Eightfold: On Gods

The Ogdoad of Hermopolis: Frogs and Snakes

The problem with gods in fantasy settings is that they make way too much sense. Seriously; look at any actual mythological pantheon and see how well the gods fit into neat packages. Even the Greek pantheon, which has been progressively tidied and homogenised through generations of study and retelling, has figures like Apollo, god of the sun, music, prophecy, sickness and healing, which is a pretty broad portfolio and probably still misses a whole mess of local attributions.

Obviously, there's a big difference with fantasy gods - to whit, that they are an indisputably real presence in their worlds, who did specific and quantifiable things in the fictional history - but unless they're constantly chatting to their clerics on a first name basis, there's likely to be some blurring, especially since the gods themselves in this scenario are probably unreliable narrators.

James Holloway explains most of this better than I can - certainly better than I can in a blog post - in his podcast, Patron Deities (a Patreon-only bonus for backers of his Monster Man.) It's well worth a listen, and I really don't mind shilling for it, but be warned: If you're planning to create a fantasy world any time soon, it's going to make it more complicated.

For Eightfold, I took my first inspiration from eight of the more obscure figures of Egyptian mythology: the Ogdoad of Hermopolis. These gods - four couples, each consisting of a snake-headed woman and a frog-headed man, which sounds like something out of the world of southern blues - represent the pre-creation primordial world - possibly time, water, darkness and sky or something like that; I'm not being vague here, we just don't know the specifics - in the Hermopolitan creation myth, and that's about it. I felt that the couples were a little redundant, and risked sidelining the female members of the Ogdoad, so instead I began my world with a set of four, gender-neutral, primordial gods, who created the world as an elemental progression: Na sings the sky out of the Void, Una dances the land from the sky, Muna wept and created the waters, and Amuna breathed the spark of life into existence.

And that's it. Having done this, they bog off back to the Void and leave the world to the Old Gods - who directly represent air, earth, water, fire and spirit - and the Primordial Dragons. These figures are part of a perfect, harmonious world, peopled by Titans and dragons, which is promptly fucked up by the arrival of the Colossi, alien creatures that mess with reality itself; because there's always room for Lovecraft, except in racial politics. Thus the Old Gods bugger off, the Primordial Dragons have a falling out and the world breaks, which is the traditional Reason Why Everything Sucks that most religions - real and fantastical - incorporate.

So much for the creators. This is D&D, which means clerics, and that means vaguely comprehensible deities who grant powers. (In theory, you could get your powers from incomprehensible deities, but that's more the bailiwick of the Warlock of the Great Old One, who in this setting would make their pact with a surviving Colossus.) to fill this want, I have the Young Gods, who came after the Old Gods left, but before the Dragons had their schism. There were many of these gods, some of whom did well and some of whom did not. They made the many mortal races as imitations of the Titans, and the ones whose creations flourished (mostly the elves, dwarfs, orcs, tortles and dragonborn) grew stronger. When the world broke, the races were scattered and divided. Different races recovered at different speeds - humans, goblins and kobolds did specially well, because they breed fast - and many found new gods, because there are loads of them.

'Modern' cults - like the Church - essentially worship corporate deities, made up of the gods of the various smaller cults that have gathered together under a single religious identity. This is why the clerics of a given god might have very different domain powers, and why a given god can represent so many things; what a cult calls a god is more a collective identity for a number of gods, each taking their own slant on the shared name. It's basically the divine equivalent of a shared pen name which allows, say, 'Daisy Meadows' to churn out books about fairies like a Mills and Boon author on speed, or that film in which half a dozen people all played Bob Dylan. This is more than a mere fiction, however. The nature of divinity is somewhat plastic; gods become what their worshippers need them to be, but become fixed over time, so that the collective deities answering to the name of Iuva are all Iuva, and speak as one voice, albeit with sometimes varying accents.

The Eightfold Church has - you may be surprised to hear - eight cults, four greater and four lesser. The greater cults are the ones who were part of the original alliance against the Mage Sovereigns, while the lesser were brought in after, either because they provided clear utility to the Church or because there was no way to get rid of them.

Iuva the Mage-Breaker is the god of magic, the sky and the sea, storms, authority, law and dominance.

Tinevra is the god of knowledge, teaching, truth, secrets, lies, the moon, strategy and civic planning.

Tanit is the god of war, the sun, enforcement, glory, healing, and all forms of physical and performative excellence, including sex as performative.

