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Topics - Jubal

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31
General Chatter - The Boozer / February pub - 29th?
« on: February 06, 2024, 09:25:03 PM »
We're due a Thursday pub, I'm away (as is Glaurung) the week previous, so Thursday the 29th would seem sensible. Any objections?

32
Game & program tutorials / Using Steampipe
« on: February 06, 2024, 04:57:44 PM »
Using Steampipe

Steampipe is the system used for uploading games to Steam as a developer. This is a "tutorial" which is really just me writing shorthand notes from the Steampipe user video because I loathe video content and never want to have to watch that thing again.

Things you need
  • Steamworks set up
  • Steam account with appropriate access
  • Latest steamworks SDK
  • An app ID for the game
  • A game

Config
  • Go to steamworks (on the web) then Dashboard -> Steamworks Settings -> Installation -> General Installation
  • Add a launch option and point to the executable
  • Set the OS it can be used with

Depots
  • Depots are zipped type files that are blocks of content attached to the AppID
  • Go to the Depots page on steamworks and make sure you have a Depot ID.

File Prep
  • Go to the SDK. Steamworks SDK -> tools -> ContentBuilder -> Scripts
  • There'll be a basic app and depot file in there. Recommended by steam to make renamed ones with your relevant ids in the trailing code.
  • Open the app build script, change the app id to match your app id and the depot id to the depot id (and relevant filename). Other parameters optional & explained in code comments.
  • Open the depot build script and change the id. Default location is set to * which means things in the default location Steamworks SDK -> tools -> ContentBuilder -> Content will get packaged. Can be amended for a subfolder, etc.
  • Put the files in the location.

Build
  • Go to Steamworks SDK -> tools -> ContentBuilder -> builder and run steamcmd.exe. This will make and unpack a bunch of stuff the first time you run it.
  • Log in (this seems to be done with "login Username Password")
  • Use the run_app_build command pointing to your app build script.
  • Assuming it works, the build should now be visible on the Steamworks website under the Builds tab.
  • The build can be set to be the main live build by making it default branch.

33
Computer Game Development - The Indie Alley / Is it possible to make an RTS that isn't speed-focused?
« on: January 26, 2024, 12:51:13 PM »
So, a design discussion topic: I went back to doing a bit of RTS gaming once or twice in recent years. It's the genre some of my first computer games in - my four-CD set of Age of Empires 1 & 2 was one of my earlier proper PC games (Civilisation II being the first game I really owned). I've even worked on RTS games, when I was making the 0AD AIs a while back, and I've got a forthcoming academic paper about one.

That said, I'm not sure I've ever enjoyed a lot of the core gameplay of most RTSes, and my last two attempts (playing Impossible Creatures last year, and most recently playing Age of Mythology EE to play through the Chinese myth campaign) have felt a bit meh.

I think there's a number of reasons for that, but a lot of them boil down to effectiveness in the core gameplay loop being mostly focused on efficient gameplay over and above strategic thinking. I'm at least reasonable at macro-level strategy, and working out interesting ways to develop and use the landscape and react to opponents' choice of units, buuuut I'm very bad at extreme-efficiency micromanagement of an RTS economy and battles, which is often really the fundamental required skill. Most of these games essentially boil down to "know the meta, execute it efficiently and at speed" which isn't really the skill-set I want to test when I'm playing a strategy game.

So I was wondering if one could make something that was fundamentally still an RTS but focused on things a bit differently, and indeed if anyone has made RTSes in a different way. I think the essential problem is that the way I'd like to play - which would sort of be more of a "turtle" strategy as default either ends up prioritising rapid expansion anyway (because whoever turtles more of the map's key resources wins) or ends up being an eternal war of miserable attrition. I wonder if adding more strategic and map elements could help counteract this, though: I don't think I've ever seen an RTS where the focus was more on capturing rather than razing enemy settlements for example, and besides the very minimal mechanics for it in AoEII (with inter-player/AI alliance) and AoEIII (with trading post competition) there's rarely much of a diplomatic game to complicate the expand/exterminate loop.

Maybe it's just not my genre of game really, but I've always aesthetically really loved RTSes and it would be cool to find or see people building games in the genre that I got on with better. Would be interested in people's thoughts!

34
Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Chengdu worldcon voting fiasco
« on: January 23, 2024, 01:13:09 PM »
I don't keep up much with "core SFF" fandom, it's the main genre I read but I feel like there's a big big gap between me and people who keep properly up to date with this stuff and read five times as many books as I do per annum and know a bunch of the authors and so on. Nonetheless, it's been crossing my timeline a lot recently, because apparently the Worldcon held in Chengdu has ended up with some very very dodgy looking voting practices, not least disqualifying some pretty well known books and authors (RF Kuang's Babel for example, which I'd have thought might be a strong best novel contender) for reasons that remain unknown and unexplained.

Some writeups if people are interested can be found at File 770, on the blog of Abigail Nussbaum, and as a public patreon post by Jason Sanford.

It's difficult for these sorts of things, which are on the one hand increasingly committed to trying to make a global idea of their work meaningful, to balance that against the actually very real fact that a lot of governments and places in the world actually don't fully share the values that make creative or democratic processes viable.

35
Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / Trade and the left
« on: January 23, 2024, 12:15:44 PM »
So, the recent round of conflict in Yemen has reminded me of something I think doesn't add up well (in that it's historically explicable, but wrong) on the left, which is a general scepticism of any form of commerce or exchange taking place for literally any reason. A lot of people on social media seem to be able to watch the global trade slowdown in the Black Sea and simply assume that all this will lead to is reduced profits for the super-rich and some people getting their Amazon parcels a bit slower, like the Houthis set off some fireworks that caused a traffic jam on the M1 rather than attempting deadly attacks on actual shipping lanes.

This often goes hand in hand with people accepting the narrative that the Houthis, a group whose motto literally includes "Curse upon the Jews" definitely have good and progressive motivations for their "blockade of Israel", which as has been noted plenty of times elsewhere isn't actually a blockade and isn't going to do anything meaningful to the Israeli war effort anyway.

