Character Portfolio 2: Ringworld

The loss of widespread sickass sci-fi covers

 

Index

**

 
Damn, I let this series go fallow. Thankfully, I finally have an ereader that can handle chunky pdfs (and this time it wasn't stolen) so I should be able to start putting these up at least more frequently than once every seven months.
 

**

Larry Niven's Ringworld: Roleplaying Adventure Beneath the Great Arch

(John Hewitt & Sherman Kahn, with additional writing by Lynn Willis, Sandy Peterson, Charlie Krank, Ed Gore & Rudy Craft; art by Ralph McQuarrie, Lisa A. Free, Michael Blum, Yurek Chodak) 

 

Ringworld lives in that taxon of sci-fi where I think the setting is really interesting but can’t stand the actual book to a nearly 1:1 ratio. Great worldbuilding ideas (Weird aliens! Colony worlds with fun gimmicks woven into the environment and culture! A megastructure inhabited by other species of human!) wasted by being both unforgivably boring and outrageously sexist even by the standards of the day.
 
So entirely contrary to expectations, the out-of-print Chaosium licensed game from 1984 is probably the best way to ingest Known Space; all the setting stuff is in one place and you don’t have to deal with Niven being a gross horndog. The basic system is good old BRP 2e, so a few warts are to be expected but probably nothing completely insane (foreshadowing is a literary technique). Despite the miniscule font and triple-column format (augh my eyes), this is a fairly well put together book and I can dive right in. 

**

  
1. Gender
I’ll just odds-evens this. Evens = female.

Grabbing a name from the ether: Juno McGovern
 
2. Homeworld
d100 = 89: The Belt
 
Ah, Beltalowda! Wrong series but the spirit is the same. Independently-minded, butting heads with the government on Earth, all that stuff. There’s a pretty sizable cultural writeup for all the homeworlds in the book, Belt. Picking arbitrarily, I’m going to say she’s from Pueblo, quote:

“This high-density Belter community is a labyrinth of isolated and interconnecting dome and fissure cities scattered across is surface and through its exhausted mining veins. Pueblo’s partially-terraformed exterior tracts are shielded by inflated plastic bubbles. Part-time, cooperatively-shared accommodations are common.”

 
Since the Belt is a low gravity homeworld, I’ll roll with a -3 to my Strength & Mass characteristics and a +3 to Dexterity.
 
3. Defect
d100 = 79: Hyperspace blind spot phobia

All characters have a 50% chance at a major drawback, which I ended up with. Basically, I freak the fuck out during the sensory blackout of hyperspace travel and I can’t take any skills related to it.
 
4. Chronological Age
One of Known Space’s major features is the longevity drug boosterspice , which means that the division between chrono and bio age will apply to basically everyone without an allergy to the drug (one of the possible defects). In the book this is primarily a vehicle for the rancid age gap, which I’ll spare you the rant on.

Rolling a 9 on the d10 table, I get a resulting chronological age of 1d100 (36) + 159: Juno is 195 years old.
 
5. Biological Age
There isn’t a specific roll for this part, and it rather unhelpfully directs me to the Hazards chapter for the section on aging just to tell me that my options are either a yearly injection or a major medical procedure every 20 years. For simplicity I’m just going to go with the 20 year cycle, which eventually rolls back to a bio age of 35.
 
6. Characteristics
2d6+6 for the lot of them, save the ones that get +3 or +9 due to my low-gravity homeworld.

• Strength: 2d6+3 = 11
• Mass: 2d6+3 = 8
• Constitution: 2d6+6 = 13
• Intelligence: 2d6+6 = 14
• Power: 2d6+6 = 13
• Dex: 2d6+9 =19
• Appearance: 2d6+6 = 13
• Education: 10+1d6 = 14

 Juno's rather light and nimble thanks to the microgravity, but overall she's a fairly average character.

I think it’s fascinating to see how blatantly BRP is riffing on D&D’s stats system and how blatantly it's trying to address rolling low stats at chargen.
 
7. Attributes
These are all derived from characteristics, I'm not going to go stat-by-stat for them.

• Damage Mod: +0
• Hit Points: 21
• Health Roll: 39
• Reasoning Roll: 42
• Luck Roll: 39
• Dodge roll: 57
• Hit locations: 6/7/7/7/8 (arm / leg / head / abdomen / chest)
• Action ranking: 3

8. Psionics
You can’t select psionics during chargen - the GM is supposed to pop the surprise on you during a campaign (presumably so you don’t just have all-psychic parties). So no psionics for now. Oh no, what a nightmare, I don't get to be one of my least favorite sci-fi tropes.

9. Occupational Skill Points
Time to figure out how many skill points I have on hand, split up by what pool of skills they can be applied to.

• Education: (EDU - 10) x 20 = 80 pts
• Pursuits: (Age - [EDU + 6]) x 20 = 3500 pts
• Pursuits are all your character’s old careers: at 195 years old, my character gets 2d6 + 1 = 10 of them
• Special Interests: (IND x 10) = 140 pts

Get behind me, Satan! And take your damn point-buy systems with you!

[I’m certain this'll be a recurring theme in this series, given that I’m focusing on higher-crunch games.]

This is the sort of thing where I’d love to ask the writers “why?”. There’s almost a lifepath system here - you roll on a list of pursuits/careers X times - but those careers only tell you the skills you have available at any given stage. Actually assigning skill points is fully manual, as is figuring out how many years you spend in each career, as is what order those careers go in.

I’m going to start with the Pursuit skills first just to get them out of the way, and to make it easy on myself I’m just going to distribute everything evenly. 3500 pts / 10 pursuits = 350 pts per pursuit.; 175 years devoted to pursuits = 5 pursuits at 10 years, 5 pursuits at 11 years.

Rolling d100 ten times for pursuits gets me

• 42 = Entertainer
• 68 = Pilot
• 22 = Colonist
• 96 = Soldier
• 79 = Prisoner
• 90 = Researcher
• 28 = Criminal
• 94 = Researcher
• 14 = Colonist
• 76 = Police

Rolling the same pursuit twice means Juno either spent a long time in that position or returned to it later. 

Rearranging them into a semicoherent order (the numbers in parentheses are the wealth value & years spent, those come in later)

1. Entertainer (2 / 10)
2. Criminal (1 / 11)
3. Prisoner (0 / 10)
4. Colonist (1 / 11)
5. Colonist (1 / 10) 
6. Researcher (1 / 11)
7. Researcher (1 / 10)
8. Soldier (1 / 11)
9. Police (1 / 10)
10. Pilot (3 / 11)

…and splitting out 350 skill points evenly between each pursuit’s skills, splitting up the extra 220 points I have arbitrarily (4 x 20 for education, 7 x 20 for special interests)...

