All posts by Ewen

3D Printing!

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!

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!

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!

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

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

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.

octo1

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.

mr

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.

Dragon World Hack 0.4

dw cover new

Dragon World is a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG for fantasy comedy adventures in the vein of classic anime like Slayers and Dragon Half. The game has been in the works for a while now, and we’re now gearing up to launch a Kickstarter some time in the next few months.

Dragon World Hack 0.4
Dragon World Playbooks

I had the idea for Dragon World when I finally got my hands on the Dragon Half manga. (Which BTW is finally getting an English language release from Seven Seas.) In anime there was a weird trend in the early to mid-1990s of making short direct-to-video adaptations of much longer manga, which in turn sometimes wound up being the only versions that made their way to the English-speaking world. Dragon Half started as a 7-volume manga (later re-released in a 3-volume “omnibus” edition, which the English version is based on), which could’ve worked nicely as a full 26-episode TV series. Instead it got a mere two OAV episodes, and plans to do two more episodes got scrapped. The Dragon Half OAVs had a little bit of a cult following in the early anime scene, and I devoured the manga once I got my hands on it. It shows its age and anime-ness with a lot of fanservice (our heroine pretty much only wears a metal bikini), but the zany humor, flagrantly ridiculous take on the fantasy genre, and Ryusuke Mita’s energetic art make it worth your time.

That wasn’t too long after I’d discovered Apocalypse World, and as I made my way through the manga, I kept seeing it in terms of different AW-style moves and their outcomes. This was before the term “Powered by the Apocalypse” came about and while it was still the thing to have those “AW hacks” end with “World,” so “Dragon World” was born. A certain portion of anime and manga, especially from the 90s, used “dragon” in titles to essentially signify “fantasy,” probably a result of Dragon Quest being so massively popular and influential, plus it was a tongue-in-cheek nod to Dungeon World. (And I did talk Jonathan Walton into making a game called “& World.”) From there I watched a ton of Slayers (probably the single most popular comedy fantasy anime), and a bunch of others, giving me a wider palette of ideas to draw on. Dragon World most blatantly shows its influences in the selection of classes, ranging from the likes of the Explosive Mage and Dumb Fighter (which have Lina and Gourry from Slayers at their core) to the Angsty Shadow Warrior (for whom Dororo from Sgt. Frog was an inspiration, but also a bunch of fantasy tropes) to the Shiny Paladin and Ruthless Warlord (who come from silly takes on D&D classes). One of my favorites is the Chosen Visitor, which is a Japanese teenager sent to this fantasy world and given weird powers, echoing shows like Magic Knight Rayearth and El Hazard.

This is the fourth version of Dragon World that I’ve shared with the world, and it’s generally been through a lot of revisions as I did a bunch of playtesting and figured out what did and didn’t work, and thought of new stuff to add. The game started considerably closer to Apocalypse World, but I dropped things like highlighting stats and marking experience. On the other hand (although I refined it a bit), the concept of replacing Harm with “falling down” remained a core part of the game from the start. I changed the selection of classes a little, adding the likes of the Ruthless Warlord and changing the Useless Bard into the Foolhardy Bard (which was how people had been playing the Useless Bard for the most part anyway).

It’s not in the Hack, but the final commercial version is going to have a setting chapter for the land of Easteros. (Not the only Game of Thrones reference in there, but there’s copious anime nonsense regardless.) It was generally an opportunity to put together a bunch of toys and plot hooks, plus some dumb humor (like a pun-laden list of 100 slime names).

In any case, I’m looking forward to finally bringing this game fully to fruition in a nice book with actual artwork, and possibly putting together some supplements and alternate settings. I’m also planning a Creative Commons release, in the hopes that (not unlike with Dungeon World, though presumably in much lower quantities) people will take the opportunity to design and publish their own Dungeon World weirdness.

 

I Hate You: A Cartoon Game

Growing up, cartoons were a pretty massive component of my mental landscape. I was a socially awkward loner (today I’m significantly less awkward, but possibly even more introverted), and I largely filled my time by being a media junkie. TV was the major source of content available to me, and as my family graduated from rabbit ears to cable, I watched so, so many cartoons. There was then-current stuff like the Disney Afternoon, Muppet Babies, and the first generation of Nicktoons, but also old Looney Tunes shorts and episodes of shows like Tom and Jerry, Pink Panther, and Rocky and Bullwinkle that stations put on more or less as filler. In high school I got into anime in a big way, and while that filled a whole lot of my viewing time, I never completely stopped watching cartoons. Today we have brilliant stuff like Steven Universe, Regular ShowStar vs. the Forces of Evil, and Gravity Falls, though if I get too much into talking about those I’ll stray from the original point of this post. The major thing I’m winding my way towards discussing is that I’m working on a mini-RPG inspired by old-school cartoons called “I Hate You: A Cartoon Story Game For Two Good Friends.”