Now, I'd be very willing to suggest that the west in general has done a very poor job of its policy in Yemen, don't get me wrong, and I'm not at all convinced that their response to the Houthis will be or has been effective, and I worry it'll move soon from ineffective to immoral if the Houthis decide to bunker down more in civilian areas and the US/UK decide to bomb them anyway. However what I wanted to think about here was the general unwillingness among left-wing critics of those policies to appreciate that economic exchange is actually important to anyone. Blocking the transport of core goods - most obviously including food, also fuel - and creating gaps in supply can very literally kill a huge number of people who are reliant on those goods, and in a world that operates on tight supply lines a relatively small slowdown per vessel as ships reroute around South Africa can multiply into an economic hit leaving a whole bunch of the world's poorest people in a very bad place indeed.

There are critiques of that wider framework that have merit. Of course we should have an economic system where most of those worst-off people have a lot more economic and supply cushion, and I think there is an argument that the world as a whole has been far too blase about issues like food and water security. I'd also be broadly in favour of trying to reduce aspects of long-distance trade which have arisen from the perverse incentives of highly polluting movements being cheap and labour in the west being expensive (e.g. getting fresh goods from Europe packaged in eastern Asia and then flown back again, which there have been some cases of). I think it's also a fair criticism that far too much of the profit from global trade broadly goes to the wrong people in the wrong places.

Nonetheless, as a whole it's very obvious that there are some countries that can produce a lot more of certain goods than others and are doing, and that we can't healthily sustain people around the world if those goods can't get to them regularly and reliably. Even if one were living in a very different economic system and all these companies were cooperatives, or were owned by some sort of benevolent world social-democratic state, we'd still need to be able to do those exchanges of goods. And one can't really both claim that economic inequalities are bad because they're keeping profits from going to the workers, and claim that we should reform to a system where those profits shouldn't exist at all - even if you think far less or none of them should go to investors, you can't use trade revenues to bring people out of poverty if you're cancelling the trade revenues.

All that said, I think the history of this is pretty interesting, and has a lot of aspects, among but not all of which are:
  • I think part of this is really old, and still comes from a Christian radical background: the sense that trade is per se greedy and that of course greed is bad so commerce is bad, all the way back to imagery of Jesus overturning market stalls in the temple. (This also has some old-fashioned antisemitism subtly laced in at times, too.)
  • This first point has also helped link an essentially left-radical opposition to trade to a deeply conservative one, as in the C19th where the Tory/Liberal split in the UK effectively was on the grounds that the Tories could be anti-commerce because they were the asset owning class.
  • Social democracy and the state in the C20th - I think the left get some scepticism of trade from the understanding that they work via the nation-state and that trade between states can only ever be partly under the control of their particular state. So e.g. European social democrats who harbour deep scepticisms of the USA for its economic practices (ones which I share) will sometimes generalise that to global trade (a sentiment I don't share)
  • Unions and globalisation: Linked to the social democratic sense of trade as being outside state control, there's a real scepticism around offshoring profits or jobs, tax avoidance, etc, which is generally painted onto international trade as a whole thing.
  • Free trade being largely associated with the west, liberalism, etc, such that leftists from the west who see themselves as more generally wanting to upend "the system" translate that into every part of the system, trade included, being Bad Actually.
  • People not understanding that free trade and free markets are different things, and people thinking a laissez-faire market and a free market are the same thing, so they think free trade is bad because it hurts labour rights or something.
  • I think there's a sense of distance about trade: because it's a wide global scale system, people can't hold how it works in their heads, and so people don't really separate bits of it out or work out which bits might be good and which not.
  • Trade is something where it's much easier to see the negatives - ultra-rich people getting to fly private jets, poor working conditions from jobs outsourced to places with poor employment laws, etc - than the positives, because the positives are slow to form and far too widely distributed. That doesn't make the positives less real: but a few pennies off the price of a bag of rice is something that adds up to be meaningful across a large population over time, not something with any real immediacy.

Anyway, I don't know quite where I'm going with this so I'll wrap the vent up there. I don't think it's an uncomplicated issue and there are reasons why we may want to slow down bits of world commerce in very specific ways, but it annoys me seeing people who are going to be among the least affected if there's a major supply chain issue just blithely declaring that maybe we didn't need the supply chains anyway and that nobody will really care about a few merchant vessels anyway. Just thought I'd write this in case anyone else has thoughts.

36
Tabletop Games - The Game Room / Warhammer Old World TTRPG - 300 years before classic Fantasy?
« on: January 22, 2024, 02:22:29 PM »
Quote
Cubicle 7 has announced a new Warhammer tabletop RPG, based on Warhammer: The Old World. You may know the company already for its many other games set in Games Workshop's worlds, including Wrath & Glory, Imperium Maledictum, and Soulbound.

The Old World is Games Workshop's ongoing revival of the Warhammer Fantasy setting as a wargame, after its destruction in 2015 to make way for Age of Sigmar. The weird part is, Cubicle 7 already sells a TTRPG based in the Warhammer Fantasy setting, and has for years—it's called Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and is itself a continuation of a system that first came out in the '80s. This isn't a new edition for that, and doesn't seem to be replacing it—it's a new, separate game. The obvious question is: why?

The announcement is light on detail, but there are a couple of potential reasons why it might make sense to have two RPGs in the same setting. The first is that The Old World wargame takes place about 300 years earlier than the Warhammer Fantasy setting most fans are used to—so a lot earlier than the stuff you'd have seen in, for example, the Total War: Warhammer games, or indeed the default setting books for Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
https://www.pcgamer.com/warhammer-fantasy-is-backand-now-its-getting-a-new-tabletop-rpg-too/


This feels interesting but also odd, as a move, apparently GW is doing a lot of Old World fantasy rebooting because it turns out that people actually liked settings that loosely based themselves off things that made sense and had fun reality-inspired bric-a-brac all over the place.

More oddly though, a new TTRPG (and possibly other stuff, the PCGamer article wasn't clear and I haven't done much wider checking) seem to be set 300 years before the setting people used to know and love, which feels an odd choice to me. It's early enough that there are arbitrary lore differences, apparently fewer Skaven and no Colleges of Magic, but also close enough to the setting's old "present" that you don't have a really big difference in tone. I'm not super clear on why I'd want to play in a chronologically older and less well fleshed out part of a setting's timeline. Dunno, any thoughts?