Ilmar is the god of crafts, the forge, civic health, trade, sports, oaths, ships, shipbuilding and golems.

Aster is the god of agriculture, tamed nature, husbandry, growth and also a big fuck you to the druids, whom the Church hates.

Morha is the god of love, ecstasy, marriage, family, loyalty, fellowship and organised crime. They are associated with sexual relationships.

Nissus is the god of joy, music, drink, art, athletics, sex as a form of expression, and riot.

Yagai is the god of death, birth, boundaries, dreams, time, and kicking in the undead or planar intruders.

They're probably still too focused, but on the other hand their cults are meant to be pretty synthetic.

Eightfold: The Church Octaval

So, why is this game called 'Eightfold'? I hear you ask, and I'm glad you did, as it plays into today's topic.

The title refers to the principle political force in the Sacred Republic: the Eternal Union of the Church of the Eightfold Way, known colloquially as the Church Octaval. This is the coalition of religious cults that formed to overthrow the previous regime - that of the Mage Sovereigns - in the War of Hubris. As well as defeating the Sovereigns of six of the seven dominions of Talahaea, the Church was able, after the war, to unite those dominions - less a chunk of the south coast that was conquered by the Drow while everyone was distracted with the internal conflict - and forge something very roughly approximating a single, centralised government.

Each of the seven provinces - the six dominions that were taken in the War, plus a section of the south coast reconquered sometime after, possibly because it was the former domain of a necromancer and the Drow just got fed up of dealing with the zombies - has its own civic government dominated by the estates - the non-magical survivors of the old aristocratic structures, who own most of the land - and the guilds - the rising merchant class who have most of the money - and there is a shared civil state structure, but all civil authorities are at the very least strongly influenced, if not openly dominated by, the Church.

The High Regent - supreme priest of the Church Octaval - is also the head of state, in which position they use the title Octarch, but the head of government is the Supreme Consul, leader of the executive branch, the Supreme Consulate. The Consulate and the Assembly of the Republic (the legislature) are elected by and from the estates and guilds of the provinces, while the Court Absolute is a collection of mutually acknowledged jurists who act as a judicial branch. Any and all of these civil positions can be, and often are, filled by priests of the Church Octaval.

The Church Hierarchy is complicated (although probably not as complicated as it ought to be.) First, there are the eight cults, each of which is actually a collection of similar cults originally worshiping many similar gods who have now been given a collective name. 

The greater cults are the ones who formed the original alliance: The Cult of Magic, the Cult of Knowledge, the Cult of War and the Cult of Crafts. The lesser cults are those who were brought into the alliance later and considered important enough not to just absorb into the greater cults, usually because they fulfilled a vital role in maintaining social order: The Cult of Agriculture, the Cult of Love, the Cult of Joy and the Cult of Death. 

Each of the greater cults is headed by one of the four Regents of the Church, whose roles are largely symbolic, but who are seen as the candidates to become the next High Regent. The lesser cults have no singular head, but all of the cults have Regents-in-Ordinary who form a governing convocation, and a number of Regents with provincial or smaller geographical remits, priests attached to great temples, smaller shrines, seminaries or to civil bodies as spiritual advisers. There are also mendicants, paladins and templars (non-paladin soldiers in service of the church,) and notably not all of the priests are clerics in the character class sense.

And then there are the Congregations. Notionally committees formed to address specific issues, some of these have become the permanent organisations known as Cardinal Congregations, which wield considerable authority within the bounds of their particular remit. Some of these are inquisitorial in nature, enforcing orthodoxy or hunting down arcane practitioners, others oversee public health initiatives; one of the congregations of the Cult of Love maintains bonds of community and has links to organised crime.

Honestly, I think that the thing I'm most proud of about this whole set up is how difficult it is to briefly explain it. As I say, it's still way too simple to simulate a real international religious organisation, but it's got much more complexity than I would usually include - the war cult is also involved with healing and dance, and while there is no simplistic 'god of love', three cults oversee sexuality as a performative, relational and expressive activity, respectively - for which I blame the influence of the Patron Deities podcast.

Eightfold

It's been a while since I posted on this blog, but since I'm designing a new game setting and people seem interested, I thought I might expand a little.

Not incidentally inspired by streaming games including Critical Role, High Rollers and the Oxventure Guild, and thanks to moving to a larger house with space for a proper table, I'm going to have a shot at running a D&D 5e game in my own, homebrewed setting. This setting is the Sacred Republic, a major power in a smallish fantasy world, which I'll talk about as a whole in another post. I kicked off with a few basic notes: That the tech level was roughly at the Renaissance, rather than the pan-mediaevalism of the 'stock' setting; that the Republic was controlled by a powerful church; and that wizards were outlawed.