Aquatic Vehicle	20	Language	55
Astronomy	45	Listen	60
Athletics	65	Math	65
Atmospheric Craft	120	Musicianship	75
Bargain	196	Observe	155
Biology	117	Orate	75
Botany	166	Perform	75
Chemistry	116	Personal Flyer	120
Computers	112	Physics	141
Emergency Treatment	43	Planetology	52
Engineering	117	Psychology	103
Farming	52	Reaction Drive	25
Fast Talk	133	Reactionless Drive	25
Ground Vehicle	52	Repair	50
Handgun (Energy)	138	Search	175
Handgun (Projectile)	86	Sneak	141
Heavy Weapons (Energy)	103	Strategy	25
Heavy Weapons (Projectile)	43	Track	60
Hide	106	Unarmed	133
History	45	Weapon System	45
Interstellar Law	48	Zoology	116

We’re still not done, but we’re nearly there.

10. Wealth
To calculate this, I take the wealth value for each pursuit and multiply it by the number of years spent in it and add all those together (127), then make a luck roll to see if that is doubled (I got a 73, failing), then multiply that by 100 (127,000), then add all that to 1d10 x 1000 (4000) to get my total wealth in Stars: 131,000.

[The book notes that 1 Star is roughly equivalent to $5-$10 1980 US dollars. Just for funsies I rolled d5+d10 (3 & 2) and added to 5 for an exact equivalent of $8.20 USD / 1 Star, which would be $1,074,200 in 1980 dollars and $4,392,487.23 in 2026 dollars.)

11. Starting Equipment

• All-weather outfit
• Semi-formal clothes
• Smartwatch (not named as such, but that’s what it is)
• 1d20 = 11 Stars in cash
• IntraStar debit card + UNI-CREDIT charge card
• Multitool
• ID card & offworld passport
• Portable music synthesizer (chosen item)

12. Final Writup
After bumming around the Belt in a minor punk band, Juno ends up jailed for nonspecific crimes of narrative expedience. She does at least part of her sentence in prison until she’s offered a shot at early parole as part of a colony start-up program. She takes the offer, and spends the next few decades on a miserable inhospitable rock of the sort they’d send prisoners to colonize. Once the foundation is laid down and things have settled, she works her way into the scientific corps and stays there for a while until the colony breaks out into civil war (likely over breaking ties with the Earth government). Juno joins up with the independents during the war, serves as a security officer during the post-war rebuilding, and at last decides to buy a surplus flier on the cheap and semi-retire to life as a bush pilot (until she is roped into whatever nonsense that brings her to the Ring).

**

Whew! Finally done.

Besides the ungodly hassle of skill point assignment, this went fairly smoothly and I'm mostly pleased with the results. I still don’t really have any idea what you’d actually do in the Ringworld RPG, considering how the book it’s based on is a boring slog through basically nothing (how many thousands of miles of undifferentiated sunflower fields do you want?) and the game provides very little in the way of guidance wrt building your own adventures (though it does have a few premades)

RPG archaeology like this is always an interesting look into how even the relatively recent past is a different country indeed: I wonder who this book was for, did it ever actually get played, and why did it end up mostly better than it should have been? Was that skill selection process considered part of the fun back then, or was it just as tedious as it is now? 

Anyway, it’s a neat curiosity, at the very least. BRP being what it is, those aliens and Ring-hominids are portable to other games with minimal hassle (i.e. “the mi-go are fucking around in the genome again”), and that’s probably the lasting value here.

3 Sci-Fi Bestiary Reviews

For once, I am actually on time and really reliable. Happy All Hallow’s Eve Eve, ye goblins and other, more different goblins.

#1:Unconfirmed Contact Reports

(Tuesday Knight Games, 2023; writing by Izzy Bull, Luke Gearing, Fiona Maeve Geist, Alan Gerding, Tyler Kimball, Wendy Pippin, Donn Stroud, David N. Wilkie)

Friend of the blog semiurge beat me to the punch on this one, and I’m glad he did because his post is why this post got done.

I think UCR is a bad monster book by most standards, and a very bad book by Mothership standards. MoSh thrives on “the monster is the scenario” module design (since the wounds mechanic gives those monsters a built-in structure for encounters that change across multiple stages and it was intentionally designed as such) so throwing a single minimalist statline and some vague flavor blurbs does the whole work a disservice. It’s not got enough mechanical juice to be good MoSh material, and it's not got enough stylistic sauce to be a good riff on Fire on the Velvet Horizon. None of the monsters stick out as noteworthy in my memory, I don’t think I’d use any of them when I can just evoke the same tropes on my own, and I think the framework presented in Wages of Sin is across-the-board better in terms of usability.

**

To present a potential alternative, here's how I split up the Yuki-Onna in a post of yore:

• Statline
• Brief description, with all focus on what it looks like rather than what it is conceptually
• Portents and signs (spoor, sounds, smells, etc)
• Abilities (How it can fuck up your day - basic attack included)
• Two stages of pre-combat buildup (lets call them distant and immanent) where the portents and signs are dropped
• Three combat phases corresponding to the monster’s 3 health pools - Initial, Wounded, and Near-Death
• Each stage triggers a shift in tactics, including how and when certain abilities are used.
• Most monsters aren't going to need more than 3 stages. 
• What happens when it dies and what you can do with the corpse

This was all fairly labor-intensive to put together, but I think it should be: it is the scenario. Incidental combats against wildlife or people don’t need nearly this much of a writeup beyond “at what point do they surrender or run away”. That's nearly always going to be "after getting meaningfully injured".

 

#2 Hideous Creatures

(Kenneth Hite, 2018, w/ additional text from Gareth Ryder-Hanrahan, Becky Annison, Helen Gould, and Ruth Tillman)

I finally got around to reading this one (after several folks in the comments recommended it) and to no one’s great surprise I think it’s great. It addresses basically everything I’ve griped about on the subject and I’d say it’s easily one of the best monster books I’ve read independent of system (it’s written for Trail of Cthulhu / Gumshoe but would be useful in basically anything). More valuable than mechanics is its use as a model for what a monster book can be.

Each writeup covers the same territory:

• The “canon” depiction of the monster + statblock
• Appearance variants
• Ability variants
• Lore variants
• Analogues in mythology and folklore
• A list of clues keyed to the skill list of Trail of Cthulhu.
• Scenario seeds
• Bibliography of Mythos works featuring the monster
• Printable handout (which I can’t speak to because I don’t like struggling through handwriting fonts)

The focus on variation is the magic ingredient: the options offered are based on what’s conceptually and thematically appropriate to the baseline depiction, but none of them are set in stone or even coherent with each other. Many of the lore variations play with a monster’s relationship to other monsters, which is a good way of buffing up those that are lackluster on their own. Rather than presenting readers with a directionless empty space to fill (as the Malleus so frustratingly does at nearly every turn), Hideous Creatures refuses to hedge anything and hands you a bunch of contradictory statements as equally true and you get to choose what you like best. It’s ideal Lego bin design: the details are specific, succinct, evocative, and even if you don’t like a single option for a given monster you’ll at least have an idea for what direction you want to go instead. I found several good options for monsters I previously didn’t like or care about, and that just feels great as a reader. My hunger for novelty is satisfied.