37
Announcements! The Town Crier! / Exilian Election Results, January 2024
« on: January 20, 2024, 04:40:58 PM »
Election Results

The regular annual Exilian elections for core volunteer staff positions have happened, and our new committee has been duly elected as follows.

Regularly Elected Staff

Jubal (FIF) re-elected unopposed as Basileus, 6 votes to 0 with 1 abstention
Tusky (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Sebastokrator, 6 votes to 0 with 1 abstention
Spritelady (Ind) re-elected unopposed as Tribounos, 7 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions

No candidates stood for the role of Spatharios.

Ratification of Permanent Staff

Jubal (FIF) ratified as Megadux, 7 votes to 0 with 0 abstentions
Glaurung (Ind) ratified as Sakellarios, 6 votes to 0 with 1 abstention


Thanks to everyone who voted and to all our staff: the next regular elections will be in January 2025, with opportunities for joining the staff team in the meantime - including filling the vacancies created by the above departures - likely to be announced in the Questions & Suggestions forum.

38
Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / UK Politics 2024
« on: January 20, 2024, 12:26:05 AM »
Well, it's the UK's election year, and things look... mostly predictable, oddly enough. There will probably be an election, maybe in early autumn, the Conservatives will probably lose badly, and we'll get a Labour government. But we'll see what events have to say about that.


Polling averages as of now have the Conservatives in the mid twenties, Labour in the mid forties, the Liberal Democrats on about ten percent and the same for hard-right Reform, the Greens a bit below those two. Models vary a lot as to what that means exactly, but all of them agree that's a healthy Labour majority: the least bullish models now for Labour put them on a solid 345 seats, the most bullish have them well over four hundred. It's in the zone where it becomes really difficult to do the swings because where the votes come from becomes harder to model with an extremely big vote shift.

The Lib Dems should pick up 15-20 seats on those sorts of numbers: I think the party not gaining double figures of seats would constitute a significant failure (honestly the fact that the party might poll worse than at the previous general election is pretty bad in these circumstances). The Greens are going to struggle because they have only one seat to defend, almost all of their targets are Labour facing, and their few percent of the vote is far less concentrated than that of the Lib Dems. Reform have similar issues, it's far from clear where they can actually target given their almost total lack of a local base anywhere (though if they do well they'll probably hurt the Conservatives especially and also Labour a bit).

39
Exilian Articles / Exilian Interviews: Phoenixguard!
« on: January 18, 2024, 10:32:45 AM »
A Conversation With: Phoenixguard!
Your Interviewer: Jubal

The RPG design team at Norbayne have been key parts of the Exilian community for many years, especially their captain and lead designer James Gatehouse (Phoenixguard09). We caught up with him for a chat in our latest Exilian interview, now going up as Exilians 150,000th post! Read on to find out more about the project, the influences and issues on indie fantasy RPG design, and a fair bit of nerdery besides...

Jubal: So, we’re here mostly to talk about your tabletop RPG project Norbayne, but first, let’s talk about you: what got you into tabletop RPGs to begin with?

Phoenixguard: Hey Jubs, thanks for having us here. For anyone not aware, my name is James Gatehouse. I am the initial creator and lead developer of the Norbayne tabletop role-playing game.

The story as far as my initial tabletop experience is, I think, at least a little atypical. I went to a pretty fundamentalist school in my early years. Dungeons and Dragons for instance was a complete no-go, I was somewhat ostracised because I had read Harry Potter, the whole Satanic Panic made somewhat manifest in suburban Queensland, Australia. Narnia and Lord of the Rings were fine though, so there was some form of acceptable fantasy - though I must admit, I did not get into Lord of the Rings until just before The Two Towers came out in cinemas. I think my first dabbling with a tabletop game was perhaps around early 2003, with a kind of bizarre, dice-less, largely solo-player narrative adventure game with a real kitchen-sink fantasy setting. Somehow, I managed to rope my poor mother into playtesting it for me, which still to this day means a great deal to me, though she has never let me forget what a sacrifice it was for her to sit through!

Around that same time, I got absolutely hooked on Lord of the Rings and devoured absolutely everything Middle-Earth related I could get my hands on. At the end of 2003, after the theatrical release of The Return of the King, I received a copy of the Games Workshop Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game starter box. I was quite young at the time and it took me a fair while to properly parse the rules, but I found it absolutely fascinating. I spent truly unreasonable hours learning the game, painting the miniatures, crafting terrain, playing against myself, memorising the rulebook by rote and soon, I was creating my own rules content as well, coming up with new units and an unreleased ‘campaign’ type system for you to create your own little warband. I would have been insufferable as a child (still am by most accounts).

I progressed into Warhammer pretty smoothly from that point, crafting another homebrew RP system to use with the Warhammer Fantasy setting, this one relying on D6 dice pools. Not long after running a few games of this at school, I was introduced to the concept of Dungeons and Dragons and played a few games, but I was never really enamoured with the D20 system.

Since that time, I’ve dabbled a bit in a few different tabletop systems, particularly enjoying the 2nd edition of Fantasy Flight Games Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing Game, which gave me a great appreciation of the versatility of a percentile-based system. It is an appreciation which has informed many of the design decisions which have, in turn, given rise to Norbayne.


A draft title page from an earlier Norbayne version.
Jubal: And what made you start work on the Norbayne setting – were there particular media or ideas that inspired it, or did it just grow out of the play culture at your own table?

Phoenixguard: I think it was late 2011. I had been struggling for months to write a story. I had all the ideas for an interesting setting and world, but could not come up with a compelling story to write. The depression was setting in alarmingly quickly, until a friend of mine at the time (now wife), Stephanie, told me one evening, “Don’t write a story then, use the world you’ve created for something else.”

