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TK-421, do you copy?

Has been quite a while since I’ve done anything RPG related.

For the last year, I’ve been learning about videogame design and using Godot and Blender. Something that is still ongoing and I expect for a long while, but no, there is nothing I have to show yet.

Last week I started playing in Geoffrey’s Old School Star Wars campaign on Grenzland, because I was only going to be a player and it’s a rules light system, so nothing was required of me other than show up for a few hours. Which is a very different kind of activity than preparing and running a campaign in a game like modern D&D. It was an immediate blast. Even though my only die roll was a single shot at a stormtrooper. (Which missed.)

And of course it had me right away thinking that running a rules-light system in an open-ended swashbuckling campaign wouldn’t actually be much more work and a time commitment. For the last months, I’ve been more or less settling on working on a small videogame set in a new incarnation of my Iridium Moons space opera setting, and happened to be browsing the Scum and Villainy rulebook for ideas and inspirations. Right now, a Scum and Villainy campaign in the new Iridium Moons in the not so distant future might be a real possibility, as it wouldn’t really conflict with my videogame hobby.

While cleaning out the spam comments that had build up over the last year (most were tracksbacks that didn’t get caught by Antispam-Bee), I also saw that there’s been 19 actual comments here on older posts since the last time I wrote something. Really cool.

I also noticed that I never actually updated the link to my Mastodon profile. I’ve not been using the old for a year now. It’s fixed now.

Follow Spriggan’s Den on Mastodon

I just installed ActivityPub on this site, which now makes it possible to follow it through Mastodon.

The account is @Yora, which you put into the search bar on Mastodon and then just follow it like any other Mastodon account. That account will then automatically post a link to any new post that goes up on this site.

Might be useful for people who are interested in my posts here but maybe not necessarily so much in my endless blabbering on Mastodon. ;)

“How to have a message” on civilizational conflict

I don’t usually post links to random videos here, but this is one I really want to share with more people:

The initial premise of “Avatar is stupid and Princess Mononoke is great” is pretty much a no brainer and what could possibly be added to that conversation? But after an initial overview and comparison of the two movies, which I think is actually really funny and entertaining, I started to wonder how he’s going to draw that one out for another half hour. Which is where the movie starts to broaden out and take off into a very unexpected direction and turns into one of the most interesting discussion about conflicts of this kind I’ve seen in a very long time.

I don’t think I’ve come across any new videos of this caliber (except Jacob Geller, of course) in several years. This is really good. I very much recommend giving it a listen.

10 Years of This

According to my first post, this page has been up for 10 years today.

Go, me!

Yeah, I don’t think there’s really anything profound to say about the occasion. When I decided to take a shot at setting up a site like this, they already had their greatest days behind them and the great buzz was quieting down. And while there might be a case for this kind of thing having fallen out of fashion, I actually think I’m having more readers now than I ever did before. At least going by the amount and quality of comments I’ve been getting over the last year.

I really wasn’t one of the old crowd and I think still somewhat feel like being that new guy who joined the party much later. But given that most of the oldest sites are also just 14 years old now, that difference has probably become pretty insignificant. I was thinking a while back how it seems that most of the original crowd have been gone by now, but when I checked all the sites I remember as being the big ones that everyone quoted and referred to regularly, it turned out that almost all of the sites are still up, and probably some 70% or more have had new posts in the last few year. But for a lot of them, this has become three or four posts per year. Which is a shame, as I really liked a lot of them. But that does give some context to me still doing some four to eight posts every months. And while I rarely think that I have something big and meaningful about RPGs to tell the world, I really don’t feel like I’m running out of stuff to share anytime soon.

I think putting a notification for every new post here on Mastodon has made a big difference for feeling that my stuff is getting more attention now than in used to be for most of the time I’ve been running this site. It’s something I’d recommend to anyone running a site like this. Or even is thinking about starting one. I’m still finding new ones that I never heard of before, and some are really good. This party nowhere getting near to being over.

And I think another 10 years from now, I’m probably still doing this.

One year with the Mastodon

It’s been a year since I did take a shot at this Mastodon thing. The idea of something that works like Twitter but isn’t Twitter always sounded quite appealing, and around this time last year it was looking like a lot of people would be leaving Twitter and go to Mastodon instead. And it actually happened.

I have my account on dice.camp and the growth that happened there in the early months of this year has been huge. I don’t know anything about user numbers, but you could really see the amount of RPG related chatter go up every week for months, and it’s been staying there ever since. The dice.camp instance is currently at a scale and activity level that you can just browse the entire local feed and browse through everything that has been posted in the last day in 10-15 minutes if you want to. But you can also follow hashtags in addition to users to make yourself a customized home feed. You can ban people if you feel you have to, but if it’s just accounts that keep babbling about stuff you just don’t care for but are otherwise inoffensive, you can simple mute them. This doesn’t do anything but hide their posts from your feeds. Or you can filter out words or hashtags as well.

I’ve filtered out “Kickstarter”, “Patreon”, and “itch.io”, and muted a good 40 accounts of youtube and podcast shows that only post new episode announcements. This has turned the dice.camp home feed and the #ttrpg hashtag into really fun places where people share around interesting and/or random thoughts about RPGs and occasional links.

I absolutely recommend giving it a look. I think it’s particularly well suited for people with small private RPG sites like this to share new posts with a wider audience. While overall there seems to be an impression that this kind of sites has fallen out of fashion, I’ve been seeing more responses to my posts in the last year than I ever did before.

I want a Fantasy Wargame

For a while now I’ve been thinking on and off how fun it would be to play a fantasy game where the players are going on a campaign with whole armies under their command.

Each player playing as one of the captains of each company that make up the army (and one general), with several hundred or even a few thousand soldiers under their command. Played on a big country-sized hexmap where the players have to send out scouts to find enemy forces and maneuver their troops to engage them in favorable terrain. With sieges and managing supplies to feed the troops. And of course hero units like sorcerers, priests, and champions, and special enemies like giants and dragons.

Do such games exist? I am sure they have to.

Anyone heard of one of those? And any that could be recommended?