A quick addendum to the last post: when I was just rearranging some books today, I realized that Into the Odd might also be a great game for kids. (Or, perhaps, it’d be a great game for the right kind of kids.) It’s quick, it’s fast, it gets you into a dungeon crawl or whatever without any hassle, and gives them some interesting items / arcana to mess around with (as Hobgoblinry has already pointed out). I think you’d need kids who are OK with their characters being a bit on the fragile side, but if you just wanted to pull a map or an old/OSR module off the shelf and get going (as, in fact, I was hoping to this past weekend), I think it’d be great.¹

So something I think about a little is finding good ways to run RPGs with kids. Some kids are super into the crunch of RPGs– I definitely had friends when I was a young person who would have been obsessed with minmaxing some character class or something– but a lot of the time, what I want if I’m sitting down with kids is something that gives me a little bit of randomization but mostly gets out of the way.

So when a friend and their kids stopped by last night to get out of the heat, I started thinking again about trying to find a good system for kids to play… and eventually found myself up late at night, poring over a few different options. To be clear, I’ve tried a few systems with kids before (Dungeon World, 5e, DCC, a few other things), and I’ve looked at a lot more (Beyond the Wall, Maze Rats/Knave, Troika, various lightweight OSR things).¹

I want a few competing things: I want the system to be light enough that the kids can follow along and feel engaged; I want it to be a system that gives them some options to customize their character and how they want to play without being overwhelming; and I want it to be a system that I find reasonably fun.

And so I hit upon Savage Worlds, and wondered why I hadn’t thought of it sooner. Its core mechanic is easy enough that even little kids can follow (if they can read numbers), it has a lot of flexibility (for those cases where the kid you’re playing with decides to go off script), and it has enough bells and whistles to keep me occupied while running it. It doesn’t infantilize kids (which is a problem that some TTRPGs for kids have), but it doesn’t require a bunch of knowledge they might not have. (Dungeon World would seem to be fun for kids, but it kind of expects you to be familiar with the tropes of D&D.) I like the fact that SW’s bennies give the GM the opportunity to reward a kid for doing something inventive, but also give the kid the opportunity to reroll something they’re really unhappy with. (It is very tempting– for both GMs and the players– to fudge rolls when you’re playing with kids.)²

But in the more or less fantasy adventures I was thinking of, I do want players to be able to use magic, and I want magic to be fun and evocative and interactive. I was looking at Mausritter tonight, and I realized that it’d be pretty easy to hack a magic system into Savage Worlds on the basis of the Mausritter / GLoG system I already know and love: you just set up spells as part of a player’s equipment (maybe as runes or spell books, if you want to be concrete about it), with a certain number of uses, as in Mausritter; and then have them roll their sorcery die (likely with their wild die, as well) to cast a spell. You can use the [DIE] and [SUM] mechanics from GLoG and Mausritter to determine the power of the spell. Heck, if you really want to get wild, you can make spell casting dice explode, as well. To recharge spells, you can go the fun, evocative Mausritter path, or you can just kind of handwave it. You might want to fiddle around with how many uses a spell has (does each die that counts towards the power of the spell check a use, as in Mausritter?), but I suspect you do want to give kids something to check off as they use their spells (to give them an opportunity to be strategic about using their resources). You can even use the GLoG mechanic that rolling doubles causes something weird and chaotic to happen.

To me, this seems like a pretty robust way to play (fantasy) TTRPGs with kids: it should be fun, and easy to pick up, without requiring a lot of rules. It seems like you’d probably be able to make it as complicated or as simple as you want, more or less on the fly. It gets them rolling dice and casting spells without requiring a whole lot of prep.

Origins 2025 is in the books; I had a decent time this year. Some of my usual standbys– a DCC game or two, a game or two of Blood on the Clocktower, some miscellaneous boardgaming, a stop off in Unpub– and some new stuff, too. I’m definitely going to add Crokinole into the rotation in future years (even if I’m not great at it), and I enjoyed the (somewhat slow) game of Necromunda I played in as well. I even really enjoyed the engine building board game I tried out: I’m not a fan of Wingspan, but I liked Undergrove a lot more. Maybe not totally my thing, but I enjoyed the mechanics and the way all of the pieces fit together, and the way the mechanics link up with the biological systems they’re trying to represent is very much something I appreciate.