In hindsight, that advice seems very simple, but at the time, my mind was blown. It hadn’t occurred to me to even consider such a thing. So I think maybe ten months passed, where I worked on this thing basically in secret. I put together what I felt was quite a robust system to go with the setting and then began to invite a few people I thought may be interested. At the time, we didn’t actually have an explicit table as such, it was the playtesting of this game which brought our gaming group together. Thus was the Three Coins campaign born, which would last approximately nine years in the end, albeit with a couple of hiatuses in there due to various real-life scheduling issues.

Jubal: Can you give us a quick pitch – what makes Norbayne stand out for you and what makes it differ from other TTRPG settings out there?

Phoenixguard: From a setting perspective, there’s a bit of everything. We’ve got some allusions to an almost space operatic in the deep past of the setting, a classical fantasy kind of feel with some unique twists to the formula and then a legitimately in-depth evolutionary origin for the various species at large in the world. I think we’ve hit a really good balance between providing a detailed framework and providing enough freedom to come up with your own parts of the setting.

On the mechanical front, it’s elaborate. We’re a hard class-based percentile system with a fully independent ruleset and multiple ways to play baked into the core rules. While we may have a hard class-based design, the customisation available to you within your Class selection is prodigious, and to be fair, is probably the biggest part of why we’re still in development.

Jubal: If you could pick one place and one character that really sum up the setting for you, who and where would those be – and why?

Phoenixguard: I’m afraid I really can’t pick a single place or character right off the bat, but I think the initial Three Coins group is pretty representative of the setting. For that matter, there are worse locations to consider than the independent township of Summer Hill, in which we spend a great deal of time throughout the course of the Three Coins campaign. A Midland town sitting on the border between two powerful kingdoms, Summer Hill society is a conglomeration of various peoples, as are most towns throughout the Midlands of Norbayne come the modern era. One big design concept I wanted to emphasise right from the beginning was to stay away from the idea of great monolithic cultures being demarcated by species. In some places, this is still the case, but these cases are largely the exception, usually due to remoteness of location and the deliberately insular nature of the culture itself. By the modern age of Norbayne, most of the more populous settlements will have a mixed species population, and the society reflects this.

As for our initial playtest group, in large parts they defined the quintessential member of their people. For instance, George’s character, Harold Oakenshield provided us with a great example of just what an Invarrian was. He threw himself into the physiology of the species, for example always asking specifically if he could smell anything when I asked for Perception Checks, but he also really embraced the mentality of the Invarrians, their dualistic nature and dichotomy between their generally fun-loving personality and their inherent thrill in causing destruction.

He wasn’t alone in this. For instance, Steph’s Danann, Maebh Preachain-Eite really delved into the psyche of a Fell Clan Danann who had imposed a form of self-exile upon herself.

This is not to say we have not had similarly well-fleshed out and compelling characters since this time. Steph again has really hit the brief perfectly with another Danann, Bedelia Ceanndorcha in our Forgotten Glories campaign for example, nailing the concept of the Fell Clan Danann trying to exist in a society she really doesn’t quite understand, all the while dealing with her own, personal historical trauma.

Jubal: The aesthetics of much of Norbayne have a European feel – with for example the highlanders having very Scots aesthetics, some celtic myth terms like Danaan used. But, of course, you and your team are all Australian. What do you think is the attraction of building that Europeanism into your worlds – and how do you think your experiences and surroundings growing up in Australia might have influenced Norbayne?

Phoenixguard: In large part, this particular influence has come from me. The Lord of the Rings in particular was a huge influence upon me and most of the work I have done, even outside of the Norbayne project. I’d consider the Warhammer setting to also be a significant influence too, which definitely has a fairly strong European feel to it as well. I think personally, it’s a matter of comfort. I understand European folklore and languages quite well and can therefore incorporate it more easily as inspiration for my own works.

That is one thing to note, I guess. A lot of the structure of the setting is built around my personal love for and interest in languages. We use real-world languages to help us represent the in-game dialects (similarly to what Tolkien did, what with using Old English to represent Rohirric for instance, though I am not talented nor mad enough to construct my own languages), and as such, relationships between languages in the real world can help reveal various relationships between the languages, peoples and cultures of the world of Norbayne. It’s a fun little game you can play while you make your way through our years of collated lore. 


Some highlanders from Norbayne's, well, highlands.

Jubal: To return to the other part of the question about whether there's any 'Australian-ness' in how Norbayne has come together, do you think your relationship to that European folklore differs from authors who live in Europe, in aspects of landscape, wildlife or culture that might resonate differently for you?

Phoenixguard: Oh definitely, no doubt at all. I think being so far removed from that European ‘base’ has given our development a sense of other-ness. There’s a sense of it still being mysterious and foreign, without it being wholly unrecognisable and unfamiliar. Particularly from a landscape perspective, Australia doesn’t exactly have mountains, or at least not really in the sense other continents do, so there is a sense of the mountain ranges of Norbayne feeling perhaps a little more fantastical as a result.

There’d be quite a few things in that vein too, for instance, wolves. Wolves in many places in Europe are a very real and somewhat mundane creature (for all they are endangered in many regions today) however from an Australian perspective, there is so much mythology built up around those animals which cannot be experienced in day-to-day life. The Norbayne setting treats various species and variety of wolf perhaps more seriously and with more reverence (not sure if it’s the correct term) than other comparable settings may.

Jubal: You mentioned Warhammer and Tolkien as core inspirations. Warhammer in particular is a sort of "bucket of oddments" approach to a setting, whereas Tolkien's work has something of a more internally consistent and less anarchic feel (Tom Bombadil notwithstanding). Which of those approaches do you think better characterises how you build fantasy?

Phoenixguard: I think I aim for somewhere in between, as close to the centre as possible, while pushing to one extreme or the other as the whim takes me. While that sounds anarchic and unfocussed, I think it adds to the depth of the setting as, ideally, we’d like to think there should be something for everyone.

It's probably fair to say I aim for internal consistency everywhere I can and have spent countless hours mulling over the evolutionary paths of any given ancestry in an attempt to tie their birth into the setting’s prehistory, but sometimes, just as in the real world, occurrences can be wild and unexpected and there may just be no explanation every now and then, which just adds to the mystery and excitement.

