All posts by Ashgar

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On Avatars

This might be kind of obvious because my progress on these ran to a screeching halt, but I had a lot of trouble figuring out what to write for Ashgar, who is the 4th member of the “adventuring group”.

Ashgar is me, in a lot of senses, so figuring out what to write feels like I’m trying to decide what my own character traits are, what faults I’m okay with a fictional version of myself having, and bragging about the things I’m good at. Introspection is hard, and also it runs into how private I am about my own life.

That said, I do still want to get this project advanced a bit, so I’ll be working on character profiles for my other characters. I’ll get to myself eventually, and hopefully that will also let me address some spots where I have personality type gaps. Fiction doesn’t have to perfectly mirror reality, after all.

Character Bios

On Kori

This one was one of the wild cards. This is the first one where the character design was done by someone else, as I was trying to find a character to fill a “mostly dragon, size large” role in the party.

Kori is another one who is not based on a previous RPG character of mine directly, but is very related to one. My sorcerer-turned-dragon (it’s a long story) from a previous D&D Campaign is her patron and also probably her dad. Neither of these is public knowledge in-setting.

The third member of the Order of the Silver Scale, Kori is the largest and most-imposing of the party members. She’s posing as a Dragonborn (she’s a dragon) and a Sorcerer (she’s a warlock, mostly). An extremely gifted ice mage, she mostly fights with things made from her own breath (daggers, etc) and a sword that seems to be made from non-melting ice. She’s also handy with improvised tools.

As for her personality, she has a good sense of humor; her dragon-like nature means that Tizak treats her with great respect. She is fond of straight-forward solutions to problems, and believes that dragons are better than everyone else.

It’s probably this belief that explains why she’s stuck walking around with an adventuring party. Her patron has sealed away her true form, and encouraged her to “learn more about the world”. Perhaps if she figures out that the “lesser races” aren’t, then she’ll be able to take to the sky with her real wings.

Character Bios

On Tariel

This is why you shouldn’t tell me that a character I’m asking you to draw is “too boring” or tempt me to explore the capabilities of Heroforge.

Tariel is not based on any existing character I have or have plans to play, and more grew out of the need to have something resembling a physical character in an otherwise all-caster party. He competed for this role with a kobold barbarian that may or may not exist in the future.

He is another member of the Order of the Silver Scale, and he’s a “Kitsune” according to his own words. Just because no other known kitsune have scales, four arms, spine ridges, or a dragon tail have not gotten in the way of this claim. I’m pretty sure he’s an Eastern-style dragon, but it’s a little unclear how he ended up in a setting where no one else has even heard of those.

Maybe it’s this.

Tariel is the Serious member of the party, which makes him a frequent target for practical jokes from Tizak. He fights using his staff (which can shrink/expand) and martial arts; it certainly adds a bit to hand-to-hand combat when you have more hands. He does prefer to avoid fights, and frequently ends up paired with Tizak for any situations needing a moderately delicate touch.

Tariel is with the group primarily to find out more about himself, and to do whatever good he can along the way. This also works for Tizak, who always wants to know why this particular individual seems very dragon-like and yet not at all like most dragons. This is in contrast to one of the other party members…

Character Bios

On Tizak

While it might have made sense to start with Ashgar, it turns out that’s basically describing an idealized version of myself and that’s hard. So here, have a Kobold.

Tizak is a Dragonscaled Kobold, servant/envoy of the blue dragon Zydroxa, although that’s not exactly a well-known piece of information. As he’s my character in a currently-running Pathfinder game, what he gets up to in his original setting is yet to be fully determined. Deeds so far include helping to found a settlement and working very hard to improve the opinion of kobolds and dragonkin among the other races.

In my setting, he’s the leader of an adventuring party called the Order of the Silver Scale. It is in this capacity that he’s gathered up a few other potentially notable individuals (one of whom might be a bear) and really, is still working on that whole “opinion of kobolds” thing. It’s a little pretentious that his party is named indirectly after a well-known dragon, but when the kobold is the one with the third-strongest claim to dragonkind, it fits pretty well. The “summoner” part of his abilities is also de-emphasized a bit here.

