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We're back to being due a Friday, the 21st is the day before A Certain Member Of This Parish gets married, so that leaves us with the 28th. Any objections?

[sound snappy and engaging]

The Name of The Game

By Jubal

This is a short piece on naming games! A lot of people, especially in small gaming projects, need to find names for their game, and a lot of what some people come up with can be a little underwhelming.

Often, I think the trap people fall into is to try and take a name format they know from a larger game elsewhere, and then take something that sounds vaguely similar, without thinking about game names in terms of function. Game names, though, absolutely are a functional part of the game's marketing and experience.

Game names need to do one of three things, ideally more than one: they need to sound snappy and engaging, they need to tell people something about the game, or they need to give a hook people will be interested in. You don't need all of these in every game name - there are trade-offs - but these are core things to keep in mind.

Sounding snappy is the most subjective part of this setup, but it's important nonetheless. If  game name ideally shouldn't be more than about 4-5 syllables. If it's longer, then it at least should have an obvious abbreviation. All the same techniques that work in poetry or marketing also apply to game titles: think for example about assonance (whether words have sounds that form a pattern) and alliteration (same sound/letter at the start of the words). Sometimes the best way to get a sense of this is to literally try saying the name out loud, or get someone else to do it: the instinct of whether it sounds right is easier to get in spoken format.

A brief note here on articles. "A" and "The" have quite different functions in titles. It often IS worth using one or the other. "A Tale of Doom" is better than "Tale of Doom", but is also different to "The Tale of Doom". Use "the" when you want the name to feel definite and singular, and "A" when you want the name to feel like part of something wider, more ephemeral, or more specific to a character rather than the whole world.

Telling people something about the game is a complex problem. It's a major part of game naming – you want to be informative but ideally without just saying a feature directly. So for example "Dungeons of Hinterberg" is a really good info-title. Dungeons bring the correct expectations of dungeon-crawling, and Hinterberg implies some kind of mountain settlement, and that's basically the game... but it doesn't tell you everything, and it implies some uniqueness to what it's doing, because Hinterberg is a place the player presumable doesn't know (providing a bit of a hook). It's also important that Hinterberg provides a bunch of signals that a more generic name might not – hinter makes us think hinterland, berg is a common root for mountains. Dungeons of Alzorgard is not nearly as good a name, because Alzorgard tells us nothing by comparison. Conversely, the game "Tactical Battles" is too blunt a name. Quite a lot of games have tactical battles, so why people should play your game which hasn't told them anything other than that it has a very common feature in it is left unclear.

The "hook" element can also be phrased as "does the title create a question the player will want an answer to". This is a less strongly used element, but it can be pretty effective. Usually hooks aren't phrased as questions, though there are exceptions: it's about creating a juxtaposition of things that inspire curiosity, or using something that's inherently mysterious. Something like "There's A Gun In The Office" is a hook title: it does tell you quite a bit about the game's setting (guns and offices) but primarily its job is to set up a literal Chekhov's gun effect, an expectation that the gun will eventually go off, but without being clear about under what circumstances.

There's a sting in the tail of all these parts, though, which is that a lot of them are easier, or suggest longer names, for games that are in larger, better known franchises. This is for two reasons. Firstly, if an abbreviation can apply to multiple things, you need to be a pretty big game to muscle others out. DAI, in gaming circles, is Dragon Age: Inquisition. So if you went and made De Administrando Imperio, a Byzantine management sim based on the text of the same name by the emperor Constantine VII, you absolutely wouldn't manage to get more than about five actual Byzantinists joining with you in calling that DAI rather than the Dragon Age title.

Also, bigger game names can be longer because the need to inform a player that a title is part of a series they like is valuable enough to take the extra syllables to do. The extra six syllables to add "The Legend of Zelda" to a game's title is more than worth it because for most buyers the single most important factor in their decision to buy is just "it's another Zelda game!". Conversely, if you're producing the first game in a planned series, calling it "The Apocalypse of Artodor: Swords of Awakening" doesn't work as well. You may have 10 Apocalypse of Artodor games planned, but having that in the title doesn't yet mean anything to anyone and is a lot of weight of syllables for something which doesn't have a strong pull factor. It's also notable that a lot of bigger game series start with a simpler title rather than a long one with a colon: for example, the first Zelda game is just "The Legend of Zelda".


Now, let's look at examples!

Dragon Age: Origins. OK, I know it's the first game in a series. The Dragon reference also tells me it's probably fantasy. Solid title all round.

Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time. This seems a fairly long one – but most of the name is there to tell me things. First, the game tells me that it's a Legend of Zelda game, which is an already established franchise. The Ocarina of Time bit is more a hook than information, in that it makes us question "what does an Ocarina have to do with Time" and in many cases "hang on what's an Ocarina". So, informative and raises questions.

The Exile Princes. This tells me it's likely to involve rulers, maybe strategy or RPG elements, maybe exploration elements given the 'exile' element. All of which are correct.

Roadwarden. This is snappy and tells me who my character will be, really good informative title.

Wildermyth. Also snappy and tells me that a) there'll be a mythos/fantasy element and b) that there'll be some focus on the wilderness. Again, informative but the portmanteau saves on syllables, making it much cleaner than "Mythos of the Wilderness" would have been.

Rome: Total War. This tells me it's a Total War game. Even if I've not played one, Total War is a strategy concept in and of itself, so the franchise title works even if you're unfamiliar with the franchise. Also, it's about Rome. And the whole thing is done in four syllables.

Deponia. Actually one of the weaker examples here in that it tells me absolutely nothing. However, it sounds kinda cool, so fits the snappy criterion.

Under The Yoke. This is a really good one. It's short (four syllables) and it provides multiple meanings which both apply to the game. It's a game about medieval agriculture so animals will literally be yoked to plough fields, but the phrase "under the yoke" is often used for someone working excessively hard for someone else, as was the case with medieval peasants.

Tyranny. A three syllable, single word title that also gets across the overarching theme of the game, how you survive and create your own space under – while taking part in – a tyrannical overlordship.


