🚨US FOREIGN POLICY FUCKS THE WORLD ALERT🚨

" Gul and others's mistrust [of vaccinations] stems from a much more sinister source ... hunting for Bin Laden in the Pakistani city of Abbottabad, the CIA organized a fake hepatitis B vaccination program to aid in their search. "
" ... though the White House announced that the CIA would no longer use vaccination programs as cover for espionage, Pakistan moved from being a country that had almost eradicated polio to one whose polio cases accounted for a whopping 85 percent of the global share. "
Even if you expect a baseline of USian interventionist evil, this is *beyond the pale* HOLY SHIT
" Iftikhar says she has been pelted with stones and that some of her colleagues have been killed; now, as the coronavirus vaccine has started making its way to Pakistan, she is far from the only healthcare provider worried about the CIA’s lasting impact on the country. "

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More from @zedecksiew

20 Mar
🚨RPG DISCOURSE ALERT🚨

This has always been the most obvious thing to me:

"TTRPGs are a conversation; how you get people into the conversation is design. How you describe a particular place, how you’ve drawn a particular character are as important as mechanical rules."

1/
"TTRPGs are a conversation", particularly-

It feels like a useless thing to point out; every instance of RPG play (that isn't solo play) is obviously "people, talking".

But I've come to realise that this simple observation underpins everything I want do, re: RPG design.

2/
The idea that everything said at the table-

"They've left a key on the table. Do you take it?"
"My character hates dwarves ..."
"Yes, but what *direction* do we flee in?"

Is play. Is the heart of the game, working. Not just when conversation triggers resolution mechanics.

3/
Read 17 tweets
18 Mar
To contextualise my thoughts re: incentivizing ethical decisions in RPGs:

Yesterday I played in a game, running through @DonnStroud 's "The Isle of the Plangent Mage". At the start of the adventure, a scene of townsfolk slaughtering beached whales.

1/
The parent whale had already been killed; its three children were still on the beach, breathing.

The bulk of our session became: "How do we save these whale babies???"

2/
We were playing with Old School Essentials. OSE's rules-sanctioned incentive for play is as old-school as it gets: gold for XP; monsters defeated for XP.

3/
Read 13 tweets
18 Mar
This is my main problem with mechanically rewarding pro-social play: a character's ethical choice is rendered mercenary.

"Being good for a reward isn’t being good - it’s just optimal play. "
Bear in mind I'm not saying that pro-social play can't have "rewarding" outcomes for players:

Any decision should have (diegetic?) consequences in the fiction. The townsfolk are thankful; the goblins remember your mercy, etc.

But extra XP tickets for ethical decisions stinks.
If you give bonus XP for sparing goblins your players aren't making a decisions based on how much their value life. They are making a decision based on how much they want XP.

A subtle but *absolutely* essential distinction, when it comes to ethics.
Read 10 tweets
15 Mar
Tried reading Lancer RPG several times now. (It's been on my bedside table for a month.)

And it is *genuinely* difficult for me to see its setting's central polity, Union, as anything but an analogue to imperial US America.
Union:
* centralised polity with clear metropole worlds
* absolutely intertwined with megacorporations
* "safeguarded" by a secret intelligence bureau a la the CIA / KGB
* foreign policy against its "periphery" is expansionism / corpocratic brush war
* sure of its moral rectitude
The text uses the word "utopia" / "utopian" 18 times. (Not counting the phrase "Utopian Pillars", Union's charter.)

I kept looking to see whether it was using this world ironically. It does not.

I'm sorry, but secret police + centralised nation-state + MEGACORPS =/= utopia.
Read 19 tweets
15 Dec 20
Modern cyberpunk's problem isn't dystopia. Cyberpunk fiction has always had dystopia. Punks need a bad world to resist.

Modern cyberpunk's problem is tone. Feels like there's more stories of surrender / evil-ultimately-wins cynicism now. We've stopped resisting the bad world.
1/
Maybe this is natural:

As we slip further into dystopia, cyberpunk begins to dress in the costume of realist fiction.

In real life, as we discover the insurmountability of the corpo-state; as we realise that evil wins not because it is ruthless but because it is convenient;

2/
Creators working in the idiom of cyberpunk may feel like its their duty to reflect these realities:

"We live in a dystopia now. Turns out, we aren't the punks. We're the wage-slaves."

3/
Read 13 tweets
4 Apr 20
🦚d20 PLACES YOU MISS🦚

Another weekend under quarantine. This morning there were sirens, where I am.

I'd like to leave the house for a bit. Come with me?

Drop me an object-themed emoji? I'll write you a place you've seen before, and long to see again.
1:⛽️At home, with your husband carrying your crying son; your mother on the phone, chattering-

You miss the rig.

It was no less of a pressure-cooker: sixty crew in a football field crammed with gear, crude, a gas flare.

But there, on the deck -wind on an open sea.

@adibzaini
2:🔦The light on your suit casts a wavering disc. Hadal amphipods and jellies drift into its beam, then dart away.

You waddle up a dead driveway. Shine your light through the windows of a ruined house. You once lived here. Squid and spiderfish live in it, now.

@planetkasei
Read 22 tweets

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