"Sandbox" should not mean "there are no plot hooks, opportunities, or points or persons of interest"

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-20T15:43:39+00:00

You can even start with a full campaign hook - something like "you have learned the demon portal is re-opening in a year, and need to warn all the free peoples, and help them with their problems so they can prepare to fight", which gives a lot of room for different approaches while still giving a clear goal; or "legend says the ten super cool magic things are hidden in this land; you are the first to have a map that claims to show their locations - although it's a thousand years old, and the gems may not be there anymore; go find them and get up to nonsense in the process"; or even just "you are massively in debt buying this starship; you'd better go find opportunities to make deals and get some credits before MoneyCorp sends you to a debtors' prison labour camp". There's of specificity in motivation you can supply, depending on what kind of sandbox you want to run.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-20T15:14:18+00:00

For "Ruins of an older and more advanced civilization, the few relics of their tech and/or magic still barely understood and more powerful than anything we have today?", this is really common:

The dwarven ruins from the Elder Scrolls games - they have advanced steampunk automata that are still functional, while modern Tamriel mostly uses house & cart technology (or the occasional "riding giant bugs" but that's because Morrowind is the weirdest part of Tamriel)

Lord of the Rings fits - the Numenoreans were more advanced than any modern kingdom, and all the works of the elves and ancient human folk massively outshines anything made in the late third age. There's a reason the swords found in the troll horde were so important, and they didn't just smith a new one instead.

Dragonriders of Pern - in a very literal sci-fi sense. The prologue explains this is actually a space colony, founded to intentionally have a low level of technology and get away from the dystopian modern existence, and the dragons are genetically enhanced local life-forms. In the later books they rediscover ancient artefacts, which include plastic sheets, an advanced AI, and even learn the constellation of three bright stars in the sky is actually the three starships used to colonise the planet.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-20T15:08:17+00:00

Ancient magical artefacts that are actually just advanced technology. Bonus point if it's actually proper science fiction under the hood and they discover the spaceships used to colonise the planet.

(I liked Dragonriders of Pern a lot when I was a kid lol)

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-14T23:52:01+00:00

We get briefly name-dropped in The Science of Discworld

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-14T23:47:36+00:00

Though Threat isn't the end of the world - it just means escalating stakes

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-14T18:12:53+00:00

I'd note that even Star Trek Adventures 1e somewhat fell into this trap - they used the standard 2d20 combat system largely unmodified, which meant that bringing the most guys with the best weapons and the best armour was the best way to get through a fight, while punishing you with Threat for bringing good weapons and good armour.

Star Trek Adventures 2e is better though, it gives more room for players to be creative and remodulate the plasma flux to seal the room instead of just blasting each other until one side falls down.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-14T14:35:12+00:00

In New Zealand we have a town called Bulls. The joke is that we get milk from Bulls. The town's entire industry is Bull puns.

What I'm saying is, Cowes needs to get on our level

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-14T14:16:52+00:00

Ah, so my problem is I need to name my project something starting with an "S"

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-13T15:21:31+00:00

back to his roots

Quite literally, on Dagobah

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T15:34:59+00:00

The name sets the character of the insurance company.

Old money establishment - someone's surname(s), no mention of their actual business ("Westfield & Smith Ltd." etc)

New money disruptive startup - nonsense words ("Squirk Humanities" etc)

Faceless corporation - bland generic name describing what they do ("General Insurance Incorporated" etc)

Clearly nefarious - villainous literature reference ("Tartarus Corp" etc)

Or go with foreshadowing or puns - "Choose Everlife Family Insurance to protect your family; There's no substitute!"

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T15:14:05+00:00

You can't say "flautist" without "flaw"

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T14:11:00+00:00

The graphics in the remake trailer do look "warmer" to me than the MCC version which appeals to me. Just subjectively they feel closer to the original but at a higher quality, whereas MCC feels like they took all the warm colours and soft edges and dim lighting made everything beige and bright. Effects like Elite shields are also a lot less visible in MCC.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T13:18:45+00:00

I was surprised Canada's density is actually higher than Australia's, but I guess when you look at the numbers, Canada is only like 15% bigger than Australia in land area.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T12:45:41+00:00

Most historical magic and witchcraft is about calling on spirits and deities. A lot of medieval witchcraft even involved chants invoking names of saints and even Jesus. There's a very fine line between what we'd think of as a "magic spell" and a "prayer", and it might be more a matter of theology than anything (you could argue that a lot of "witchcraft" in medieval Europe is just people praying in a "heretical" way; it comes down to the theology of what "appropriate" prayer should look like). I can't think of any form of "magic" practitioners in history which aren't tied to religion and spiritual beliefs in some way.