Hopefully this illustrated some problems and possible solutions when it comes to game naming. Thinking through the three principles we had at the start – what does it tell the player, what questions does it raise, and does it sound good and do so efficiently – is a good basic framework that you can come back to.

Hope you found this useful! If you have any questions, comments, or things you think I've neglected to mention, please say so in the comments below. Or post your own game naming question/problem and I'm happy to see if I can advise at all!

An article I found interesting in a very very nerdy way:

https://chadnauseam.com/coding/random/calculator-app

Essentially, it goes through a problem I'd never thought of: you can't strictly contain any number in binary, because you can't store the infinite recursions etc, so this actually makes it really hard to write calculator apps properly at the absolute base level. And the various requirements to fully solve said problem are pretty interesting!

Symbolic of your tale? Hit the button to find out!

The Exilian Romantasy Blurb Generator

By Jubal

This is not so much an article as a generator: I decided that with the advent of all the LLM slop I was actually somewhat wistful for the days of JavaScript generators - the sort of thing where you hit a button and it actually random-numbered through a bunch of possibilities that had been curated by an actual person. Is the result any better or worse than GPT? That's probably for you to decide. It's certainly less damaging to the environment.

And the topic of this generator? Well, it's been a running joke with some Exilian friends that there really are a lot of romance fantasy books with titles in the form "An X of Y and Z" these days. So many so, in fact, that one could almost... get the titles and blurbs to write themselves? As such, behold the EXILIAN ROMANTASY BLURB GENERATOR, your one stop engine for creating fantasy romance plot ideas.

Do post your favourites below and let us know if this created anything useful for you!

Without further ado, all that remains is for you to push the button and...

Happy Cyril & Methodius Day!

As usual on Feb 14, we celebrate a very important saints' day - that of Cyril and Methodius. Why, who else were you thinking of?

As patrons of languages and of Europe, Cyril & Methodius Day is a niche little festival of learning, linguistics, and reading which we celebrate non-denominationally. Today's a good day to learn a new alphabet, tell a linguist how much you appreciate them, or just read a really good book. We hope you'll join us in doing so!

Find out more

[What is Cyril and Methodius Day?]

It's Cyril & Methodius Day 2025! Here's the usual thread to wish other people a happy Cyril & Methodius day and let us know what you've been up to regarding writing, alphabets, and languages on this particular year's celebration.

If you want to donate to charity today, Room to Read's direct donation link here. Please donate to them, they're a very good cost efficient charity for supporting literacy in developing countries.

FAQs

What is Cyril and Methodius Day?
As celebrated by Exilians and many others, Cyril and Methodius Day is a festival of literature, learning, languages, and linguistics. It's an alternative or additional celebration to the feast day of Saint Valentine - not as an "anti-Valentine's" project, but providing people another choice of celebration for the day.

How do I celebrate it?

• Read a book.
• Hug a friendly linguist, and tell them how much you appreciate alphabets.
• Tell other people it's Cyril and Methodius day. Spread the word!
• Recommend good books to a friend. Make ALL the reading happen!
• Celebrate and discover more about European, and particularly eastern European, culture, writing, food, arts, and more.
• Do some work on learning a language.
• Talk to your international friends from Europe (and beyond).
• Do conlanging/make a new alphabet!
• Donate to a reading-related charity

So, uh, why do this?

• It's fun! It's that extra bit of excuse and motivation to get on and do the language learning you wanted, or finish that book chapter.
• The world needs people learning about, and reaching out to, each other more than ever. Now is absolutely the time to do that.
• For people who are alienated by the commercialisation of Feb 14, or otherwise don't want to or can't celebrate it, finding something else positive to do and celebrate is SO much better than just sitting around being glum.
• It's inclusive: not everyone has or wants romantic partners for Feb 14, but just about everyone can communicate and learn.
• It helps people. Raising money for charity has been a part of how we celebrate Cyril & Methodius day for some years now, and that's raised worthwhile sums to help spread education to those who need it most.
• It shines a light on two really interesting historical characters who, whilst little known in many countries, had an impact that especially in the form of the Cyrillic alphabet, named after Cyril, is noticeable to this day.
• Books really are just plain excellent.

Is religion important here?
We've claimed Cyril and Methodius' Day in an entirely non-denominational fashion, as has happened to many other Saints' Days, so there is no religious prerequisite for celebrating it. Cyril and Methodius were of course Christians, as were almost all people in their cultural place and context, but their work included many fields combined with or outside purely religious functions including diplomacy, law, and languages. We of course respect that these saints do have a particular religious context and function for people in some traditions, but we think it's possible to celebrate some of the ethos of the things for which they are patrons without being disrespectful to those contexts.

You've got the date wrong!
Cyril and Methodius' Day is celebrated on Feb 14 in the Catholic and Anglican traditions - the Orthodox church and others celebrate their feast at other times of year.

Why can't you just celebrate Valentine's Day?
Not everyone wants to, for all sorts of reasons. Valentine's Day tends to involve heavy commercial promotion of a certain type of romantic relationship that just doesn't suit everyone - some people are happy being single, or indeed are aromantic, or asexual, have other reasons for not wanting to celebrate, or just don't want to define their relationships and celebrate them in the way that Valentine's Day now has a tradition of promoting. Other people may just decide that Europe, reading, and languages are something they value and want to celebrate more than - or alongside - the alternatives. There's no problem mixing the festivals either - languages and love can always be intertwined! Cyril and Methodius day offers a choice of festival that embraces this and can give people a fun and interesting rationale for something different to do on Feb 14.

Who were Cyril and Methodius?
Cyril and Methodius, apostles to the Slavs, were Greek saints in the ninth century AD. They're primarily known for the creation of the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet designed specifically for slavic-family languages, and the ancestor of the modern Cyrillic (which is named after Cyril). They accomplished numerous missions on behalf of the Byzantines, including to the north of the Black Sea, though most famously to Moravia (modern Slovakia). There they worked to create and spread a uniquely Slavic Christian tradition, drawing on both the Latin and Greek traditions of learning but with many unique elements. Despite Moravia moving into the Latin sphere after their deaths, their followers moved to other Slavic nations, especially Bulgaria, from which their work influenced many eastern Europeans to this day. They are patron saints of Europe in the Catholic church.

