently just because OA had hengeyokai as one of the new races it introduced. Honor mechanics are one of OA’s more unfortunate innovations. Aside from the fact that OA’s Kara-Tur setting isn’t supposed to draw solely from Japan and thus people’s ideas about what constitutes “honorable” behavior ought to vary, the entire concept of honorable samurai has a deeply problematic—and surprisingly recent—history.

Julian Kay pointed me to a lengthy but excellent essay on Bushido, which helped me solidify my thoughts on the subject.

Real-life samurai were warrior vassals of Japanese feudal lords. Although they did have swords, in battle they acted more as mounted archers, not unlike the Mongols. (Minus the part about being poised to conquer most of Eurasia.) While they did have moral ideals, in practice a lot of major battles were decided by defections. To the extent that ninjas were real, they were spies and assassins, and the major ninja clans were subsumed into the wider political structures and their power struggles . Samurai were heavily armed and privileged assholes, and the lower classes largely despised them. Despite living in a society with public morals—Buddhism was a state religion for a significant stretch of Japanese history—the samurai were no less inclined to do horrible things and go “fuck you, because I can” than any other powerful men. The Tokugawa shogunate brought about an era of peace however, and the samurai became bureaucrats who put their spare time into the arts and had swords as symbols and heirlooms rather than weapons per se.

The Meiji Era saw the modernization of Japan–Japanese leaders realized just how far behind they were and rushed to catch up with the West–and the removal of the traditional class system. While there are still people today who can claim samurai lineage, there are no special privileges afforded to them per se. In the late 1800s some ex-samurai didn’t take this well, and there were a series of conflicts, culminating in the Satsuma Rebellion of 1877 that ended the samurai as a recognized social class. The samurai became a page in Japan’s history, and the march of progress continued.

The concept of Bushido (the “Way of the Warrior”) and its supposed code of honor, which put samurai under intense pressure to be honorable or commit seppuku, came from Inazo Nitobe, who wrote a book in English called Bushido: The Soul of Japan, in an attempt to rehabilitate Japan’s image in the West. Although a Japanese man born in Japan, he admired Western culture to the point where he was highly fluent in English, converted to Christianity, and married a Caucasian woman. While he apparently had some genuine expertise when it came to English-language literature, he was comparatively ignorant of Japanese history.

Since information about Japan was so scarce in the early 1900s, his book was nonetheless a huge success and people took it as fact. Actual historians in Japan wrote scathing critiques, calling out the book’s blatant historical inaccuracies. The notion of “Bushido” as he defined it simply didn’t exist in Japan before that, and Nitobe’s conception of it was at least as much Christian as Japanese, having been created to appeal to Westerners in the first place by way of equating honorable samurai with virtuous, chivalrous knights. (The notion of a chivalric code that knights followed was itself a result of mythologizing in folklore and literature in the first place.) Western media, whether James Clavell’s Shogun or the film The Last Samurai, uncritically portrayed his version of the samurai ethos, which the likes of Gygax also internalized and spat out in the form of Honor rules.

That might have been the extent of Nitobe’s influence, but in the early 20th Century the modernizing Japan was flexing its military might, fighting and winning wars against other Asian counties and even Russia. This was when Japanese nationalism took hold and the military—which at the time was highly independent of the civilian government—became a hotbed of extremism. It wasn’t unusual for nationalists to assassinate civilian politicians who weren’t sufficiently behind the military’s imperialist projects in Asia.

In the buildup to Japan’s entry into World War II, the Bushido myth proved an effective propaganda tool to encourage Japanese troops to become fanatics for the cause. Katanas were a powerful symbol of national pride, even though the mass-produced ones handed out to Japanese officers represented a nadir in Japanese sword making. The Imperial Japanese military’s evil deeds weren’t totally unique in human history, but they were nonetheless unspeakable, solidifying the anti-Japanese sentiment that persists across East Asia today.

In the postwar years, the Japanese psyche dealt with the nation’s defeat—and especially the atomic bombings—in a variety of ways. There was a great national shame, some voices proclaiming that Japan could reinvent itself as a new force for peace and progress, and of course some ultranationalists who cling to that murderous ideology to this day, just as there are still fascists and their ilk in the West. While you occasionally get a manga or light novel from a creator who’s into Japanese nationalism, by and large Japanese narratives about the samurai, although idealized to be sure, don’t have anything like the caricature seen in Western media.

