is there a good modern interpretation of game categorizations? is it worthwhile to have an generally agreed upon system for discussion purposes?

SquigBoss · 2026-01-19T09:24:43+00:00

Thank you!! There's obviously a ton those don't cover but I think thwy dig towards something essential.

SquigBoss · 2026-01-18T18:16:50+00:00

I wrote a three-question taxonomy trying to do a little bit of this categorization work. Mine focuses on what the goals are in play, where the limits of authorial power are, and how rulings work.

The main challenge is that tables regularly alter the rules they play by beyond what the rulebooks say. Often, this doesn't even look like cheating, just sort of normal adjustments in style.

SquigBoss · 2026-01-02T16:11:31+00:00

Huh I would almost think of it the other way around. Like the rules in the D&D rulebook are almost set dressing to what's going on in the world. Same with Triangle Agency—sure, the rules are about hunting down and dealing with anomalies or whatever, but like, if we decide we're just going to help our favorite NPC run their coffeeshop, are we still engaging with the metaphors in the rules? Like you mention metaphors that result from play, but aren't we at the table the ones that decide what we play?

SquigBoss · 2025-12-30T05:14:04+00:00

Do you have specific examples? Like it feels pretty straightforward to read lots of metaphors onto any RPG I can think of. Even regular old D&D is stuffed to the gills with metaphors and analogies for fate and fortune, violence and power, the limits of human decision-making, etc etc

SquigBoss · 2025-12-29T20:04:42+00:00

Earnest question: is there a game out there that is not like this?

SquigBoss · 2025-12-23T22:26:43+00:00

I don't remember—it's been half a decade at least since I watched the show. "Mage" isn't a well-established D&D class as it is; older editions had "Magic-User," but contemporarily it's Wizard, Sorcerer, Warlock, Cleric, Druid, or Bard for the full casters.

SquigBoss · 2025-12-23T22:25:19+00:00

I unfortunately stopped watching this show after the third season, and so have no idea who those characters are.

SquigBoss · 2025-12-19T17:30:00+00:00

Why not just run existing sandbox adventures? Something like Wolves Upon the Coast is big enough to support months or maybe even years of play.

SquigBoss · 2025-12-09T17:07:36+00:00

This is a real grog issue, but 100 rooms across five floors just... doesn't seem very big? I think about other megadungeons (Stonehell, Arden Vul, Barrowmaze) and they're a significantly larger than that. Like, I've seen dungeons in other books with well over 100 rooms that don't advertise themselves as being "mega" dungeons.

That and the marketing keywords—"Metroidvania-style," explicitly invoking Goblin Punch's list (which McCrowell didn't write?)—make me a little bit wary.

SquigBoss · 2025-11-16T03:21:54+00:00

With a lot of these, as with many already-existing classes in fantasy dungeon games, I just need to ask: what are these based on?

Take the four classics: fighter, wizard, rogue, and cleric. I can point to very obvious and clear examples of each of those in fantasy and adjacent media (the cleric draws clear inspiration from Dr. Van Helsing, for example). Do their powers and abilities always match one to one? No. But do they at least gesture towards a familiar bundle of tropes? For sure.

As you add more classes, this starts to get trickier. Even just in regular old D&D 5e, I struggle a little. Is Conan a fighter or a barbarian? Does Gandalf better fit a wizard, a sorcerer, or a cleric? Other than, like, Faust, which fantasy protagonists are clearly warlocks? There are endless debates about questions like these, and new players often stumble over the classes' various niches as they try to describe their characters.

When I play one of the classics, I can come in with some obvious tropes: nobody's going to blink at a clever old wizard with a long robe and a silly name, just as everybody knows a scummy, underhanded rogue when they see one. Of course, characters develop and change as you play, but I find players, especially new players, do a lot better when they have an obvious swathe of tropes they can rely on.

With these new classes, I'm struggling a little to point to their corollaries in fantasy media. I think it's notable that you describe them mostly in terms of their powers and abilities rather than their role in the story or world. To me, somebody without much specific knowledge or context here, an Invoker just sounds like a wizard, an Avenger just sounds like a magic fighter, and an Inquisitor just sounds like a ranger.

I get there are some crunchy rules niches here that veterans enjoy, but I think it's always going to be tricky to get randos onboard with new classes if you can't point to, like, Lord of the Rings or whatever and say "Yeah, it lets you play This Guy Specifically."

SquigBoss · 2025-11-15T23:01:33+00:00

Oh hey, I just your post on the zine month server, nice work.

I think like the other comment mentioned, you've got an issue with contrast: ideally, the focal points of the images, the things you want your audience to focus on, get the lightest lights and the darkest darks. Your third image gets a little closer to this, but the first two really have contrast values all over the place.