Can I get a lest text based explanation of all this?
If you want a video explanation of what's going on here, I made one in 2015.

I'd rather not do pub immediately before CMW, and we're due a Thursday, so Feb 27 seems the obvious. Would that work OK for people?

So, Vicorva (of this parish) is playing Ocarina of Time on streams at the moment and it has fire slugs in it. And I realised that I am already familiar with "fire slug" or "lava slug" as a concept, which is honestly kind of weird as a combination of ideas but it's also actually pretty common. So my question is, why? And when do they first appear?

Right now my oldest fire slug reference is Ocarina of Time itself (1998).

Other fire slugs in games that I've discovered from reading:
Slugma in Pokemon Gen. 2 (1999)
World of Warcraft
Elden Ring
Guild Wars
Divinity: Original Sin 2
Octopath Traveller
Sly Cooper and the Thievius Raccoonus
SlugTerra (animated TV series not a game)

This list is also interesting because it cuts a bit across studios and styles: there's both Japanese and western games on the list, for example.

So, any other (and especially pre-1998) examples of fire slugs would be interesting, as I'm curious how the idea arose and propagated. There's such a thing as a gas slug in volcanoes but I'm not sure if that's directly related. There's also Volcano Snails, not sure if they're related either. Ideas and insights welcome!

[Positives:]

So, I'm thinking of starting a ko-fi virtual tip jar and want opinions on if I should. I'm going to register for self-employed income anyway this year so there's no bureaucratic bar any more, it's just whether I should or not.

As you guys know, I do an array of free stuff already in free time that's sporadic but hopefully interesting to people - over the past year, six songs, eight misc articles, two travelogues, three politics blogposts and a computer game. Can see positives and negatives to having a ko-fi to help cover that.

Positives:
+ More money is nice. I'm not desperate atm, but I am only on half a salary for my work grade and I'm getting away with that in large part because my rent keeps not getting hiked.
+ More money could allow me to spend more on projects - I expect some of it would go towards art and proofreading for things.
+ It could be good to have a hub for people to see various bits of what I'm doing, though I feel like people are bombarded with things to look at all the time nowadays

Negatives:
- I don't *need* more money, this is a precarious time and I don't want to feel I'm siphoning from people who need that style of income more.
- I'm worried setting one up will mainly show me that there isn't actually much interest in all the stuff I do
- I'm nervous about it becoming an obligation: much of this stuff is hobby projects and having to produce on a schedule might stress me out
- What I do is so mixed across fields that it may be weird to have one system to cover it all?

Thoughts welcome in any case

Not as many elections, significantly more clusterportugalery, welcome to the US Politics 2025 thread.


So I'm going to use this as a chance to write down my predictions for 2025: yes, those are a fool's game, but it's interesting to test one's hypotheses against whatever the reality turns out to be.

My core thinking re Trump II:

• It's going to be nasty. The things the cabinet and congress can all agree on will be things like border security, deregulating cryptocurrency, and some of the 'anti-woke' stuff: the pointlessly cruel or simply climate-burning bits of the Trump agenda.
• The economic side of Trump's agenda is probably doomed. There may be an outside chance that Trump can sacrifice America's long-term geopolitical position and climate efforts to try and get a short term economic boom: if Trump sacrifices Ukraine and drills a lot he might get oil prices down, though at the cost of America's position in Europe. In general either his protectionism happens, in which case it will be very inflationary and voters will get upset, or business interests and political concerns stave off the protectionism in which case Trump's nationalist base start feuding with the said business interests. I guess I'd say maybe 20% that Trump gets a high by luck more than judgement, 20% his approval slides on bad inflation, 20% his approval craters horribly in a major economic depression, 30% the tarriffs keep getting staved off amid political infighting.
• It's probably not going to retain coherence. The usual popularity dip of a midterm will be more than enough for Trump to lose the house, and if things are going badly the Senate isn't invulnerable either. So Trump has two years, not four, for big changes, and he has a cabinet with very, very different opinions on what those should be, plus senators who'll be being lobbied in various ways. I think that's what's most likely to scupper attempts to seriously gut state structures or move the US more solidly towards autocracy.
• So my midpoint scenario is that Trump's popularity keeps up until maybe April, slumps by a regular amount during 2025, and by this November the wheels are coming off the cart a bit, 2026 up to the midterms then becomes mostly feuding as swing-state senators balk at an unpopular agenda and/or get primaried from the right. And all of this is happening against a background of large-scale deportations, US alliances creaking at the seams or snapping entirely, and a bad economic climate.
• That's a median prediction, so there are options that are less bad (the feuding starts much earlier and they get almost nothing done, Musk is funding a new party by the midterms that splits the GOP vote) and options that are worse (global economic depression, unexpectedly efficient Orbanisation policies).

Probably makes sense to go end of month as I've got two things to pack into the end of the previous week, but should we do a Thursday or Friday to start the year off?

[Innocents' Carol]

Weird that this isn't a thread I made already, but here we go, a grim but seasonal one:

Innocents' Carol
Who's that knocking at the window?
Em
Who's that standing at the door?
Em                         D
What are all those presents laying on the kitchen floor?
C                  G                              D
Who is the laughing stranger with his hair as white as gin?
Em                                    D                Em
What is he doing with the children?
C                         G
Who could have let him in?
G                      D

Why has he rubies on his fingers?
G          C             D   Em
Gold crown on his head.
     Em    D      Em
Why when he calls his carol
G   C                 D  Em
Does the salty snow run red?
Em        D             Em

Why does he ferry my fireside
As a spider on a thread,
His fingers made of fuses
And his tongue of gingerbread?
Why does the world before him
Melt in a million suns,
Why do his yellow, yearning eyes
Burn like saffron buns?

Watch where he comes walking
Out of the Christmas flame,
Dancing, double-talking:
And Herod is his name.

[EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS]

Issue 56: New Year 2025

EDITORIAL & COMMUNITY NEWS

Welcome back to Updates from the Forge! It's time for another round of projects across a multitude of different forms and types of creativity - but first, some news!