Historical accuracy is hard to achieve even for historians, much less game designers. History is ultimately a story we’ve constructed to explain the past. When we do it ethically, we do what we can to have that story reflect the available evidence, but honest history will admit where we simply don’t know what happened. Future historians who try to untangle the moment we’re currently living through may have an astronomical quantity of tweets to sift through, but if you go far enough into the past, you reach eras from which we just have scant collections of pottery. For lay people, primary sources are often arcane or boring, and we get out view of history from simplified lessons and pop culture. To some extent that’s unavoidable, but it does open us up to propaganda like 300, a film that historians knowledgeable about the era in question would find at turns laughable and sinister.

In science education there’s a concept called “lies to children.” It’s essentially the idea that you have to teach a version of things that isn’t exactly right in order to make it simple enough for young learners to get enough of a footing to be ready for the real thing. Atoms don’t have electrons going around in neat little orbits like in the picture in an elementary school textbook, but your average 3rd grader isn’t anywhere near ready for a lecture on quantum mechanics. History is another subject that can easily get deeper than laymen have the time or knowledge base to comprehend. Replacing the numerous and disparate threads of history with easily digestible stories seems unavoidable to some extent, but we need to be more careful about the stories we choose to tell ourselves as a society. We still have people trying to defend the lionization of Christopher Columbus for example, even though he somehow managed to be a vile person even by the standards of 15th Century Genoa, which is saying a lot.

Role-playing games are vehicles for us to gather to enter worlds of our own imaginations, and in practice you have to have a consensus about the fiction world in question among a small group of people. That makes them naturally work against true historical accuracy, though for that matter it similarly makes it hard to get a group together to play a licensed game unless everyone is on board with the licensed property in question. When I say I want “authenticity” in an Asian setting for Dragon World (and Asian settings in TTRPGs in general), I don’t mean rigid conformity with history, but I do what something where someone from the cultures in question wouldn’t feel insulted or roll their eyes.

The colorful ninjas of Naruto have virtually no connection to the historical spies—though the ninja likely encouraged fanciful myths about themselves—but it reflects a native’s knowledge of Japanese culture and mythology, and is richer for it. D&D’s attempts at ninjas fall into the “guys in black pajamas” stereotype beloved by Cannon Films, and lack the bonkers fun you get from things like ninjas summoning giant supernatural frogs. Not every source of inauthenticity will lead us on a journey that includes discussing hideous war crimes (seriously, even at the heights of imperial fervor Japanese civilians were still shocked at what their military was up to in Asia), but there’s inevitably something deeper and more interesting, such that even if we were to set aside questions of what is respectful (which we shouldn’t), we’d still be missing out.

Lessons Learned

writing, ,

I realized I’ve been neglecting this site for way too long. Aside from my life having a lot of chaotic, anxiety-inducing interruptions, I’ve just been posting more on Patreon. I’m going to get back into the habit of posting here, starting with some of the posts that got early releases on my Patreon.

Not unlike with TTRPGs, I’ve wanted to write stories pretty much since I understood that they’re a thing that a person can write. People seem to think I have a certain talent for dialogue, but I’ve always struggled with plotting. Not every kind of prose writing depends on plot, whether it’s nonfiction or literary fiction that emphasizes other aspects, but a lot of what I want to write needs good plotting. I have ideas for stories that involve adventure, sci-fi, and fantasy, even if I also want them to include some poetic prose and explore deeper themes. I need a way to think about what happens in the story.

Despite many attempts at using or even creating systems to help with plotting, I’ve resolutely remained more of a “seat of the pants” writer, which is to say that somehow putting together detailed outlines doesn’t seem to work for me. I still have to stop and think about where the story is going, but my attempts to use methods like those outlined in Save the Cat and Rock Your Plot never led to any finished stories. Likewise, I bounced off of Scrivener and other more systematic writing tools, and I pretty much just write in a Word document, maybe with a second Word doc for notes if there’s a lot of setting and such to keep track of.

I don’t think there can be a single silver bullet to writing fiction—Save the Cat has worked for a lot of people, maybe too many, but not me—but I finally hit on something that does work for me. Creative advice isn’t universal, but I think I have something worth sharing, if only because I haven’t seen it outright stated anywhere else.