The Sacred Republic (and neighbours)

These three factors all fed into each other of course. Why is the tech level higher than in most fantasy worlds? Because there isn't as much magic. Why isn't there as much magic? Because the church has outlawed wizardry. That just left the question of why wizardry was outlawed, and so it came to be that there was a period in history when the wizards ran the whole show, before the Church overthrew them. From this, I developed the history and geography of the area, before moving on to the world and a planar system - because you have to have a planar system - and a rough approximation of the balance of trade between the provinces of the Republic, because if Catan teaches us anything it's that you can't call it world-building if you don't know who's buying sheep.

Since the church is important, of course there had to be gods. In this area, matters were greatly complicated by the influence of James Holloway's Patron Deities podcast, which has made me think even more than usual about how gods and religion work. The provinces of the Republic are mostly on a European model, because while that is a bit old hat, it's also what I know and what I can write without falling back on nothin' but stereotypes. Still, I've tried to make a bit more use of the concept, so the PCs' home province is your standard Anglo-German business, but moving out they'll encounter less familiar cultures. The real trick will be making sure that the specifically non-human cultures are actually non-human, rather than just... non-European.

Those non-human cultures?

Well, because I like to challenge myself, the Halflings of Yethera (the name of the continent; the world is called Aiaos,) are originally a travelling culture, so they mustn't be too egregiously cod-Roma.

The orcs and goliaths in this world had a somewhat less advanced culture in the north, before they were pushed out by encroaching giants, and now mostly form an immigrant workforce in the Republic.

The 'beast kingdoms' to the east are where the various animal-like humanoids live. Well, apart from the Tortles, who are another nomadic race and travel in massive, mobile fortresses, driven by subterranean lizards on treadmills.

And to the south we have the Drow, who are a major mercantile and occasionally military power bloc to the south, who control trade in and out of the Great Delta by means of a massive, fuck-off chain stretched across the mouth of the bay. There are some aspects of Constantinople/Istanbul in there of course, but so far I haven't gone into detail because I want to do something unique. I'm aware that I've kind of put the black-skinned elves in what looks like North Africa; in my defence this is actually in the shadow of the crown - the highest point on what is in fact a dome-shaped world - and it thus in shade for about half the day; I just have a limited range of coast shapes in my mind.

Finally, there are the Yuan-ti. Now, they're a particularly touchy case, because Yuan-ti are canonically humans corrupted by dark, sacrificial rites, so that has to be handled with care so you don't end up with a Peter Jackson kind of situation.

And the elves are Euro as fuck, because elves are the definition of racial privilege. Specifically, High Elves are the city builders, having been the rulers of the culture before the culture before this one, while the Wood Elves are the preservers of the wilderness and thus latterly leaning towards eco-terrorism.

There are also dwarfs and gnomes, but I haven't gone into much detail on them yet, and dragonborn in the archipelago of Ladonia, who trade with the coastal province.

X-COM 2: War of the Chosen

The Chosen,whose new album is out this week.

War of the Chosen is a massive DLC pack for X-COM 2 which, like Enemy Unknown's expansion, Enemy Within, transforms the standard campaign with new content, adding additional enemies, units and features of the strategy layer.

First and foremost are the titular Chosen, a trio of badass enforcers for the alien Elders. In a cutscene completely outside of X-COM's possible view or knowledge - a first for the series - the Assassin, the Hunter and the Warlock are tasked with returning the Commander to ADVENT custody. In order to ensure best results from their infighting underlings and promote cooperation, the Elders promise control of Earth to the one who captures the Commander (and later have the gall to get pissed at the Chosen for being competitive.) What this means in-game is that each Chosen controls an area of the world, and has the potential to show up during missions in this area and get all up in your face.

Strike a pose.

The Assassin is a bit like your Rangers, combining tremendous speed with a concealment power, a devastating melee attack which leaves all nearby X-COM operatives effectively puking their guts up in shock, a shotgun for back-up, and the ability to move after attacking. Oh, and she doesn't trigger overwatch fire, because fuck you, that's why. The Hunter is all about precision range work, bouncing all over the shop with her grapple and deploying a targeting lock which forces the engaged target to reposition or face a lethal attack in the following turn. Finally, the Warlock has some nasty psionic abilities, and they are all built like bastards, overflowing with hit points, armour and reinforcements. Oh, and you can't permanently kill them at first. And they can sometimes capture your soldiers.