I hope so, anyway. 


Jubal: Norbayne is a setting first and foremost but it’s also a completely independent game with its own rules. What made you decide to develop Norbayne as a totally independent system, rather than a setting supplement for a major published TTRPG rule set?

Phoenixguard: In light of the recent Wizards of the Coast Open Gaming Licence drama, I’m very glad I chose to do something different. Largely, I struggled to find a system which properly modelled the specifics of how I wanted the setting to be represented. The WFRPG, while excellent and a favourite of mine, doesn’t lend itself particularly well to being translated to other settings. I’ve never really liked most D20-based systems and I definitely did not want to work with Vancian-style casting for Norbayne’s various magic systems.

In the end, it almost felt like less work to build a system from scratch, as compared to chopping and changing something which already existed to make it fit reasonably well.

I remember the very early days of the project, trying to show people and explain it to them and I’d regularly be met with a barrage of, “Why don’t you just use the D&D rules?” Considering that fact, you would think I’d have a better answer for this question by now.


GMing Norbayne: Phoenixguard in action
Jubal: Could you give us a blow-by-blow account of a quick example combat round, to give people an idea of how some rolls might play out in your system?

Phoenixguard: Of course. I’ll try to keep this as brief as possible, as while on the tabletop this is usually pretty quick and efficient, in prose it might come across a bit rough.

On any given combat round, each participant would act in Initiative order, which is determined by rolling a single d10 and adding it to your character’s Initiative Statistic. For example, let’s say two of our longest running characters, the sisters, Mathlynn and Aracaeda Cild-Ailith are going to have a little sparring match to pass the time.

They’d each determine their Initiative, with the higher result acting first. In this case, it is likely Aracaeda would act first as she has the higher base Initiative, but there is a chance she’d be slow on the uptake. For the example’s sake, let’s say she rolled higher. Each character generally has a Movement Action and a Full Action to utilise on their turn. Aracaeda may move up to her Speed Statistic in feet as a Movement Action every turn. In addition to this, she may elect to perform a Full Attack with her Full Action or a Quick Attack with a Half Action. By electing to do the latter, Aracaeda may hold a Half Action in reserve to use as a Dodge or Parry should the occasion call for it.

She does so, moving into close combat with Mathlynn and making a Quick Attack with her longsword. She must then determine her target number to hit Mathlynn. By adding her Dexterity Statistic to any bonus she may have to her Close Combat Skill and her longsword Weapon Proficiency and then subtracting any situation negatives she may suffer to the target number, Aracaeda can determine her target number. She may then roll a d100 to determine her success, wanting to get as far under the target number as she can. She will then advise the Games Master of how many ‘degrees of success’ she achieved, by determining the difference between the ‘10’s’ die of the d100 and the ‘10’s’ place value of the target number. For example, if her target number was ‘87’ and she rolled a ‘24’, she would have achieved 6 degrees of success.

Mathlynn, should she have a half action available to her, may attempt to Parry or Dodge this oncoming attack. She would do this by either rolling a d100 and attempting to achieve higher than Aracaeda’s target number to hit, or alternatively rolling under her own Agility Statistic plus any bonus she may have to her own Dodge Skill. In this case, Mathlynn knows Aracaeda’s target number is very high and so would likely attempt to dodge the strike. Should she succeed, no Damage would be done, though on her turn, Mathlynn would only have a Half Action with which to perform any activities, as she would have used a Half Action to perform the Dodge Check. Should she fail to perform the Dodge, she would of course take damage, equal to Aracaeda’s degrees of success to hit, the damage value of her sword and her Strength Modifier, plus any other bonuses Aracaeda may have. This would then be mitigated by any damage reduction and resistances Mathlynn may have, with the final total subtracted from Mathlynn’s current Health total.

This is our basic close combat mechanic, though different weapons, armour, Talents and other abilities can cause this initial mechanic to take on further varied forms. On her own turn, Mathlynn, a Necromancer, may well seek to raise some nearby corpses and use them to apprehend and detain her sister.

Jubal: What have been some of the biggest problems and changes you’ve had to make on a mechanics and rules level to the game over time, and how do you approach those challenges?

Phoenixguard: We’ve seen quite a few major paradigm changes to the system over the years. I think the first big one (and likely the most contentious in practice) was implementing Soulfire as a generated Statistic for your character. Previously, we balanced magic by making it very dangerous, but it quickly became apparent this was not particularly working. As such, I reduced the inherent danger of Arcane Magic by a little and incorporated Soulfire as a way of tracking your character’s ability to sling spells around. There was a varied reaction to that change, let me tell you.

On the one hand, about half the party were very happy with the change, while particularly Steph, who was playing a Mage, could not have felt more differently.

I think the most important thing we’ve had to embrace with regards to this is the fact our stories to date, while the game as a whole is now largely realised, remain playtests. As such, when a balancing issue does become apparent, we normally try and implement fixes in between sessions. In recent years, this has become significantly less prevalent, but I can’t deny, it has taken some cooperation and understanding from the playing group.

Jubal: Can you talk a bit more about how you deal with that playtesting element? Are there particular guidelines you have to set yourself with how to approach rebalancing and other issues, like not changing too many elements at once, or do you just reshuffle the game as needed and eyeball the outcome you're after?

Phoenixguard: Again, probably a bit of both. I try my best to factor in the feedback from each of the players at the table and any reports I may get from outside it. I personally try to make changes to a certain mechanic or area of the game in one hit and hope not to change too many other major elements at the same time in an attempt to help the players keep track of changes when they occur. By dint of the various campaigns we play though, this can be somewhat difficult at times, which again, as mentioned previously, requires some understanding and cooperation from the players.

As the ruleset is, to be frank, pretty sprawling at this stage, there’s certainly an element of simply eyeballing changes and trying to monitor it in play. We are lucky to have a few members of the team with a bit of an analytical bent. Previously, one of our inaugural players, Geoffrey, provided us with some significant statistical breakdowns for a fair few concepts to help give us an idea of places we should look to redress, which was very useful.