I really enjoyed the Disney animated series Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and the last time I re-watched it, I was left wanting more, so I ended up trying out Amphibia and The Owl House. (I’m still annoyed that The Owl House got an abridged third season apparently because Disney executives are cowards about LGBT representation, but that’s beside the point here.) Both series have young, plucky heroines thrust into weird other worlds where they make friends and gets into all kinds of trouble. And I realized that at the heart of each episode there’s something that the characters need to learn in order to grow and to resolve the conflict in front of them. It’s a bit more blatant in Amphibia, and in that show (I think) the characters growing and learning is the main through-line in the first place, taking them all the way from Anne emerging from the wilderness near Wartwood to the series’ epilogue.

In The Owl House, Luz is a plucky middle school girl with an overactive imagination and an obsession with a series of trashy fantasy novels. In the first episode she finds herself in the magical land of the Boiling Isles, living with a witch named Eda who’s a cynical scammer with a heart of gold (if you look hard enough). In the second episode, Luz accepts an epic quest from a wizard, and learns the hard way that no one’s going to hand her a grand destiny or epic quest on a platter when it turns out the wizard is a puppeteer monster and everything in her quest was fake. The world is weird and at times cruel (but with its own kind of beauty), and the only destiny she has is the one she makes for herself.

That kind of plotting can get a bit trite and PSA-ish, but for me it works.  Asking myself “What is the conflict here?” just doesn’t seem to get me anywhere, whereas asking “What do they learn here?” has yet to steer me wrong. It forces me to have the characters be more proactive and to have them display faults and get into trouble, and the conflict naturally flows from setting the characters up to learn and grow.

There’s a concept in sitcoms called the “idiot ball,” from when Hank Azaria observed how it seemed like each week one character on Herman’s Head would temporarily act out of character and become an idiot in order to drive the plot, as though some force were moving an invisible ball of idiocy around the cast. I mention this because it feels like a natural pitfall of the learning-oriented approach. If a character needs to learn something, they have to be ignorant or wrong in some way, and a writer has to be careful to have that deficiency be something that feels natural rather than a contrivance to drive the plot.

Lately I’ve been putting in a lot of work on Memes of the Prophets, my isekai series. Erica started as something of a self-insert, which is a problem in that I’m introverted, conflict-averse, and often just plain passive. The major theme of my therapy sessions so far has been that I’m too hard on myself over my possible faults, but Erica needs to be something other than “Ewen as a catgirl.” The lesson-based approach to plotting, combined with having her collide with a weird fantasy society, has made her a lot more proactive and outspoken, even if she’s nowhere near as boisterous as the protagonists of the cartoons that inspired me. Still, so far she’s ended up riding a unicorn, introducing the world to tic-tac-toe, and throwing the art world into chaos by exposing them to abstract expressionism, and I’m leading up to her accidentally sparking Eitania’s first anti-war movement.

We’ll have to see how this approach actually works for me as I continue writing. Much as I like randomizers and other tools to spur creativity, right now what I really seem to need is just a card that says, “What will they learn?”

3D Printing!

musings

Getting into keyboards in turn led me to give 3D printing a try, because when you do the more DIY keyboard stuff you end up with a lot of things where it’s the easiest or only way to get certain parts, and I didn’t want to bug my roommate to print stuff for me quite that much. There are several kinds of 3D printing (including ceramic, metal, and various kinds of food), but if you’re a hobbyist and don’t have thousands of dollars to throw around, the two types you can get right now are filament and resin. Resin printing can produce much more detailed prints, but it requires dealing with toxic chemicals, so I went for an entry-level filament printer, specifically an Ender 3 Pro, which cost me a little over $200 or so.

Filament printers (or more properly FDM–“fused deposition modeling”) take in a plastic filament and push it through a heated nozzle that is placed so that motors can precisely move it along the X, Y, and Z axes, building up an object in layers. There are several different types of filament available, but the most common is PLA (polylactic acid), which has a relatively low melting point, produces reasonably durable prints, and is non-toxic. (It’s not edible, but it is food-safe, and gets used to make compostable drinking glasses, albeit compostable via industrial processes.) You can print with for example ABS (a very common, basic plastic frequently used for keycaps), but it creates a burning styrofoam smell and fumes, which is why I’ve never used it. (Better quality keycaps use a plastic called PBT, but it has significantly higher temperature tolerances, which I suspect is why it isn’t used for 3D printing.) Most other materials have other issues with things like adhering to the print bed or adding wear and tear to the printer nozzle.