The main site news hasn't been very visible but it is very important - we've moved hosting to a new provider. This will both provide the site with more reliable service and a significant improvement in costs for the next four years, which will in turn hopefully free up some more money for community projects. We seem to have managed the move with remarkably few technical issues, and after summer's major forum upgrade we hope that the technical improvements over the course of this year will help keep your experience on Exilian smooth and enjoyable.

We've also had a particularly bumper crop of articles in the last months of 2024. Our five new pieces include irreverent explorations of ideas we accidentally came up with playing word association and how to use two cows to explain medieval European history - but also tackle more practical questions, like when to build dungeon encounters in RPGs. Monsters and mythos have rounded out the set, with a toe-curlingly grim set of new folk horror monster concepts written for Halloween and a dive into the mythology of Asturias, a northern Spanish region defined by its isolating mountains and local traditions.

We've had one major project announcement too, with The Exile Princes, Jubal's tactical procedural medieval RPG, being released for free on Steam in December. With well over 90% positive reviews so far, it may be worth checking out!

Finally, please do check out our winter competition: with a prize offered by brilliant indie author Veo Corva, and guest judging from musician & game producer Clio Em and Twitch variety streamer GoldKarat, we're excited to see what you come up with on this year's frosted theme of ICEBOUND.

And with that - onto the updates!

CONTENTS:

• Editorial & Community News
  
• Game Development
  
  • Venleitche: A TTRPG of Seasons, Morality, and Magic
  • Jubal's Godot tests
  • Modding Minecraft's Menu: ChefQuest!
• Arts & Writing
  
  • Cosy Hallowe'en Crafting
  • A New Language is Born
  • The Song of Fen'harel
  • Writing and Cultures
• Miscellany
  
  • SoundImage goes Urban
  • MAMG Proceedings 2024
  • Jump off at Exilian's Docks for a new project!

GAME DEV

Venleitche: A TTRPG of Seasons, Morality, and Magic

New member WanderingBeekeper has brought a new RPG to the site! Venleitche covers a world in which the karmic effects of people's actions are bound deeply into the fabric of existence - with disastrous consequences for the decidedly imperfect beings who inhabit Antillia. Loss of karmic connection can cause penalties from mere difficulty to full monstrous transformation, with large parts of the world turned into post-apocalyptic wreckage by the terrifying effects of tearing karmic horror. Those who are willing to make hard choices - with the very real social and monstrous dangers that implies - may become the adventurers who can respond to problems and try to rebuild the social fabric of a broken world... but at real personal cost.

Antillia's magic is woven into the natural as well as karmic worlds, with the changing seasons having different tones and flavours to the magic that they best support, with connections to the classical elements and to the souls of individuals who most closely align with their character. The game's name, Venleitche, encapsulates an in-world concept of natural rightness and order that underpins the way the people in this world have to understand their environment. Some character stats are trade-off balances rather than simply numbers that improve as they go up, giving characters more need to find ways to align with their world rather than just breaking free of it on an endless power curve.

If you're looking for an interesting new take on morality in RPGs, this may well be worth having a good look at - will you keep a karmic balance, or will the clash of magic and excess lead to tales best left untold?

Get Venleitche on Ko-fi

Discuss the game on Exilian

Jubal's Godot tests

Godot - what have we been waiting for?

With The Exile Princes coming to release after six years of development, Jubal has been investigating possibilities for future projects, including the Godot engine, a popular open source game engine that has a wide community and user base, and which has underpinned some other Exilian members' projects like Priory Games' Under the Yoke. Jubal has been cataloguing his first steps with the engine's capabilities, focusing on points that differed from his previous experience with 2d Python development such as 3D controls and physics.

If you're thinking of getting into game development, or looking at Godot specifically, Jubal's notes may be useful for helping you set up the basics of a 3d environment, controls, and cameras. If you're interested in his next game development plans, there may be hints of what's to come. Either way - do check out the log and ask any questions you may have!

Read Jubal's Godot logs on Exilian

Modding Minecraft's Menu: ChefQuest!

Arboghast Culinary Academy is a respected institution, with a surprisingly low dragon fatality rate (remaining consistently under 100%)

If what you want out of Minecraft is an experience to make your mouth water in voxel style, the ChefQuest pack will introduce you to the Arboghast Culinary Academy and the construction of magically automated farming to supply your dairy, winery, bakery and brewery with the finest ingredients to produce meals fit for the most discerning of connoisseurs - or the most hungry of guests.

And what's known for being discerningly cunning and very, very hungry? A dragon!

What could go wrong?

Get the modpack
Discuss it on the forum

ARTS AND WRITING

Cosy Crafting at Hallowe'en

Not all projects on Exilian exist in exclusively digital formats! Crafts are just as welcome as any other form of creative geekery in these halls, and we're delighted to see people sharing such things, including Exilian member The Seamstress, whose Hallowe'en preparations included this delightfully round and fluffly pumpkin. Her new thread in the Artisans' guilds is there for telling us about her crafting works, something other members seem to approve of especially when they are squishy. This pumpkin in fact reportedly ended up being very significantly larger than planned for double halloween squish!

If you have your own crafts to share, do please do so in the Artisans' Guilds on the forum, where our visual artists, sculptors, tailors, and more are all welcome to hang out and discuss their latest projects. See you there sometime.

The Diary of a Seamstress

Enter The Artisans' Guilds

A New Language Is Born

Conlanging, the process of creating artificial languages for stories, has a long history in SFF writing, and so it makes its way to our halls of creative geekery too: new member JessMahler has been discussing fahngow, a constructed language being created for an upcoming story. The grammar is not yet in place, but the first ideas of a language are being hammered into shape.

Some interesting constraints have already emerged: a small 19-phoneme range of possible sounds, and the isolating language, where each word represents a singular idea without modifiers. So a word like unenviable - consisting of un-, a negative, envy, a core concept, and able, a modifier for possibility - won't be able to exist as a single word in fahngow.