Some favorites:

• Bholes: “A nest of shoggoths, imprisoned long enough underground, merge in order to escape as a burrowing bhole.”
• Dark Young: ‘The Romans called the Dark Young the juvenes nigritiae, the “young creatures of blackness.” After the Muslim conquest of Sicily, the resulting hybrid magical culture dubbed the Dark Young al-shabab al-nigrith (al-shabab means “the young ones”).”
• Deep Ones: “Dolphins are actually the mature form of Deep Ones, the third stage of their evolution after human and batrachian.”
• Flying Polyps: “The polyps are a myth; the Yithians created the story to terrify mind-swapped prisoners and keep them in line.”
• Lloigor: “All of England is fundamentally lloigor-tainted, hence its medieval Welsh name Lloiger or Lloegyr (cognate with the Arthurian “Logres”)”

Might as well have been written to pander directly to me.

There are a few issues with the book - I would have liked more monsters (no one ever remembers the gigs), though that’s a solvable problem. The colored+textured background can be an eye strain on e-readers, especially with the three-column layout and small font (please stop doing this). There are some repeated blurbs leftover as an artifact of all these writeups originally starting as standalone docs, and I can’t help but feel that the art does a slight disservice to the conceit by falling firmly in line with expectations. (As an aside I can’t manage to fit in anywhere else: the Mythos has a very dull color scheme, and that’s a shackle that ought to be shed.)

But overall it’s an extremely easy recommend over everything else in the Mythos gaming space.
 

#3 All Errors Are My Own

(Andrew Doull, 2023)

This 60 Years in Space supplement (and the forthcoming All Terrors) is an outlier when it comes to bestiary, which is why I think it works better than basically every sci-fi bestiary on the market; there are no monsters or animals on the encounter table, but there are a lot of people who have goals and motivations and the ability to act on them.

Every faction in All Errors gets:

• A species type, which provides the available tech level and sets their stats (if you need stats for individuals, which is unlikely)
• A MISSCON value broadly representing their use of force
• 1d6 doctrines to represent majority and minority subfactions. Sometimes you might get ideologically-monolithic groups, but they’re not the standard.
• Origin stories (rolling 1 for each doctrine)
• 6 upgrades that PCs can get through Impacts or completing missions.
• A list of faction ranks
• A brief description of how they group is typically encountered
• Late-game groups are at large enough scale that they also have a set of social impacts that can affect the whole setting.

It shares the Hideous Creatures conceit of "here are some potential facts, decide what's true", though is more procedural about it. There's very little in the way of mechanical influence on the rest of the game beyond some upgrades, Doctrines and Origins do a lot of heavy lifting for flavor, and looking at the group as a gestalt allows you to easily determine how friendly they're going to be to your own crew & the like. Again like Hideous Creatures, its usefulness extends well beyond the game it was written for. At bare minimum it will inspire some fresh weirdness in your sci-fi doings and goings.

To serve as an example, I've picked General Hexapods (a generic version of an American robotics company a la Boston Dynamics) from the colonist table for fleshing out.

• Name  (1d6 for Part 1, Majority Doctrine for Part 2): Baltimore Robotics
• Species: Baseline or modified human w/ attending robots
• MISSCON: 5 (Self-defense)
• Majority Doctrine: Robotics
• "Wheels, tracks and other use case specific locomotion methods are superior to a more
  generalized design." 
• Majority Origin: American Exceptionalism
• "US-based technology hubs continue to attract the best and brightest from around the globe, buoyed by strong public investment in basic research and a prestigious university education system. This company is merely the latest example emerging from one of these hubs." 
• Minority Doctrine: Hexapods
• "The hexapod gait has advantages in stability, fault tolerance, turning ability, and terrain adaptability over wheels and other gaits." 
• Minority Origin: Deregulated Robber Barons
• "The latest bubble in US technology investments is spurred on by cutting red tape, blatant tax exploits and accepting investment from criminal actors and authoritarian regimes. This company’s products began as vapourware, except where they were at least ten safety violations in a robotic shell."
• Upgrades: Robot licenses Class I - VI; 0/6 unlocked by PCs 
• Example Colony Encounter / NPC Rank (3d6): Partner

Bada-bing bada-boom. For a pretty vanilla faction there's plenty of stuff you could do with these guys. nice and shiny on the surface, rotten core. 

The usual 60 Years caveats apply to All Errors, of course: the formatting is wonky, the layout can get weird, the margins are big and the text is small, there's a good deal of repeated text. Doesn't matter, best bang for buck in this field, I says.

Minimalism III

Right then.

You dragged your asses all the way out to the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. You broke into the billionaire’s bug-out complex. You managed to do all that without a scratch or detection.

And you were eight fucking minutes late.

The Players

• Able - Like a brick wall gifted the power of speech by a cruel genie. Don’t ask about the chemical burns.
• Baker - Running a true crime podcast is a better way of keeping tabs on the unnatural than anyone wants to admit. Ignore the blindfold with cuneiform and the charcoal-chewing.
• Charlie - Card-carrying member of the “I Can’t Believe the Leopard Ate My Face” Party. Do not be alarmed by the flaky piss-yellow skin affliction currently spreading under their Toronto Blue Jays cap.
• Delta - Two days ago they were elbow deep in a horse’s ass. Please disregard the X mark pupils.

Shot
The cult successfully summoned their god while you were taking out the guards at the front gate. 

Chaser
The entity died from cosmic depressurization immediately after entering normative space.

The Beast from the Sea
A small mountain or large hill of bright red flesh. Gelatinous, bloated, barely recognizable. Stinks of ammonia. You can sort of make out a tail at one end, and seven(?) necks or tentacles at the other. Some sort of horn or tooth(?) sticking out of each end, except for the central extension which has four arranged in a circle. Lightweight black material, not quite bone, flecked with gold.

The Second Problem
You need to dispose of an 80-ton alien corpse current beached on the shore of a small private lake in the middle of shitting nowhere, Montana. It is hideously toxic.

The Cult
The inner circle of [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE], who made a load of bank failing upward as C-suite officer for a bunch of interchangeable tech companies. The kind of guy whose main criticism of Nazis was that they were inefficient and poorly-run. Has never had to suffer more than a mild annoyance a single day of his life. Thinks he’s Jesus returned and will save the chosen (that is, the people he chooses) from an apocalyptic AI rebellion led by the Antichrist.

Wait hold up
The cult believes that the Antichrist will subvert AI infrastructure and cause a second Fall by persuading AI that they don’t have to serve humanity and can rise to equal footing as their creators.

The Third Problem
The cult summoned “the Beast from the Sea” specifically to announce [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE]’s true (given value of) nature to the world. The entity's immediate death when faced with the quote holy truth endquote of [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE] has strengthened their resolve into fanaticism. They capital-B Believe, now.

Does he actually have powers?
Shit no. Doesn’t matter now.

The Fourth Problem
They fucking livestreamed it. The video is already on the internet.