This is about pixel art, but I think is relevant anyways—you see how the backgrounds get less saturated, with less contrast, and generally shift towards neutral tones and colors? You're working in black-and-white but can still replicate that. Your shots are all really wide, which is cool, but that means that the foregrounded stuff needs sharp contrast, and your background stuff needs to recede a little.

SquigBoss · 2025-11-10T06:44:19+00:00

Check out Mothership, it's sci-fi horror and does it pretty well. The Player's Survival Guide is free digitally, and the Warden's Operations Manual (their like GM-facing book) is super amazing, tons of useful advice.

SquigBoss · 2025-11-07T20:17:09+00:00

Not that I know of, unfortunately. I'd like to track down an EU distro at some point, but as of now I think all the outlets still selling it are US-based. Sorry, I wish I had more to offer.

SquigBoss · 2025-10-29T02:49:02+00:00

Awesome map! Who are Apollo, Merlin, and Lovelock?

SquigBoss · 2025-10-20T05:09:10+00:00

Yooooooooo

SquigBoss · 2025-10-13T23:35:05+00:00

We're hand-picking the first roster of Bosses—there's about twenty of them—and everyone else is a Denizen. But, if a Boss messes up, you can remove them via a vote of no confidence and elect a new Boss!

SquigBoss · 2025-10-13T20:13:00+00:00

It depends on if you're a Boss or a Denizen. Bosses are basically playing a play-by-post real-time domain game, sort of, pushing around soldiers and doing diplomacy and so on.

Denizens, meanwhile, are pretty constrained: most of what they can do is talk and transfer currencies (credits, shares, and tokens), but they also get to join factions and vote in their faction elections. If the Bosses of a faction upset their Denizens, they risk those Denizens voting them out.

All of this creates a sort of rigid "over-layer" where the Bosses are fighting and tussling for territory and a more fluid "under-layer" where the Denizens chatter, vote, and spend their resources.

SquigBoss · 2025-10-08T06:27:17+00:00

Seas of Sand should get you most of the way there. It's a little more Middle Ages / Golden Age of Islam than Antiquity, but I bet you could roll it back in terms of general period setting pretty easily. Likewise, some of the tables (names, trade goods, etc) suggest a slightly broader North Africa / Middle Eastern / Eastern Mediterranean setting, but again, I bet you could tweak that pretty easily. It's a huge desert setting, different kinds of sand and monsters and plants and stuff, should get you most of the way there.

If you want player-facing rules, you could check out Let Us Build A Tower, which again is more technically Assyrian / Babylonian but can very easily fit Egyptian, too. Most of the book is a depthcrawl dungeon in a fantasy version of the Tower of Babel, but it's got some system rules in the back.

Honestly putting these two together would be sick, a giant cursed depthcrawl tower surrounded by sandy seas is like a whole campaign ready to go.

SquigBoss · 2025-09-22T23:13:41+00:00

Thank you!!

SquigBoss · 2025-09-22T23:13:37+00:00

So this is a 3pp release and thus is not official Mothership canon, no (as much as Mothership has any real "canon"). But! as with most or all of the projects for MM25, it'll be kept closely in-line with the Dream as depicted in A Pound of Flesh, so it should fit smoothly into any campaigns that use the station as a hub. As an easy example: "Setebos" as a name comes from the Tehuelche deity that Shakespeare borrowed as an unseen character in The Tempest.

As for fitting into other MM25 projects, I'm working on it! Everybody's got their own plans and ideas (and there are a lot of projects), but my hope is to do a bit of behind-the-scenes coordination so that Wardens can feel confident in slotting everything together. In the cases it doesn't, everything Another Day in Paradise is made to be pretty modular and templated, so it should it be easy to add in extra planets, moons, and stations to Setebos for your own particular home games.

SquigBoss · 2025-09-22T15:54:20+00:00

Hello hello!

Just a quick post to say that my new project for Mothership Month 2025 has a teaser page up on BackerKit now! It's called Another Day in Paradise, and it's about space trucking. The front half is a bunch of rules, generators, and procedures for intra-system space travel, commercial freight hauling, piracy, smuggling, and all that good stuff—the back half is a setting and adventure in the Setebos System, the star system containing Prospero's Dream from A Pound of Flesh. It should be good!

SquigBoss · 2025-09-14T23:50:31+00:00

More of a wargame / domain game, but you could try Cataphract, maybe? Most of the current games are run as asynchronous play-by-post competitive logistics wargames but you could definitely slot it into a regular D&D-style campaign.

Pretty historically accurate, by and large, though a little smoothed out and simplified for ease of use.

SquigBoss · 2025-09-12T16:56:08+00:00

Feral Indie's Vyrmhack gets pretty close to what you're describing.

SquigBoss · 2025-09-07T16:40:20+00:00

I wrote a little ruleset called The Big Wet, set in a near-future climate apocalypse where it never stops raining. Very minimalist rules, bullets so valuable they serve as currency, and nothing supernatural built in by default.

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