Resin printing meanwhile uses a vat of liquid resin, and it has a device–either an LCD screen or a laser–that uses UV light to harden a layer. It then pulls the print up slightly and repeats the process until the print is done. The ability to print an entire layer at once means that it can potentially be faster than FDM printing. On the other hand you have to wash the finished print in alcohol and cure it in UV light, and you should be wearing protective gloves and have good ventilation for the whole process. The level of detail these printers can produce is exceptional though, and they can do things that FDM printers either can’t manage or struggle with.

3D printing is a time-consuming and finnicky process. If I print something on a paper printer, issues are rare and it only takes a few seconds to spit out a printed page. With 3D printing it’s very easy to end up with a print that takes several hours or even multiple days, and printing failures are to be expected, especially when you’re starting out. I had a lot of failing around as I got the hang of bed leveling and so on.

Most 3D printers have you take your 3D model (usually an STL file, though there are some other formats out there) and put it into a “slicing” program that lets you set parameters and convert it into a series of instructions for your particular printer. You can tweak things like the level of precision and the amount of infill (how much of the interior of the object is filled in; at less than 100% it generates a honeycomb pattern to save on filament while maintaining a strong structure), arrange the model(s) on your printing bed, and change the scale. From there you put the converted model onto an SD card, stick that into your printer, and tell it to start. The printer is essentially just following a series of instructions–it doesn’t have sensors to detect issues or anything like that–and more advanced users have found ways to tweak those instructions in interesting ways. One guy set it up so that his printer would print a part, use the side of the printing nozzle assembly to knock the finished part off the printing bed into a container, and repeat.

Boxy Miku, in the Cura slicing app

There’s a massive amount of stuff you can make with a 3D printer, even if you don’t have any clue how to do any 3D modeling. There are a number of sites with free models, the biggest of which is Thingiverse. For any given thing where normally you’d get a plastic item made in China, chances are you can 3D print something. (Food safety is a little tricky because although PLA itself is food safe, the crenellations that 3D printing creates can trap bacteria, so it’s necessary to apply a food safe coating.) That in turn means that 3D printing has exciting possibilities in terms of a more sustainable lifestyles, since it would let us cut down on how much stuff we’re shipping halfway around the world, and it naturally works best with a biodegradable plastic. Of course, the technology needs become more reliable and less technical for the end user before it can gain widespread adoption. Right now it’s more the domain of geeky hobbyists who are willing to put up with the frustrations that come with it.

When I’ve asked people what I should print, more than once I’ve gotten a sarcastic reply that I should print a 3D printer. That’s a very involved project with all the wiring and such involved, but it’s actually something you can do! Hobbyist 3D printing is mostly open-source, plus people just generally like that kind of silliness. There are also quite a few mods for printers that you can 3D print, and in particular I found that adding an extruder knob to my printer made changing filament much easier. There are also a lot of accessories for tech items (for example I printed a stand for my HomePod mini), household items, and figures of pop culture characters.

3D printing has a lot of potential to be of benefit to tabletop gaming. My roommate has a resin printer specifically to supplement his Warhammer 40k armies, and there are tons of models for miniatures, dice towers, board game storage solutions, and so on. People with 3D printers are still enough of an exception that it’s not ready to be the main way a given game gets into people’s hands, but it’s an option that a publisher can put out there if they want (potentially with a greater customizability), as well as a good way to do prototyping.

A thing I realized is that 3D printing is one tool, and just as you can do an entire piece with just a pencil or go on to add other materials, a 3D print can be a starting point, after which you can go on to add things like sanding, painting, coatings, hardware, LEDs and other electronics, etc. That lets you overcome a lot of the limitations of 3D printing, adding different colors, capabilities, and so on rather than just sticking with the single-color, layered look of basic 3D printing. Among other things my roommate 3D printed a Blue Spirit mask from Avatar: The Last Airbender, and then finished it with sanding and painting to produce a really excellent cosplay prop.

3D printers that can handle multiple types of filament or outright add coloring are still relatively new and expensive, but given how fast the technology has developed–from bleeding edge tech with limited industrial uses to an open-source technology you can get into at home for a few hundred dollars in about a decade–it’s undoubtedly going to become cheaper and more accessible.