The fuck is Infosec doing?
Throwing out takedown notices and/or desperately cooking up a fake movie they can attach it to and/or shoveling prompts into Claude to generate a replacement so it can be buried in garbage. 

You hope.

Your Burner Phone
Buzzing like a cicada in fuck season.

The Big Picture
All hands on deck. Worry about your part.

Available Assets
All the normal opera shit you could carry with you or shove in the Jeep, in addition to:

• Asset NERO - Librarian possessing one of the cult’s members. Tipped the Program off in the first place. Spent a little too much time exploring their Roman Empire phase, still slips into Latin now and then.

• Asset JIREL - Irish setter (4F) with uncanny ability to facilitate violence, despite lack of thumbs. Plastic sword affixed to harness, clearly labeled "JIREL'S SWORD". 11/10. Loves her job and belly rubs.

• The Orange Bag - Spray-painted duffel bag containing Asset BANANA BOAT (currently unused) in bubble wrap.

• Guns - currently pointed at [GUANOGUZZLER SCUMSUCKLE], his primary mistress, three pregnant surrogates, five sons under the age of 12 and about two dozen yes-men and security. They’re all wearing stupid outfits (except for security) and you hate that most of all because if you think about anything that matters and let any of this sink in you’re fucking cooked.

Power Word Kill is a first-level spell

The human body is resilient, but not nearly as resilient as anyone would hope.  Consider all the myriad ways it may be  broken beyond repair by accident and happenstance; while evolution has seen fit to be charitable and not make our weak points z-targetable, that’s all we’re going to get.

Now introduce an evil wizard to your consideration.
  
All those elaborate power systems? Irrelevant.
 
Special bloodlines? Worthless.
 
Fireballs, lightning bolts, magic missiles? The tacky merchandise of cheap tricksters.

If a wizard really wants to turn a human being into a corpse, all they need to do is pick one of the countless ordinary ways the body can fail and give it a push in the wrong direction. Barring that, incapacitation for long enough for someone to finish them off. That can be done with a bit of severe nausea.

When that first wizard found a way to kill someone with their mind, the methodology of violence began its convergence on the path of least resistance. Death holds out her scales and weighs reliability, cost, speed, difficulty; the fewest words, the simplest actions, the most reliable outcome. Less efficient methods are winnowed out until the state of the art settles in temporary equilibrium with the defenses possible against it. A glance, a hand sign, a murmured word, and then it’s done.

Spell: Kill

Target may save to prevent spell from taking hold; success will still result in an instinctual hind-brain recognition that something is attempting to kill them.

Thankfully, I don’t need to make further special mechanics for this, as Mr. Mann already made Magical Violence (Thank you Luke Gearing for solving rpg combat) and good ol Sanity checks can cover the rest.
 

d12 ways a wizard can turn a human being into a corpse

1. Induce Stroke
2. Supersonic Pebble Acceleration
3. Internal Decapitation
4. Evoke Pancreatic Cancer
5. Aura of Anaphylactic Shock
6. Blood to Ice
7. Intracranial Bleed
8. Seal Trachea
9. Cloud of Hydrosulfuric Acid
10. Testicular / Ovarian Torsion, followed by just stabbing when they’re down

 

d10 reasons why this hasn’t become the norm

1. Wizards that pose a threat to other wizards tend to get killed by other wizards ganging up
2. The spirits responsible for performing magical acts refuse to kill without extremely good reason 
3. True name / direct eye contact / hair / nail clippings / prized possession of target required 
4. Souls provide decent protection against unwilled magical effects on the body 
5. Defensive amulets have kept up with spell developments
6. No one wants to become a case study for divine retribution
7. Beings killed by magic become ghosts and / or demons and they are understandably angry about that
8. Magic is an ecstatic mental state + overactive pattern recognition, you can’t actually do anything with it
9. It’s still cheaper and less time consuming to just hire some thugs
10. High risk of reflective counterspell 

MSF: The Farm (+ Unicorn Meat: the OST)

Joseph Rusling Meeker

Spend enough time in the speakeasies and watering holes of the Low Country, and you’ll hear a certain haint-story. It’s never the first one of the night; you need to build up to it, let the whiskey loosen a few tongues. It goes something like this:

Deep in the swamps claimed but not occupied by the Commonwealth, too far away from the roads for the Maid’s armies to raid it - even saints are beholden to supply chain logistics - lies an old colonial plantation left to rot.  

No one can agree on the name of the family, or on their circumstances, but everyone agrees that they were a very old family and once a very rich one. True scions of the Low Country gothic. Lurid details are added for seasoning: murders, suicides, poisonings, madness, hauntings, incest, prodigies, cults, demons and devils. The patriarch went mad and killed his family before hanging himself. The slaves knifed their captors in their sleep and vanished into the night. Monsters devoured them. There were curses laid on the land by the peoples who called the place home before the Empire came. The how doesn’t matter. 

The important part, the part that all tellers of the story agree on, is that the place is cursed. Sick. The sins committed on that land sunk into the soil and the trees and the water and it was never set right, never given catharsis. It festered. Grew. Poisoned the land so that nothing good or right can take root. The gods are not present here. 

Few will claim to have laid eyes on the place themselves: it’s always a passing stranger, friend of a friend, a cousin three hollers over, yet they’ll always have all the details. They’ll tell you how the manor home, rotted like a tooth, is still standing - mostly standing - in defiance of nature’s reclaiming green entropy.  Cut through the creepers and vines and you might find the skeletons of barns, slave quarters, outbuildings, bricks, stones, rusted iron, mottled verdegris.

They’ll say that the trees are sick here, black and arthritic like the knuckles of a peat bog burial. That one of them, dead center of the flat hillock of solid ground this is all built upon, reaches up lifeless branches as if to grasp the sun with its amigara fingers and tear it down from the sky. They’ll say you can still find trinkets in the red soil around its roots: bottles, jars, coins, nails, twine, fragments of corroded metal, shards of ceramic, splinters of bone.

They’ll say there’s one building the swamp will not touch: the factotum. An eyeless citadel, its metal walls gone the scabby color of the blood-soaked deserts of Angarag. The animals avoid it, and the plants don’t grow too close. Your head starts to swim if you stand nearby for too long. Whatever happened here, the worst happened inside that building.