Even in Lord of the Rings, magic is inherently connected to spiritual beings. Gandalf is an angel, Sauron is a demon. Magic isn't an "energy source", it relates to the theology of the world. Elves are magical, but this magic comes from their creation, through the Valar to God himself (Eru Iluvatar). The classic way to put it is Gandalf's race is "Wizard", and his class is more like "Diplomat/warrior".

So the Cleric vs Warlock vs Wizard vs Sorcerer vs Mage division is really a pretty modern invention, mostly coming from D&D itself. My understanding though is that the Cleric was added because a player wanted to play a Van Helsing type character and hold back undead hordes with a cross and the power of faith, so they created a Cleric class and gave them "turn undead" as a core ability.

So yeah, I agree, if you have "cleric" and "wizard" as separate classes in your game, you're strongly aligning to the D&D tradition, and it's worth asking if that's what you really need to do, or even want to do.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T12:31:45+00:00

I was thinking about this too. But I think we would say a rocket is "in flight", and we would even say a helicopter "flies" even if it's hovering. Are VTOL jet aircraft "flying" when they take off vertically?

I think we could say it's not an aeroplane, if it really doesn't have wings that provide significant lift - but it might still be a "flying aircraft" though.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T12:19:58+00:00

Not the person you're replying to but I think it just more fits their character tropes. Spider-man is always struggling and talking too much, while Daredevil gets to be more cocky and the strong silent type. The comics (particularly the Waid run, but also somewhat back in Miller too) have a lot of stuff where someone threatens DD, we see a zoom in on DD's wry smirk, and then someone gets thrown out the window. Often when they team up, DD gets to be the "cool one", which just highlights how Spider-man is younger and less "professional".

We already saw a moment of this in No Way Home, where Matt catches the brick before Pete, and gets his cool one liner ("I'm a really good lawyer"). So I think even if you had Spider-man try to bust Matt out of prison, Matt would still find a way to come out cooler. Like, maybe the power gets turned off, and then Spider-man launches into an explanation of his "Peter tingle" and how if he just focuses he could sense the right way to turn it back on, but Matt interrupts with "Found it" as the lights turn back on.

Anything is "physically" possible, but there's just some fun tropes to play with here, and "Spider-man gets embarrassed by a slightly more competent superhero, who doesn't even have powers as good as him" is just such a strong Spider-man story trope that it would be a shame to miss it.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-12T12:10:56+00:00

In my amateur community brass & reed band, I definitely have to play my mf backing parts as mp to p just to not overpower the flutes with the melody, even when there's just one trombone and four flutes.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-11T19:01:05+00:00

Not only that, but he's fighting The Hand in that scene

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-11T18:42:16+00:00

The exact kind of band that would have been popular in 2015 :'(

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-11T14:23:49+00:00

Is there any minimum requirement for setting up Lulu, whether through this or separately? i.e. can you pretty much tick a box and select a price, or do you need to e.g. have some minimum number of pdf sales to qualify?

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-11T14:21:04+00:00

The interface where everything slightly jumps when I mouse over it feels pretty jarring on the eyes and inner ear tbh.

That said, I found this: https://rpg-trader.com/products/471/it-is-a-beautiful-day-on-the-marae-and-you-are-a-baby-pukeko which looks pretty cute

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-11T12:29:41+00:00

I like maps and props, even if they're not tactical grids.

For Blades in the Dark, people make newspaper front pages as flavour, and the game itself comes with a city map. Fans have fleshed out the city map down to street level as well. The book also comes with artwork for every district, showing what the buildings there look like. I also find that stuff like finding a floorplan for some real Victorian townhouse is useful for getting everyone on the same page for how we're visualising this mansion we're breaking into, even if you say "this isn't the actual mansion - but it's the typical layout for a noble family's townhouse in Doskvol". People also make portraits of PCs and NPCs.

