@talkandplay.substack.com
He/him writer/game dev. culture/political posting, politics are in all aspects of life, including creative pursuits. #NAFO appreciator #BLM Writing sporadically @ https://talkandplay.substack.com
If I said that Mothership/Iron Sworn or many other systems was my favorite system or the only system I play very few people would bat an eye at that, if I said the same thing but said D&D, I would never hear the end of how I just need to play more systems. And that is bullshit. 1/5
This play culture is actually so pervasive that books/games have been written *assuming* players are going to do whatever they want anyways and take a "do whatever" stance, further reinforcing this mentality rather than doing anything to break out of it.
Well-written TTRPGs aren't Calvinball.
Poorly-written games are so common and expected that a play culture has become pervasive where GMs approach well-written games and their first instinct is to just slash them apart and slap the bits into their own version of a bad 5E hack rather than try to run a game as it's written.
You should read RPG books even if you don't play them if you're working around any kind of narrative medium.
This thread should be the death-knell for Platner's claim that the army didn't ban him for the Nazi tattoo and for his defenders' claims that he didn't know it was a Nazi tattoo.
It's the reason he was barred from re-enlistment, and he knew it.
He's a liar who deliberately kept a Nazi tattoo.
As Square Enix gears up to officially reveal Part 3 of the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, I probed director Naoki Hamaguchi for some teases of what's coming.
Wutai? Yes. Space? Yup. Chocobo breeding? Not clear... www.bloomberg.com/news/newslet...
Honestly nothing illustrates Newsom's unfitness for higher office than his willingness to talk to the absolute worst podcasters.
From Trump to Noem to Hegseth and beyond, we are being governed by a party of perverts who are set on making their own psychosexual derangements into policy
www.liberalcurrents.com/pervert-poli...
Great encapsulation of the MAGA obsession with bathroom usage, children's genitals, describing their sexual exploits, grotesque plastic surgery, and pornographic descriptions of violence. It's truly breathtaking the way they've cornered the market on deranged perversion.
On 2: if SCOTUS did that, that’d just turn congress into a literal cage match right? Like, one crackhead house rep shows up with an AR and congress turns into columbine.
Anyone who uses treatler like that should be pelted with rotten produce, preferably produce the size and consistency of a brick. Treatler means “someone who supports reactionaries for consumerist reasons” not just anyone who buys treats for themselves! Fuck these horsehair shirt salesmen.
feels like a minute since i have pointed out that donald trump has pardoned more child sex offenders than every other president of the united states combined
Man actually told his barber “give me the ‘boy band hitler’”
For sure, but none of us get the luxury of choosing our context. We gotta go with the flow (or roll with the punches as the case may be), the IoM is the PoV faction by GW’s own choice and protagonists need to connect to the audience to keep them
Yeah, especially since (due to the sheer range of subfactions) the Imperium has an insanely wide array of on-screen cultures and group beliefs. To antidote this would require expanding the Xeno lines tenfold at a minimum!
Eh, we’re all friends here
Oh yeah, I very much agree there. That’s why the satire was very much undermined for the sake of heavy metal album cover factor. Now the setting’s assumptions and focus on the IoM are making a fairly unfortunate brew wrt criticizing fascism.
Part of that is just the setting though. Like pretty much every named character has at least one major atrocity under their belt. Guilliman is pretty much the morally best person in the IoM *and also one of the best in the setting*.
That’s honestly my issue with how they’ve run the ‘satire’.
I mean, I could buy that was GW’s intent but I feel like that goes full Mark Twain “It is better to keep your mouth closed and let people think you are a fool than to open it and remove all doubt”, given that Bob G is working to solidify the IoM rather than doing Imperium Secundus 2
🤞🤞
Oh I agree, don’t get me wrong. It’s just also a terrifying thought that the Literal Face Melter Guitar Solo and Wolf McWolferson: Wolf Priest of the Great Wolf game would be up there with the most enduring dramas of history.
The existence of Belisarius Cawl and the Primaris marines are a pretty clear omen on that front
Yeah! There’s loads of room to explore, it’s really what makes the setting as compelling as it is.
Bone-chilling, but likely true
Same, tbh. It gives us room for genuinely interesting characters while not losing the Heavy Metal Album Cover factor. Grand drama starring flawed but sympathetic characters and enacted via rule of cool hyperviolence.
Exactly! And a lot of the best stuff being done in WH40K’s setting explicitly addresses that, like Fatshark’s Darktide or Owlcat’s Rogue Trader. The shift to tragic dystopia is happening/ has happened, there’s not much reason to cling to the old satire line and, frankly, it just makes it look worse.
Pete may be the world’s only case of a drinking problem being contagious.
Titus and Cain actually cared about human life, and because they’re major PoV characters, the Imperium itself begins to look human. Which again, makes for a strong tragic story and a really bad parody of fascism.
It also made the random moments of human decency necessarily thrown into the lore to make compelling characters undercut the idea that the IoM were supposed to be functionally as evil as any of the other, less covered factions.