Computation Easel

I’ve been working on ideas for computers from an alternate present — one that I think we still have time to get in contact with. In the alternate history that produces that alternated present, the idealists and utopians kept control of their creations, spreading them into creative hands rather than investors seeking a business market, and choking the designs down to useful appliances that are not, themselves, a creative medium.

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Oscillator

This story is thinly veiled personal experience, pointing toward my desire to make an adventure roleplaying game about being an interdimensional experimental musician with a cool warehouse studio who gets to hang out with your favorite real world musicians. Are there enough experimental music enthusiasts to get a group together? Who knows! There are a couple of my Discord, so when this game starts to gel I should make sure that the kind of experience I’m describing here works well remotely.

But also, this story is as personal as it is silly.

(The image at the top is a cover of Savage Henry, a comic about just such weirdo musicians. The series and its creator, Matt Howarth, have been an inspiration to me for thirty years.)

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Temu Decides

On the xenophilia Discord (where my Patreonfolk hang out), I had to give an example, and spontaneously mentioned

an idol of Temu, with her hair of reeds and four horns, made from clay from the river. Carrying a seed pod in one hand and a strangled ibis in the other. You know the story.

…and then I could exactly see her, and had to start drawing right away.

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Types of Hazardous Terrain in Mobile Frame Zero

As currently written, the MFØ rules for exotic and hazardous terrain effectively penalizes all players except the defender, who sets up camp where they’re safest and can roll their full complement of dice. The best move for the defender is to set up in such a way that their frames don’t require a specialized system, and set up outside the effect of the hazardous terrain, which then requires the other players to have specialized systems that takes up one of their system slots whether they wind up setting up in hazardous terrain or not.

By the time they get to trying to seize the defender’s stations — a defender who, you’ll recall, has four systems per frame to the attackers’ three, and is only one good/bad roll away from being better off than the second place player — the attackers have been chewed up and are starting to look at each other’s now-underdefended stations where the specialized systems still count for something.

The entire time, the odds that the defender is going to step out into hazardous areas and take the penalty of a white die are very slim. The primary attacker’s best target is the secondary attacker, who has less materiél with which to return fire and is almost certainly closer. And knows that their only legit target is the defender, who they can’t defeat alone.

A Second Edition Kind of Hazard

So let’s try a new way of running hazards. In this test there are three characteristics terrain can have: Rough, Harmful, and Revealing. They can have more than one at a time, and movement systems can allow you to cross over them, though they still have their effects if you start or end your turn there.

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Rushieb

In the story I’m currently running, our heroes Gribus, Ghiarren, and Taiuum have found themselves in the company of many other space travelers at a convocation called the Conjoiner, finding that their bizarre circumstances are not unique.

They greeted by two humans and their towering Moiu companion. When they’re not at the Conjoiner, their ship, Rushieb, is their home.

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Elemenshuantalenianjuaat

In our Eyes Wide to the Stars playtest last week, our grey market explorer-traders came across this sapient spacecraft that had buried itself a billion years in the past in an apparently-successful attempt to outrun a yet-unnamed pursuer — a pursuer we certainly hope isn’t still on a prowl in the age we live in.

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