The amount of stuff I want to 3D print has been enough that it’s going to take a good while to work through it all, and lately I’ve been hearing the whine of stepper motors all day most days. It’s not something I’d recommend everyone get into given the expense and frustration it can entail, but it can be relatively cheap, and there’s all kinds of neat stuff you can do with it.

Keyboards!

musings,

I haven’t been posting all that much to this blog, but then the world’s been on fire (literally in some places), so I haven’t been able to get nearly as much done as I’d like in the first place. About the only hobby that I’ve been able to pursue without any big impediments is mechanical keyboards, so I figured I ought to write a bit about them here.

An Epomaker keyboard (with “Miami’ SA keycaps), 9-key macropad, and a Drop.com CTRL (with “Atlantis” SA keycaps)

Mechanical keyboards are called that because they use mechanical switches instead of the cheaper membrane switches that are common on more basic keyboards. Computer keyboards evolved from teletypes and electric typewriters that got adapted for use as the interfaces on early computers, and the IBM computers that became the basis of the DOS/Intel/Windows platform originally had heavy mechanical keyboards with buckling spring switches. Over time, cheaper membrane switches became the default, and in recent years the push for thinner keyboards in laptops has also led to even the keyboards for desktops often being thinner types that use the scissor switches (a kind of membrane switch with a scissor-like mechanism that allows for a thinner profile). One of the most prominent examples is Apple’s Magic Keyboard, which is included with most desktop Macs, and is basically a MacBook’s keyboard repackaged as a thin Bluetooth device. These aren’t bad, especially when the aim is to have the keyboard be light and thin, but when space and weight aren’t at a premium, mechanical keyboards have a lot of advantages. They’re more ergonomic, last longer, look better, and just plain feel better to use.

The current Apple Magic Keyboard

The shift to thinner and cheaper keyboards, combined with certain patents on key switches running out, helped create a niche for more premium keyboards. Mechanical keyboards are now a pretty deep hobby that you can get into, ranging anywhere from just buying a better off the shelf keyboard to designing your own. I haven’t gone that far, but I do have a bit of a collection already, including a bunch that I soldered myself.

There are others, but the main type of key switch in use in mechanical keyboards is the MX type that a German keyboard company called Cherry created. While a Chinese company called Kailh has become a massive player in this industry, Cherry is still around, and there are a number of other manufacturers, and even people who’ve done small batches of premium switches. Switches come in different colors, which are a code for their actuation force and whether they’re silent (not literally silent, but not clicky), tactile (with a bump you can feel as they press down), or clicky (which some people prefer, but can be obnoxious for people around you). Key switches typically have an actuation force of around 50 to 70gf (gram force), though I’m one of the relatively few people who prefers much lighter switches, and I have two keyboards with Gateron Clear switches (35gf). I like them a lot, but they did take some getting used to so I wasn’t pressing keys accidentally all the time.

Cherry MX key switches

I got into mechanical keyboard by way of steno (thanks to the Open Steno Project), which is how I ended up with 2 keyboards that are solely for steno (a SOFT/HRUF Splitography and a Georgi) and 3 more that can do steno as well as QWERTY. I now use steno enough that it feels a little annoying to not be able to use it to get a whole word out with one chord.

My Georgi steno keyboard

My current main keyboard is a GergoPlex Heavy, a split ergonomic keyboard designed and hand-assembled by a Canadian guy who goes by Germ and does weird keyboards as his side hustle. It only has 36 keys, but with layers it can produce any standard keystroke, and with the firmware tweaks I did it can switch to a steno mode to boot. One of the nice things about these kinds of keyboards is that you can customize the firmware relatively easily, and adding a new layer and hotkeys to activate it isn’t too hard. An open-source firmware package called QMK is very widely used, and even has a GUI “configurator” so you can do basic firmware tweaks without any coding at all.

Japan has a whole DIY keyboard scene (自作キーボード), and there’s even a brick and mortar store in Ueno called Yusha Kobo that I’m definitely going to visit whenever I finally go to Japan again. From what I’ve seen online, the scene there is big on small split keyboards, and the Corne seems to be both popular and one of several such keyboards from and/or relatively popular among hobbyists.