Cartoon Precedent

The first RPG I played was Palladium’s Robotech game, but the first one I ever owned was Toon: The Cartoon Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan (of Paranoia fame) and published by Steve Jackson Games. I got it by doing a special order from the local B. Dalton Bookseller, which was a store that still existed at the time. (That particular one became a Waldenbooks, then a Borders Express, then finally closed.) Toon is a great game that provided me and my friends with a lot of fun times, but some parts of it hold up better than others. It does a great job of explaining how to play–the “Toon Commandments” are a lot like PbtA Principles–and brilliantly codifies and explains a bunch of cartoon conventions. Kyle Miller did a ton of great art for the books that managed to capture the general feel of old school cartoons without directly aping the styles of existing ones.

toon

Continue reading I Hate You: A Cartoon Game

Channel A Returns!

Back in 2012 I designed my first ever card game, Channel A: The Anime Pitch Party Game. In 2013 Asmadi Games published it, bringing it to Kickstarter backers and then game stores. It’s been well-received, but once the original print run sold out, Asmadi was never quite able to get it back in print. While I’m still a fan of Asmadi Games and Chris Cieslik–and the other Asmadi Games offerings are well worth checking out!–I’m very pleased to be able to announce that Evil Hat Productions will be taking up Channel A as part of their line of board games. It’ll be their first real foray into both anime-inspired games and party games, but Channel A still has some heady company given that it’ll be alongside the likes of the Dresden Files Cooperative Board Game.

EHP is launching Channel A with a Kickstarter, and the game is getting an upgrade in the form of new art (by Dawn Davis, the same artist, who has improved her skills considerably over the past 6 years or so) and around 70 new cards (with Clay Gardner doing the logo designs for the new Title Cards). We’re calling this new version the “Alpha Genesis Edition,” and hopefully new and old fans of Channel A will find a lot to like in what we’ve changed and added. (Also: more normal cardstock!)

If you want to give the came a test drive first, Evil Hat has some cool stuff for that:

There are also stretch goals! The first is a set of stickers of chibi characters, and the second is an expansion called “Channel A: Second Season.” And we have more waiting in the wings! Kind of a lot more!

The Evil Hat folks have generally been great to work with, and their huge enthusiasm about the game has been pretty inspiring to me. Fred is a fan of the game and it really shows!

channel a ehp
Continue reading Channel A Returns!

D&D is Weird, and That’s Fine

Even though back in my Yaruki Zero book I had an entire section about D&D, I’m still grappling with it. There are a lot of reasons for that, the biggest being that it continues to dominate RPGs, even as there are new developments in how people relate to RPGs. Podcasts and other online media have given us actual play shows with a heightened level of polish, to the point where they can develop their own fandoms, but I still find myself feeling the need to remind people that RPGs other than D&D do in fact exist. D&D is also genuinely a very deep an interesting topic though, and we’re belatedly starting to get a clearer picture of its history.

Despite its position of dominance and its massive cultural reach, D&D is a very strange game, even within the weird niche that is tabletop RPGs. It’s not a bad game, but it is an incredibly specific one, in countless ways. It’s situated in a “dungeon fantasy” subgenre that it created, and despite its massive popularity, in many ways it sits outside the mainstream of tabletop RPG design.

Wargame Origins

D&D evolved out of wargames, and there were more transitional forms than people realize. Wargames are roughly divided into miniatures and board wargames. Board wargames typically come complete in a box, with maps and cardboard chits, whereas miniatures wargames were a surprisingly informal and creative hobby, even though in the 60s and 70s they’d attracted a fanbase that looked down on anything not based in historical warfare. The vagueness of miniatures wargames caused a lot of disputes during play, which led to experiments with having a human referee. The referee role existing led to the referee making rulings on the fly, so that players could conceivably try things that weren’t in the rules. The rulebook might not have anything to say about whether units can ford a river, but a referee can make a ruling and the game can roll on. I think that’s a really interesting development for wargames, and in general it’s rare to see anything remotely like it in tabletop games other than RPGs. These days, while wargame rules aren’t always as clear as would be ideal, they’re closer to board games in that they generally allow for straightforward play without recourse to a referee. (And the most played wargames today are ones with copious fantastical elements.) While this was of course before the internet, the wargames scene communicated more broadly through zines, letting these gamers communicate these ideas around the country and beyond.

white box
…And Some Friends and Polyhedral Dice Even Though They (The Dice) Are Hard To Find Because It Is 1974

Continue reading D&D is Weird, and That’s Fine