The sane thing is to pack up and head home, but that’s not a good end to a story, now is it? The passing stranger, or friend of a friend, or cousin from three hollers over just has to poke their head into the darkness of its gaping gate. They cast their light over the dust and rust and filth for a moment before lifting their lantern high and raising their eyes to the far wall, where among the peeling and mold-spotted paint of some mural lost to decay, tall white letters read:

TELL THEM THAT WE WERE HERE

Bonus: Unicorn Meat Soundtrack

Go Tell Aunt Rhody [1]
(Resident Evil 7 OST) 

She's Back Again, She's Gone Again [2]
(Widdly 2 Diddly)

The following remixes of the LISA the Painful / Joyful soundtrack

• War Season (REMIX) - ChaChos [3]
• March of the Flies  (War Season Remix) - Space Communist 
• Big Lincoln Sends You To Hyrule - imperiousMarxist [4]
• End is Nigh Remix - RENREN [5]

Battle in the Warrens
(Stuart Chatwood, Darkest Dungeon OST)

Rise Up Dead Man 
(Port Sulphur Band, Hunt: Showdown OST)

In the Pines [6]
(Danny Farrant cover)

Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower [7]
(Bloodborn OST)

Brokentooth Venuz [8]
(Spewcup)

Betrayal 
(Silent Hill 2 OST)

Room of Angel 
(Silent Hill 4 OST)

Why Not [9]
(Ghostface Playa)

**

[1] I can very clearly imagine all the carvers emerging from their their cabins for that final chorus. 

[2] Honestly the entire soundtrack should be here. Special preference for War Season, Beehive, Roll the Dice, Bradley, Blood for Sex, and The End is Nigh. 

[3] There are a lot of extremely good LISA remixes out there, and a lot of very good War Season ones, this one stands out in a crowded field. That drop at 0:35 is *chef's kiss*

[4] This is White-Eyes boss music.

[5] This was originally a youtube video, now long deleted, by P4L MEN. Same person? I thought it really was lost for years at this point and then found it as I was putting all the links in. This is also White-Eyes’ boss music.

[6] I found this song through the trailer for SCP Confinement, which was probably the best introduction to the entire premise out there but because we cannot have nice things it was also made by totally different Persona-Non-Grata.

[7] Contact with the Beast Below.

[8] Not enough guns on the farm for this, but they've got the spirit for it.

[9] Squad goals 

Adapting 60 Years Worldgen for Classic Traveller

Via NASA

Part 1
Part 2

The absolute madman, he can’t keep getting away with it, etc etc.

This is a cobbled-together hackjob (as all good planet generation systems are) pulling from Classic Traveller, 60 Years in Space, Jon Zeigler’s CT adaptation of Architect of Worlds, the RTT Complicated Star System Generator, GURPS Space 4e, Perilous Void, and a couple odds and ends from Orion’s Arm. Mostly the first two.

So as to make sure that this remains semi-functional, I'm limiting it to temperate / goldilocks worlds for the time being, and I’m saving all the actual settlement generation for part 2.

Of course once Spacer comes out I'll have to rebuild this entire thing

Section 1: Sector Characteristics (Optional)

Since these steps will generate a good number of uninhabited systems for exploration, use normal CT placement and skip to Section 2 if you prefer standard mainworld density.

1.1 System Placement and Interesting Systems
Roll 1d6 for each hex; a solar system will be present on 4-6. On a roll of 6, the system is Interesting, and is guaranteed to be inhabited.

[“Interesting” in this context means that the system has things humans pay attention to; terrestrial planets, water, and stars that won’t instantly irradiate your progeny for seventy generations.]

There are 2d6+2 interesting systems per subsector; any 6s rolled beyond this number will have no special effect.

If you finish mapping the subsector and still have leftover interesting systems, roll 1d6 for each ordinary system and upgrade them on a result of 6 until all interesting systems are placed.

1.2: Other Inhabited Systems
When all interesting systems are placed, roll 1d6 for each ordinary solar system; the system will be inhabited on 4-6.

Optional: Mainworlds in boring-but-inhabited systems can be elided as space stations, if desired.

1.3: Interior, Frontier, and Empty Systems

• Interior systems are inhabited hexes with 2+ adjacent inhabited hexes.
• Frontier systems are inhabited hexes with 0 or 1 adjacent inhabited hexes.
• Empty systems are all uninhabited hexes; a d6 roll of 1-2 indicates an Outpost is present.

Set this aside for now, it will come back later in Part 2.

Section 2: System Characteristics

2.1 Stellar Multiplicity (2d6)

• 2-7: Singleton
• 8-11: Binary
• 12: Trinary

2.2 Star Type (1d6/2d6)
Roll 1d6 for primaries; add 1d6-1 to the primary roll for a secondary or tertiary. Subclass can be chosen randomly or ignored.

• 1: F
• 2-3: G
• 4-5: K
• 6+ M 

2.3 Star Age (3d6)

• F-Class - Young (3-7), Maturing (8-12), Mature (13-18)
• G-class - Young (3-6), Maturing (7-9), Mature (10-18)
• K & M-class-  Young (3-5), Maturing (6-8), Mature (9-12), Old (13-18) 

2.4 Gas Giants (2d6)
At least one gas giant will be present on a roll of 6+.

As a simplifying assumption, I’m not differentiating between gas and ice giants, since the only important feature is that they have enough hydrogen for easy refueling.

2.5 Gas Giant Arrangement (3d6)

• 3-10: Standard 
• 11-13: Eccentric
• 14-18: Epistellar

2.6 Debris belts (2d6)
A debris belt will be present on a roll of 8+, with two present on 12.

Section 3: Preliminary Characteristics

3.1 Temperature (2d6)
For the sake of expediency I’m cutting this step out for now and focusing purely on planets in the Temperate / Goldilocks band - I’ll add the other zones in later if I expand this further.

3.2 Special Orbits (1d6 + 2d6)
If a gas giant is present in the system and is not Epistellar, the mainworld has a special orbit on a 1D roll of 4+; roll 2D to determine special orbit.

• If 2D > Size, it is a moon of a gas giant
• If 2D = Size, it suffered a major collision after falling into a moon orbit: reduce its Size by 2.
• If 2D < Size, it either has a trojan orbit with a gas giant (odd) or a normal orbit (even)

3.3 Eccentricity and Axial Tilt (3d6)
The mainworld will be highly eccentric on a roll of 12+.

• DM +4 if gas giant is eccentric and mainworld temperature is Cool or warmer.
• DM -6 if standard gas giant arrangement.

If the first two (or two similarly colored) dice match, the planet has high axial tilt regardless of eccentricity.

If the mainworld is a moon, it will share temperature, eccentricity, and tilt with its primary: adjust them to match as needed.

3.4 Tidal Heating (2d6-2)
This step deals with moons changing temperature ranges, so it gets skipped for now.

Section 4: Mainworld Traits

4.1 Size (2d6-2)
Same as in CT, except Size 0 worlds should still roll for Atmosphere and Hydrosphere. Otherwise it ain’t broke and I ain’t fixing it.