It’s not exactly a cheap hobby (I’m typing this on a $230 keyboard after all), though there are certainly more expensive ones. It’s possible to just get a basic mechanical keyboard for $40 or so and call it a day, but I was very quickly tempted into getting more and better keyboards and pretty keycaps. There’s still a ton that I could spend money on if I really wanted, like fancy hand-made cables and resin wrist rests, but as of now I’m getting to the point where I’ve about got my setup just right for the foreseeable future. Granted that entails not only the GergoPlex but a RoMac+ macropad and a separate numpad (a Setta21), but it works for me.

While you can just walk into Best Buy and pick up a decent mechanical keyboard off the shelf (though those are mostly gaming-oriented, and you can get ones of comparable quality for cheaper elsewhere), a big part of the appeal of the hobby is that you can customize your keyboards in all sorts of ways, most of which are pretty easy (and many of which aren’t too expensive). If you buy a new set of keycaps, you can give your keyboard a new look and feel in about 15 minutes, and there are now a lot of boards with hot swappable sockets, so that you can change out switches, either to replace ones that aren’t working or just to put in ones more to your liking, without having to pick up a soldering iron. You can also do all kinds of stuff with the firmware, especially if you know how to code in C, so that you can get a keyboard to produce most any keypress or combination of keys. Germ went as far as to create a library for combos and chords for QMK firmware, which he’s used in several of his keyboard designs.

Mechanical keyboards are an odd hobby in that there are almost no brick and mortar shops for it. There are a few things I’ve used for keyboards that I’ve gotten locally, but all of the keyboards, keycaps, switches, and other electronic components have had to come in the mail, and a lot of them came from China and were pretty much impossible to get any other way. There are some domestic stores that cater to hobbyists like 1UP Keyboards, MKULTRA, Spacecat Design, etc. I’ve had good experiences with them so far, though they do tend to have very limited stock, so it can be a little frustrating to sift through product listings that are mostly sold out.

Zines and Shirts!

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On Sunday, September 1st I’m going to have a table at SF Zine Fest, a small zine event held at the County Fair Building at Golden Gate Park. If you’re into that kind of thing, come check it out! It’s a pretty neat event, and I recommend checking it out (or whatever zine events there might be in your neck of the woods) if you get a chance regardless of whether I’m there.

New Stuff

I was able to finish a total of four new zines in time for SFZF. I’ll be making them available through Etsy and itch.io not too long after.

  • Things I’ve Seen Contracting at Tech Companies: No shocking revelations or anything, but a collection of weird events and imagery I’ve witnessed while working contract jobs at Silicon Valley tech companies.
  • aromantic: I don’t usually talk about it a lot, but I’m aromantic (meaning I don’t experience romantic attraction), and I decided to write a short zine about what that means to me.
  • Kagegami High Student Handbook: An excerpt from Kagegami High that you can use to introduce people to the setting or just read for the fun of it I guess.
  • My Grandpa’s Poems: My grandfather, Robert W. Cluney, was an appliance repairman, and in retirement he did a lot of painting and a fair amount of writing. I put together a small collection of some of my favorite poems of his.

Old Stuff

I’m also bringing all of my previous zines, plus a few other things!

  • Kagegami High
  • The Dungeon Zone
  • Magical Fury
  • Five-Card Fictions
  • Melancholy Kaiju
  • All That Glitters is Palladium
  • Small Company Big Mess
  • Ewen’s Tables Zine
  • Bizarre & Adventure
  • “Losses”
  • Cats I Have Known
  • Choose Your Own Homura
  • Conservapedia is Extremely Weird

T-Shirts

I also randomly got inspired to start making T-shirt designs to put up on sale at Threadless. I’m calling my shop there the “Yaruki Zero Games Merch Store,” but it’s kind of a mixture of stuff related to my games and attempts at weird humor.

Steno!

musings

The other day I randomly decided to look into ways to type faster. There are things like the Dvorak keyboard layout (and some newer alternatives, most notably Colemak), but the differences in speed between those and a QWERTY keyboard seem to be relatively minor. There were several attempts at creating chorded keyboards–where you use combinations of keys to produce text–but none of them really caught on, so that the hardware is hard to find and overpriced. I eventually arrived at stenography.

steno machineStrictly speaking, “stenography” is a term for any method of quickly recording text, and thus it also includes things like shorthand and even speech-to-text technologies. The most recognizable form of stenography today is court reporting, which is usually done with a stenograph machine, also known as a stenotype. Stenograph machines have been around for over a century, dating back to the late 1800s. They now have a standardized 22-key keyboard, and a trained operator can use chords to produce text. To get certified as a court reporter in the U.S., you have to be able to type at 225 words per minute (fast enough to comfortably record conversations in real time), and exceptional stenographers can reach 400 or more WPM, compared to 216 being the world record for QWERTY typing. Even if you don’t get anywhere close to being qualified as a court reporter (which typically takes 2-6 years), with a few months of practice at steno you can get significantly faster than you’d be on a QWERTY.

