I wrote a blogpost that answers a number of questions that Prismatic Wastelands asked me on Bluesky a few weeks ago.
I hope you find it as entertaining to read as I did to write.
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Religions are just factions who can’t reason very well
Brutal, and unironically good advice for a slush post!
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fun read. ON MONSTERS: i think a core part of my favorite rpg fantasy flavor is having the protagonists be mostly just humans, while others can be, and often are… something else. like personifications of concepts etc.
that way, the PCs feel grounded in the player experience/the player world. they get to be “the everyman” to contrast with the magical world. I like to give them little seasonings of magic (wizards! people with weird powers or pigfeet), but want to keep their core experience as human. IMMERSION PURPOSES HERE.
then I want that shit wide open for the rest of the world. monsters can just rise out of the muck because of bad vibes- they aren’t people- they are bad vibes mixed with muck. maybe others are bits of the deep abyss of nothingness (thinking here like the pigmen in house on the borderlands). trixter foxes. etc.
It’s been a lot of fun to read. Random question: what’s the weirdest thing you wanted to include in the second edition of Cairn, but in the end you left it out?!
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Weirdest? I’m not sure. I had a lot more examples written that we had to cut due to page count, and I would have loved to do a chapter on urban generation.
Originally I started with 36 backgrounds, then pared them down to 20. Perhaps one of the other backgrounds would have been cool (there was a druid of the undead wood, for example).
Initially I had a shared debt system for the PCs as well. It didn’t work quite as unexpected though.
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I was just catching up on a month old Between Two Cairns episode with a brief mention of Bluesky, and wanted to check on what you posted. Your account didn’t seem to be live and I didn’t seem to be following you anymore, so down the rabbit hole I went until I ended up back here.
I’m sorry to hear about the drama nonsense and the immature sniping. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Haha I assume you read my post on the subject?
I did! Do you plan to continue posting on Mastodon, or eschew the format altogether?
No, though I might not close my account there since it’s harder to recover. I’ll just leave it for now.
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