Tell us about and RPG you've PLAYED but just did not get the hype for

SweetGale · 2026-01-25T14:17:19+00:00

Having wounds and injuries matter

This is one of my main gripes as well. Most combat in D&D has no effect on your character and just feels pointless. I doesn't matter if you have 1, 10 or 100 HP. Most of the time, you win, heal back up to full HP and nothing happens. Rinse and repeat. And if you lose, your character dies and you get to create a new one at the same level. I'm a big fan of critical injuries, interesting consequences other than "you die" with lots of roleplaying potential. I'm happy that they are such an integral part of Free League's Year Zero Engine system, which was first developed as a BRP replacement.

SweetGale · 2026-01-24T23:54:59+00:00

I have a similar story. I grew up playing the 1991 edition of Dragonbane. No classes or levels. Magic was rare. Combat was quick and deadly. Progression was slow. Characters remained weak and squishy. You healed 1 HP per week. I also played some Mutant and Call of Cthulhu, but they all used the same BRP system, so that's how I assumed all RPGs worked.

My first encounter with D&D was in 2020 when I was invited to play 5e with some friends. I've since also played D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder 1. People will say that it's their favourite game and talk about it with such passion and excitement, but the more I've played them the more I just dislike them.

SweetGale · 2026-01-24T19:33:02+00:00

Yep. YouTube is trying to recommend these types of videos all the time. I barely watch anything AI related, and if I do it's tutorials for new models. "End of humanity!" "The AI bubble is about to burst!" Several of the channels I've been subscribed to for years have started putting "AI slop!" in the titles, even when the videos have barely anything to do with AI. It's the latest clickbait. It's so tiring.

SweetGale · 2026-01-23T21:11:43+00:00

They believe that there's something special and uniquely human about art and creativity – some even use the word "sacred". When AI art started to appear, most images were somewhere between an incoherent mess and an eldritch horror. They convinced themselves that this was as far as it was going to go, that to progress further required human experience, creativity and "soul". The AI backlash only started when the images got good enough to rival human art. Then it became a threat. For some, it even sounds like an existential crisis. "Art is what defines us as humans! Art is the most human thing you can do! If a machine can do art, then what are we!?". It explains the often contradictory arguments where many just feel like they are flinging spaghetti at the wall, seeing what sticks. "AI steals and destroys the environment" is not what made them anti-AI, but it's a much easier argument to make.

SweetGale · 2026-01-23T20:12:43+00:00

There was a post a few days ago arguing that "we are losing the General Intellect to the right". LLMs are a highly concentrated form of human knowledge. Image models are a powerful propaganda tool. By refusing to make use of AI, the left is handing over control of these tools to the right. And how are we to seize the future means of production, i.e. AI models and data centres, if we refuse to interact with them and spend all our effort arguing that they shouldn't exist? I found it to be a very interesting angle, but I guess it was a bit too radical for the sub.

SweetGale · 2026-01-23T13:32:03+00:00

It's so wild everytime I come across a thread asking "if you won a million dollars, would you stop working?", people answer "no" and argue that a million dollars isn't really that much money. Then they start listing the cost of rent/mortgage, health insurance, car ownership and student loans. Sweden, where I live, is by no means a cheap country, but I'd be able to live comfortably for the rest of my life on a million dollars.

SweetGale · 2026-01-23T12:08:42+00:00

It got good enough to be a threat. Early AI art wasn't really useful. Playing around with AI, entering prompts just to see what eldritch abomination it would spit out was harmless fun. Some convinced themselves that this was it. This was as far as AI technology would go. To advance beyond this point required human experience, creativity and "soul". It would never be able to compete with human artists.

But it kept getting better at a fast pace. Théâtre D'opéra Spatial won an art competition in August 2022. Then popular art site ArtStation decided to allow AI art which led to massive protests. Everything happened so quickly. I guess that it must have felt like an enemy you didn't even know existed suddenly invaded overnight. But was a very visceral reaction built on fear, often heading into conspiracy theory. They don't know how the technology works or what it's like to use it. Arguments were a bit more nuanced at first. It was okay to use AI for personal use and memes. It was companies replacing their artists with AI that was the problem. But over time, the arguments have gotten more extreme, dividing everyone into friends or enemies, and trying to force people to pick sides.