Continue reading Steno! →

General Update

musings

I decided to revamp my Patreon, switching to a (cheaper) monthly formal where I do Ewen’s Tables packs every month. It’s been fun to work on, and generally reinvigorated the whole Patreon thing for me. I put together a “project inventory” post listing and describing the various projects I have cooking, and man there are a lot.

The Dungeon Zone is now finished and up for sale! It was really fun to work on, and I’m really pleased with the zany 129-page book I ended up creating.

tdz cover

I also got into making zines in a big way. These have been shorter works (though still fairly ambitious in some cases, especially when it comes to the ones about the histories of RPG companies), which I’m offering in the form of hand-stapled booklets through Etsy, plus PDFs through a few other places. They’re fun to work on, and they let me express myself about basically any topic I want without too big of a commitment of time or money. I was also able to get metallic silver cardstock for my zine about Palladium Books, which was really cool. I’m hoping to do a table at a local zine event some time this year, and I’m currently working on a zine about Maid RPG.

2019-01-04 13.27.32

Channel A was successfully funded on Kickstarter (though it was a narrow thing), and the manufacturing process is just about done, so the game should be going out to backers in the next month or so, followed by retail!

channel a ehp

Working on Small Company Big Mess (a zine about the history of Guardians of Order and Big Eyes Small Mouth) led me to think about how I would make an “anime” RPG now, which led me to start on a game called Chocola Anime, aimed at as I put it “colorful, melodramatic anime adventure” (think Tenchi Muyo!, Fullmetal Alchemist, Symphogear, etc., and not Ghost in the Shell, Attack on Titan, or Pop Team Epic). The system so far is kind of a mashup of PbtA, Fate, Fudge, Blades in the Dark, and a few other things. It’s not something I’m working on very intensely or seriously, but I really like what I have of it so far.

For the past two years I was working in a contract job at Facebook, and the contract came to an end a few weeks ago. I just got a job offer for a contract job at another tech company, so I’ll pretty much be continuing with the status quo, albeit with the addition of a daily commute. I’m looking forward to getting back to work and (after two years of a mostly-telecommuting job) actually going into an office and having face-to-face contact with coworkers.

Magical Burst and Tactical Combat

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I’ve sporadically gotten inspired to poke at Magical Burst, but I haven’t made a lot of progress until very recently. I posted about it a while back, but Magical Burst has two combat systems. “Skirmishes” are based on the combat rules from Magical Fury, a lightning-fast system that distills battles down to a handful of rolls and determining the consequences, while “full battles” are meant to be a tactical combat system that still generates consequences, but is also fun to play for its own sake. Shinobigami and some of Adventure Planning Service’s other recent games has a thing where there’s a “Climax Phase” to a game session where an all-out battle can happen, but otherwise clashes between characters end as soon as one character takes damage. It’s a little arbitrary perhaps, but particularly in the context of Shinobigami, it helps reinforce the genre. In the Persona games, although they use the same combat system, there’s a sharp distinction between fights with dungeon mobs and bosses. When fighting random shadows, your goal is to use their weaknesses to short-circuit things and end the battle as quickly as possible, whereas bosses are always more of an endurance test as you try to balance damage and healing. I really like having the flexibility to decide how much time you want to spend on combat in Magical Burst, because as much as I enjoy good tactical combat, I also sometimes want to just get on with the story.

Of course, that means that I’ve set myself the task of designing a tactical combat system, for the first time. Most of the RPGs I’ve designed have either minimized fighting or handled it with a more narrative approach, and while I have some really useful inspiration in D&D 4th Edition and Strike!, I needed more. I ended up looking to video games for inspiration. I went and bought a Nintendo Switch with Octopath Traveler and Mario + Rabbids Kingdom Battle.