Other members have also been sharing some of their conlanging experience, so if you're interested in this and in discovering how a language might be put together, do head over and check out the thread:

Learn about fahngow on Exilian

The song of Fen'harel

In rather larger game news than most of the projects we do here on Exilian, the last few months also saw the release of the fourth Dragon Age game, Veilguard. But we're not here in Updates from the Forge to report on big game releases directly - though you can read Jubal's detailed review if you want to find out more about the game - rather, we're here to tell you about Jubal's musical take on one of the series' most iconic characters, the dread wolf Fen'harel. You can have a listen here:

Jubal's music take puts the listener among the Dalish, elves struggling to hold onto their old traditions in the wilderness, in the face of isolation and the ghettoisation or enslavement of the city-dwelling cousins. The Dread Wolf's schemes may spread fast among such folk, keen as they are to see a revival of the ancient beauty and immortality their. Would this song sway you to to the side of a trickster god, if you were in such shoes?

You can always check out this and all of Jubal's other music at the ExilianMedia YouTube channel, and on our forum area for discussing Exilian Media projects:

Exilian Media on the Forum
Exilian Media on YouTube

Writing and cultures

We've had an interesting discussion going on recently in the writing section looking at how to encapsulate different cultures' world experiences in writing. The starting point of the conversation was how to take a relatively reserved-personality book character from outside the same culture as most of the rest of the characters and include him properly in group conversations. Of course direct culture-clash writing is possible in such cases, and even humour as people adjust to new settings, but this can only be played for so long before it becomes a joke at a character and culture's expense rather than the inevitable misunderstandings of a new meeting.

Ideas for alternative routes have been interesting, including a "rope and saw" approach where characters can see connections between items or concepts differently as a result of their different cultural background, and utilising alternative skills and experiences more directly that will retain utility even when the character does much better understand the new cultural landscape they now inhabit. If you have further ideas or want to see how the discussion develops, do take a look!

Visit the thread on Exilian

MISCELLANY

SoundImage goes Urban

It's a new year for SoundImage, and that means new sounds free to use in people's projects - whether reflecting the mood of 2025, or a desire for futuristic escape from it, the most recent set have a sci-fi urban theme, with Cyber Mean Streets and Nightmare City Grid as the titles. Are the streets real or virtual? Is this all the result of a lack of good public transport? Is it just all about the frustration of someone stuck in traffic recently? Only you can answer these questions by including the pieces in whatever creativity you're inspired to use them for.

All SoundImage music can be used completely free in commercial and non-commercial projects by attribution license: OGG format sound packs, custom music work, and non-attribution licenses are available from SoundImage proprietor Eric Matyas for a price. Please do support this fantastic resource: it's a great aid to commercial and non-commercial creators alike.

We'll doubtless have more new SoundImage work to report later this year: until then, we'll see you on the cyber streets somewhere...!

SoundImage Website

SoundImage on Exilian - Latest Updates

MAMG Proceedings 2024

The proceedings book for the Middle Ages in Modern Games conference 2024 has been released! This year's MAMG was the first to be hosted by Exilian: we're providing hosting space to the virtual conference's website to help support a wide range of academics and developers investigate the ways in which the medieval world and modern gaming ideas and cultures collide.

The MAMG2024 proceedings include a wide array of short pieces looking at games from Age of Empires II to Morrowind to Overwatch, looking at the narratives, dynamics, and presentation of a range of ideas and themes around our imagination of the medieval world. From integrating the Langobard law codes into a tabletop RPG to investigating the , there's a lot for historians and game designers alike to have a look at.

Read the MAMG2024 Proceedings

Discuss the Proceedings on Exilian

Jump off at Exilian's Docks for a new project


Where might the boats take you?

One area of Exilian that you might not have seen much of is the River Docks, our area for sharing resources, ideas, and skills for creative projects of all kinds. Recently we've had a couple of additions to the Tutorial Base section of the docks, with a new mini-explainer on the basics of copyright for those starting creative journeys, and a new and growing resource on some of the best places to find non-AI sources of images, sounds, textures, music, and 3D art across the web.

The docks also include areas for offering skills and resources, and requesting help or posting job ads for projects you're working on. We hope you can make use of them and set sail for your next creative destination!

The River Docks on Exilian

That's all for now! Welcome to 2025, and we hope for a kinder and more creative year for all of us to come. If you'd like something of yours to be in this newsletter next time, please do post it on the forum and you may well be featured here in Spring's issue. Until then, good luck with the winter months and may better flowers grow again soon, wherever you are.

[copyright]

For people just starting out doing any sort of creative work, copyright can be confusing. Intellectual property rights in general are a very complex topic, and I'm not a lawyer, but I thought it might be useful to write a very short explainer for anyone confused about the basic terminologies. Any thoughts for how to improve this appreciated!


In general, you have copyright over any creative work you authored. This is sometimes confused with a patent, which protects a technical design, idea, invention or process, or a trademark, which protects a word or symbol as part of a brand. Both of the latter do need to be filed for - copyright doesn't, you automatically have it as a work's author until you sign it away (or unless you signed it away in advance).

This also means that in general you cannot legally use copyrighted works in your own work. In practice, the extent of this is defined by the rights holder and how aggressive they are at enforcing their copyright, but the broad rule is that you can't just take something someone else made and use it if they haven't said you're allowed to do so.

There are three big exceptions to this:

• things under open license
• things in the public domain
• something that is copyrighted, but you have fair use of

An open license of some kind gives you the right to use something under particular terms - maybe you can use it but you have to attribute the author, or you can use it but not for commercial projects or not in some other specific circumstance. The most common set of open licenses are those provided by the Creative Commons organisation, which works to create internationally valid, easy to use licenses for freely shared creative works. Creative commons licenses are often referred to with various shorthands, depending on whether they require attribution of the author, whether they allow commercial use or not, and whether or not they allow adaptation.

The public domain consists of things that cannot be copyrighted, usually because the author has been dead for a long time and the copyright has expired. Once copyright has expired nobody can come back and copyright the same work again (though they may be able to copyright or trademark their particular take on the work). The creative commons also offers a "public domain license", CC-0, which allows you to declare a work public domain. There can be difficulties around reproduction of out of copyright works in some cases: some countries think that for example a photograph of an old painting can be a new work and thus copyrighted, some that it can't, so even when you're using out of copyright material it ideally helps to have some statement that it has been released on public domain terms.

