Discussion at Old Men Running the World. Further listening at the Smiling Fox podcast (I haven’t listened to this yet). Also name-checked: Cosmic Encounter, a board game that might be a worthy candidate for one of the board gaming situations I occasionally find myself in.
What really interested me about this was Gillen’s discussion of campaign prep:
… using the spark tables and the generation process I made a sketch of a living kingdom. As you explored, I generated more of it, as required. When they were conceived – either from the sparks or the core idea – the entities in that world act according to their goals, so I had all the backdrop to the events. The king who had lied to his children for fifteen years about being injured, leaving them to run the kingdom and be driven away, all so he could try and trap his ancestral enemies into a final battle: everything cascaded out from that, all from the spark of something like “INJURED PILGRIMAGE” and rolling him as the FOX KNIGHT. And then with those datapoints, everything emerges.
Anyway, I’ve bought so many games I haven’t even tried to run yet (BLADES IN THE DARK, BRINDLEWOOD BAY, KIDS ON BROOMS) and written so many campaigns which, same; so it is not particularly productive for me to fixate on a $70 acquisition when the TBP is so high. (In my defense, my kids appear to have bunged KIDS ON BROOMS into some kind of dimensional rift.) But the idea of procedurally generating a campaign is appealing for all the usual reasons. Of course, those same reasons feel like they ought to make it predictably unappealing, which is why Gillen & Rossignol’s enjoyment of the game is so intriguing. I guess the mental model is tarot or the I Ching — you start with a random seed of some set of things that are rich in associations, and that just potentiates things in a way that staring at a blank page might not. Or at least teleports you to a region of your own brainspace where following the gradient leads to more interesting outcomes.
Not to change the subject too abruptly, but also, hello. There appear to be more of you than there were before? Or at least whatever off-the-shelf analytics I have on the backend of this thing suggest a sustained uptick in visitors over the last several weeks. Which is weird, since I haven’t posted since October. Anyway, to the extent you are not bots, I’d love to know who you are, why you’re here, and what you like to read (blog-wise or, you know, books; we do books here). And if you are bots and can answer back, I mean I guess I can’t stop you.
What I’m trying to figure out is whether I should be distressed by this dynamic, insofar as I came back here in part to get my dumb ass off Bluesky (AGAIN). But if Bluesky is driving traffic here, well. “Traffic” will neither fill my belly nor put my kids to bed, but eyes on my shit isn’t something I’m necessarily prepared to wave off either.
Enough! If you’re new here, go read a book. It’s on me. (The ebook version anyway, print will set you back a few bucks.) I’ll be back.
Currently reading: MAPPING THE INTERIOR, by Stephen Graham Jones.