We are bringing quite a few new players into the game in the next few months too, which I’ll mention again a little bit later. We’re definitely hoping to continue to build up our resources in this area as we are constantly looking for different perspectives and experiences to help us enrich the game experience.


The Norbayne team busy with a long Hallowe'en playtest session
Jubal: Of course, Norbayne’s a team project: how do you balance different people’s inputs and interests, and how important is that collective part of the effort to what Norbayne has become?

Phoenixguard: It’s been huge, right from the outset. I mentioned before how we’ve had so many elements of the setting informed by the creativity of our players. So much of the Invarrian society for instance was laid out by George initially when he played Harold Oakenshield in Three Coins, but then a lot more of it was codified by Bri when she put together an elaborate backstory for Assar Eiliert upon the resumption of The God King campaign.

Skye has been huge in this area too. There’s a lot of depth in many different places which is owed to Skye, firstly as a player, then as part of our development team and, more recently, as a games master too. We have a private chat where Skye just asks me random setting-related questions, which I may or may not end up finishing the answers to.

The balancing act has been interesting. I think it’s fair to say, from a setting and lore perspective, the entire team is more than happy to cede overall decisions to me, but I guess I’m lucky in that the whole team has a good grasp of the feel of the setting. Most discussion surrounding, “Can I do this in the setting?” is normally very positive and built around discussing exactly how such a thing could work. It is very rare I’ve had to say to one of our players, “No, it doesn’t work like that, you couldn’t do such a thing.”

The rules and system differences can be a little more contentious. Again, normally the final decision pretty well comes down to me, but there’s been a few times where I’ve been outvoted. I try to remain as balanced and even-handed as possible and I’ve had to learn to take a step back and let others provide their input even in those situations where I disagree.

The key principle we’ve really tried to push recently has been the idea of, ‘Responsibility, not ownership.’ There was a tendency in the past where individual developers would feel a sense of ownership over concepts and elements of the game they had worked on, which led to a feeling of discontent upon other members of the team running an eye over those elements and offering feedback, or, in my opinion, even more distressingly, a sense one could not work upon a certain concept or class because it was one individual’s personal project. We’ve consciously tried to move away from this, seeking a holistic design process which encompasses the core team as a base and referring to our consultant team as required.

Jubal: And to give people an insight into your next steps, what can we expect from Norbayne in the near future?

Phoenixguard: At this stage, we’re getting mighty close to launching our Kickstarter campaign. We’ve been dedicated to making sure the actual content of the game is completed before launching the Kickstarter, so all we will need to do is fund the artwork and overall design of our product and then printing and distribution costs.

We’re currently in the process of really opening our playtesting group too. We’ve had a significant influx of interested newcomers looking to play some one-shot games with our development team after we put out a call to arms of sorts.

Steph and I got married last April, so we’re taking a little bit of time to enjoy that before launching into what is shaping up to be our biggest year yet. Between our newcomer one-shots, the launch of Arc 3 of Seven Stones and a Pale Shadow and hopefully the release of our Great Maw table-read, there’ll be plenty of content to experience in the lead up to the Kickstarter campaign.

There’s also been a little bit of talk around a streamed game, though I probably shouldn’t say too much more about that.

Jubal: And finally, where can people find out more about the game?

Phoenixguard: At this stage, a lot of our material is based here on Exilian. We will be moving to our own website in time, but we’ll be maintaining a strong presence on Exilian to discuss elements of the game moving forward.

If you’d like to join our community and keep abreast of any and all updates, please join our Discord. You’ll note we’re still taking expressions of interest for prospective newcomers. At this time, we’re only able to cater for players local to the South-East Queensland area in Australia, however we are working to incorporate a remote option for our friends further afield.

Lastly, we have an Instagram page at the moment, where we’ve historically posted all kinds of concept art, fan art and sometimes photos and snippets of video from our sessions. Feel free to give us a cheeky follow on there.




40
General Chatter - The Boozer / January Pub - 26th?
« on: January 07, 2024, 10:23:32 PM »
Maybe Friday 26th this month? Would that work for people? I'm probably quite flexible if other options are needed.

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Announcements! The Town Crier! / Updates from the Forge 52: New Year 2024
« on: January 06, 2024, 09:15:04 PM »
Issue 52: New Year 2024

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome back to another traditionally late issue of Updates from the Forge, Exilian's newsletter of creative geekery! As ever, these pages contain just a handful of the many projects that indie game developers, ink-handed writers, wandering bards, scholars of repute, and other folk of an eccentric, creative, and nerdish persuasion have been churning out for the edification and delight of the general public - which here, dear reader, means you.

A small change for this issue is that I'm trialling renaming this header section to include community news, which is usually what about two thirds of the editorial actually covers - or perhaps we should move that to a separate article or section in and of itself. Feedback would be very welcome on where that should go, so let us know where you'd like to see the bit of this newsletter where we recap recent site events, give important announcements for the whole community, and give a quick run-down of links to things that didn't get space in the main issue. It'd be great to hear from you!

And what news is there, before we get to the updates, I (would like to imagine I) hear you cry? Well, the last quarter of 2023 had all the usual Exilian things, continued online meetups and much work at the creative forges with everything from travels in Bulgaria and the space industry in Spain to bardic music for an angry space frog warrior and disabling strikes in game rules coming up across the forum. We also had the announcement of our fourth Coding Medieval Worlds workshop run between our community and the University of Vienna in Austria, which you can find out about here - if you're interested in coming late places may still be available. The Exilian Discord had a successful film night, run by Jafeth Who Is Also Here, who we can also welcome as Exilian's newest voting member as of this weekend! We also launched our 2023-2024 Creative Competition, this time with the theme of Hibernation, for which we're really looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

There's plenty coming up, too: the first part of the year is always a busy run here, with Coding Medieval Worlds and Cyril and Methodius Day in February and Exilian's anniversary day in March. We're also expecting more than one game project to reach fruition in the coming months, so there's lots to stay tuned and get excited about.

But that's all yet to come, and you're here to see what excitements people have already prepared - onward, then, to a new year and a new set of Updates from the Forge...