Thoughout the game, the Chosen learn more and more about your operation, with an ultimate eye to attacking the Avenger and recapturing the Commander. This growing knowledge provides an additional countdown which, unlike the Avatar Project, can never be reset. In addition, they have the option to capture your soldiers for questioning, which is just... rude.

Sneaky!

But what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the ruthless alien enforcer, and that additional strategy layer element comes into play with the covert action screen. Managed via the new Resistance Ring facility, Covert Actions allow you to seek out rare resources, but also to find information on your enemies just as they seek information on you. The primary missions of this type relate to locating the stronghold of each Chosen and unlocking a mission to infiltrate it and destroy the stasis coffin which keeps them alive, but you can also send troops to find out where they are holding your captured soldiers, and completing such a covert action similarly activates a one-off rescue mission. Completing a covert action requires you to assign one or more soldiers, scientists and engineers, and possible intel or supply resources, with most actions having a required baseline and additional assets which can be assigned to buy off some of the risks. Each action has a risk of injury, ambush or capture, which makes covert action a bad choice for getting some quick experience on the rookies.

These two are introduced as barely able not to kill each other. I think most
players probably set them up as a max-bonded kill team.

Covert action opportunities are provided by the three Resistance Factions, another addition to the game. The Reapers are facemasked, Russianish scout-snipers who look like refugees from Gone with the Blastwave and eat ADVENT troopers for breakfast; literally. Naturally, this makes working with the Skirmishers, ex-ADVENT defectors, iffy at best, and the goal of the Covert game is to get each of the factions sufficiently onside to create a united resistance. The third faction, the Templars, are psi-cultists, but lack the specific beef with the other factions which makes the Reapers and Skirmishers engaging. At the start of each month, any faction that likes you (including X-COM) can be assigned Resistance Orders, which act as powerful modifiers for the coming month, boosting income, reducing the risk of Covert actions, or making certain Proving Ground projects complete instantly, to name but a few. Each of the factions also provides a 'hero' soldier for your forces (and the Reapers at least may very rarely assign a Covert action allowing you to recruit another,) with powerful abilities.

The templar's focus is, essentially, cutting a fool.

The Reaper uses stealth, sharpshooting and explosives. Their enhanced Concealment mode, Shadow, makes them incredible point-runners for ambushes, and they can remain in cover for entire missions if correctly specced and used for picking off the injured. The Skirmisher focuses on mid-range firepower and mobility, with a grappling hook that can be used for traversal, to drag in enemies for a melee attack, or to take the Skirmisher across the map to the enemy. While the Skirmisher does have a limited melee capacity, the real close-range specialist is the Templar, who has only a machine pistol to back up a brutal hand-to-hand attack and a battery of psi-abilities which are powered by successful melee kills.

The hero units are not distinctly more powerful than regular soldiers, but they are versatile, especially with the new ability point system, which allows you to choose abilities from multiple branches of their advance tree at each level. In addition, each has the potential to inflict horrific damage, with a high level Templar carving a swathe through the enemy, and the upgraded Banish ability and a souped-up rifle allowing the Reaper to take out half a dozen large enemies in a turn on a good day. The Skirmisher lacks any such extreme manouevres, but has a number of traits granting additional actions, including the hit-or-miss potential of Battle Lord, which for one turn each combat grants the ability to act like one of Vahlen's rulers and act each time an enemy takes an action in the character's line of sight.

By this point, their guns had been named... after
each other.

Another new addition to the mix is soldier bonding. Operatives sent on missions together, especially those who spend time in proximity on the field and shoot at the same enemies (or at enemies shooting at each other,) develop cohesion, and have the potential to form bonds, which grant extra abilities relating to their partner. Such pairings can then be made the subject of an inspirational poster, as can victorious group shots and other photos taken with the new photo booth feature. Stored in our game files, these can be found as propaganda posters around the battlefields, which now include underground levels and abandoned city blocks. The last of these are home to the Lost, zombie-like rejects from the Elders' experiments that attack in hordes. Killing one grants an extra action, so it is possible to take down a lot of Lost in a single turn, especially with a good sniper.