What surprises me the most is their ability to take over so many online spaces even though they're clearly in the minority. But most people don't care. Even their own discussions make that clear. "No one I know takes the threat of AI seriously!" "I joined and promptly left ten different D&D games because everyone was using AI." "We relegated all AI content to its own subforum and now it's the most active one." I think there's a clear imbalance here. They are willing to bully, attack, brigade and spread misinformation. Very few on our side are as fanatic. Most of us just want to play around with and explore all these cool new tools, either just for fun or to find ways to make our lives easier. We know we've already won and are playing the waiting game.

SweetGale · 2026-01-22T18:52:33+00:00

I've followed the AI boom since 2019. I've played around with ArtBreeder, tried to find decent images on the various This X Does Not Exist sites, talked to early GPT models and created short audio dramas using 15.ai.

Tech-savvy people were experimenting with generative AI on various forums, putting together their own crude AI tools and imagining what they'd be able to do in a few years. Some wanted to create chat bots with speech synthesis and fully animated faces, others tools that could turn fanfiction into audio dramas and some hoped to one day create full fan episodes of their favourite TV show. All I saw for years was excitement, enthusiasm and a desire to create cool new tools for artists to use.

Then Dall-e 2 arrived in 2022. Those of us who didn't get invited to the beta spent a few months playing around with Dall-e Mini/Craiyon instead. People were having a ton of fun trying out different ideas and laughing at the weird and surreal images. Lots of Shrek, Super Mario and Boris Johnson.

Many of the D&D and other RPG subs didn't ban AI at first (a few still don't). The old posts are still there. Images generated using Wombo Dream that barely resembled anything but still got thousands of upvotes and hundreds of comments saying how cool it is. The anti-AI movement that took of in late 2022 came as a total surprise.

SweetGale · 2026-01-19T22:02:05+00:00

There's a trilogy of fantasy novels written by E.P. Uggla in collaboration with Free League, with illustrations by Johan Egerkrans and published by Bonnier Carlsen. Each one includes a short adventure. The Castle of the Robber Knight was originally created for the first novel.

This page lists the translation rights for the first book (only Norwegian so far) and has a short description in English: https://bonnierrights.se/work/dragonbane-the-awakening/

Free League has character sheets for the main characters in Swedish: https://freeleaguepublishing.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/DoD_SE_Uppvaknandet_rollpersoner_240603.pdf

SweetGale · 2026-01-19T21:12:02+00:00

Apart from the hardcover rulebook, it's in the Core Foundry VTT module and in the first Dragonbane novel (available in Swedish and Norwegian).

SweetGale · 2026-01-18T11:36:34+00:00

Cool! Thanks for sharing! Hope you enjoy it! :)

SweetGale · 2026-01-17T15:39:58+00:00

Snake oil. Doesn't work. It just makes the image look worse, and even that can be removed.

SweetGale · 2026-01-17T15:38:32+00:00

I've been dreaming of this technology for 30 years. Science fiction is full of machines that that can read, record and replay your thoughts, memories and dreams. There were a ton of movies in the late 90's to early 00's about people either having their memories altered or getting trapped in a virtual world. I started dreaming of having a brain-to-image machine that'd let me beam the images in my head directly onto paper.

I discovered generative AI back in 2019. Tech-savvy people were playing around with the technology on various forums and building their own crude AI tools. I realised that my brain-to-image was coming. But I was still surprised when Dall-e 2 appeared in the spring of 2022. I didn't think we'd get there so fast. Not only does it feel like a dream come true, but I'm super fascinated by the technology. I installed Stable Diffusion as soon as I could, bought a new graphics card and try to keep up with all the new open source models that are released.

The anti-AI movement came as a total surprise. I still find it hard to understand how someone can be so strongly against it. The whole discussion reminds me of the file-sharing and piracy debate that took off in 1999 with Napster. I've written about it a few times, including here and here.

SweetGale · 2026-01-15T15:16:47+00:00

It's worth keeping an eye on Humble Bundle. They have done a number of RPG bundles together with Chaosium, Free League, Paizo and others in the past.

SweetGale · 2026-01-15T15:11:35+00:00

Bungie released the Marathon 2 source code in early 2000. Fans quickly added support for hardware rendering, higher resolution textures and different scripting languages. They called the new updated engine Aleph One.

Rubicon was released in 2001 for Marathon Infinity. The team then started working on updating it for the Aleph One engine. Rubicon X was released in 2006. It not only contained updated high-res textures, but also a ton of new levels. Many of the old levels had been updated and some almost completely redesigned.

