Philosophy, writing, and reviews!
velotha’s flock is now live on DriveThruRPG! It actually has been for a few days, but I… kind of forgot that I never linked to it here. Such is life, I guess.
Because velotha’s flock is “complete, but in progress” I figured I’d give a quick status update on the things that I’m changing/adding to the game, as well as other plans for velotha’s flock that should see fruition soon.
For those of us just joining me, I’ve been reading Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Amazon Affiliate link). Peterson’s approach to truth-telling at first seemed to echo Kant, but as I read deeper I learned it was more nuanced (and perhaps more far-reaching than even Kant’s categorical imperative).
As I’ve said a couple times before, this isn’t a review. I’m just using this post as a way to reflect on what I’ve read and commit it to memory (though readers are more than welcome to use it to pique their interest in the book or compare it to their own findings). A full review should be coming once I finish the book.
This was originally going to be a velotha’s flock post, but I decided that some of this should be a stand-alone thing. One of the issues with game design, I feel, is that most of it doesn’t really go down the road of storytelling. Even more narrative-focused games often do so with a focus on “story over rules” rather than following any sort of storytelling praxis.
I think that there are a few reasons for this, and I’ve got a brief breakdown of what I think GMs and designers can do to prevent mediocre storytelling in their games.
Continue reading “On Archetypes, Heroes, and RPG Characters”
For those of us just joining me, I’ve been reading Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Amazon Affiliate link). Peterson’s approach to truth-telling at first seemed to echo Kant, but as I read deeper I learned it was more nuanced (and perhaps more far-reaching than even Kant’s categorical imperative).
As I’ve said a couple times before, this isn’t a review. I’m just using this post as a way to reflect on what I’ve read and commit it to memory (though readers are more than welcome to use it to pique their interest in the book or compare it to their own findings). A full review should be coming once I finish the book.
One of the things that I wanted to do with velotha’s flock is create an interesting world that people haven’t seen the likes of before, to make something that challenges their conceptions of what many of the basic tenets of the game’s world are.
Of course, I put a lot of the elements of the game down in tradition too, because I don’t want to explain anything and I want to reward readers and players who have a strong interest in intellectual pursuits for doing what they do best and finding connections between things.
Continue reading “Commentary on velotha’s flock Part 1: Eden, Wilderness, Promised Land”
As someone who games on PC and has a fairly busy schedule, I tend not to get my hands on games until a while after the console world gets their hands on them, so I’ve been excitedly looking forward to Metal Gear Survive after the beta it held last weekend.
Now it’s out, and (after a somewhat tumultuous launch) I’ve gotten further into it without any major technical issues, but I’m having a less pleasant experience than I had during the multiplayer beta for a number of reasons.
For those of us just joining me, I’ve been reading Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Amazon Affiliate link). This chapter, covering Peterson’s seventh rule, builds heavily on previous chapters and helps combine a lot of the previous ideas together.
As I’ve said a couple times before, this isn’t a review. I’m just using this post as a way to reflect on what I’ve read and commit it to memory (though readers are more than welcome to use it to pique their interest in the book or compare it to their own findings). A full review should be coming once I finish the book.
velotha’s flock is “released”, though it’s not yet populated on any of the official distribution channels yet. I need to put more stuff up on DriveThruRPG to get officially approved to just post stuff instantly of my own accord, so we’re potentially going to see some stuff go up there in future days.
With that said, I want to give a brief overview of what my future plans are, before retiring to bed at a halfway decent time for once.
Tomorrow I’m going to be publishing the Early Bird Edition of velotha’s flock over on DriveThruRPG (though whether it gets approved tomorrow is anyone’s guess.
It’s not my largest project ever (I estimate about 9000 words; LibreOffice doesn’t calculate the text in sidebars when I do it the way I do), but it’s got a lot of passion and a fair amount of sweat and tears (no blood, however; trying to do away with dangerous keyboarding habits) poured into it.
It’s also my first “finished” game to be released under the Loreshaper Games logo, so there’s that going for it. Yay, Loreshaper Games.
In case anyone’s interested, here are the things that I put into the final day of work (AKA what I was working on today and will be finishing tomorrow).
In the past year or so, I’ve redoubled my efforts to become a better writer of fiction. While I’m pretty comfortable with some of my writing (too comfortable, in many ways), I’ve never felt good as a storyteller, judging my work for being too cliched, too amateurish, or too poorly developed.
So I’ve taken a few steps to improve that, and I feel confident that I’ve gotten my skills to a point where they’re passable, at least to start doing more serious writing work. Here are a few of the milestones I’ve hit that I feel have really made that happen: