I’m not a Warhammer player, but…

…I unironically like the old Warhammer 40K universe depictions and canon. You know, the Rick Priestley, John Blanche era. Where everything was bad, grimy, gloomy and evil.

This is peak Leman Russ, as he should be:

A black and white pencil portrait of "Marine Commander Leman Russ", taken from the first edition Rogue Trader book - his face is warped from scars and cybernetic implants, everything looks distorted and gloomy

Not this:

A colour illustration of a very heroic looking Leman Russ with flowing blonde hair, taken from https://warhammer40k.fandom.com/wiki/Leman_Russ

Warhammer 40,000, as depicted and conceived in the 80ies absolutely was a satire and reaction to Thatcherism in the UK, quite in line with comics like Judge Dredd and other things from the 2000 AD magazine. Space Marines were fucked up purposefully mutated humans that were fighting fucked up accidentally mutated humans.

And in that take of the universe, I think it is fine to have uber-macho all-male Space Marines, to have a devoted cult of the emperor, to have the humans shout „death to all xenos“. Because it is clear from the artwork alone that this is a fucked up world, full of fucked up decisions. No one in there looks or stands in for anyone in our real world, which is a neat thing to have when the game is about wholesale slaughter. (Of course, a lot of the „human factions“ take on decorations and themes from armies from our real-world past. But they are so exaggerated, that I don’t really think a matching and identification is possible.)

So, yes, I actually like this take. It brings me back to the 80ies, to crusty Punks and Hair Metal, to counterculture and rebellion.

But today, as the artwork starts to become squeaky clean and actually heroic. Games Workshop is clearly trying to focus on about how cool the Space Marines are. Nothing on the surface tells you that they would be fucked up, and the lore keeps telling you that they have to be the way they are, that the xenos threat is real.

And with that, the satire looses its teeth. Games Workshop of course knows this, so they end up having to make the good guys, you know, actually good. These toy soldiers cannot be doing warcrimes left and right anymore, they become more good-looking, and (and that is where the sad puppies start howling at the moon) you start making figures that your whole audience can identify with.

And that means including people of colour, a variety of gender being represented outside of Slaaneesh cults, and so on. Because the factions aren’t all villains anymore.

This change is the natural consequence of the slow-but-sure transition of the Space Marines from „crazed fanatics willing to die for the cult of a dead Emperor rotting on his golden throne“ to „somehow heroic, noble and virtuous. As good guys.“ (quotes from freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngul)

So, if you want the Space Marines and the Empire of Man to be „the good guys“, you have to embrace the good sides of humanity too. And that means including ALL of humanity, in all its multi-gendered, multi-skin-hues, multi-anything glory.Sorry to the sad puppies, I don’t make the rules, I’m just telling you how it is.

19. April 2024 playing, random Keine Kommentare zu I’m not a Warhammer player, but…

Living in the suburbs

Slightly more than a decade ago, I moved from one of the more out there parts of Hamburg back into a more central part. And I loved it. I gained about one to two hours of free time thanks to a shorter commute, I had all the shops and places to eat I wanted in walking distance, things felt more lively overall.

Back then, I vowed I would never go back to that awful place at the periphery.

Two years ago, I moved back to that part, and I love it. What has changed?

Well, for starters, I work from home full time now. That means that awful commute has completely disappeared.

The other reason is that I moved not into the same house as before, but to a place that has all the necessary daily needs within walking distance: Supermarket, bakery, hairdresser, doctors, pharmacy, public transit connection. It is all there and can be reached by less than 5 minutes of walking. Most of them actually under a minute.

At the „awful place“, I had to take a bus (that would leave right from my doorstep admittedly) to the city, but there was no direct connection, and it didn’t leave as often as one would love to.

The new place has a bus and a train, and it is a more direct connection too.

But the cincher really is the fact that all the important bits of infrastructure are right here. That is what people need — not more car lanes into the city, but infrastructure for daily life in walking distance. Really, learn this lesson, dear city planners!

25. September 2023 Politics, random Keine Kommentare zu Living in the suburbs

I have my own Mastodon instance now

One of the cool things of federated social media is that each instance can have their own rules and conventions.

One of the bad things of federated social media is that each instance has their own rules and conventions.

What do I mean? I started out on octodon​.social and felt pretty good there. Then I realized that a lot of people I followed initially went silent. Turns out that they were on infosec​.social, and for $reasons (reasons I understand, but don’t necessarily need to adopt myself) , the admin of octodon​.social blocked that instance. So I eventually and very reluctantly moved to hachyderm​.io. Turns out, the same thing is happening there too, just with different servers.

Fediverse moderation has several levels:

  • end user self-defense: „This person did something bad and I prevent them from interacting with me.“
  • moderating local content on a personal basis: „This person on the same server as me did something bad, so here are the consequences for them“
  • moderating external content on a personal basis: „This person on a different server as me did something bad, so I limit how they can interact with people on my server“
  • moderate external content on an instance basis: „I find this whole other instance suspect, so I limit how everyone on that whole instance can interact with people on my server“

If my personal sensibilities and those of the people who moderate my insteance differ (and they will absolutely differ to some degree!), you will at best just miss out on a bit of content but at worst will suddenly be cut off from people you interacted a lot.