Images courtesy of Ammo

Ultimately Tizak is the go-getter of the group, the first to jump into danger. He’s not averse to making plans, but does not always wait to consider consequences before starting on a course of action. He’s also an actor and a musician, and enjoys exercising these skills to make money and also demonstrate that kobolds are good for more than just making traps.

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On Blaugust 2021

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The last post I made on this blog was for Blaugust in 2019, but my 2020 wasn’t exactly the best either mentally or physically. I know I’m in good company there.

Regardless, I’m basically going to be ignoring the blaugust prompts, and using this as an excuse to do some writing for my stable of massively underdeveloped characters. I plan to get Monday/Wednesday/Friday posts out for these, so that can be something to look forward to. In time, I would like to get back to using this as an expansion of thoughts from the podcast. But for now, writing for writing’s sake will have to do.

Tabletop

On Lancer, Again

Blaugust is half over and I haven’t even posted the thing I promised months ago.

Lancer’s Setting

Because it’s been so long, Lancer is a tabletop RPG about giant robot pilots (for a somewhat flexible definition of “giant” that also includes power armor). It’s set in the Somewhat distant future of our galaxy, in which mankind has used both FTL and long-form travel to spread out among the stars. There’s a mild space-fantasy element primarily consisting of AIs that do things that can’t be explained by physics and what humans have learned from studying them. The term used for this is “Paracausality”, borrowed directly from Destiny.
Monarch Cutaway

Lancer’s History

Lancer is a post-apocalyptic setting, but not in the usual sense of the term. In Lancer’s theoretical future mankind developed near-light ships and managed to establish some colonies on distant worlds. With colonies established and more ships en-route, the collapse of society cut off communication and ended most life on Earth. After a roughly ~5000-year dark age or so, old knowledge was rediscovered in the Massif vaults, and a “world government” called Union was created after a bit of fighting. The game’s narrative present is about 5000 years after this.
IPS-Northstar Mechs
As a Lancer, you (probably) work for Union’s Third Committee. Old Earth (now known as Cradle) and most of known space are recovering from the aftermath of the Second Committee, whose authoritarian and imperialist policies (referred to as “anthrochauvanist”) made a bit of a mess of the place before they were overthrown. Time has resulted in some of the original colonists re-establishing communications, and they’ve had plenty of opportunity to develop their own cultures and in some cases technologies in the thousands of years since contact was originally lost. The most notable of these are the Karrakin Trade Baronies (who existed before the Fall) and the Aun Ecumene (established during the dark ages). Relations between these entities vary.
Smith Shimano Corpro Mechs

Lancer’s Technology

A major event in Lancer’s timeline is referred to as the Deimos Incident. A summary is that a super-powerful AI (known as RA or MONIST-1) was being studied on the aforementioned moon of Mars, and it managed to somehow take over and leave, taking the entire moon with it. It reappeared to force Union to sign a treaty concerning AI research, and has proven to be willing to show up personally to enforce violations. Much of Lancer’s “advanced” technology is the product of studying this entity, and is the given explanation for FTL. Some other factions have their own unique technologies: The Voladores are space nomads and have some knowledge of folding space that no one else does, and the Aun have “hard light” and their own unique form of FTL.
Horus Mechs
As far as what players get, there are 5 major Manufacturers. (It’s really 4 and a cult that has a gear catalog.) Your starter gear is from General Massive Systems, who produces a really quite good generalist mech and weapons of every type. As you advance as a pilot you get access to gear from the other manufacturers with more specialized portfolios. Horus has a strong emphasis on both hacking and defying physics, SSC makes fast, lightly-armored mechs, IPS-N mostly makes the opposite, and Harrison Armory uses the most advanced tech (some of it stolen) in theirs. These manufacturers are also some of the major players within union, so you may end up working for/against their interests. Just like Shadowrun, it doesn’t prevent you from using their gear while you do it.
Harrison Armory Mechs

The Unknown

One of my favorite things about the setting as written is that there are a lot of explicit and implicit mysteries. What does RA want and where is it? What happened to most of the colony ships during the dark ages? What are NHPs really? What weird tech is HA currently developing? What happened on Hercynia?

That last one is the subject of the first module, but the rest of these you’ll just have to figure out as they come up.

Gaming, Tabletop

On Lancer

In the most recent podcast, I mentioned Lancer, a sci-fi mech RPG that’s currently on Kickstarter. I feel like I didn’t entirely do it justice, so here’s a bit of a longer explanation on what it is, and why I think it’s great.