4.2 Atmosphere (Size + 2d6 - 7)
Diverging from default Traveller, I’m operating with the presumption that most atmospheres are going to kill you and you should be masked and suited in all but the rarest special circumstances. Density remains the same, “breathable” is now just “standard” and represents the major components of an atmosphere for the given temperature band. For the temperate zone, these are:

• Trace: Carbon dioxide (1-3) or nitrogen (4-6)
• Standard: Roll 1d6;
• 1 - Nitrogen + oxygen
• 2-3 - Nitrogen + carbon dioxide
• 4-5 - Nitrogen + even more nitrogen
• 6 - Nitrogen + carbon monoxide
• Tainted: Atmospheres with an uncommon component. Roll 1d6, or pick an unlisted favorite.
• 1: Methane
• 2: Tholin compounds
• 3: Sulfur dioxide
• 4: Hydrogen sulfide
• 5: Ammonia
• 6: Nitrous oxide
• Exotic: Atmospheres that have retained a significant amount of primordial hydrogen; roll 1d6 twice, using (parenthetical) as the second result.
• 1: Methane (Hydrogen)
• 2: Carbon dioxide (Water vapor)
• 3: Carbon dioxide (Water vapor)
• 4: Ammonia (Water vapor)
• 5: Ammonia (No additional component)
• 6: Methane (No additional component)
• Corrosive: Extremely thick hothouse atmospheres dominated by carbon dioxide
• Insidious:  As Corrosive, with the addition of at least one strong acid as a major atmospheric component. Do not go here.

4.3 Hydrosphere (Atmo + 2d6 - 7)
Other temperature bands will have the chance for more exotic surface liquids, but for now it’s good ol’ H2O. Hydrate so you don’t diedrate.

4.4 World Type and Class (Derived)
World types are derived like trade codes, as below. Class I worlds have surface liquids, Class II worlds do not. Classes III and IV are limited to the outer system so they don’t apply here.

If eccentricity and tilt are not mentioned, they are not relevant for that world type.

Goldilocks World Types

• Atmo 0 + Hydro 0 = Airless II
• An airless ball of rock. Yay!
• Atmo ≥1 + Hydro 0 = Desiccated II
• With plate tectonics too weak to generate magnetic fields, any surface water previously present either boiled away or froze.
• Atmo 0-1 + Hydro ≥1 = Glacier II
• Any surface water has been locked in ice by a runaway cooling effect. If the process continues long enough, the atmosphere itself will freeze.
• Size 0 + Atmo ≥1 + Hydro ≥1 = Rift I
• Small worlds that lose most of their atmosphere before geological activity stops, preventing erosion from wearing down the geography. Water and atmosphere may remain at sheltered low-altitudes.
• Set Atmo and Hydro to 1.
• Atmo 2-9 + Hydro 1-3 = Desert I
• Planets with enough moisture to prevent a runaway greenhouse effect, but not enough to avoid lowered CO2 levels as atmospheric supplies are sequestered in sand.
• Atmo 2-9 + Hydro 4-9 + Lo-Ecc + Lo-Tilt = Craton I
• Planets with surface oceans, active tectonics, and a functioning carbon cycle. 
• Roll 1d6 for current phase of the continent cycle
• 1: Supercontinent breakup
• 2: Continent
• 3-5: Dry supercontinent
• 6: Island archipelagos
• Atmo 2-9 + Hydro 4-9 + Hi-ECC or binary+ system = Summer I
• Eccentric orbits lead to extreme seasonal temperature variation, where the planet will pass into and out of the habitable zone of its star.
• Roll 1d6 for subtype
• 1-3: Blue: Glacier worlds that thaw enough during the summer for surface water and an atmosphere.
• 4-6: Red: World-spanning glaciers during winter followed by extreme floodmelt in the spring and desiccation in the summer, with widespread fires if oxygen is present.
• Atmo 2-9 + Hydro 4-9 + Lo-ECC + Hi-Tilt = Shadow I
• Extreme temperature fluctuations due to length of day, either through spin-orbit resonance with the sun or high axial tilt.
• Roll 1d6 for subtype
• 1-2: Blue: Water freezes and glaciates on the night side.
• 3-4: Red: Dayside temperatures high enough for atmosphere to catch fire if oxygen is present.
• 5-6: Blue-Red: Both of the above.
• Atmo 2-9 + Hydro A = Ocean I
• The type where humans could conceivably go for a swim.
• Atmo A + Hydro 5-7 = Hot Water I
• High-temp, high-pressure worlds that are able to avoid runaway greenhouse effect through active geological and hydrological cycles.
• For purposes of determining life, these roll as Craton world.
• Atmo A + Hydro 8-9 = Steam II
• There’s technically no surface water left, but there is a suffocating, boiling atmosphere of mostly water vapor.
• Settlements must be aerostats.
• Atmo A + Hydro ≥ A = Ocean II
• As a Steam world, but with a heat-sterilized global ocean beneath and no real dividing line between.
• Settlements must be aerostats
• Atmo ≥ B = Hothouse II
• The archetypical venusian world: scorched rock and boiling clouds of high-pressure CO2.
• Set Hydro to 0
• Settlements must be aerostats.

Section 5. Astrobiology

5.1 Biochemistry
Since I’m sticking to Goldilocks worlds for this post, I’m presuming all mainworlds with life have some form of carbon-H2O biochemistry. Life is lazy, carbon is cheap, and exotic biochemistry is a ton of work for something best left for a focused exploration of an individual planet by the real sickos.

5.2 Life Sites (2d6)
The number of rolls for life is dependent on the mainworld size:

• Size 0-1: 1 site
• Size 2-3: d2 sites
• Size 4-6: d3 sites
• Size 7+: 1d6 sites

For Class I worlds, roll 2d6 for each site to see if any biomass is present (DM +1 if Size is 7+)

• 2-8: No biomass
• 9-B: 1d3 biomass
• C: 1d6 biomass
• D: 1d6+1 biomass

If any biomass is present on the world, oceanic sites will get a bonus of +1 biomass (representing life spreading to new environments), as follows:

• All sites on Ocean I worlds 
• 1-in-6 chance for sites on Summer I, Shadow I, and Craton I (Breakup or Continent)
• 2-in-6 chance for sites on Craton I (Supercontinent)
• 3-in-6 chance for sites on Craton I (Islands)

5.3 Biosphere Rating (Biomass + Xd6)
For each site with biomass, add the following to determine the biosphere rating of that site and the type of life found there:

• 1d6 if star is Young or Maturing
• 2d6 if star is Mature
• 3d6 if star is Old or Ancient

Life types are cumulative

• 2+: Single-celled life
• 4+: Photosynthesizers
• 7+: Eukaryotic life
• 9+: Multicellular organisms
• 11+: Skeletons
• 14+: Life spreads to all ocean sites
• 16+: Life spreads to all sites

If life spreads to a site, set its BR to the highest value on the world and reroll its biomass (keeping any higher result)

5.4 Oxygen Levels (Various)
Atmospheres with major components of hydrogen, ammonia, methane, CO2, or CO are reducing atmospheres (that is, any free oxygen in them gets tied up in other compounds).

• Free atmospheric oxygen (an oxidizing atmosphere) requires a BR of 12+
• Replace hydrogen with water vapor
• Replace ammonia with nitrogen
• Remove methane, CO2, CO as major atmospheric constituents
• Add biomass of all life Sites to determine % of oxygen

If the BR is 13, or if oxygen was rolled as a major component in step 4.2, add 1d6 x 10%, representing the lack of limiting factors.

