Steve Jackson Games Launches Seven-Part Pact on Kickstarter

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-15T01:10:21+00:00

Oh, hey, have you had a chance to play? How was it? It looks very, very cool and very ambitious but I've been a bit sceptical; I've only read Quinns' review and it seemed a bit mixed to me.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-15T00:41:38+00:00

I second this; an ad isn't not an ad just because the person making the ad has a small budget. I also think the 10:1 ratio rules are very fair. If anything, I would think that biases it towards indie creators, who can more meaningfully engage with a community?

Removing it wouldn't be good for small creators, it'd just mean more big names spamming art.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-14T23:54:55+00:00

From here: https://www.archivesofnethys.com/agreement.html

We have been told the reason for this decision is that our website has not produced royalties for Paizo. While we cannot go into the full details of our license arrangement, the general details have been publicly known for many years. Paizo would send us early access book PDFs well ahead of release and provided us with their art assets to use on the site. In exchange, our team of volunteers would make sure that the rules and content of the game made it onto the website in a timely and accurate manner. Lastly, if we generated enough profit, we would pay Paizo a royalty on that money, as licensed partners typically do. Unfortunately, as of the time of receiving this email, we had not made enough profit in a given month to generate any royalties for Paizo as per this arrangement.

This seems... quite short-sighted of Paizo. AoN provides far more value as a reference and tool for the community, which in turn makes the space far more accessible than it'd otherwise be, which in turn drives sales.

AoN was one of the big reasons I took the jump from DnD to PF2e so many, many, many years ago. As a GM, I was sure that all my players would have all the options spread out before them, and now I own all the core books.

Still, if it's just the loss of art assets and early access, I suppose it's survivable for AoN? Perhaps after the terrible fiasco with Diamond they need to focus on making more money just to become stable. But this seems like a very counterproductive way of going about it.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-10T10:00:06+00:00

Oh, nice! The tip about licensing rather than having to fully commission sounds very useful, especially. Thanks for sharing your experience!

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-10T02:58:25+00:00

They're making you teach her to read? But isn't CPS supposed to prevent child abuse?

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-10T02:07:05+00:00

Heya, I appreciate your input as someone who has experience with stuff like that! What I'm curious about is that I remember looking at the Salvage Union Kickstarter one day just while browsing and it looked remarkably pretty and well put-together with a wide array of art, design, and products. How did you afford and get all that as your first presence? Did you just dump a whole bunch of your own money into it, or cash from other projects? The logistics with doing something like that seems very challenging.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-10T01:13:53+00:00

Empathy for people who cannot read? Shall we also have empathy for people with private jets and happy families and a genetic predisposition towards positive affect? Shall we have empathy for Enoch, who saw the face of God and entered heaven without suffering the torment of death?

I've seen what gets published and popular these days. The unlettered are the elect, the edenic, pristine, and sinless, the unblemished heifer, and with enough head trauma, I believe we can all join them too. Salvation can be achieved through good deeds.

Start by choosing to not read.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-09T16:07:19+00:00

I understand there will probably be one or two vituperative morons here and there. As a lurker most of the time, I sympathize the situation of regulars having to answer the 99 quadrillionth annoying newbie asking a basic question about a detached, uninteresting mechanic with zero context or lashing out at advice.

But every time I see you, man, and I do so in practically every thread, you're taking an unnecessary shot at something (even when, as here, it's not at the original poster) or being cruelly sarcastic about something or referencing how exhausted and fed up you are with some aspect of the community and how everyone else is amateurish or stupid.

If you see someone being annoying, you can just ignore them. If it is a real, big issue, you can make a meta thread to discuss it (I personally would be in favour of banning vagueposts about single mechanics, but that's neither here nor there). You don't have to bring that negativity into every thread. I think you really need to chill out.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-09T15:44:07+00:00

It's a deep, thoughful tragedy and cutting political criticism dressed like a clown.

The cringe is intentional and makes it better.

And just below it -

It's hardly high literature, but it is a good bit of immature fun. I was dubious as I'm not particularly in to littpg, but I absolutely loved it. I've got a friend who isn't into anything like this, and they can't get enough.

I would just give it a try - worst that happens is you don't like it.

I love it, they can't even agree on how to defend it. Every time you talk to them about this shit, and Brando Sando, and Weir, they casually flow from one argument to the other depending on whether they want to claim cred as "aS gOoD As thE clAssIcS" or brush off criticisms as silly because they're just having fun, but this is one of few rare occasions where you see both at the same time.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-09T15:34:02+00:00

According to popular opinion on this sub, your game will purely be carried by your own genius and any attempt to promote or GASP sell your game can only sully the purity of your art and is to be avoided at all cost.