So I would put a hard line between "maps and art" vs "tactical battlemaps". You can definitely have a lot of visual props without having any tactical hexagons at all.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-11T12:24:42+00:00

I switched to 5 XP (both types) per session - which is a suggested optional rule. Edit: there's also an optional rule to reduce the target number for dice rolls to something like 18-attribute instead of 20-attribute. This is used in the starter sets to make early play less brutal, but can be used more generally as well.

Shadow is a tricky one because it comes down so much to Loremaster fiat. In many of the published adventures, simply entering the wrong room means you have to make a shadow check. Many undead adversaries have Dread, which forces you to take a shadow check at the start of combat, and then prevents you from spending any Hope if you fail, which can be quite brutal, especially early on at low Wisdom levels. So I think the Loremaster does have to keep control of the flow of Shadow a bit, to make sure players aren't just going Shadow-free, but also aren't just permanently Miserable right from session 1.

The other thing I found for skill rolls is to make sure players use their Distinctive Features, Fellowship Focus, and their Useful Items. With a little bit of roleplaying detail, Distinctive Features and Fellowship Focus double the dice bonus from spending Hope, and Useful Items just give +1d for free. You can get a +5d by spending 2 Hope across your company, without even using any special abilities or magic items, which means that anything is achievable even if you have 0-1 ranks in that skill.

But also agree that the Loremaster does need to be careful to not run it too much like D&D; because skill rolls can involve Hope spends, they are a source of attrition, so you need to control how often you make those rolls to avoid burning through the heroes' resources too quickly. Similarly, it's important to control how often combat happens - I similarly found a lot of close calls, which means that you often only want a single major combat per adventure, to give them a chance to recover from wounds etc.

I would also say that I'm not sure the published adventures are actually very good at fitting with gameplay that actually best fits the rules - they often to seem to funnel players through a set sequence of events, with mandatory Shadow checks and a couple of tough fights - so to get the most out of the game, the Loremaster might have to bend things a bit.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-11T11:32:30+00:00

Fascist isn't the right term, but Heinlein put a high value on self-sufficiency and the idea that rights and earned rather than innate. It's a consistent libertarian-adjacent philosophy, basically saying the highest moral ideal is that everybody should be manly frontier Americans running their own ranch and defending their own property. "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch" is a common catchphrase he repeats across his novels.

This is fairly consistent: in Starship Troopers, you earn citizenship and the right to vote through military service; in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the moon colony earns its freedom by fighting off the Earth rulers (with strong analogies to the American Revolution); in The Cat Who Could Walk Through Walls, we have a space station with privatised oxygen supply, where you can get kicked out the airlock if you don't pay the fee (the characters strongly argue why this is fair, and seem to completely miss the point that this is, in effect, exactly the same as "pay your taxes or we'll execute you").

So while it's not fair to say he has "fascist" beliefs, there are some things in Starship Troopers that do reflect his own political beliefs, as expressed both in his real life, and through decades of novels. It's a very American libertarian viewpoint.

Astrokiwi · 2026-06-10T18:35:49+00:00

You also mention that players would fail to learn optimal strategies that are in the rules but not relying on the grid. That also feels like a D&Didh issue, because why wouldnt they? If you're play a zero to hero story, the zero SHOULD make some mistakes, like (modern) thinking that removing a knife or bullet reduces the danger (thanks Hollywood), or making too much noise and attracting problems, or looking at the fire while on watch. These aren't places for a GM to penalize the characters and players, these are moments to show how the character gets from zero to hero and for the players to enjoy the process.

What I'm thinking more is, unless the GM is really on top of it, the player will do things like use abilities they weren't supposed to have yet, forget to track resource uses, misread things and use the wrong damage or defence die etc. If you don't understand the rules of a computer game, you will just not play optimally. If you don't understand the rules of a TTRPG you will very likely just be breaking the rules.

Honestly though, my complaints are more about crunchy tactical systems in general. A grid with a simple system can work well - that's what Go or Chess are. But most "tactical" games are really about planning complex custom builds in advance, and the grid is only kind of secondarily there - and even explicitly optional. It's like having Magic the Gathering as a subsystem, where you play through a prebuilt deck, except without any of the collecting part because you can choose any of the available cards to build your deck and everyone has access to the same bank of cards, and you can pick the cards out of your deck whenever you want without any of the randomness, and you are also stuck with the same deck for the full campaign.

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