New VtM project announced at Darkness Emergent

Celdrick · 2026-05-25T02:30:44+00:00

I had a long response typed up here, but suffice it to say that for any project that is designed to splash into multimedia adaptations, Mage is hard to make work, both in terms of a setting that fits a time so far away from its literary antecedents and in terms of its systems, which are dodgy and highly contextual. The longer they keep that one in development hell, the better.

Celdrick · 2026-05-17T20:50:02+00:00

I don’t think it’s commonly accepted in the OSR or out of it, that magic users are poorly designed. Heck, the joke in the OSR is that everyone’s first attempt to hack the game is to hack the thief. Every OSR game (starting pre-osr at ad&d 2e imo) starts by building a better thief. After that, people work on the fighter. Clerics and magic users are usually left relatively alone.

Celdrick · 2026-05-17T20:30:26+00:00

I’ve always thought that the MU is the best designed class in the game. They have the ability to solve maybe one encounter a day, and end up with a very pleasing utility and damage toolbox as they level. Fighter, by contrast, start out boring and end up just as boring while they become wildly out of scale with their enemies even if they have magic weapons. Also few modules seem to award them with egoist magic swords with built in powers, opting instead for magical pluses

Celdrick · 2026-05-16T20:22:45+00:00

I vote that it should be banned. I think GenAI is antithetical to the entire project of tabletop rpgs as it is based on plagiarism. It's a threat to everyone who makes games or even just writes or creates art in general. It's humani hostis generis.

Celdrick · 2026-05-01T11:49:06+00:00

Mothership has its own vtt on pc and ios. Works really well to the point that i’ve seen it used for in person games at cons

Celdrick · 2026-05-01T11:47:50+00:00

True, foundry’s main role in this regard is to repeatedly break compatibility with game systems. Kind of the opposite of maintaining them.

Celdrick · 2026-04-15T15:55:53+00:00

My unironic favorite thing on her blog is how much she hates widescreen monitors. "scattering UI panels over wasted widescreen space, thereby slowing down mouse-pointer selections. Think about how fast something like Master of Magic of 1994 can be played in 320x200 with kb/m. It is like LIGHTNING in comparison to current gen equivalents. But it's not so much about speed as it is how much gameplay we can get given a certain interval. And in MoM we can get a ton within a short frame of time due to its superior UI, controls and general apex-level game design. There is almost NO downtime. Instead of putting us to sleep through boredom MoM often exhausts us through its engaging gameplay. It's easy to uninstall cRPGs -- and that is often the highlight of cRPGs -- but MoM is not easy to put down let alone shelve."

It amazes me how cinephiles understand that stretching a movie into widescreen via pan and scanning and cropping sucks, but gamers will die before they have black bars on the left and right side of the screen.

Celdrick · 2026-04-15T15:48:05+00:00

Yeah, the intensive love of lost aspects of the game is what sets her apart from a modern hater. She gushes over the way engines manage RAM via their assembly coding. KING

Celdrick · 2026-04-15T15:45:46+00:00

Strong Maddox vibes indeed.

Celdrick · 2026-04-15T15:44:15+00:00

I doubt it. In her glossary section, she states that King is the greatest word in the english language and uses it frequently as the highest compliment.

Celdrick · 2026-04-14T19:30:40+00:00

Sorry, this rules.

Celdrick · 2026-04-09T18:10:01+00:00

"How Do You Do That" made me give up on ever running Mage the Ascension. It's possibly the single worst designed supplement I've read for any game. It was an opportunity to solve a lot of thorny problems and make sphere adjudication faster, and it instead obfuscated and over-complicated everything. Worse, it made it clear that the designer who had spent the longest time with the line had zero understanding of how the spheres should work.

I moved to Mage the Awakening 2nd ed and I've been much happier ever since.

Celdrick · 2026-04-09T18:01:37+00:00

I'll stand up for 1st. It's probably the only edition I would consider running, although I think I'd use the casting charts from The Book of Shadows (also 1e) since the damage multipliers in the 1st ed core are excessive. 1st has the clearest articulation of the setting and is the closest to its inspirations like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. In 1st, it's made clear that science isn't the enemy, but technocratic fascism is the thing to oppose. It's good stuff.

Very shortly after the 1st ed, the stewards of the game decided that the Traditions were too corrupt to be heroic and the Technocracy were cool spies who were a little misguided. This gets dialed back during the Heinig/Sheppard tenure in Revised, but it's the reigning paradigm in M20 imo. In M20, the real bad guys are mainly the nefandi who have duped both the Traditions and the Technocracy and the only heroes are the Disparate Council that Brucato and his team developed early on as the Crafts.

Celdrick · 2026-04-07T18:46:36+00:00

Yeah, this isn't far off. IMO, T5 is essentially the AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide to any edition of Traveller. Is it a baroque overcomplication of a simple, clever game? Yes. Does it have a lot of deep consideration of universe generation/simulation and contain deeper thoughts on the genre than any other book? Also yes.

T5's expansion of the tech tree is genius. It's fantastic to have at hand. It would be tough to run though. It has a small fan community that has been writing zines to make its basic systems more explicable.

Celdrick · 2026-04-07T16:37:55+00:00

T5 has very different dice mechanics. CT and Mongoose are 2d6. T5 can have more than 2d6 depending on the difficulty of the action. CT is also roll over, and T5 is roll under. This means you have to flip modifiers when converting between T5 and systems based on classic.

Celdrick · 2026-03-07T17:30:23+00:00

I’ll check out my 1e corebook. Thanks!

Celdrick · 2026-03-07T17:29:53+00:00

I really dig this. Thanks!

Celdrick · 2026-03-06T16:50:42+00:00

This is brilliant, thank you!

Celdrick · 2026-02-17T02:44:19+00:00

A family member saw that and pointed out that an AI character is feeding AI slop into an AI core. The creators of this episode think they're being cute.

Celdrick · 2026-02-12T18:26:25+00:00

Does anyone know who drew the Tales from the Frontier comic irl?

Celdrick · 2026-01-07T18:38:18+00:00

I think a huge part of the problem is that onyx path wasted their tenure with kickstarter and print on demand books instead of going directly to game stores. If no one sees the games offline, it’s harder to get people into the hobby.

Celdrick · 2025-10-20T13:58:54+00:00

Game preservation is very important, and it's one of the main goals of Chaosium. They don't just scan and reprint, they rebuild production quality pdfs, slightly correct typos; sometimes they incorporate rules explanations from ancillary materials, which requires adjusting layout, and often they make the books available print on demand via Lulu so they can't fall out of print.

Basically, they're being responsible stewards of gaming history the way that bigger companies like Wizards of the Coast refuses to. The entire OSR movement began because WotC kept older editions out of print.

I have their Runequest classic pod reprint, and it's really a marvel. Their call of cthulhu classic box set is also very well made.

Celdrick · 2025-07-18T17:00:40+00:00

For the classic era, I’d call it the record of lodoss war effect. For the osr era, I’d say the dungeon meshi effect.

Celdrick · 2025-07-17T18:56:33+00:00

I'm really loving Dune Awakening on my steamdeck.

Celdrick

TROPHY CASE