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Friday, August 14, 2020

So, what's up with this ARGUS reboot? & Other Stuff (including health references)

Current situation

I have a very talented artist producing colour faction iconics, but since he has a very serious real-life job, and I only have monthly funds from which to pay him, that front is steady, and not likely to outpace my sporadic writing and technical illustrations and layout and editing as I go -- routine.

There is a particular section, one which requires setting-specific character background tags, which stymies forward progress in finishing a particular step in char-gen, or building, or both/either.  Fortunately,I can skip past that and introduce other portions of the text, but I've been gnawing away at that and therefore not making progress in the writing.

Instead, I have been using a freeware CAD lite program to illustrate the primary faction military arms, which are essential to PCs, as this first product is explicitly from the PoV of this faction.  I'm likely to import these images into a raster programme to enhance the colours and fill areas which the CAD doesn't recognise as a shape, but rather, a collection of lines.

I generally get to run this once a week over Discord, and a wayward player may be rejoining us after a couple of months off.  They do much more setting-effery than mechanics testing, but that may simply be the thing that kids do these days, dunno.


Other stuff

Recovered a copy of my 'award winning novella' from a site that had been out of commission for years, and my mom is urging me to get back to that and expand it or simply publish it and get on with actually writing Urutsk' grand cycle.  Considering my age and general health, not a bad idea; it'd be kinda bittersweet to sign off thinking of my unpublished Magnum Opus I've talked about so much.  Here's to the hope for that I do get to it before too late.

I participated in a Harnworld seminar at GenCon 2020 online, and also played in a Morrow Project 4e game while suffering from disabling allergy symptoms.  I had also been playing Jessica Jones in an online ICONS game with reprobates from G+/MeWe, and I think I won the internet when I played Frank Castle in the finale and had him urge a ghostlike baddie to kill him so he could spend time with his dead family; still, playing Jessica was a lot of fun, and Mothmaiden the GM (not her handle) ran a fun campaign with decent RP moments.  Oh, yeah, imagine Jessica Jones paired up with Dazzler, it was priceless.

Let's see, I've recently received my HarnMaster Deluxe 3rd Edition books in print, and added them to my zipper binder.  I'm waiting on Fading Suns, Dark Matter, MetAlpha Warden, and a clay monster maker game from KS.  I found the Legendary Games' Forest Kingdom Compendium pdf and then purchased the hardback new: gorgeous and well worthy of mention.  It, as another poster wrote, and the 5e PHB are all that are necessary for a long campaign in that sort of setting.  It also pairs up thematically with my Harn and The Green Knight focus.

A24 movies, such as Midsommar, and, The Vvitch, have produced a beautifully boxed starter style FRPG with wonderful production value, and a very solid system -- but hobbled by the strict adherence to what I suppose will be the movie's narrative structure and philosophy.  I plan to spend some time liberating it from the hardwired railroad encounter system which penalises PCs for mandatory encounters and then hard-codes specific outcomes.  The end-state of three addressed outcomes of the boss fight do not permit future play with the same PCs, and there is no evidence they plan to support the game with future, freer scenarios or anything else, but this is 202, so, who knows?

If the Coof weren't screwing everything up, I could conceivably actually see a Dr. about this and other health issues, but this one is my daily antagonist); when I was smoking on a daily basis I don't think I was ever this bad off, but perhaps that is what led to the current situation.  Oh, I've been smoke-free for years now, btw, for anyone who knew me for a while.  Now I drink Kombucha 2x a day; crazy, I know.

OK, that's it for now, or is it? <eerie music>

A24's The Green Knight boxed RPG set

 A24's The Green Knight boxed RPG set

#rpgreview

[I am re-printing this from my MeWe timeline]

After having read the core adventure of The Green Knight, I wonder if I will enjoy the movie as much as I had hoped.

Not only are the choices and rules structure constructed to disadvantage PCs, with automatic Dishonour resulting from mandatory encounters, but the boss fight outcomes are ... ideologically-loaded propositions which do not seem to permit continued play with the same characters. The three 'scenario outlines' after the conclusion are not only allusions/overt advertisements/in-jokes regarding other A24 movies, but I can't imagine they will produce [them] as future products.

Mechanically, I think there is a good deal of merit to the structure of the TGK, and the Classes' abilities definitely play well into the conceit of the Honour/Dishonour system -- that's all good, but the scenarios' H/D ratings are definitely questionable by my outlook, and may brand me as more of a misanthrope than I would like to imagine. These encounters' metrics would be hard-pressed to win general accord, especially from the more aggressive OSR crowd. I briefly thought of codifying them in one place for a 'rules compendium' document, but am waffling on the idea for the reason I have stated above.

So, what is my current analysis of A24's The Green Knight?

It is a playable, expandable, marketing gimmick likely created just as merch with no plans to support, and yet it is playable, expandable, and is worthy of attention.

Plus, the box construction with the insert is the new standard IMO, and the d20 (and you know i don't like d20s) is gorgeous.

Perhaps expansion articles to precede a contemporary Clone so that its strengths can be maximised while liberating it from the narrative philosophy of the movie are necessary.

[][][*][/][] 3.5 Stars of 5

P.S. I am more likely than not to collect the H/D ratings from the essential mini-campaign, so that some work can be done on this otherwise fine system.