Octopath Traveler is a recent game from Square Enix, a a 16-bit throwback reminiscent of Final Fantasy VI with modern touches, including a gorgeous “2D HD” look with sprite characters moving through a beautiful 3D world with sprite textures and extensive lighting effects.

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OT has a turn-based combat system typical of old-school JRPGs, but each round, each of your characters gets a Boost Point (unless they spent BP the previous turn). You can spend these to increase the potency of the character’s actions, turning basic attacks into multi-attacks, making magic attacks more potent, making buffs last longer, and so on. Characters can store up to 6 BP and can spend up to 3 on an action, and there are a few special skills that can manipulate BP as well. (Enemies also have various vulnerabilities, and hitting them enough times with attacks they’re vulnerable to temporarily incapacitates them. This becomes a vital strategy in the game, and makes boosted basic attacks really useful beyond doing more damage.)

It’s a little bit different, but I hit on the idea of adding a currency called “Resonance” to full battles in Magical Burst. Magical girls start with 1 Resonance, and get one at the end of each round, plus (inspired by the Miss Tokens from Strike!) one when they miss with an attack. The different specializations also get bonus Resonance based on actions that relate to their roles in combat.

  • I wanted to have an action economy similar to D&D4e and Strike!, but a little simpler, so I had it so that each character gets a Main Action and Support Action. Having movement be a Support Action tended to put a squeeze on the action economy though, and letting players spend a Resonance for an extra Support Action (or 3 Resonance for an extra Main Action) will hopefully alleviate that.
  • With characters taking Overcharge points for both rolling too high with magical checks and for using certain Talents, there’s a significant risk of full battles generating too much Overcharge relative to other parts of the game. Letting players spend Resonance to power Talents and to negate Overcharge will allow them to manage both better when they want and take bigger risks when they feel it’s worth it.

I really hope this works out in playtesting, because it feels like a really fun mechanic that will hopefully shore up the full battle system in multiple ways.

Mario + Rabbids is turning out to be more or less exactly what I’d heard it was, which is to say XCOM Lite with Mario and Rabbids characters, which somehow results in a way better game than you’d think. Some of its core mechanics are deliberately cartoony–like how if you move one of your units into the position of one of your other units, they get catapulted to another location of your choice, letting them do a double move that ignores terrain obstacles–but it also does a good job of implementing tactics fundamentals like cover. It’s a bit weird that once you get past the prologue Mario promptly gets a gun (albeit a cartoony blaster thing) and winds up with mutant Peach and Luigi Rabbids as companions, but the game shows real skill in how it gradually introduces you to its mechanics, slowly increasing your palette of tactical considerations and options.

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I’m still in the process of playing Mario + Rabbids and figuring out what to take from it, but I think the biggest take-away so far is how it makes such extensive use of terrain to create new tactical considerations. One of D&D4e’s shortcomings was that while terrain was (rightly) very important, the game needed better tools to create and use interesting terrain. As much fun as we had playing it, there were a few too many battles in mostly-empty rooms, regardless of whether or not the DM was using stuff out of modules.

Looking to video games for inspiration when designing tabletop RPGs is weird, because while video games are limited in how they can use human interaction, their mechanical aspects are much more varied, with sophistication in different places. I most likely wouldn’t have come up with something like Resonance if I’d only been looking at other RPGs for example. While in RPG design you do have to use and accommodate the conversation and the fiction, the medium has a long tradition of perhaps excessively falling back on (a certain vision of) realism.

I’ve also been working more on the youma rules, and one thing that’s been really helpful is Blog of Holding’s Monster Manual 3 on a Business Card. (There’s a 5th Edition version too by the way.) As good as D&D 4th Edition was in terms of tightly designed tactical combat, it took them until Monster Manual 3 to really nail down the math for monster stats. That’s especially true of solo monsters, which had too many hit points initially, making them a slog to fight. BoH distilled that improved math down until it could fit on one side of a business card, which lays bare the sheer simplicity of determining HP, damage, defense values, etc. once the designers figured out how to balance everything right. This is proving immensely helpful to me, especially since Magical Burst, following its source material, naturally tends towards solo monsters, which are significantly harder to design. While I think the ideas I’ve been working on (like having a “Spread” value that determines how good a youma is at fighting multiple enemies) are on the right track, I needed to see there in black and white that a solo monster outright has 4x the HP.