The doctrine of fair use (or fair dealing, in some countries) is significantly more complicated, but covers referencing and using copyrighted material in ways that are legally permissible. Fair use is legally necessary - because people reference trademarked and copyrighted material all the time, and it would be impossible to stop them - but there are few very clear lines as to its use especially as regards things like fanfiction. Some areas tend to be more likely to be considered fair use - for example if one can argue that a use is educational, a parody, or a criticism of the work it is using. Fan works are in the less-than-ideal situation of often existing because the rights holder doesn't enforce their copyright, rather than having proper legal standing.

In your own projects, it's important to know the origin of any materials - textures, sounds, etc - that you're using, to make sure you're not breaching someone's intellectual property rights and therefore aren't risking legal action or other problems. If you can't find the source, don't just assume it's public domain and free to use.

Where should you look for more information on these sorts of issues without having to pay through the nose for pre-emptive legal advice? University libraries may be good sources of information on the precise rules where you are, and if you have any affiliation with them may be able to help you more directly. The website of Creative Commons itself also has a range of useful information. Please do also ask in the comments here if you're having issues and hopefully someone will be able to point you at better resources.

Hopefully this has helped with a few of the basic need-to-knows - if you found it useful, or if there's anything I should add, please do say below.

There's actually quite a lot of places online where you can get free resources for your projects via Creative Commons licensing or public domain works. Here's a list of some places you can find such things! Additions/submissions welcome.

3D Models

Open Game Art (3D Section)
Large site full of Creative Commons licensed artworks for games.
Link: https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?keys=&field_art_type_tid%5B%5D=10&sort_by=count&sort_order=DESC

2D Images

Old Book Art
A largish collection of CC-0 art plates from old books, maintained by a bookshop owner from the US.
Link: https://www.oldbookart.com/

Old Book Illustrations
A site focused on Victorian and French Romantic book illustrations, all of which are public domain.
Link: https://www.oldbookillustrations.com/

Open Game Art (Concepts & 2D)
Large site full of Creative Commons licensed artworks for games. Focused on game art and including e.g. animated 2d artworks.
Link: https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?keys=&title=&field_art_tags_tid_op=or&field_art_tags_tid=&name=&field_art_type_tid%5B%5D=9&field_art_type_tid%5B%5D=7273&sort_by=count&sort_order=DESC&items_per_page=24&Collection=

Internet Archive Book Images
A pro tip for this resource: Flickr's search is quite janky, and it defaults to unselecting illustrations. So if you're not seeing any search results when searching within the resource, check the advanced tab and make sure that illustrations are properly selected.
Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/internetarchivebookimages/

Wikimedia Commons
A large resource - most files are creative commons but not necessarily CC-0, so make sure you check the licensing. On the other hand, much more by way of photography and up to date art than some other options here.
Link: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Textures

Open Game Art (Textures)
Large site full of Creative Commons licensed artworks for games.
Link: https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?keys=&field_art_type_tid%5B%5D=14&sort_by=count&sort_order=DESC

SoundImage Texture Library
A very large collection of basic texture images for stone, metal, wood, paper, etc. See also the creator's Exilian thread for updates.
Link: https://soundimage.org/images-home-page/

Sound Effects

Open Game Art (SFX)
Large site full of Creative Commons licensed artworks for games.
https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?keys=&title=&field_art_tags_tid_op=or&field_art_tags_tid=&name=&field_art_type_tid%5B%5D=13&sort_by=count&sort_order=DESC&items_per_page=24&Collection=

SoundImage SFX Library
A large collection of basic SFX.
Link: https://soundimage.org/

Music

Open Game Art (Music)
Large site full of Creative Commons licensed artworks for games. Tends to focus on quite "backgroundy" music.
Link: https://opengameart.org/art-search-advanced?keys=&field_art_type_tid%5B%5D=12&sort_by=count&sort_order=DESC

SoundImage Music Library
A huge collection of background music for all purposes. Useable in all projects with attribution. See also the creator's Exilian thread for updates.
Link: https://soundimage.org/

Here we go again.

A much less election heavy year though there are some big ones coming up - for example Germany, Canada, and Australia, all three of which look like good prospects for right wing challengers to centre left governments struggling with cost of living issues.

We'll also likely start seeing the impacts of various 2024 elections more, especially re the course of the new US administration and how that affects the wider world.

[Produce your entry]

Creative Competition: Icebound
 

It's time for another of our winter creative competitions! Moving on from last year's HIBERNATION, this year we're back out in the cold with our new theme, ICEBOUND. Whether you're heading bound for the ice or stuck bound within it, this hard-frozen stillness will require creativity, will and wit to overcome. Whatever your response to the hard cold of winter, we hope to see your creative endeavours for this year's competitions!


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 9th, 2025.
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:
An ebook copy of BOOKS AND BONE by the wonderful Veo Corva, a tale of a librarian in a town of the dead featuring an out-of-place historian, unexpected underground paths, Wandering Larry, unexpected career paths, ancient evils, and what it means to call a place home.

If you'd like to donate an additional prize and thereby sponsor the competition, please get in touch

THE JUDGES

Clio Em is a weaver of imaginary worlds through many media including as a game producer, multi-instrumentalist, writer and vocalist. Her projects include being the author and performer of the cross-medium sci-fi work Gravity Wing, writing and presenting on building fantasy worlds through music including at our own Coding Medieval Worlds workshop in 2023, vocal credits on a range of major projects and titles, and being the game producer of the acclaimed Austrian modern-SFF dungeon crawler, Dungeons of Hinterberg. You can find more of her work at her website.

GoldKarat is a Twitch variety streamer with over seven years of playing through, reviewing, and discovering a wide range of games. His channel boasts over 8500 followers watching him play his way through titles from Undertale to God of War to The Exile Princes - so the full range from AAA titans they show statues of at conventions through to titles so indie their name is passed along on yellowed scraps of paper in underground taverns may crop up in his explorations of fictional worlds. You can find him on a wide array of social media, including of course on his Twitch channel itself and on Bluesky @GoldKaratTV.

