Month: August 2017

As anyone who’s been following this blog knows (these people know nothing, because they do not exist), my younger brother moved away recently. He won’t be in regular contact with civilization for a while, and he left behind a few things, including some drawings he made of our old D&D game. The campaign we played before the one that finished at Phlan. This was one Hoard of the Dragon Queen. I asked him if it was okay if I scanned them onto the internet before he left, and he said sure. Then I realized I don’t actually have a scanning machine, so here are some terrible phone pictures of them instead.

Continue reading “Hoard of the Dragon Queen: Fan Art From My Brother” →

Another one in the “shameless blogging” category, this post is dedicated entirely to a brief recollection of the battle for Phlan. It’s the last session of D&D I ran for my younger brother before he left. I was running the Tyranny of Dragons campaign initially, but by the end things got…different. I squished several different adventures together into a single finale, and ran them with an improvised mass battle system.

Continue reading “The Defense of Phlan” →

Seeing as how this is basically just my blog, now, let’s talk about my goal for the year.

Continue reading “The Quest Log For Meat Space” →

Here’s a miscellaneous project that wrapped itself up recently. I did a Let’s Play of one of the first JRPGs I’d ever played, Chrono Cross, with my younger brother playing the game for the first time. The idea was that he’d be experiencing the game for the first time, contrasted against my having played the game as a kid, so his perspective would balance out any nostalgia I have for the game. We wound up losing half the commentary audio, so we wound up ending it halfway through the game at the end of one of the major plot arcs.

It’s…okay. I learned a lot about video editing while making it, but the main thing I learned is that my analytical commentary, which requires long stretches (2+ minutes) of uninterrupted monologue to make a detailed and nuanced point, doesn’t really gel well with my younger brother’s off-the-cuff jokes well at all, since he needs to deliver his punchline immediately after the game gives him a setup to work with. It’s not until later in the game that my analysis tended to get more focused, less rambling, and fast enough to avoid interruption, so the early stuff was pretty heavy on us just joking back and forth to varying amounts of quality and me occasionally starting in on something potentially interesting before losing my train of thought. It doesn’t help that the two plot arcs that we didn’t lose the commentary for pretty much work, and there’s a lot less to talk about when something works, especially off-the-cuff, than when something’s awful. It’s a shame that our best work was lost, because he just moved halfway across the country and we won’t be doing this again for a while.

Hogwarts houses make a certain amount of sense. You sort students into groups based on a degree of compatibility. They were invented by medieval wizards, so if the groups they settled on turn out not to be very conducive to getting pre-teens and teens to get on with one another, that’s fine. Sure, it’s a bit of a design failure in universe, but as a setting element it makes it very easy to establish different cliques in a hurry and it’s appealing to a young audience who are still trying to figure out exactly who they are as individuals because it gives a finite list of options to sort through.

Its major failing is that there was a strong theme of all the houses of Hogwarts needing to unite in the face of Voldemort, but it turns out there was an asterisk on that theme, and the footnote said “except Slytherin, fuck those guys, they’re evil.” This particular theme is supposed to be about bringing together lots of different people in opposition of hatred and terrorism and all the other things Voldemort brings in his wake, but since all the protagonists are Gryffindors, their allies in Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw are quirky sidekicks rather than major characters, and all Slytherins are evil (except for one, who is a defector who turned his back on evil after graduating, not someone who was simultaneously Slytherin and proud and also opposed to Voldemort), what you get is a story about Gryffindor vs. Slytherin in which two other houses are shadow divisions for Gryffindor.

Divergent takes this basic formula and, rather than fixing up the broken bits, instead completely cocks up the whole thing.

Continue reading “Divergent Factions Make Even Less Sense Than Hogwarts Houses” →