The Premise

Lancer is a Mech-based Tabletop RPG using a custom d20 system. (A d20 is used for resolution, but the “standard stats” and levels and various other things that are in a normal d20 system are not here.) It’s set in a sort of future version of our galaxy with some hand-waves in the form of “sufficiently advanced technology” (think Mass Effect or Infinity) but very little in the way of aliens. As a result humans have spread across the galaxy, multiple factions are trying to advance their own agendas and the players are mech pilots who Got Involved. How exactly that works is left pretty open.

Lancer cover art

The System

One of the more creative things about Lancer is that it’s basically two games stapled together. There’s a very open narrative system for pilot interactions while you’re not in a giant robot, then also has tactical combat built in for when you need to get into fights. In this way it avoids the tendency of other narrative systems to break down when negotiations do (I know this is a complaint my usual GM has about World of Darkness-based systems) but also supports doing more than just fighting (which is the generally largest complaint about systems like D&D 4e). Interestingly Kodra proposed something like this on the podcast for playing 4e, so it’s interesting to see it in a more realized form.

The Mechanics

Part of the fun of Gundam Breaker 3 to me is the very high amount of customization you can do on any given robot. Lancer uses the concept of Licenses to add their own spin on this, and getting more licenses means you have more options to choose from when designing a mech. Each license has one associated frame, and then an assortment of 6 associated weapons and systems that go with that frame thematically. Once you have enough license levels you can mix and match these as you choose (within certain limits) until you have a mech that does what you want it to.

There’s also a little bit of vertical progression associated with license levels, as your pilot skills increase and can result in your mech having more ammo, more HP, faster movement, etc. Pilots also have talents for further customization, plus a set of things they can do while not in their mech.

The Fluff

This is actually complicated enough that I think it deserves its own post. Until next time!

Gaming

On Honorable Mentions, 2018

For those of you that missed it, we recorded our “GOTY 2018” Aggrochat show two weeks ago. In a break from tradition, a few Honorable Mentions also came up last week. I just want to give some additional words to a few of my favorites.

Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth: Hacker’s Memory

This is a side-story of sorts to 2016’s Digimon Story: Cyber Sleuth. (It takes place at the same time, TVTropes would call this a P.O.V. Sequel.) It’s a good example of a “the same, but more” approach to a sequel, in that you play as an actual hacker who has more capability to mess with the digital world but less unexplained magical power to travel through computers. Opinions on this mostly relate to whether or not you needed Cyber Sleuth to be longer. I put quite a few hours into it, but Monster Hunter World cut into the time I was using to play it. It’s still worth a look if you really enjoyed the first game.

Spyro Reignited Trilogy

Crash vs. Spyro was a big thing when both of these franchises on the PS1, but for me there wasn’t really much contest. The Crash games were products of the limited ability to display 3D spaces at the time and don’t hold up terribly well today. Spyro levels have a considerably more open design and a more mobile protagonist, and remain interesting even 20 years later. These games show that with a fresh coat of paint, they’re just as good as they ever were. You still have to like collect-a-thon platformers on some level, and it turns out I still do.

Tangledeep

This is a game that I picked up in Early Access and liked a lot. It hit 1.0 and released in February and I unfortunately have to admit that I haven’t played it since this happened, but I’m still going to mention it here. Tangledeep is a roguelike in nearly all of the definitions of that term (turn-based, grid movement, random generation, (optional) permadeath). It’s set in a fairly whimsical and colorful world but what really drew my attention is that uses a job system for the main character that’s pretty close to the implementation from Final Fantasy Tactics.

The reason it didn’t get played this year is mostly because they announced a Switch version which then didn’t come out before the end of the year.

Gaming

On Missed Opportunities

It’s that time for Game of the Year discussions, and I find my list is pretty short. This is not because good games didn’t come out this year, but more because I didn’t play them (or enough of them) to have a solid opinion. Here’s a short list of games that seem good, but I can’t really comment on:

God of War

The big one. I’m not entirely sure what I was doing in April, but I didn’t pick this game up until the end of August and still haven’t gotten much of an opportunity to put time into it. People seem to like this game very much, but it’s so different from the old God of War games that it put me off at first. I think approaching it as its own thing would improve my experience, especially since the game seems to have a very strong theme of “new beginnings” anyway.