[1) Pub Garden (of) Eden]

17 More Things We Came Up With Playing Word Association
By Jubal

Yes, this is what it says on the tin. We've been playing literally the same Word Association game since 2008, it has over 37,000 words in it, and the combinations we come up with sometimes create some interesting concepts that we might not have thought of otherwise. In 2018 I wrote a list of 17 Things We Came Up With In Word Association, so we're well overdue another compilation of quirky and unusual ideas created by the word-jumbles of Exilian members. Various members contributed the original posts: definitions and writeups by yours truly. Do enjoy!


1) Pub Garden (of) Eden
This pub presumably serves the Hesperidean Cider famous from Failbetter Games' Fallen London... and wouldn't it make a lot of sense if Adam and Eve were thrown out of Eden in part for drunk and disorderly behaviour? Theologians are currently discussing what the smoking rules were.

2) Stack Overflow Pipe
The most important part of any automated or human programming system is the Stack Overflow Pipe for exchange with the Grand Repository of Programming Knowledge And People Who Hate The Way You Didn't Search Enough For The Answer First. Unfortunately, attempts to redirect the stack overflow pipe into AI training have led mostly to the production of sewage-quality code.

3) Sourpuss (in) Boots
Puss in Boots is a much beloved character, but these days, audiences are surely looking for the gritty anti-hero take on the fairytale. Enter Sourpuss in Boots, an alley-cat whose best days are past him, whose boots are hob-nailed and probably have too many buckles, who wields a shiv instead of a rapier and who for some reason is still a hit with the femme felines. His adventures will include rat-slaying, dog-fighting, getting stuck up a hawthorn tree for the sake of making that trope spikier, and being a tragic dad to a tabby daughter-figure thrown out from a wealthy household and finding her way in the world. However, even if we do get Henry Cavill to do the voiceover, there will be no scene in the bath.

4) Robin Red Shift
It's like a regular robin, but it's actually green and is just always moving away from you at cosmic speeds. Probably runs on the same technology as Father Christmas' sleigh, probably not often found in gardens as you'd need a very large one to be able to see it before it left again at red-shift speed. May or may not be associated with Batman.

5) Woolly Hat-Trick
If a hat-trick is a three-goal achievement, a woolly hat-trick is a three goal achievement specifically in ice hockey. Canada, get on this one!

6) Middle Earthshot
A grand endeavour to make the world more mythic and heroic OR more hobbity in some way, maybe with an award attached. Options could include ensuring global access to strawberries, throwing blockchains into a volcano, or crying in a very manly yet gentle fashion. Weird American tech bros with Tolkien-named companies for some reason probably wouldn't like the outcomes of this prize.

7) Tone Police Force
They're out there, they're probably self appointed, and they're really mad about what you're saying on the internet especially if it's literally your own life you're talking about in your own words. Actual cops don't always get on with the Tone Police because the latter set a very unrealistic expectation for exceptionally speedy response times.

8) Forge-master-mind
This idea actually has something to it. Who else but the forgemastermind to plan out how the fires of technology allow the Great Scheme to advance? If you need a secondary (or even primary) villain for a narrative of TTRPG, the forgemastermind can calculate the trajectories of automated catapults, plan maps of molten metal through a dungeon, and bait the protagonists with a mix of evil and fiendish technology in a way that definitely doesn't leave enormous potential for on-the-nose commentary and subversion of a wide range of topical issues.

(But no, the Forgemastermind did not build the cybertruck. She has standards, people. Standards.)

9) Milky Waypoint
Yup, you're here, out on the ol' spiral arm. This may be  Directions are available to other stops on your journey, spacefarer! See also, Simak's Way Station.

10) Daylight Savings Bank
Welcome to the Daylight Savings Bank. It's probably where the days we lost shfting to the Gregorian calendar got stored, and it's definitely where a chunk of your sleep goes once a year. What interest do they get on our stolen time while they're storing it? Do the chronological profits get stored somewhere, and what would they do with them?

An honourable mention goes to the Savings Bank Vole, who presumably operates the Daylight Savings bank from a small burrow somewhere in rural England, near the burrow that TH White's King Arthur is residing in to await his return.

11) Mole(dy) Warp Storm
Wormholes, clearly, are created by very large worms indeed on a cosmic level. But where there are worms, there are things that want to eat the worms: and so, burrowing through the fabric of space-time, the moldy-warp storm brews, getting ever more intense as the enormous eight dimensional cosmic mole gets ever closer and ready to find its wormhole-making prey.

It may be the end of all we know, but at least the end of all we know will be kind of cute.

12) Acid Rain Main
Probably like regular rain man, except if he actually made a lot of justifiably extremely snarky comments about the poor representation and treatment of neurodiversity in films and other popular media.

13) Pillow Fight Club
The first rule of Pillow fight club: yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay pillow fight!
The second rule of Pillow club was not recorded over the sound of people hitting each other with pillows.

14) Branch Line Dancing
A dance that's kind of like line dancing but the lines split off all over the place and end up in side-rooms you didn't expect to be used for this dance. The dance ends whenever the dancemaster calls "Beeching".

15) Lion's Share (and) Subscribe
To the winner, the spoils – and far too much of social media works on that principle, with exponential curves such that most things barely get scene and a few things go utterly, swampingly viral. Getting the lion's share and subscribe accelerates a creator and their content up the exponential curve, but at what cost?

16) Hobbit Hole Golf
Given that Tolkien's explanation for golf was that it was invented when Bullroarer Took hit a goblin's head off with a club so hard that it bounced down a nearby hole, this is actually already essentially a thing. It could also be a solution for the endless problem in the Anglosphere of golf courses taking up prime land that could be otherwise be used for better things if we put hobbit holes under all the courses, but golfers may occasionally find their buggy tires get let down by halflings suspicious of newfangled Sarumanic machinery.

17) Solar Flare Gun
If a flare gun could knock out most of the electronics in a vast radius and indeed cook a noticeable chunk of the earth's surface, this is that flare gun! When you really need to signal distress to someone not on this planet, and are willing to gamble a lot of lives of people actually on this planet to do so, this is the technology you need.