War of the Chosen overhauls X-COM 2  with a new feeling and a host of new gameplay elements, although one of my favourite things doesn't come up until the very end, when we see the Skirmishers welcoming waves of ADVENT troopers now free of conditioning. It's rather sweet. It also expands the original game without the crippling difficulty hike that makes it hard for me to get on with the excellent Long War 2 mod. I won't say 'otherwise excellent', because it's a feature rather than a bug, but does unfortunately mean that the mod is not really for me (at least until someone with better technical skills than I creates a better aim mod that works with LW2.)

RPGaDAY 2017 – 'Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?', 'You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!', 'What was your most impactful RPG session?', and 'What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?'

Here I catch up on the last four days of RPGaDAY. I honestly don't know if this is in the spirit of the thing, but...

'Which RPG cover best captures the spirit of the game?'

I'm not sure how to answer this, since honestly the best covers tend to gel smoothly with the design so that you barely notice them as a discrete element of the whole. Covers that fail to capture the spirit are the ones that stand out, usually when you get about halfway in and find yourself thinking 'why are five centuries of British history all happening at once and where the actual fuck are the pirates?'

1668? Bollocks more like.

Yes, that's right long-time readers, I'm talking about first ed. 7^th Sea again, and in particular the fact that its cover very clearly promised one thing – swashbuckling adventures in the Golden Age of Piracy (1668, to be exact,) and instead delivers a mishmash of historical fantasy including the weird assumption that Elizabethan drag never went out of fashion in a pseudo-Britain where Scotland is hardcore post-Catholic Stuart and there is no Commonwealth, because after all, history doesn't consist of related events at all.

You know, it's never really occurred to me before, but I think that after the massive dissonance with the cover, the thing that stopped me getting back into 7^th Sea however many people told me it was the most amazing thing ever(1) was that its world-building grated so much. Thea is a world put together from an anachronistic assemblage of each nation's 'classic' period, without regard for the fact that history is a great, interlocking machine, and that you can't just ignore those interactions and have each nation have reached their idealised historic peak simultaneously. Also, the Eisen looked ridiculous, and I turn out to have a serious twitch about a swashbuckling game with a full-fledged magic system.

Now, it's entirely possible that there is a solid fictional history behind the cultural clusterfuck of Thea, and I hear that the second edition is a very high-class piece of game design. I'll likely never know, because with my time so brutally curtailed by the demands of adulting, it's hard for me to take a chance on something new, and harder still to take a chance on something that's burned me before.

'You can game every day for a week. Describe what you'd do!'

A whole week with no other demands? Sleep?

Okay, if I am required by the terms of whatever scenario means that this can happen to be gaming, then I'm going to hire a place in the country and put together a programme, damnit.

Mornings would be fresh air and exercise after a late start and a good-size breakfast: Nice walks or visits to local parks and places of interest with my daughter, because yes I'm taking my daughter with me. Late morning we'd have board and card games out for those back from their walks.

There would be a social, but not sit-down, lunch at about one o'clock, after which we'd begin in earnest, with two hours of 'A Game of Ponies', followed by breakout boardgaming. A light dinner would be served early, followed by a large-scale boardgame while whatever kids are with us are put to bed, followed by a late supper for the grownups and the meat of the week, a five-part campaign, probably run in a relatively freeform fashion using Fate Core rules.

'What was your most impactful RPG session?'

The climax of James Holloway's long-running Unknown Armies game was a big one, dramatically reshaping a lot of my expectations of how a campaign should go when we wrapped up by running into a burning building with no real expectation of survival and called it an unqualified win.

'What is a good RPG to play for sessions of 2hrs or less?'

Wait; there are sessions of more than two hours? That would be nice.

(1) And there are a lot of them, and people I trust, although in truth a lot of the enthusiastic descriptions have served only to convince me that this isn't for me. One friend described the awesome pirate adventures her PC had while near-permanently shapeshifted into a cat. Weirdly, I would be more enthusiastic about a pirate swashbuckling game in which you could opt to play as the ship's cat, than one in which you could turn into a cat.

RPGaDAY 2017 – 'How do you find out about new RPGs?' and 'Which RPG have you played the most since August 2016'

Another twofer today.

New RPGs tend to come my way when Robin Farndon excitedly posts something about a Kickstarter campaign. I also see announcements from Onyx Path since backing the fascinating but virtually unplayable Mummy reboot(1), but for the most part that's a matter of curiosity.

This image is relevant to so much in this post.

Okay, I backed the game about anthropomorphic cats, but it's a game about anthropomorphic cats(3).