Marvel’s Spider-Man

The other big one. Swinging around in this game is so much fun but I didn’t pick this up until Black Friday. I’ve had not much time for gaming at all during December, and almost all of what I did have has gone to Smash Bros. This is at the top of the list once the holidays are over, but that’s not soon enough to get mentioned for GOTY discussions.

Ni No Kuni II

As far as gameplay goes, this is way better than the original. This one’s a victim of timing, since it came out while I was still buried in Monster Hunter World. Later, instead of going back to it, I went back to a different long JRPG. Nier: Automata could probably be mentioned here because it’s in a similar situation. Maybe no good JRPGs are going to come out in 2019, and I can finally catch up.

Omensight

I’m not sure what happened with this game. It’s the spiritual successor to a game I liked very much (enough to beat on two platforms): Stories: The Path of Destinies. It got a bit lost in the shuffle when it came out, and they announced a “definitive edition” patch not too long after that, which came out in October. One of the other games I think was great this year took over the time that would have gone here.

Shadows: Awakening

It’s entirely possible I’m the only person who would like this game. Shadows: Awakening is a sequel/remake to Shadows: Heretic Kingdoms, a game that came out when I was trying nearly everything on Steam that looked remotely interesting. I liked the premise but figured I’d come back to it when the story was complete, since Heretic Kingdoms was just supposed to be Chapter 1. This year that happened, but like many of the story-focused games in the above list, I haven’t made time for it.

Honorable mentions…

…to everything that came out in late November/December that isn’t Smash Bros. Ultimate. Mutant: Year Zero looks like my kind of game, and Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is absolutely my type of game. The remasters of Katamari Damacy and Last Remnant would also have gotten a look, but neither of those would have come up in GOTY discussions anyway. (A remaster of We ❤︎ Katamari might have, though.)

Gaming

On PAX West 2018, Part 2

More games from PAX West!

Soundfall

Like I mentioned with Spin Rhythm, rhythm games are kind of my thing. This one is a top-down style action-RPG where your actions are much stronger if you do them on the beat. This resembles Crypt of the Necrodancer in practice, but you aren’t punished quite so hard for failing to get the timing correct and you have free movement. The game looks really nice with a lot of neon, but manages to avoid the frequent problem that games with a lot going on tend to have with attacks that are hard to see. This should be coming out for everything under the sun next year (yes, including Switch) so we’ll find out how all of these ideas hold up.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHnJQFKX-RM

Star Renegades

This is a somewhat non-traditional entry into the roguelite category. This is a sci-fi party-based RPG about a rebellion, and you play as a group of heroes fighting to dethrone the Tyrant. A big selling point is the battle system, which bears a very strong resemblance to Grandia. (If you’re unfamiliar with Grandia, Child of Light also uses a very similar system.) the idea is that actions take different amounts of time, and by choosing your actions and targets properly you can do the things you want while disrupting what the enemy is trying to do to you. The roguelike structure discourages you from getting too attached to your team members, but it still seems like you can have a sense of progression even if your party meets a horrible death.

Summoners Fate

I feel like that title needs an apostrophe somewhere, but there isn’t one to be seen. Summoners Fate is a top-sown tactical RPG-like game featuring deck building. In many ways this reminds me of Hero Academy, but with more of a focus on interesting single-player. It also features a primary character (your Summoner) that is both the source of all of your cards and your loss condition if they’re defeated. This one definitely looks like it’s developed for mobile first, but it was a lot of fun to play and should also be coming to PC at some point.

This game also earns lots of bonus points for having a ranged attack that spawns a squirrel on hit.

Honorable Mentions

I saw a lot more games at PAX: Party Golf/Party Crashers was a set of fun and highly customizable party games from the same studio. They’re on Steam now and should be hitting the Switch shortly. Pathfinder: Kingmaker is a CRPG rendition of Pathfinder’s most popular adventure module, and it should be out very soon. Indivisible is a party-based RPG from the studio that made Skullgirls, and it brings that same level of incredible 2D animation to a very different type of game. All of these look like they’ll be interesting, and the future of indie games looks very bright indeed.