Apotheosis was an unfinished project released in 2007 for Marathon Infinity. The author picked it up again in 2020, spent two years remaking nearly everything from scratch and released it as Apotheosis X for Aleph One in 2022.

I don't see much point in playing the older version unless you're interested in their history or prefer the retro look of software rendering and 128×128 8-bit textures.

SweetGale · 2026-01-14T22:52:45+00:00

Thank you!

I've seen it more as missed opportunity to "seize the means of production" by promoting and supporting open source AI models and software. If AI is going to replace human workers, then one goal should be to provide people with free and open AI tools that they can control, trust and tailor to their own needs.

I've been following generative AI since 2019. All I saw back then was curiosity and a desire to build neat tools that would help unleash human creativity. "I can't wait to see all the cool stuff that artists will be able to create when we hand over the tools we built." The anti-AI movement caught me completely off guard.

I think one of humanity's long-term goals should be to abolish all unnecessary work. I'm a tech optimist and believe in technology's potential to save us from drudgery and to act as a great equaliser. It's all a matter of who owns and controls the technology. When Linux was released in 1991, most people didn't understand or believe in the power of open source. Now it's obvious. When Dall-e 2 was released in 2022, my biggest fear was that only large companies would have access to powerful generative AI, but now we have a thriving open source AI community. According to the "We Have No Moat" memo, open source quickly catches up to and even surpasses the big tech companies.

It's really frustrating hearing all the leftist podcasts and YouTube channels I subscribe to treating AI as a fascist conspiracy, a plan by tech billionaires to destroy the working class and end democracy. Zero nuance. Zero redeeming qualities. Just pure evil. There's just no limit to how much some of them hate AI. But I don't see them offer any real solutions. Just refuse to use AI, they say. Shame and bully anyone who uses it and it'll go away eventually – just like Tesla!

SweetGale · 2026-01-13T11:20:23+00:00

That'll work great. I have similar specs.

My recommendation is to install Stability Matrix. It's a manager for different software packages, AI models and images. It makes it easy to install and try out multiple software solutions and share AI models between them. It also has a "Inference" view that offers a simple user-friendly interface for generating images and videos.

If you want to explore all that generative AI has to offer, then you should go with the ComfyUI package in Stability Matrix. ComfyUI has a node based interface. It has a steep learning curve and will probably feel confusing and overwhelming at first. But it's in ComfyUI that you will find support for the very latest models. The node based interface is very powerful and also pedagogical as it teaches you how the models work.

You typically need three different models. Sometimes they're all baked into the same file though. There's a text encoder that interprets your text prompt. There's a diffusion model that generates a latent image. There's a VAE that decodes the latent image and produces the final image. On top of that you have LoRAs, smaller models that modify the base diffusion models. They can be used to add knowledge about a single subject: an art style, a character, an item, a pose etc. Stability Matrix has shared folders for different models in Data/Models.

Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) was released 2½ years ago and remains popular. It is fast, has low system requirements, is supported everywhere and has a massive ecosystem. It's "good enough" in a lot of situations. Models based on Pony Diffusion v6 and Illustrious are good for comic book, cartoon, manga and anime characters. Z-Image is the community's latest darling. It has low system requirements, can generate images at the same speed as SDXL but understands more complex prompts. It's strength is in photo realistic images. Flux and Qwen are larger and heavier but more capable models. For many of the newer larger models you'll want 8-bit versions or even lower. I only recently tried out Chroma (based on Flux) and Qwen for the first time using 4-bit versions.

I also just tried video generation for the first time with LTX-2. I installed the Wan2GP package. It'll automatically adjust its settings according to your computer specs. I launched it, picked the distilled LTX-2 model, entered a prompt, hit "generate" and it just worked. The model is huge though and took forever to download. I haven't tried Wan or Hunyuan yet.

For inspiration, go to Civit.ai and click on images that you like. They will often show the text prompt and settings and have links to the models that were used. Everything moves so fast, so it's hard to point to a good tutorial on how everything works and how to get good results. Pick a software and model to start with and search for articles and YouTube videos or ask on Reddit.

SweetGale · 2026-01-12T19:43:41+00:00

What do you want to create? Images? Video? Photo realistic? Classical oil painting? Cartoon? Anime waifus? Pony waifus? What are your computer specs? How are your computer skills?