And I loved getting to spend some time with and see some gamer friends of various kinds. I didn’t run into a ton of Cbus gamer friends (outside of work friends I see regularly), but I did get to chat with one non-work friend who I only seem to see at Origins now, and who seems to be doing well, which is lovely to see.

For whatever reason, it did feel like a bit of an off year, at least in some ways. In many years, there seems to be an abundance of novel TTRPG things to try, and the offerings this year seemed a bit thinner than usual. Goodman Games is still working out the kinks in their Organized Play system; I enjoyed aspects of the funnel I played in, but there were some things that didn’t really work, frankly. And the convention seemed a bit more chaotic than usual.

Maybe I’ll change my mind, but in coming years I might stick to the things that I know work well at Origins: more Blood on the Clocktower, probably some DCC, an Unpub session… Maybe I’ll branch out and do more Indie Games on Demand, or even some Pathfinder– those groups always seem to be having a lot of fun.

I was on the plane the other day, looking through setting materials for the Forgotten Realms (pdfs of the box sets of the original Forgotten Realms and the Lands of Intrigue box), and it got me thinking about RPG projects that I have underway, and what I’m trying to get out of the hobby.

Anne Helen Peterson has an essay out today about Millennial Hobby Energy, and it’s a striking contrast to my hobbies. I like having a hobby or two– and I can get preoccupied with one, for a time, as I am currently preoccupied with M:TG– but a big part of having a hobby for me is having something to do that I don’t treat like a job. I’m a serious fan of RPGs, I think, but I don’t feel some burning need to pick up every game that comes out, or to play all of the modules recommended by Questing Beast. It’s something I do when my time and energy allow, not something that I’m forgoing sleep to pursue. In the interest of getting on to the main point of this post, I’m going to skip more ruminations in this vein, but my thoughts are almost exactly captured by Burkeman’s discussion of hobbies in Four Thousand Weeks.

In that spirit, here are the RPG projects that I have underway. I’m going to divide them up into a couple of different categories. The first category is active RPG projects, ones for which I have some unresolved things to do; the second is back pocket games, games which I’ve run and played enough that I feel like I could pick up or play them on short notice. I’ve also added someday/maybe games as a category, which are the games that I’d like to run at some point, but that I don’t feel any sense of urgency about.

Active RPG projects

• Outposts of the Undying. I should probably be more aggressive at getting sessions of this campaign together, but I feel pretty happy where I’m at with this. I wanted a setting and a set of rules and procedures that I could use to run arbitrary OSR modules that look good, and on that front, I feel pretty happy with where things are. I need to go through my notes and make sure that I have both my setting notes, my houserules, and my DM-facing procedures documented well enough to be able to pick up and play, but I’m pretty happy with this. I feel like I can start adding in various modules and bits and bobs about the setting any time I want.
• Schoolcraft, MI. Faute de mieux, Monster of the Week is probably my go-to PbtA game, up there with Brindlewood Bay (even though I haven’t played it a ton in the last year). The genre it’s trying to emulate is accessible to almost everyone (including me), the system is pretty easy to pick up and play, and I have a setting for it and a few mysteries that I know pretty well. Why is this an active project and not just a back pocket game? There are two big outstanding items for Schoolcraft/MotW. First, it’d be good if I incorporated some of the new MotW material into the game: I’d really like to have my players to have a static base that they can upgrade over time, a la Blades in the Dark. I think there’s good material for this in the newer MotW supplements, but I should go through it and make some choices. Second, I probably need to do some work on my setting. I’ve just hand waved a lot of it in the past, but I was distracted by the vagueness of the geography of the town in the last mystery I ran. I may actually need a slightly larger town; it probably makes sense to just steal from Kalamazoo to make a more fleshed out town. (It occurs to me as well that you could probably do a lot of great vintage Call of Cthulhu stuff in historic SW Michigan.)