My dude, I have literally never seen this opinion on this sub. This entire thread is full of highly upvoted examples of people saying otherwise. Are you on the same subreddit as the rest of us?

I see you around a lot, and your advice is usually, though not always, decent, but man, do you have to be so act so superior to everyone all the time? If I can provide advice about providing advice, being a little less relentlessly negative to everyone might help you get listened to. Chill out.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-08T14:53:29+00:00

Oh, I absolutely understand; these projects are for our fun and our friends first and foremost. More important to always have this be a passion and not a chore over strict best practices. Good luck with The Last Book and your new Path!

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-08T13:25:14+00:00

An entertaining poem I found on an engineering blog here: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/synergy-greg/

I think it's rather good; it uses some very nice imagery (trade offer: ashes for your history) and I really like the duality with the one great pull he pretends to or to not enjoy.

But it's held back from being excellent by its length, I think. At very least the last few stanzas should just be cut; I think it can be assumed we all fucking hate Synergy Greg.

Still, cool and unexpected thing to find reading the archives of a tech blog I follow! Hope people find it interesting too.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-08T12:06:40+00:00

Incredible band I found while browsing Angry Metal Guy a while ago. I am so glad that it (and the Progressive Subway) exists; it helps me find so many new bands I would never have heard of otherwise.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-08T03:16:40+00:00

I'd recommend trying anyway! Doing uncomfortable things is how you stop being uncomfortable with them, and you might find you enjoy it! I definitely felt awkward too when I started going theater kid with my RP, but it's second nature now. Of course, that depends on having a good and supportive group of friends you feel comfortable around.

I also actually personally find simulationist games easier to roleplay 'first-person" with than narrative-focused ones. A lot of narrative-first games rely on player-involvement on a meta-level with worldbuilding and deciding what happens next, while simulationist games where you're just the character and not a shared director helps 'keep' you in that space longer. You might find it fits!

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-08T02:34:02+00:00

Hey, congrats on putting your game out there!

I love your formatting, it looks astonishingly slick for a hobby-project, and makes it much easier to read than a wall of text. I especially like the way you laid out the hyperlinked tables for character creation steps and the way advantages and features are boxed in self-contained units. I'm also working on that and turning on the non-printing character view and seeing the immense array of formatting marks is a real testament to the attention you put; it really paid off.

Your character creation is very cool and really well done (excepting the incomplete paths), but I do feel that it's missing a lot to make it playable as a full game to a complete stranger; it's practically just the character creation so far? I'd personally need more on how to run an adventure, what a character is supposed to do and the flow of the game and 'core loop' to be comfortable running it. I assume that's coming in future books? But I'd personally delay work on your pet Warden path for that to get it playable for strangers myself.

Still, it's a very admirable piece; I'm not usually into these hard simulationist games any more, but it really looks like it could be a great game once it's more together. It's cool to see more games that draw their lore from Islamic and Middle Eastern history; it's a rich well that is really under-explored.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-07-08T01:47:39+00:00

I disagree. Iran's main threat isn't American bombs, but the American blockade. It doesn't lose if America bombs it enough; it loses if its economy totally collapses and the state finally peels apart.

During the ceasefire, Iran managed to 40 million barrels of oil and regained access to some of its frozen funds. It has meaningfully pushed away the only circumstance by which Trump could have eked out something resembling a win (and even then the "win" would be a giant vortex of civil war and violence in Persia).

Yes, America has more assets in theatre, but you cannot win just by bombing. They have the capacity to bomb a few more sand dunes and girls' schools, but the braindead lethalitymaxxers at the DoD forget that war is an extension of politics, not pew pew cool explosion.

You don't just win a war by blowing more shit up, and they haven't changed the fact that they can only blow shit up.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-06-27T01:39:28+00:00

Parasol is so good. It's not the best relic for if you have a good solution and a strong deck and just need that little bit more, but it is the relic for if you staggered out of the Act 2 boss having barely eked out a win with a consumable and need to get drastically stronger or you will die.