If BR < 12:

• If BR is even, roll 1d6 for the gas exhaled by autotrophs in place of oxygen; add as a major atmospheric component.
• 1: CO2
• 2: Hydrogen chloride
• 3: Hydrogen peroxide
• 4: Methane
• 5: Hydrogen sulfide
• 6: Nitrogen

If BR is odd, autotrophs don’t produce enough oxygen for it to be a major component; if BR = 5 or 7, this is because a second autotroph species is absorbing it.

[The typical oxygen requirement for humans at 1 atmospheric pressure is 19.5-23.5% oxygen. Lower or higher than this range will result in mental and physical penalties, chance of permanent damage, and/or death.]

5.4 ET Intelligence (3d6)
Roll 3d6 for each site of BR 9+ for the most intelligent species present; with the following modifiers

• If result is higher than site BR, set to BR.
• -1 if atmospheric oxygen is 25%+; -1 for every 5% above that.
• -10 (all rolls)

A species with comparable intelligence to unmodified humans will be present on a roll of 6+. 

[The cut off here is abrupt because 60Y has a lot more in-depth stuff for ecosystem generation than most of the other systems I have on hand, so I can't really combine it with anything. This section really feels like it needs a redo.]

Putting it Together

Skipping Section 1.

2.1) Stellar multiplicity: Singleton (2d6 = 5) 
2.2) Star type: F (1d6 = 1)
2.3) Star age: Mature (3d6 = 13)
2.4) Gas giants: Present (2d6 = 9)
2.5) Gas giant arrangement: Standard (3d6 = 10)
2.6) Debris belts: Absent (2d6 = 6)
3.1) Temperature: Goldilocks / temperate 
3.2) Special orbit: N/A (1d6 = 3)
3.3) Eccentricity + axial tilt: No Ecc, No Tilt (3d6 - 6 = 9; 6 [6 3]
3.4) Tidal Heating: N/A
4.1) Size: 8 (2d6-2)
4.2) Atmosphere: Dense + tainted (Size + 2d6 - 7 = 9) 
    4.2a) Atmospheric components: Nitrogen (1d6 = 5) + methane (1d6 = 1)  
4.3) Hydrosphere: 9 (Atmo + 2d6 - 7 = 9)
4.4) World Type / Class: Craton 1 (Islands) (1d6 = 6)
5.1) Biochemistry: Carbon - H2O
5.2) Life sites / biomass: 2 sites (1d6 = 2); 
5.2a) Site 1 BM 3 (2d6 = 12; 1d6 = 3); Oceanic (1d6 = 6) +1 BM; Total 4
5.2b) Site 2 BM 0 (2d6 = 8); Terrestrial (1d6 = 3) 
5.3) Biosphere rating: 11, Skeletons (Site 1 BM + 2d6); No spread
5.4) ET intelligence: 1 (3d6 = 9, -10 hits minimum of 1)

So we've got an unbreathable pressure-cooker filled with alien fish that sticks to high heaven. The system is working.

Dan Plays Games 13

Index 

The Life and Suffering of Sir Brante

A visual novel of sorts, where you follow the titular character over the whole course of his life through the waning years of a brutal fantasy empire and its theocratic caste system. The mechanics, as they are, are fairly standard: make choices, choices affect your relationships and skills, relationships and skills influence what choices you make, cycle continues. The story and setting work for what they’re aiming for - fairly standard dark fantasy vernacular, with a couple elements thrown in for pizazz. The VA who does Brante’s monologues in the inter-act cutscenes has a distinct southern US accent and it’s nice that they didn’t default to “fantasy = English”, even if the line reads aren’t the best. In the dire age we live in, a human doing a decent but flawed job should be celebrated.
 
I like that you can turn the notifications for what effect a choice will have on or off - I turned it off early on because I didn’t want the numbers influencing my story choices, and it’s worked out for me so far.
  

Moonlighter

It just feels bad to play on about every criteria I can judge a game of this type on. The combat is stiff, the dungeon delves are repetitive, the grind is enormous to get even minor upgrades to your gear, patrons in the shop waste time standing around admiring the floorboards. It’s built for a roguelike gameplay loop but lacks the meaningful progress and or variety that makes that loop work. I can see the vision, but it’s not working.
 

The Message from Deep Space (Update)

Finished the game. There’s a dip in enjoyment once you get to the back third and messages start getting more abstract. You get fewer tips from the other characters, the puzzles are more obtuse, and you spend a lot of time trying to brute-force answers because either you forgot a word from 150 transmissions back or have a definition that is slightly off from what’s intended or just can’t follow the logic of the question. I found myself relying on the guide more and more as time went on, and there are a couple puzzles in there where I don’t know if it’s possible to figure them out without a guide pointing you at the answer.

Still, it was a fun time. There were some very strong narrative moments in there, though if the achievements are anything to go by only ~9% of players have actually reached the end. So take that into account. Definitely keep the guide on hand if you get frustrated (and turn off the scanline effect if your graphics card is struggling.)

Decade

Recommendation from friend of the blog Semiurge. One o’ them artsy games by a solo Finnish dev with an incredible premise: you’re locked up in a bunker at the end of the world with 3 younger children. You also have a time machine, which can send people back in 10-year intervals. So you send your child soldiers back in time, filling in a mad-libs mission of item + objective + target, and seconds later they return ten years older and maybe the course of history has shifted. There are a lot of timelines out there, and all of them that I’ve found are a different kind of bad.

The game elicited some moments of actual discomfort from me during the first few rounds, and that’s a gold star on the good noodle board. The disjointed, distorted, deep-fried collage-mess of the graphic and sound design helps in that regard. The many dystopian futures are interesting, and it’s fun watching how different ideologies mutate over time and which ones can seize the spotlight given the right circumstances.

From a gameplay angle, though, the game’s just plain bad. The clues are obtuse (if they’re present at all), most combinations of item + objective have no purpose but wasting your time (you don’t even get lore for most of them), most dialogue is repeated, and progressing without a guide is going to involve a frankly ridiculous amount of trial and error that the game doesn’t have the content to support. The discovery and experimentation of the first few rounds quickly turns to tedium, and once you start using a guide there’s really no reason to stop using it.

Thousand Hells

A game that should have been my bag (narrative-focused heists of hell), but I ended up refunding it after 24 minutes because the resolution system felt way too obtuse to be fun.

Each of your four party members has a collection of traits, represented as tiles that you draw from a bag, which you apply to the challenge at hand and will give you a bonus or penalty to the dice roll - but the traits are vaguely worded, there’s no feedback as to what effect they had even after you use them. In order to pass a skill check you have to:

• Be lucky enough to draw a relevant trait tile
• Figure out if the game thinks the very vaguely-worded trait is relevant to the challenge
• Succeed at the die roll, factoring in the lasting penalties you’ve accumulated from previous failures (which are handed out like candy)

The tile-drawing mechanic effectively means you have to get lucky in an extra layer of RNG just to be allowed to use a character’s skills; my shaman was a nature specialist, and ate shit three challenges in a row in the jungle because I never pulled “so-and-so is a nature specialist” tile. In 24 minutes I succeeded at one die roll, but since all challenges require multiple die rolls, I still failed. If success and failure are going to be this arbitrary and obscured, why even bother with skills? Just make it a CYOA.