Notably, "control" was the next word picked after "Solar Flare Gun", which was, let's be honest, probably sensible.


And that's another 17 randomly constructed concepts from the collective thoughts of Exilian! Let us know if you liked reading this, and we may leave it less than six years before doing another set. Happy New Year to all you out there, and best wishes for our next roll round the sun.

This Dungeon Could Have Been An Encounter

By Jubal

Dare you enter? We have *checks notes* some rooms with orcs and stuff.

Welcome to an article about the "this meeting could have been an email" of the RPG world. Whether you're designing dungeons for a computer game or a tabletop setting, this is a brief set of thoughts on whether you should, in fact, be doing that. For our purposes, a dungeon is an environment that is enclosed (distinguishing it from an explorable wilderness) and essentially hostile (distinguishing it from settled environments). They are part of the bread and butter of role-playing games and always have been, as exciting places to explore and discover and as build-ups to key story elements. But can you have too much of a good thing?

Some dungeons, in short, are just too long for the purpose they were given. Especially in certain computer RPGs, they can become a hack-fest where numerous rooms of generic enemies just need to be plodded through in order to gain experience, loot, or some singular end-point encounter or item. There are of course ways to spruce up that experience – better pathing design that interlocks between levels, more complex intra-dungeon ecology and politics, more of a mixture of puzzles and story encounters to break up dungeoneering – but this isn't an article about how to do dungeons better per se.

This, instead, is an article that seeks to pose an alternative question, which is whether a dungeon always needs to be there in the first place. Time spent dungeoneering in a game is subject to narrative opportunity cost the same as anything else in a game: in general, that time shouldn't just be expended as a way to jump through hoops, and combat and puzzles ideally shouldn't just be "plot locks" that need to be passed through to get to the next bit of actual story.

So when should your dungeon just be an encounter? There are various parameters to consider.

First, consider how much story your dungeon needs to tell. This is perhaps the most important element for RPGs. The dungeon – whether as part of a wider core plot, or on its own terms – has a story to tell, and everything in the dungeon should help tell that story. That can include a variety of types of content or encounter, but it should all fit with the wider theming.

If the whole point of the dungeon is to have an enemy encounter at the end, could you just... skip the dungeon? Even if the enemy has a mighty fortress, you could give the player a stealth mission, entry point, or catching a villain unawares if that avoids a slog through thirty arbitrary rooms full of guards who inexplicably don't attempt to attack the player en masse or do anything else useful.

A real smallish castle's floor plan. Not actually many rooms per level!

Unless a dungeon has a good reason to sprawl, sometimes it can be condensed. Fortresses don't need to involve endless interlocking rooms – in a real environment, in general things should be accessed pretty quickly from one another, so the average castle has maybe two main layers of defence (a curtain wall and a keep), and the lord's hall will be big and central in the keep. Once an enemy is in the base, the defence is essentially lost: whilst you're unlikely to want a protagonist or player character to do a whole siege, it still applies that few, large barriers are the norm rather than numerous fights with small numbers of enemies conveniently matched up against a party of rag-tag adventurers. That may reduce build-up to fighting a major villain, but the time you save by not having a ton of dungeon rooms could be used in wilderness or settlement encounters having tussles with the evil lord's subordinates who are bullying villagers, or deposing one of his corrupt reeves who lives in the hall of a village on the other side of the valley: things that will still raise the stakes, and will ground the players more effectively in why the villain is a problem than a dungeon-style base full of minions.

The same might be true of finding a special item: sometimes items might be behind many many guards and traps, but sometimes it's a case of finding and talking to the right person, or items can be guarded in ways that aren't a single dungeon location. They could for example be moved around regularly, making the problem more a case of identifying who has the item and making the environment much more dynamic. They could equally kept in a location that is singular but hard to access. In general, if something is kept very high up a mountain or in the bottom of a mine, it may well not have a very wide sprawling base of operations because it's really hard to supply such a place.

If a game has exploring and dungeoneering as a core gameplay element in and of itself, that's a good reason per se to spend more time in dungeons. But – and this is where a lot of games falter – dungeoneering isn't the same as combat. Dungeoneering includes puzzles, survival, tactics, navigation, and other such challenges and toolkits. For many people, much of the time, a sequence of combat encounters per se won't necessarily be highly rewarding.

Yet another room like this containing d6 bugbears! My favourite!

If you need to introduce an enemy or mechanic, then there might be good reasons to build them up through a dungeon. In general if you want players to know how to fight something, whatever the system, they might need 2-3 goes to get used to a new enemy before that enemy or system is 'integrated' into their knowledge of how to play. This can be reduced if the enemy obeys pre-existing rules, however, and can also be reduced if the enemy is a single, solveable puzzle. As such, "introduction" encounters are often best placed early in games, or when introducing something that will be repeatedly used thereafter. If the change to the game's mechanics is relatively small, or is unique to the encounter, you might be better simply having it as a one-off.

This can also be used narratively: if you want a dungeon's ending to be a unique villain or encounter, having the dungeon build up to that can be important for introducing suspense and explaining who the villain is, or exploring the world in which they function. But if that's explained elsewhere, the dungeon might not need to be present – or might be able to be boiled down to a much smaller sequence of encounters and explorations.


Sometimes, then, the dungeon isn't the solution. Avoiding them becoming the universal gateway to plot elements can remove quite a bit of drudgery for players, and provide some elbow room to spend more time on other parts of the plot. Rather than building everything into a static location, having encounters in different locations linked with overland travel & encounters or having an environment where the players' targets are fluid and mobile can help change the pace of game design. The result might be more variation in play – keeping your villains, protagonists, and players alike more engaged with the story.

I hope you found these thoughts useful! Let me know if this inspired you, or if you hated it and think we actually need more dungeons, or if you are stuck in a room with d6 hobgoblins and need help from an itinerant bard. Until then, have fun designing new worlds - whether or not you're heading down a dungeon door.

How have you all been celebrating the end of the year/impending start of 2025?