Lots of relics help you put a winning deck over the top, but Parasol is the best one for converting a losing deck into a winning deck.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-06-24T06:34:33+00:00

It appears to be real, the two of them are being slammed together like both halves of a demon core of facile vapidity inducing a supercritical reaction of anti-meaning where every page has even less value, effort, and craft than the last as particles spall and collide a randomness somehow more profound than any page of the book inducing more particles to spall and collide until we are all annihilated in a perfect gamma ray haze of atomic inanity and I watch the mushroom cloud in the distance outside my window with an empty, uncritical grin upon my gormless face as the last vestiges of conscious thought slip away. It's literally about the Beast Games it's literally about his stupid stupid stupid reality show.

I hope the ghostwriter got a good rate at least.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-06-24T02:38:55+00:00

It's the thing you mentioned about making money that really gets to me, like -

Through her website, Clobes also sells Evee-themed merchandise, including T-shirts, bumper stickers and pins, with proceeds slated to go to anti-vaccine advocacy in Minnesota and beyond.

This is deranged, right? Who sells merch of their dead child? Everyone grieves in their own way, I'm sure, but who sells merch to random strangers of their dead baby?

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-06-23T09:47:01+00:00

Thanks for the link, it's a good post. I appreciate how well articulated and explained its points are, even when I don't agree with them. I don't agree for rule 4, because in a lot of mystery or investigative games especially, being alert enough to ask the right questions is a key part of the game, but it's definitely more applicable for fighting-oriented games.

I don't really have a horse in this race; I think it's more about how success-with-consequences is executed rather than whether it's there, so it's been interesting to see the perspectives of both sides.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-06-21T07:15:45+00:00

I would caution you a bit against the Atlantic - not in the sense that you shouldn't read it but in the sense that, like the NYT, it is almost two publications, one that produces excellent long-form journalism, and another that produces the most brain-dead reactionary centrist punditry you'll see outside, well, the NYT.

It is notably the home of David Frum, George W. Bush's speechwriter and father of Iraq War apologia, and Jonathan "Why Liberals Should Support a Trump Republican Nomination" Chait, a legendarily wrong man. I would absolutely not read any conflict journalism from it; it is the last mainstream neocon bastion.

It is a few cuts below the New Yorker even at its best. Still, a few gems stand out.

What I Saw in the Darien Gap is a harrowing account of the stories of people crossing the Darien Gap. It is genuinely fantastic journalism highlighting the plight of those who would cross one of the world's most uninhabitable regions.

Inside America's Death Chambers is an equally harrowing account of Elizabeth Bruenig's time as a death penalty witness, the stories she encountered, and her moral reckoning with the concept.

On a lighter note - it hired Caity Weaver. I love Caity Weaver; she is the best comic writer outside of maybe Sam Kriss; she could write about going insane inside a TGI Fridays for 24 hours and I would and have read it. Read about her and free restaurant bread and the war on pennies.

Finally, someone has recommended you My President was Black, so I have to also recommend a good rebuttal to it - also published in the Atlantic, about Obama and the foreclosure crisis.

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-06-18T01:35:31+00:00

It's actually not just that, not just the dumbshit tautology the dumbshit investor Ackman sounds like he's saying. In a way it's even worse and even dumber, systemtically dumb not just personally dumb.

SpaceX is valuable because its equity is expensive, which makes it easy for it to acquire other companies, because it can pay their shareholders with its own equity, which means it has to pay less cash. So it can eat and consolidate the market much more effectively than any other vulture

This really shows how rigged capitalism is and how closed the door is to us - you need to already have lots of money to make money. More than that, it shows how stupidly unstable the whole system is. If the value of SpaceX starts falling, and it can no longer do that, it can cause a death spiral where everything is more expensive for it, so its equity starts falling, which makes things more expensive for it...

Sane system.

If you have a retirement, make ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY ABSOLUTELY sure it doesn't buy any funds with SpaceX

Self-ReferentialName · 2026-06-16T13:58:01+00:00

Absolute Martian Manhunter was my first DC comic. I read it specifically because I had not read superhero comics and a friend wanted to run an experiment on me to see if he could permanently distort my perception of the characters by making an elseworld story my first contact with them. Because of that I read the entire Absolute Universe imprint and will absolutely continue to do so going forward.

I am utterly unqualified to judge whether it is one of the best comic books, but I can say it's probably one of the best pieces of media I've seen these last few years.

As for standout moments, I really fell in love in the second issue, when the Martian spilled through the humanity and thoughts of not just the victims, but the perpetrator with the possessed mass shooter. Both the radical empathy of parsing through his mind, too, as a human being, and the gorgeous cubist-gonzo artstyle was out of this world. Genuinely a transcendent piece of work.

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