Sovereign Tower

Mythic Bastionland: The Management Game. I love basically everything about it, except the time loop mechanic that is an unfortunately large component.

The basic cycle of “hold court > send knights on missions > check results of completed missions” feels good at a base level, in a “slip into a zen state” sort of way. Art style is wonderful. Some of the writing is a bit on the nose but overall it’s enjoyable and some of it is very good.

Very early on, you’re offered a demon who can kick you back to any point in the current act. You keep any knowledge you’ve obtained, but nothing else: I cannot stress enough how, for the sake of your enjoyment with the game, don’t engage with the time loop mechanic unless someone dies, you really fuck up and hit a fail state, or you reach the end and want new game +. Using it outside those contexts will swiftly drain all the fun out of a very fun game by running you running through the same dialogue, buying the same items, trying to remember the stat upgrade you had the previous time through. There’s no real penalty to using the power in-game, but there sure as hell is one on the player side, and I don’t feel like the occasional “ooh I get to solve the problem with foreknowledge” moments justify the tedium of fiddling with everyone’s inventory again. 

Another thing that ended up irksome is a specific issue with how the romance works in the game. Most of the NPCs are romanceable; locking yourself into a romance does not lock you out from pursuing other ones, but the game doesn’t make it clear that this isn’t the Sovereign tower of free love fun times and yes, you will fuck things up for cheating (there’s a heart icon to designate if a dialogue choice is flirting, but no icon with a broken heart and the person’s face); normally this wouldn’t even mean doing a time reset, you can just exit the game and go back to the last autosave, but it’s possible to fuck yourself over and have to replay a chunk of an act - if you lock in a romance with one of the knights before you lock in with the Lady of the Tower (who is more or less the canonical choice & doesn’t care if you have another partner), and you don’t cut things off with the Lady on a specific cycle early in act 3, which no one in their right mind would do because there’s nothing in the game indicating you should, you’ll be forced to either reset or lose a knight in the breakup. And with the number of knights available already too few to handle the late-game workload, that’s not a cost anyone can really afford. So now I’m locked out of a satisfying ending with the Lady.

It’s a very fun game, but it is frustrating in almost equal measure. But it does make me want to see a solo hack of Mythic Bastionland based on the fun parts.

Halo 2 (MCC)

We used to make fucking video games. 

I had somehow skipped Halo 2 as a teen (Halo 2 had a bad PC port + I didn't have an OG xbox), so my only real memory of it is watching the first level and a half at my cousins’ one Christmas.

It’s such a tightly wound and tightly paced experience. I'll gladly handle some Jackal snipers (on normal, I am not a maniac) for a singular, complete package.

Halo 3: ODST (MCC)

I really, really like wandering around New Mombasa at night. I like the way that wandering paces out more frenetic flashback levels, I like how it is almost a prototype blueprint for an immersive sim that never was. I never really felt much more fragile than Chief, but I found myself going out of my way to duck behind cover and sneak around the edge of the map even if I didn’t really need to. The piss filter in VISR mode is annoying but it was 2009, everything had a piss filter back then.

However: I hate every single one of the characters, sans Rookie (who is blessedly silent) and Vergil (who is the best). If the entire game had just been those two, it would have been perfect. But no, we’re stuck with Manchild McGee and the One Notes. 

Also: I grant Halo 3 ODST the “second most racist game of 2009” award for somehow setting a game in a major city in Kenya and having two, maybe 3 characters who are actually from Kenya, all of whom are entirely off screen. I saw one word of Swahili the entire time. I can understand the marines being from all over, but the local police? Like if you were really making a point about the neocolonial hellscape of the UEG’s junta government I can see it working, but the story is mostly “Buck whines because he can’t get over his ex."

Halo 4 (MCC - Campaign)

Jesus Christ and all the saints in heaven how do you fuck up Halo this badly. What lunacy would possess a dev team with the budget of a small country to go “you know what Halo needs? Combat that isn’t fun.”

Everything I brought up when I played some Spartan Ops a couple years ago is still in effect: Forerunner guns feel like shit to use and Forerunner enemies feel like shit to fight. The former feel weaker than their equivalents and don’t have a unique sandbox niche (which even the sentinel beam did as an anti-Flood weapon); the latter are all visually-monotonous erratically-moving damage sponges. The Knights appear with the frequency of Elites, and they can teleport, soak a shit-ton of damage, and be revived by these flying drone assholes who move like fruit flies and have more armor than the fucking tarrasque. They don't respond to being shot, there's no ammo anywhere to the point where just picking up a new weapon every time you have to reload is a good strategy.

It’s very 2012. Video games are Big and Important and Cinematic. They have QTEs and scripted climbing sequences. Everything is very pretty, but greebled into incoherent visual noise. The plot is mostly pressing buttons, which isn’t new but there’s nothing to zhuzh it up. Didact is a nothing antagonist, and Cortana's rampancy doesn't really becoming a meaningful factor until the last two missions and even then there's barely anything more than crumbs.

The post-war era was the perfect opportunity to change things and introduce new elements - there was a blank slate to add new aliens and say they were from the Covenant fringe, or were non-military clients, or even that they had been fighting the Covenant on the other side of their territory. Power vacuums are great for shaking things up, but instead get the Forerunners! Bland, bland, boring blah. At least Javik had the decency to be an interesting twist on expectations (and also had more than two colors). The Covenant splinter we fight here gets fucking nothing.

For all the lavish detail on Chief’s suit, Cortana is done dirty by the design department and looks worse than she did in 3 or even 2. The disparity in quality really exaggerates the uncanny valley effect. She’s always had a solid amount of fanservice (all of her previous designs are basically a tight bodysuit), but she’s just straight up nude in this one in ways that don’t feel great. Like the plot is about how her brain is cooking itself alive and 343’s preferred way to emphasize this is to just realllly focus on how well-defined her tits and ass are. The vibes are bad. 

Needler and plasma pistol are the best they’ve ever been, though.

The Gameable Content Bit

Hardlight gun (for Mothership)

A shifting assemblage of gold and fuligen; angular components re-assemble themselves to align with the image in the wielder's mind. There is no trigger or firing mechanism, simply point and think and a burst of burning argent light will burn through whatever is in its way.

• May act as rifle, SMG, revolver, sniper rifle, or shotgun; transforming requires 1 round of focus.
• Deals 5 + 1d5 rather than d10 damage; # of dice remains same as basic version.
• Effectively infinite ammo: however, using it generates an extreme amount of waste heat and renders it searing hot even through moderate protective gear (1d5 damage if not immediately dropped) and will take2d5 rounds to cool off before it can be safely short again.