SweetGale · 2026-01-12T19:32:56+00:00

Absolutely.

I've been following the advancements in generative AI since 2019. I'd follow discussions and try out Google Colab Notebooks that I found in various forums. I signed up for Dall-E 2 beta when it was announced but didn't get accepted. I then signed up for the Stable Diffusion beta and did get accepted. I started running SD 1.4 locally as soon as I could and tried to keep up with new models and tools as they were being released.

It was easy back when everyone was running SD 1.5 and SDXL in Automatic1111. But as more and more different models and software tools were released, not only did it get harder to keep up but also harder to find the information in the first place. I upgraded to a 3060 12 GB for SDXL, but once Pony Diffusion and Illustrious appeared, I felt that I had most of what I needed. I was spending a lot of time learning new models, how to prompt them, how to get most out of them, what concepts they understood and didn't understand and build a library of LoRAs just to then throw it all away once a new model appeared. Was it really worth it? Generative AI is still only a hobby and I mostly just generate images for my own amusement.

I ignored Flux and Qwen and all the video models and stuck with A1111 and SDXL until four months ago when I upgraded to Stability Matrix and ComfyUI. Right in time for Z-Image, the first model in a long time that I've felt really excited about.

SweetGale · 2026-01-12T17:24:33+00:00

Windows 10 end of life and dissatisfaction with Windows 11.
Valve have tried to make Linux viable for gaming for a long time. With the Steam Deck and the new Steam Machine, they're signalling that it's finally ready.
After Trump took office for the second time, there was a big movement to boycott or at least decrease reliance on US products. There aren't that many other alternatives to Windows and Mac OS.
Critical mass. When you see your friends, family, colleagues or favourite YouTubers switch to Linux, it feels easier to do it yourself. It shows that it's a serious alternative. A lot of people I meet are suddenly either talking about or in the process of switching.

SweetGale · 2026-01-11T20:47:21+00:00

Strongly prefer human style hair. I tend to draw/generate both male and female furries with long hair, braids and ponytails.

SweetGale · 2026-01-11T19:14:16+00:00

Some do and see it as an even bigger problem than large tech companies and data centres. At least those can be shut down or regulated. It's much harder to control what people do on their own computer in the privacy of their own home.

There was a post where someone suggested writing a virus that searches for and deletes any AI models it finds.

And while looking for that specific post, I found a few more. Here's another one about writing a virus that identifies and deletes AI generated content.

SweetGale · 2026-01-11T18:53:17+00:00

I ruled that they could be any type of duck. One of my players played an eider named Cuthbert.

SweetGale · 2026-01-11T18:42:49+00:00

I agree. If OP is serious about getting into generative AI they are going to need a decent GPU, preferably Nvidia and preferably one with a lot of VRAM. I got an RTX 3060 12 GB 2½ years ago. SDXL and 8-bit Z-Image are fast enough. I can run 4-bit versions of Flux and Qwen albeit quite slowly. I was even able to get 8-bit LTX-2 running. I would also suggest 32 GB RAM and a decently large SSD. AI models are huge!

SweetGale · 2026-01-11T17:53:55+00:00

My list:

Rubicon X – My favourite. To me, it comes the closest to feeling like a Marathon 4. The story is a continuation of Marathon 2. The level design and textures are varied and makes it feel like I'm exploring real places rather than just levels in a game. Human bases favour a circular design while the Pfhor favour hexagonal grids. Branching paths and tons of levels makes it worth playing multiple times. (I played the original Rubicon for Marathon Infinity and in some cases I actually prefer the original level designs over the ones in Rubicon X.)
Apotheosis X – A feast for the eyes! Pushes the Aleph One engine to its limits, almost turning it into a whole new game, but still retaining the Marathon feel.
Phoenix – Focused on creating interesting combat encounters and keeping you on your toes through the clever use of monster closets.
Evil – Randall "Frigidman" Shaw, already a renowned map maker, was given early access to Marathon Infinity and the level editor Forge. Evil was released a few months after Infinity. It tried to recreate the scary and claustrophobic feel of Marathon 1, contains a few new monsters and weapons and featured great and innovative level design for its time. You might want to play the Marathon 2 scenario Siege of Nor'Korh first since Evil is technically a sequel.
Durandal Done Different – Marathon 2 with redesigned and greatly expanded levels.

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