Things You Believe About Caves of Qud if You're Acting in Bad Faith or Extremely Not Paying Attention, a thread
1. Q Girl is a dev self-insert
I put Q Girl in the game before we had any other contributing writers
2. The devs made Q Girl unkillable as a political statement
You can't kill Q Girl because, despite being cruel roguelike devs, we have hearts & feel bad when you brick your twenty-hour run by murdering a major quest giver.
Reactionary stick-in-the-mud Otho, the other major quest giver, also can't be killed. Also (surprise!), they can actually both be killed.
3. You can't join the Putus Templar because of the devs' political views
You can't join any of the seventy factions in the game other than the ONE the main quest revolves around, the Barathrumites
4. I just wanna play the game without bringing politics into it. There's nowhere I can do that.
This one's gonna hurt but you can't construct a fictional world without bringing politics into it. You can recapitulate the dominant ideology uncritically, but that... is political.
The thing you want, being able to talk about the game while leaving these specific thirteen rocks in your ideological rock maze undisturbed, actually exists all over the internet. The Caves of Qud channel in the Roguelikes discord is one example.
5. The devs are all furry communists
Only SOME of the devs are furry communists
6. They're so angry all those tweets must be about Sseth
They're not about Sseth, they're about the knock-on dummies who get irate when we tell them they aren't entitled to this _one_ specific space that isn't even contained within the game they bought
7. We're hurting the devs by torrenting the game!!
Not how marketing works
8. You can't talk about the Putus Templar on the discord
See the highlight:
I'll say this for anyone who's earnestly questioning the implications of this kind of moderation: for every _1_ nuanced discussion about the Templar that's lost, 100 more flower in its place because the mods created a comfortable space for people who don't feel welcome elsewhere
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Max's thread on tools that encourage reflection gets at an important facet of what I'm coming to understand emergent narrative to be: a cracking open and reification of the creative process.
Arguments against emergent narrative point to storytelling's holism, how stories must be conceived, arranged, and paced in proper ways to cohere meaningfully.
But there's also a lot of narrative meaning to uncover through working with the materials themselves, through storyFORMING.
Hey, my friend @RachelFellman's first fantasy novel, The Breath of the Sun, came out today! I want to tell you a bit about it.
Rachel is the long-time friend of my partner Mielle. She's utterly brilliant, so even though I hadn't read any of her fiction, I had high expectations.
And... she blew them away. The novel is so stunningly good.
It's Wednesday afternoon, you know what that means
Time to eat exactly one bagel and add representative democracy to procedurally generated salt kraken villages
ELECT👏THE👏CHILDREN👏
Two important points about this village's civic history:
One of their monuments reads: "The villagers of Hawar laid offerings at the feet of Babokobam, legendary barkbiter, in exchange for enlightenment about the council."
btw these all come by way of our lovely tile artist Sam, who doesn't use twitter. I just gotta get that out because I can't have people thinking I'm this talented.
I love maps & their promise of fractal discovery.
I love procedural generation and the aesthetics of the unauthored.
Where do these two loves intersect? Generated maps.
I am the procgen map admirer. These are my favorite map generators and the folks who create them.
👇THREAD👇
To start with, you can't talk about map generation and not mention @redblobgames. His HTML5 generator is the gold standard.
The quantization of the map into hexes. The beautiful terrain iconography. They partition the gestalt into something explorable in discrete steps, one story at a time.