This is compounded by the fact that there is no documented consensus for moderation across instances. (Like darcy​.is would have provided, btw :) ) You won’t know what’ll happen until it actually does.

So, for me, the problem is this:

A venn diagramm with four circles. Three circles are arranged so they do not overlap and are labeled A, B, C. The fourth circle is in the middle and overlaps each of the other three a bit and is labeled "me"

Yep, that is me, in the middle of a few non-overlapping communities. (There are also a lot of communities that do overlap, but let’s ignore those for now) So, when I join a server in community A, and A suddenly decides to defederate from C, I lose that chunk of people. When I join B instead, and they already hate A, I lose out a different chunk.

Finding that elusive instance Z that plays nice with everyone else is gonna be… hard.

And now that folks like Meta and others are opening ActivityPub servers lines are drawn in the sand: „If you federate with Meta, I will block that instance!“ Or „if you don’t protect the children, I will protect them from you!“. Or „We’re sex positive, if you block the furries, I’ll defederate from you!“ 

And here am I, just wanting to talk to my friends and see cat pictures. So, I opt out of the drama and have my own single-person instance now: @jollyorc@social.5f9.de No, don’t ask me if you can join it, I don’t want that kind of responsibility. Take 9 Euros per month and go to fedi.monster, they’ll help you out.

4. Juli 2023 testing Keine Kommentare zu I have my own Mastodon instance now

I’m writing another game!

It is a few months since I finished Mail Order Apocalypse, and apparently, writing games is a tiny bit addictive: I’m already about 70 pages into writing the next game. (For comparison: MOA clocks in at 106 pages, a lot of them being random tables)

So, the next game, what is it?

The working title is Raiders of Arismyth, and it is supposed to be a modern dungeon crawler. Which is slightly unusual territory for me. My gaming shelf has lots of „story“ games, with abstract mechanics, collaborative narration, player empowerment and so on.

But I also have collected a few hundred gaming miniatures over the years, and I wanted to use them again! I prefer games that are rules-light, easy to grok, and ideally have not too big character sheets. There are a few options of course, but none of them really appealed to me.

With Mail Order Apocalypse, I decided early on that I didn’t want to reinvent a whole game system, and thus chose Into the Odd for the mechanics. For Raiders of Arismyth, I wanted something that feels similarly simple, but does offer more crunchiness on two fronts: Character generation and advancement, and combat. Especially the latter — it doesn’t make sense to bring miniatures into the mix when distances and such isn’t particularly relevant.

At the same time, I didn’t want the system to be too mathematical. Choosing how to advance ones character shouldn’t require too much in-depth system knowledge. Choices made today shouldn’t completely block later choices.

In the end, I have settled on a few things:

  • There are no attributes, just skills
  • There is no vancian magic, and no mana points or similar either. You know a spell, feel free to cast it as often as you like!
  • Dice are rolled in pools. Any result on a die that is greater than half the total value (ie. 4+ on a 6‑sider, or 11+ on a 20-sider) is a success.
  • Combat should be about movement. Those miniatures want to be moved around after all!
  • The rules aren’t just there as mechanical abstractions, they are there to form the game world and its metaphysics.

Sadly, all this means that where Mail Order Apocalypse managed to cram all the rules onto one single page, the core rules of Raiders of Arismyth need about 10 pages. Let’s dive into how magic works a bit, so you can see what I meant with the last bullet point about the rules influencing the game world:

Magic spells are learned as skills. Learning a new spell skill allows you to perform the least powerful version of that spell with an uttered incantation plus necessary hand-movements using both hands. With additional advancements on that spells skill allows one to make it more powerful, extend the range, or be able to cast it without an incantation or moving the hands.

In order for this to work, the spell and the advancements are tattooed onto the skin of the magic user, anchoring the mystical energies. The positioning of these marks is important, especially if the mage still needs to touch it to perform the spell. One can learn a lot about a mage by looking what sigils are placed where. And of course, seeing someone who chose to spend their precious advancements in order to be able to perform a simple light spell without any hand movements or spoken incantations tells you something about them too…

I did a few test runs with the system already, and the results were quite promising: It played smooth and easy in turns of rules application, but also allowed for some a lot of interesting tactical choices during combat. The latter felt deadly enough to the players, but not overwhelmingly so.

A lot of things are of course still missing: The skill list needs to be finalised, I need to flesh out the example magic rituals, think about equipment, or at least rules on how to improvise weapon statistics in a coherent way, and the world wants some more fleshing out.

But overall, I am quite satisfied with this, and really think this is actually a more complete game than Mail Order Apocalypse (which is more of a setting than a game). You can buy the Ashcan preview edition for a buck at DriveThruRPG if you're curious. But please, let me know your feedback!

10. Juni 2023 playing Keine Kommentare zu I’m writing another game!