CONTENTS:

GAME DEV
Maciek's Monk Tower


A new project from a new Exilian member, Monk Tower is a small roguelike where you must try to retrieve a lost manuscript from the twentieth level of, well, a tower. Besides being twenty storeys tall, the Monk Tower has plenty of inhabitants, none of whom seem to like you very much, most notably rats, snakes, and (this next one will shock you) monks, who have a whole range of abilities including poisons, ranged weapons, and other powers to throw in your general direction. You can find herbalists' cauldrons, unidentified potions, mislaid weaponry, and forges throughout the tower to help you on your quest - in other words, it's a traditional roguelike, and a nicely done and enjoyable one at that.

The combat is turn-based, and ensuring you don't get surrounded by enemies can be crucial to your survival, as can checking your weaponry, with a weapon durability system that, at worst, can leave you flailing for a weapon just when you need one most. Despite this complexity the controls and overall game are simple to pick up, and its billing as a coffee-break roguelike and browser-based play makes it very easy to have a run at in odd moments. As such, well worth checking out and dropping some feedback on, and it'll be interesting to see how future versions develop.


To the far corners of Kavis

Jubal's slow and long-standing project to map and build RPG rules for the early medieval fantasy world of Kavis has continued with a number of recent additions and blogposts, with recent months focusing on some of the more outlying regions of the world and how one gets between them. The last post covered letters and letter-carriers, from official postal services to the more general use of merchants as. This might be of interest for anyone designing TTRPGs and computer games, as one of many areas where defaulting to a modern expectation can shut off some potentially interesting opportunities for interactions and quests available in game contexts.

There have also been two new places given brief write-ups that may expand in future. The smaller of the two, Caracess, is a cliff-cut city in the far east of the setting, noted for its lamp-makers and its fleets, situated on an impenetrable coastline yet making a name for itself as one of the great ports and craft centres of the world. Verasine meanwhile is an entire archipelago to the deep southwest of the setting's core, a vast island-chain realm of magicians with forces of goblin and troll servants, keeping itself largely in stern isolation from much of the rest of the world except occasional permitted ports and exiles.

There's also a write-up of a new test game, indicating that as well as the overall work on world building things are moving along on the rules and play side, so keep an eye out for adventures and stories coming out from Kavis in the coming months as well as the general setting designs available on Exilian: there's much more to explore in this mysterious world, wrapped between dawn and dusk where weavers spin thread and the mists rise in the mornings. What will you find there?



After the Tourney


Recently from Tusky, we've had a post-hoc recap of Tourney, the medieval tournament simulator, how the project went and what happened - and if you're an indie game dev or considering your own projects, it's fascinating reading. Everything from a word-cloud of the Steam reviews to reflections on the huge challenges of game development on a budget in a pandemic has been gone through. Some of the particularly interesting take-aways are on player expectations and the aspects of the game that sat between or inserted bits of other genres, and the balance of delivery dates and building a game that lives up to expectations.

The resulting game, regardless, ended up with positive reviews and a great four-level campaign: if you're up for some medieval tournament tycoon madness and the ability to back your own winning horses (and for that matter riders) then it's definitely a game to check out!


ARTS AND WRITING


The Old Goat and the Alien: Kickstarter Success!


It's lovely being able to congratulate our friend, SFF author, and 2022-3 Exilian Winter Competition winner vicorva on another successful kickstarter, and here we are, able to do just that! Their next book, The Old Goat and the Alien, turns to the sci-fi side to explore some of the issues of a non-capitalist society and seeing humans from a different perspective, done with their characteristic gentleness and warmth as a writer. The book also promises boardgames and sparkly space animals, which seems like the sort of alternative sense of perspective that the world could really do with more of sometimes, and we've no doubt that many folks will be looking forward to reading it.

The kickstarter successfully got to 212% of its funding total, and after proofing and printing the final book should be out by sometime this coming spring, with a public online launch party when it hits readers' bookshelves, so if you're a van of Veo's work then do keep an eye out for that!


The Khan Poetically Returns...

Quote
Around and around in circles again
Repetition is my old new friend
With my tail in my mouth there is no end
Back to the same place all over again...

After an absence of a few years from the streets of Exilianople, Cuddly Khan has ridden back through the front gates with some new poetry to share! He's been discussing the importance of poetry to him as a way of getting through difficult situations, as well as sharing several of his works from recent years. These include themes of darkness, light, and cycles, including one on the theme of the Ouroboros and an untitled piece on the ideas of abyss and hiding fragments of oneself out of view. To find all these and future poetry, why not head over to the Khan's thread and see what's going on?


A Tale of Life Unbidden


Jubal may more usually post poems and songs than prose to the good people of Exilian, but we've had a recent new example of the latter in the short tale Life, Unbidden, in which a witch or two face some unexpected problems and visitors. On a spring day, there is blood in the air across some old barrow-mounds, and two small feet pad their way through old burial mounds that play host to deep purple flowers which - so they say - grew from the blood of ancient warriors long ago. To find out what happens next, read on, dear reader, read on...


Seasonal StoryDragon Poetry

We've had lovely poems from StoryDragon as well this year, and to close out 2023 we had a seasonal special with the wintry Christmas verse Notlaic ṡon. It borrows inspiration from Old Irish poetry and schemes, even containing a full verse in the language which those of you who are particular sorts of linguistic nerd may have fun translating. The rest of the poem is great regardless of one's skills - many of those who've been celebrating Christmases around the world will find that the festival's write-up as "the great birthfeast" might come as a particularly apt way to describe the festivities! If you're really enjoying StoryDragon's work, do check out the StoryDragon Ko-fi as well as checking out the link below to read more!