Back Pocket Games

• Brindlewood Bay. I’ve run enough sessions of Brindlewood Bay to feel like I have a pretty good handle on the system and what it’s trying to do, to a point where I can run it without a ton of preparation or provocation. I’d like to get some more books about small town New England– either tourist books or coffee table books– to use as inspo at some point, but that’s a minor to-do.
• Dungeon Crawl Classics. For all of its lumpy bits and weirdnesses, I really like DCC. It’s a great system that does a lot of fun stuff and (mostly) gets out of the way the rest of the time. Warriors hit hard, wizards do cool wizard stuff, and so on. What’s more, its modules do a great job of getting players into the fun, cool stuff with a minimum of fuss. I’m probably going to run some DCC for some local friends in the near future, and I’m surprisingly excited about it.

Someday/maybe

• 13th Age 2e. I’m not sure the game is totally my thing, but I like a lot of things about it. For one, something about the default setting just rubs me the wrong way; I like Midgard as a setting, but it’s a setting I find it hard to get excited about. Honestly, if I really wanted to run 13th Age, I think you could very profitably build the Birthright setting (which I do like quite a lot, and have messed around with in the past) into a campaign setting that would work for 13A (just need to make a list of the icons), with Reign for the high level political stuff. Also, imo it needs a very particular kind of group that is into both the expressive RP side of it and the crunchy mechanical bits. All of this is pretty tantalizing, honestly, but it’s not on my short list, somehow.
• 5e/5e hacks/heroic fantasy/Shadow of the Weird Wizard. A part of me wishes I had some 5e / heroic fantasy thing in my back pocket, for those friends of mine who really enjoy that sort of thing. I’m intrigued by Nimble 5e (among others) and would certainly like to give Shadow of the Weird Wizard a fair shake. But I don’t enjoy 5e enough to try to get into a game of it, and heroic fantasy isn’t really my thing, which makes the effort to get a 5e variant or SotWW to the table kind of a stretch.

There are other games that are vaguely on my agenda, but these are the ones I’m actively thinking about.

On something of a whim, I picked up The Gamemaster’s Handbook of Proactive Roleplaying, by Jonah and Tristan Fishel, which has been going around recently. And when I picked it up, I’m not sure I had super high hopes– maybe some interesting tips or ideas, but nothing big. But I was immediately grabbed by the central contention of the introduction, that centering our games around big, bad, looming threats from some external agent can make for unsatisfying games.

More than that, though, their discussion got me thinking about how central these tropes are to so much of popular culture; and how frequently we even frame our political lives and agency in terms of these tropes. At times, these tropes can even seem like what Arlie Russell Hochschild calls a deep story. And it got me thinking that limiting our political imaginations to this kind of narrative provides us with an impoverished way of thinking of our lives: it’s at least as meaningful to think of our lives in terms of building, of making community, of caring for each other than it is to think in terms of fighting pluckily against some mighty but implacable foe. We cede a lot of narrative ground if we assume our political opponents are brilliant omega level mutants or the Galactic Empire. And there may be value in building things that don’t slot into this narrative structure.

I’ve been a fan of Charli XCX for a while. I’m not an original True Romance fan, but was solidly with her from Sucker on, and totally love “Doing It”. With each new album that comes out, I’m always a little surprised by the critical reception… most Charli XCX albums (esp. post PC Music and Sophie) sound like Charli albums?

Like I can appreciate the fact that Brat is a rich text– and there are some great tracks on it– but are they really categorically different than what’s come before? Is this going to be an album we look back on in 10 years as an unvarnished classic? To be more concrete, “Von Dutch” has really grown on me, and there are a bunch of good songs on the album, but does “So I” show tonal range that surpasses “Forever”? Since at least How I’m Feeling Now, we’ve known that Charli can craft songs that fuse pop surface and earnest emotion– that’s one of the reasons we all like Charli, frankly.

Much as I like Brat, I have to suspect that part of the critical acclaim is because it provides so much grist for breathless internet speculation and critical commentary. And to the extent that there’s anything wrong with the album, it’s that for every earnest and direct reflection (“I think about it all the time”) there are tracks that seem to be intended as critical catnip (“Girl, so confusing”) in a way that can blunt their emotional impact– even if they do so openly.