In broader terms, I get my news on game releases from social media, either because someone (not always Robin, sometimes it's Eleanor Hingley(4)) has taken a shine to something, or is pointing out a Lovecraftian thing to one of the serious Lovecraft completists on my friends list, or because Grant Howitt is releasing something new, blast his enviable blend of creativity and productivity(5).

So, before I get lost in my own footnotes(6), on to the second question.

As is well recorded in this blog, I don't get to game anything like as much as I would like. In the past year, the bulk of what I've managed to play has been the winding down of my online Fate game, Operatives of CROSSBOW, which suffered immensely from something I commented on on Ellie's blog the other day, and in an earlier post about letting other people design your character, which is the ill fit between the spontaneous, near-anarchic back and forth of Fate's core mechanics and the necessary formality that makes online video conferencing so much better for steering committee meetings than casual chat once you involve more than two people. The fundamental problem with CROSSBOW was embodied in the way the players declared their action. Seven in ten times, they would begin 'can I...?' The core concept of Fate is that yes you can, if you tell us how.

Well, that and I think one of my players had been burned once too often by GMs insisting that anything not explicitly mentioned during the planning session – like torches, lockpicks, a spy's pistol, or a hacker's laptop - wasn't there at all.

"All right, so can we get one of these?"

"Do you have an aspect called 'I'm a Spy' on your sheet(7)? Then keep going; I'll tell you when you need to spend a Fate point to have something."

"Cool. What about one of these?"

I'm not judging my players here. Learned behaviours are hard to escape, is my point, and especially when you add the social constraint of that screen and only have a fuzzy webcam image to judge other people's responses by when they're not speaking. There is simply no way that remote gaming of this sort will ever truly stand in for proper tabletopping; at least until immersive telepresencing becomes a thing.

This is basically the online gaming table and I wants it.

The only other game I've played any of is, as I mentioned last time, Tails of Equestria, with which we are introducing my daughter to roleplaying (well, that and Empire,) and that has barely got going thanks to our schedules.

(1) It joins old-school White Wolf's Wraith in the centre of a Venn diagram of 'fascinating mechanical conceit', 'mega-high concept' and 'there are maybe three conceivable combinations of people who could play this without it going off the fucking chain(2).'

(2) Not that I'm saying 'off the chain' is a necessarily bad play style, but it doesn't seem to be what they're going for as a default.

(3) I'm still a little disappointed that they went with Monarchies of Mau instead of presenting the cats as a communist collective under the guiding paw of Chairman Miaow, but I suppose a working game setting was higher on their list of priorities than a one-off pun.

(4) Very occasionally someone else, but like... 80% from that one household. 90% if you count the cats.

(5) Because envy, rather than because I want him to stop producing, although if he could slow down I might be able to afford to back more of his stuff. Or if I hadn't slipped and backed the cats thing. Oh, Kickstarter regret! Such grief you bring me!

(6) Seriously, they'll be in small type once I upload this, but right now they take up pretty much the same space as the text.

(7) Yes they did, pretty much for this reason.

RPGaDay – 'What Published RPG do you wish you were playing right now?' and 'What is an RPG you would like to see published?'

In the game of ponies, you win, or you
try again.

I'm only really involved in one game at the moment, and that's 'A Game of Ponies', my oft-in-hiatus campaign for the Tails of Equestria RPG. The PCs managed to not-quite destroy the Castle of Friendship when entrusted with guarding the Cutie Map, received a Cutie Compass – sort of a MLP version of the aleitheometer – and were guided west, past the mountains of Griffonstone to a city on the edge of a desert. They defeated Pie-rats on the way, although my daughter has requested no more of those, but have been stalled in Koto-Kolia for a long time now, as it's hard to find time to play around LARP and life.

For the same reason – plus my general, although obviously not absolute, aversion to licensed games – I don't really have an answer to the second question. It' hard to want something that is completely undefined, especially when it would ultimately just be another thing I don't have time to play. I'm hardly going to sit here thinking 'man, I wish there was a low magic horror-fantasy game out there,' especially if I don't have a group I might want to run that for.

So, what these two questions really highlight for me is that it's hard to get hyped when you know that you aren't going to have a game. If you've just got your Wednesday night group's schedule locked up for the next five years, you can still get excited that maybe you could slot Marvel Supers in for March 2023, but it feels very different when there's no real prospect of getting a game in at all. It's not something I know how to remedy, because in the general sense I would really like to have a game again, it's just that I'm not all that mobile and Arya's much too young to leave on her own.

Maybe I should offer to run some Tails of Equestria for her and her friends on a Sunday.