MISCELLANY

The Great Plate Debate


If you're interested in history, this is a thread not to miss, with historian and Exilian regular Dubsartur discussing the topic of historical armour and its colouration, especially the process of blueing or blackening that can provide both rust resistance and at times a particular panache to certain suits of plate armour used in the past. Much of our knowledge of the original state of these armours involves interpretation of surviving pieces that may have been modified by having their older finishes scrubbed off, or art which is restricted by the demands of its particular medium as much as the things that it seeks to depict in the first place. So how much do we really know about medieval and earlier armours and what they looked like? This thread is a good read for starting to think about the evidence:
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Game Dev resources around Exilian


Whatever side of game design and development you're interested in - or even if you're just considering getting into it - people have been posting some really interesting resources around Exilian, giving a unique mix of areas and thought spaces for you to explore around the art. Recent examples include the free book Freedom, Oppression, Games and Play, which is the anthology from the Future and Reality of Games 2022 conference. There's plenty of history-and-games content elsewhere on the site too, including the subforum for our Coding Medieval Worlds workshops and a video Dubsartur recently shared on 3D sword models in games.

Alternatively, if the more technical side is your thing, we've been having some discussions of 3D Math Primer for Graphics and Game Development, another free book that covers the maths of three dimensional spaces with a view to honing your game dev skills. It moves from the basics of cartesian systems at the start of the book up through four-dimensional space and polar coordinate maths through to the complexities of rendering equations, parametric curves and rigid body mechanics. It's a really nice resource to have freely available, and should be really interesting for anyone wanting to get into the engine development side of game dev. Do take a look!



And that's all for another few months! As ever, please do share this newsletter with your friends, colleagues, sworn nemesis, cat, or anyone else who might be interested in the creative things we're doing here. The more feedback and support we get, the better this newsletter can support the lovely creative folk who are building and sharing knowledge about their creative endeavours. Hope to hear from you soon!

42
Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / World Politics and Elections 2024
« on: January 05, 2024, 11:25:28 PM »
Welcome back to another year in world poltics! 2024 will be a heavier duty year than 2023 for elections globally, and there's a lot of really major ones going on...

I think the first really notable election of 2024 might be Taiwan's presidency, which looks very tight between the one-china KMT and more Taiwan-independencey DPP candidates.

There's also UK and US elections which will be covered in their own threads, and an Indian general election where my expectation is that Modi will romp home again, but a big coalition of opposition parties aren't so far behind that a bad year for the BJP couldn't knock them out of power. Congress and its allies coming back into government would be a big deal if it happened, I think. We also have an election for the European parliament, which currently looks like it will mean a noticeable shift to the right (there's been speculation about the nationalist ECR becoming part of the Union's notional governing majority, perhaps replacing the Green/EFA, which would be a real change if it happened but we'll see). The right do need to maintain some of their current high polling to make that work though, and in Italy where they're in government and the Netherlands where they're trying to form one, they might not retain current numbers. At some point I think Austria is also up for elections, and Ireland could be though they might leave it to early 2025.

43
Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza / US Politics 2024
« on: January 05, 2024, 10:24:47 PM »
Another year, another US Pol thread beginneth.

The next few weeks will be critical to whether Trump gets a really clear run at the presidency from the GOP and legal sides (he probably will). If he runs table in Iowa and New Hampshire, which he looks like doing, that probably clears the GOP field for the most part. There's an outside chance that Nikki Haley could, if she comes second in Iowa and wins NH, still be a serious challenger, but that's unlikely.

At the moment Trump is largely outpolling Biden: I suspect that this is largely a result of Biden's polling being depressed among his own side (Israel, general incumbency penalties) while Trump's is buoyant, and that it'll be tighter once partisanship really starts cranking in and people face up to the potential reality of a second Trump presidency.

44
Announcements! The Town Crier! / Creative Competiton 2023-24: Hibernation!
« on: December 31, 2023, 11:39:22 PM »
Creative Competition: Hibernation
 

It's time for another of our winter creative competitions! Moving on from last year's SNOWSTORM, this year we hide away from the harshest parts of the winter chill to reach a new topic of HIBERNATION - it's time to keep out of the cold and get as cosy as possible, dreaming away the long nights as the snow falls above. Hibernation can be short or long term, it can be reality or metaphor, a state of stasis or a time of dreams and change. However you choose to bring the long sleep into your creativity, this competition is here for your most creative hibernatory works!


The rules are as follows:
1. Produce your entry. It can be a game, artwork, story, poem, recipe,  rules supplement, sculpture, dance piece, music, whatever - any sort of creative response to the theme.
2. PM your entry (or a link thereto) to Jubal, or send it by email to exilian@exilian.co.uk, and post in this thread to say you've put your entry in. Entries that don't have both the post and PM in will not be considered, and you must not post your entry publicly during the contest (so as to ensure judging is name-blind).
3. Each person is allowed up to two entries.
4. Entries must be in by 23:59 GMT, February 10, 2024.
5. The judges will score each work out of ten on two grounds: how good a response to the prompt it was, and how well executed the result was.
6. Winners will be announced by or before February 29. All entries will then be posted in a public showcase.

PRIZES

Main Prize:
1x copy of UNDER THE YOKE, the peasant life simulator by Priory Games
1x copy of ROCKPOOL, the tabletop role-playing game about life on the shoreline by Jubal

If you'd like to donate a prize and thereby sponsor the competition, please get in touch :)

THE JUDGES

Yvonne Zivkovic is a Croatian poet and literature scholar whose work focuses on the ways that migrant cultures, identity, and memory work together and how they construct ideas of heritage and belonging. Having grown up in Germany and currently living in Austria, she speaks German, Serbo-croatian, Italian and French, but writes her poems in English, somewhere in the eye of the linguistic storm between them.

Daniel Burke is a game developer and academic translator from Perth, Australia currently developing the fantasy inn management and occasional robbery simulator Innkeep, in which the player accidentally becomes master of an out-of-the-way tavern and gets caught up in much deeper issues while trying to survive thereafter. He also specialises in Japanese-to-English translation with a particular interest in philosophy and the way that words and meanings change between contexts.

45
Writing, Poems, AARs, and Stories - The Storyteller's Hall / Hearth Stories Magazine
« on: December 27, 2023, 11:19:13 PM »
I stumbled across this zine of SFF stories that explore relationships, nature, family, and comfort, which sounds like it might be interesting to some folks here so here's a share of it:
https://hearthstories.org/issues/1.html

I've not read the pieces yet but there look like being some interesting titles.

They also have a neighbours page which I've not had time to peruse yet.

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