Tower - Epilogue

 Tower - Epilogue

It has been a wild week.

Tower - Spells

Tower - Spells Guide

West Marches - Losing

West Marches - Losing

It had all gone sideways.

It wasn’t that surprising. Tirondian army tactics were hardly inspired. Form ranks, march forwards, eliminate things that stand in the way. Oh, bring siege weapons if necessary.

Works great when you fight opposing armies. Less so when your enemies are giant horrors of paint, or the corrupted twisted versions of your own soldiers. Fat lot of good a siege tower does against a painted horde.

Now, Sedriks ran through the woods, they’d lost touch with the cavalry a few hours back, horses spooked and the Captain had ordered them rounded up. Sedriks, and his command knew better. Three dozen was all that was left of their outrider wing, what should’ve been close to two hundred light and medium infantry. Harried at every turn, they’d retreated into a guerilla skirmish through the night.

Writing - A Tale of Two Bards - West Marches

Writing - A Tale of Two Bards - West Marches

“Oi! Bard!”

Sedriks looks up from a wooden bowl of eggs and pork cracklins to eye a longtable of farmhands, the lead of which, a grizzled greybeard has just addressed him.

“That twanger on your back, is it just for show or can you play a tune?”

Taking one last long pull of the mead, the bard in question responds, “Isss not for show, how dew ya do. I can play it right smartly if ye have the coin for me trouble.”

There is a slight rumble of chairs and scrapes, the farmers rustle through cotton pockets and into leather pouches to produce a fistfull of brass.

“Here then! If you are as good as they say from the night of the attack, a song. More where that came from if we likes what we hears!”

Sedriks unslings the Viola, with a nod of thanks to the waitress who deposits the coin on the table before him. The room falls to silence as a long ashwood bow is produced from within a sturdy carrying case. The first pull of the bow produces a clarion clear note, low and mournful, echoing through the rafters and out the half-cracked windows into the evening rain.

Dungeon World - Refuge of the Once-Many

Dungeon World - Refuge of the Once-Many

Just a short piece of world building writing for this week.

Shadowrun - We Are The Future

Shadowrun - We Are The Future

There is a very good reason why Shadowrun has taken pains to be inclusive in its character options and in the universe that those of us currently writing have been lucky enough to work on in its nearly thirty year history. It’s not only because making the world inclusive is the right thing to do; and it’s not just because the Player Characters are presumed to be from the marginalized, downtrodden, and ignored parts of society that are now and are in the Sixth World reserved for or otherwise filled with racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and other minorities (or majorities—numerosity doesn’t necessarily translate to political power); but at the end of the day, being an inclusive and open world is the right business decision.

This criticism is the desperate cries of dinosaurs as they struggle against the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction. It’s loud and violent, and in the end it’s just as successful.

While this tumblr is supposed to represent the Shadowrun tabletop game, the entire universe and all of the properties share these same traits and considerations. Shadowrun, in video game or tabletop RPG or novel or any other format, will continue to move forward and I expect that D&D, Pathfinder, etc. and Beampod will also continue to move forward because the future is open and inclusive. And if you don’t like it, too bad.

UPDATE: To be clear, these negative comments are in no way “criticism” of the game. It’s whining by bigots trying to impose their own biases on commercial enterprises that have made their position on their fictional universes and in who they hire and promote to continue those universes. This whining does not deserve anything more than to be ignored.

If you don’t like it, you’re free not to buy the product.