The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

What Interesting Terrain Looks Like, or, More Mud Please!  Those of us who get access to good roads are pretty spoiled, right? All other transportational advantages of modern technology quite aside, a decent street is really quite easy to walk along (assuming you've got a pavement and/or it's quiet - sorry, USAmerican readers). Go out in the wilderness, and you quite quickly find things are different. The mud sucks at your shoes. Rocks trip you up. My family walks a lot, a relative still managed to break their arm this season about half an hour up a small hill, slipping on moss. The kind of fall you have a hundred times and are fine, but the one, you're waiting five hours for mountain rescue as the air gets cold and the sun dips and you start to shiver... For whatever reason, a lot of games don't seem to care. Even games that reaaaaallly should, the 'mud, blood, and shit' end of things, the OSRs and WFRPs of the space. I'm going to break this down into two c...

 Both a necessary antidote to the conventional wisdom of consumer-focussed technocratic interventionism in the DRC and a dense mass with little readability for at least this non-specialist,  I don't find I have much to say about Conflict Minerals Inc . It taught me a lot of stuff I didn't know before. On the other hand, most of that isn't stuff I'd be particularly comfortable gamifying for popular consumption; for deeper thought from somebody with much more knowledge of the issues, see this post . So instead here's a brief little trick it inspired me to come up with, virtually setting-agnostic except that it needs a hex-map. The book includes a lot of maps of factional control in particular years, like this: Each then has a key with scores to hundreds of groups listed in (very) brief. This kind of massive overlap between factions, with several sometimes overlapping in one area (more if you were also to try to map the power of the state) hasn't been adequately a...

Short post today, because A) I'm working on a couple of bigger things and B) this is mostly setup for something else reasonably big I'm going to do in future. I'm going to assume you know about the game Mage: the Ascension if you're reading this. (If you don't, have a look here  to learn a bit about the constructivist chaotes fighting for control of your destiny.) This post started off as a thought experiment where I tried to describe how inter-mage competition would look in the setting if they adopted modestly optimal strategies, and turned into a discussion of how the resultant world lends itself to the sort of modelling proposed by the proceduralist movement of the OSR and Post-OSR (POSR).  (Yeah, I know that a lot of Mage players just instinctively cringed. I've seen/listened to how you guys talk about the OSR extensively on various discords, subreddits and at least one noteworthy and otherwise-excellent podcast: as a dumb hack-and-slash dungeon fantasy abou...