When I see the Highguard trailer, I essentially want to install it immediately - and I could, because it's free, but I can't, because it's not out. It's not hard to see the influences, which are every great game, some of which were made originally by people at the studio putting it together. You can jump off a hill onto a ghost horse. You can use a wand to licklessly enter the center of a mystical Tootsie Pop. You can do a lip trick off a giant human skull into a burning vagina. You can use a sword to Amazon Prime a battering ram to fuck up an enemy dome! I just got a dome for Christmas, and I'm returning it. I don't even see the point of having a dome with these things runnin' around.
It was the last trailer at Geoff Keighley's Funhouse, and sometimes I wonder if it costs more to be at the end, because that would make me feel even worse for them. It's clear that being at the end actually hurt the game because people were expecting some other game that it wasn't. The response was like watching a histamine reaction - I saw Concord comparisons, for fuck's sake. It was a blood pit, like in the movie "The Blood Pit" from Blood Pit Productions.
Other times I try to imagine that I exist in the same continuum, the same community, as the people who comment on awards show livestreams and I have a hard time getting all the way there. Now I'm just in a bad mood.
- I saw an article from Corey Plante at Polygon about how a cool loot table rewrote his campaign, and it seems like a great time to suggest that the random addition of items and the prodigious use of tables is actually a fundamental part of this hobby and part of your inheritance. If it's the Deck Of Many Things, obviously, you reroll that shit unless you never want to see any of these people again. But people are making millions of dollars simply reminding people what D&D used to be; the OSR is essentially an archaeological dig focused on the late seventies and early eighties. I've described running a game as being like cooking, and according to the ancient scrolls they must be allowed to cook - but there's different kinds of cooking. There's, like, the omakase style, where it takes three hours to eat dinner and you basically just get to watch your friend jack it - that's my approach, where you are all characters in my book and you have to sit there while I write it. The old ways, perhaps as a function of their wargame origins, were much more gamey - perhaps for both definitions of the word. It's more like slinging hash at a diner. I don't mean that as a denigration in any way, shape, or form. I'm saying the origins are a lot lower to the ground, and they were intended to be played the way that… Well, the way that we might play a videogame.
- There is a kind of Ophiocordyceps fungus that makes ants do things they ordinarily wouldn't, like grow a mushroom out of their heads. Healthy ants pick spores up off the ground, and once it works its way into their bodies it starts fucking around around with their brain - eventually taking control of its central nervous system. It makes them do incredibly weird crap like, oh, I dunno, clamp their mandibles on the underside of a leaf at approximately twenty-six centimeters on the northern side of the plant in an environment with ninety-five percent humidity and an average temperature of seventy-seven degrees. Once they do that, a fungal stalk with a fruiting body - a kind of biological antenna that projects the spores - grows out of the ant. Next time somebody wants to talk to you about Pluribus, start here.
(CW)TB out.