A friend of mine urgently recommended R.F. Kuang’s Babel a little while ago, and I get the appeal and the recommendation. It’s a throwback to the halcyon days we shared as Indo-European historical linguistics nerds, and it has all of these callbacks to lots of things we were into at the time. (William Jones! Silvestre de Sacy!) And the book very eventually gathers momentum– to spoil things very slightly– with a fantasia of ill-advised violence and destruction.

The earlier parts of the book are well done, but felt a bit too sedate for my taste. One of the pleasures of books like Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series– or, even better, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell– is getting to explore a world where things are untethered from historical reality; and a world where scholars engrave silver bars with often vague magical powers instead of simply writing historical monographs feels a bit… attenuated?

More substantially, I found the book’s politics overly neat. Imperial language study, per Kuang, is inextricably bound up with imperial projects– fine, no objection there– but the villains of the book are often cartoonishly evil, doing meticulous philological research during the day and deviously plotting imperial villainy on the side. It’s just a little dumb?

I’m no huge fan of Edward Said, but one of the things that makes Orientalism a compelling text is that it takes seriously both the pleasures and perils of Orientalist texts. Said’s serious engagement with, say, Edward William Lane, makes his argument richer and more compelling– precisely because it isn’t a caricature. Babel, to my mind, feels flat in comparison with Orientalism because of the simplicity of its picture of the world. Babel isn’t alone in this; the novels of Becky Chambers, for example, feel overly pat to me in a way that undercuts their qualities.

I can’t leave the topic of Sanderson, I’m afraid, without musing on one of the facts I’ve noticed about him, which is that his fans seem to run to type: almost all men, almost all straight. (I’m sure there’s a contingent of queer, female Sanderson fans, but I have yet to encounter any.) Reading big, chunky fantasy books just seems to be something that a certain kind of male in our society… inclines to? I don’t mean to disparage the fans, among whose ranks (I’ve discovered) many of my friends and relatives are numbered. What’s interesting is that many of these (increasingly middle aged) men seem to be… nice? Earnest? Thoughtful and conscientious, often?

There’s a certain kind of man who consistently reads the paper and is well informed about public events; and I’m pretty sure that almost all of the Sanderson fans fall into that category as well. (Though I know many male, earnest keepers up with the news who would never dream of picking up a Sanderson tome.)

What I can’t figure out is why. Who figured out this segment of the reading public? Was it a conscious market-driven move, or did the readers of large fantasy books self-organize, coalesced in some primordial broth? Who has modeled this reading behavior? Was the ur-text of this kind the Silmarillion? Those Thomas Covenant books? (Which, coincidentally, I was introduced to by a female friend.) Robert Jordan? Terry Goodkind?

I can describe the constellation of traits that often seem to characterize this kind of reader, but I’m still far less certain why this class of books would be irresistible to that particular kind of person.

So I just finished The Well of Ascension, and it cemented my opinion of Brandon Sanderson. (To be clear, I’ve read Mistborn, The Way of Kings, and Warbreaker, so I feel like I’ve done my due diligence.) The last 100 pages (of ~750) or so of Well is compelling: action-packed and memorable, with a bunch of evocative images and scenes that really work, and rank alongside other good bits of genre-era fantasy. But the first 650 pages? Woof. They’re often ponderous and excruciatingly paced, even when Vin is zipping around and we’re meeting rad new monsters like the koloss. How many scenes do we really need with Vin drawn to Zane but unsure about that attraction, or acting like some caricature of a flighty schoolgirl who can’t make up her mind about Elend? How often does Sanderson need to reexplain ferruchemy to the reader when Sazed does something? It’s a shame that Sanderson’s books are often such a slog, because when they get good they’re pretty good! I still think about some of the fight scenes at the end of Mistborn, and The Way of Kings has a few vivid images as well.

Why don’t Sanderson’s books work? In the last year or two, I’ve also been reading a lot of Robin Hobb, and Hobb’s books are superficially similar: they build very, very slowly, and also conclude with high drama. But Hobb’s books work for me, even as they’re also repetitive in parts, and even as some of the relationships grate. (How many scenes do we really need where Fitz unwisely bonds with Nighteyes, or where Fitz and Molly have some juvenile misunderstanding?) The difference, I think, is that Robin Hobb is a much more consistent and confident writer: her books often artfully elaborate and develop their characters, and are liberally sprinkled with vivid, memorable scenes throughout: Kettricken riding out to the hunt of the Forged in Royal Assassin, or Fitz’ encounter with the Old Blood in Assassin’s Quest.

What’s more, Hobb is singular in her ability to craft a conclusion that casts much of what has come before in a stark new light: for much of the Liveship Traders trilogy, I was vaguely annoyed each time Maulkin’s tangle took the stage; by the end of the books, however, you appreciate how these frankly interminable scenes fit into the broader arc of the books– and even, somewhat grandiosely, the sociology of the Bingtown traders. With Sanderson, the middle parts of his books consist of bowl after bowl of lumpy porridge, with gratuitous chunks of lore and vestigial, sometimes grating scenes, etc. Almost all of his books would be significantly better if they were half or even a third of their current size, because it would allow Sanderson to skip all of the things he’s not particularly good at and jump to the fun stuff.¹ By contrast, Hobb’s books might bear some editing, but they’re hardly in need of radical surgery.

To be honest, Sanderson and Hobb are more similar than all this may suggest. But there’s a reason that I’ll probably stop with Sanderson after Hero of Ages but am looking forward to more Hobb at some point.

I was thinking that I want my open table OSE game to have some sort of means of conveying information to the players that gives them a sense of what’s going on with factions in the settings, maybe also gives some sense of the history, but also provides an interface for learning about the local area.

I asked ChatGPT for a few suggestions given my setting, and they were mostly lame and predictable. I had the idea, somehow, that maybe it’s like ARDNEH in Fred Saberhagen’s Empire of the East novels, where (spoilers) there’s a massive, old, possibly vacuum tube-style computer underground somewhere. In Outposts of the Undying, there’s a large, underground computer that’s maintained and operated by some monk-technologist (Adept Lyserius?) up in the hills who might possibly have done this for too long. The computer was originally used to promulgate imperial rescripts to the people, but was also used to spread information about agricultural practices and tips, information about the weather, etc., etc.

What I didn’t have was a good name for this large computer, but I wanted it to be something like ARDNEH or ENIAC or MISTIC or whatever. So I asked ChatGPT, and ChatGPT gave me some awesome options. (I’m going to paste them all, because I think they’re all pretty great.)

1. AURINEX (Automated Universal Relay and Information Nexus)
2. OMNIRIS (Omnipotent Networked Relay and Information System)
3. VORTEN (Vacuum Operated Relay and Transmission Engine)
4. ELDRIN (Elder Data Relay and Information Node)
5. ZANTHOS (Zero-Point Automated Network Transmission Hub and Operational System)
6. MYTHOS (Magical Yoked Transmission and Heuristic Oracle System)
7. TITANEX (Total Information Transmission and Analysis Nexus)
8. QUINTEX (Quantum Universal Information Network and Transmission Engine)
9. ARGENTH (Automated Relay and Grand Information Node of the Empire)
10. SYLVARIS (Systematic Yoked Luminous Vacuum Automated Relay and Information System)

I could have gone with almost any of these, but AURINEX sounds perfect to me– ChatGPT got it in one.

And in each of the imperially sanctioned towns, the Empire built functionally indestructible screens in the town squares to display the most recent rescripts, remind the people of the impossible power of the Empire, etc. etc. (I can’t decide if the demihuman settlements have AURINEX boards.) Very strict pronouncements were made about the severity with which defacements of AURINEX boards would be punished, but as time has gone on, people post all sorts of flyers and things around the edges of the AURINEX board, so it also serves as a public notice board for issues of more local concern.

I like the idea that there are certain things our monk is obliged to send out with each post (and that may be enforced by the programming of the computer itself), but that there are also little parts of the message where he can add his own commentary (or even code comments that he’s been able to print?). I’ve been messing around with building static sites with Hugo, and I like the idea that you could easily build a website in Hugo that has a cleverly styled archive of AURINEX pronouncements.

Behold the AURINEX!