The Daylight War is the third installment in Peter V. Brett‘s slowly growing Demon Cycle. I enjoyed it, though my reading of it was rudely interrupted by HPMoR rearing its really rather fetching head. While not as horrifyingly addictive as its fanfic competitor, The Daylight War does offer a great deal of demon fighting, moderate doses of political intriguing, and a few dashes of vaguely awkward sex scenes. Oh, and I guess I wasn’t paying attention when I read the first two books several years ago, but there’s a decent helping of weird cultural stuff going on too. Maybe I’m not being fair?
Now This Is A Story All About How…
I got to where I am right now
So I’d like to take a minute; just sit right there:
I’ll tell you how I got to the set of sociocultural beliefs I’m at right now and why I think it’s important (especially for gamers) to confront sexism/racism/homophobia within our community because minority groups are already not really taken seriously so all of their bad actions reflect on them whereas bad actions of ‘normal’ people just reflect on people which is why things like Steubenville don’t make the majority of our culture say ‘see, I knew football players were no good’ whereas things like this make people say ‘see, I knew gamers were no good’ when really both of them should lead us to the belief that we live in a self-propagating rape culture
…and I did this all after going to high school in a town called Bel-Air?
HPMoR: Its Appeal is Surprisingly Reasonable
Early last week I finally gave in to the steadily building pile of recommendations and started reading Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. By Friday I had barely managed to keep up with my other commitments and had forcibly redistributed my sleep cycle; but I finished all 87 chapters that are presently out, and was left wanting more. I hadn’t understood why so many other people had thought that I would like the story: I’m not normally attracted to any sort of fanfic, and while I enjoyed the Harry Potter series I didn’t think it was the alpha and omega of wizardly fiction. But now…
Character of the Week: Jason’s Jackmerius
I’m piggybacking off of Mattias’ article because in our discussions before he published it, certain parts of his character caught my fancy, and it inspired me to try my hand at my own iteration. The core of the idea at the time in our discussions was: Demon hunter who uses magic. After more discussion Mattias mentioned how he was playing around with the idea of multiple personalities and the He Who Fights Monsters trope. My thought: What if this were literal?
Held at Gunpoint
There’s a lovely new game that came out very recently. It’s called Gunpoint. Perhaps you may have heard of it…
Character of the Week: Jackmerius
Mostly, I’m a GM; so when friends of mine said that he was setting up a group of campaigns and needed manpower, I thought he meant he needed extra GMs. But lo and behold, he needed a player! I was excited and awaited the details for the setting, which turned out to be little more than ‘basically D&D’, so I didn’t have too much setting to ground my character in. For many people, this is a boon! They have character ideas galore and settings only restrict them. After all, they want to play a character who does magic based on rituals, or based on some anime, or whatever, and the campaign just doesn’t fit that.
But for me, it’s the opposite. Given a lack of prompting, I feel unjustified with any details. I don’t have a character idea that I then fit into a campaign; I build an idea FROM the setting. Without a setting, I feel like I have no non-generic ideas.
And so when I started character creation, I was scared. And then I realized something. My fear made no sense. I was applying a standard from my old-school GMing (what if my characters don’t fit the setting) that didn’t even fit my new-school GMing style. I wanted to let players drive games, and yet here I was, a player, afraid to drive a game! I’d like to say that I overcame this fear right away and dove into character creation. But really, I didn’t until that fateful moment when the GM turned to me and said ‘so tell me about your character’. Until that moment, my character had just been a series of numbers, and character creation had been IMPOSSIBLE. But let’s back up a moment…
Choose Your Own Adventure!
Edit: Part 2a has been written, and can be found here. Part 2b has been written as well, and can be found here.
I made this short choose-your-own-adventure story a while back, and only just realized that I could try to put it together in a functioning format on this site. I haven’t managed to separate the sections as much as I’d like, so if you want the full experience try to avoid reading more than one segment at a time. The uppermost section is the one to keep your eyes on. Have fun!
You come to your senses after a long night of studying in the library and find yourself standing on a narrow dirt path running through the woods. You don’t know how you got here, and it doesn’t look like any place that you’ve ever been before. After wandering along for a brief while, you hear hoofbeats behind you. Do you:
a) Hide behind a nearby tree. Paranoia is the best survival trait after all.
b) Stand on the side of the road. Horses move quickly and you don’t want to be in their way.
Sexism in Gaming: How to Begin to Address Harassment
I want to talk about designing a setting with your players, but I’ve been pretty preoccupied with a piece I wrote elsewhere on sexism in gaming (specifically League of Legends), so instead I’ll show that off. Check it out here!
Mistress of the Catacombs, by David Drake
Mistress of the Catacombs is the fourth book in David Drake‘s Lord of the Isles series. Published in 2001, it continues to deliver on the promise of the first few books. I’m not sure I have new words to describe the delightful admixture of classical influences that form this heady concoction of Roman and Greek culture and technology, Sumerian religion, and ancient Mediterranean magic. Suffice to say that it comes across with an appropriately Atlantean feel, and *itty bitty spoilers* that the various wanderings through other worlds never break the feeling of the world(s) that Drake has created. Magic is powerful and scary, and this is made clear not just by the ways in which people react to it but also through the consequences of people’s use of magic. And more than ever before in this series, Drake makes clear his own thoughts about violence as a solution to your problems.
Game Analysis: Diablo 3
Since I took a look at a spiritual successor to Diablo 2 I figured I might as well take a look at the actual successor. Unlike Path of Exile however, I really can’t think of too much that draws me to Diablo 3. This makes me especially sad since I waited in great anticipation for its release, playing Diablo 2 over and over again in the meantime. I paid full price for it. I paid for a copy for a friend to play with me! That is how much I wanted to continue my Diablo 2 fun in Diablo 3, but I ended up losing interest and dropping the game extremely quickly. You can maybe discount my analysis because I haven’t gotten much actual game time in, but I would argue that it isn’t my job to persist at playing a game until it is fun, it is instead the game’s job to keep me interested in playing.
Fistful of Wits 