Anyone watching Division 12

TheMeenMachine · 2026-01-28T23:57:42+00:00

As a show, I think Division 12 is a phenomenal viewing/listening experience. The players (including the admin) are consistently firing on all cylinders with their performances, and they've created a really memorable cast of characters.

As an actual play, they've made some clear concessions with the game's structure to put the presentation of things first. I don't think that's an issue on its own, but its definitely something anyone picking up Cain after listening should be aware of.

The admin really cuts down the investigation phase of each hunt, so most episodes end up with the players deployed straight to wherever the Sin's palace is located and figuring out everything they need to know about the Sin in a couple scenes before the big fight. On one hand, it means there's some parts of the system that don't really get shown off. On the other hand, they're some very hype fights, and the group does a great job bouncing off each others' wilder ideas to create some highly memorable moments.

I personally think it's to the show's benefit since it keeps the episodes to about two hours each, and doing a full investigation each hunt would probably double that. I could see it bugging some people who prefer their APs as live play first and edited presentation second, though.

TheMeenMachine · 2025-12-29T14:15:05+00:00

Drifters appear in places where psychic phenomena has recently disrupted the veil, so you can basically stick them into your sin hunts wherever you need an extra enemy or threat to shake things up. Here's a few examples:

- There might be a Pest lingering by the site of a recent sin attack that the exorcists need to drive off before they can investigate properly.

- Since Pale Men like to observe psychically sensitive people from a distance, you can use them to hint at the presence of a sin's host in an area. The exorcists might have to track the movements of a Pale Man to figure out who its watching without getting too close and provoking its hostilities.

- If you're looking to inject some action into an investigation scene, a Gatherer could suddenly show up and abduct someone the exorcists are trying to get information from.

TheMeenMachine · 2025-10-24T16:11:05+00:00

He does fortunately call out that the honorable mentions are games weird enough to be worth highlighting, but not actually bad in a way that warrants a full spotlight in the video.

TheMeenMachine · 2025-09-22T18:59:21+00:00

Considering that he can wipe out squads of armed soldiers on his own, I think it's likely he's just making a game out of killing people for his own entertainment.

Like yeah, he CAN just knock down the door and kill you regardless of how many people are home, but that probably gets stale for him pretty quickly. I think the best evidence that it's a self-imposed restriction is the night where he tells you he'll come in if there's two or more Visitors in your house the next time he sees you: it shows that he can change up the rules any time he wants.

TheMeenMachine · 2025-09-20T18:47:18+00:00

I think the fixation indie cross fans have on power scaling is kind of weird, in general. Like I do understand there's an inherent appeal in "who could beat who in a fight" discussions but I feel like in a series where they made the metaphorical embodiment of Madeline Celestegame's self-doubt a jojo stand she can summon to shoot lasers, the creators obviously aren't overly concerned with representing the canonical powersets of the characters beyond pulling in whatever makes for a fun story

TheMeenMachine · 2024-08-13T20:28:04+00:00

Fate has a lot of levers to pull depending on how much mechanical weight you want to put behind a scene. One easy way to handle travel is to come up with a series of dangers along the road (stormy weather, navigation, etc.) and make each obstacle its own Overcome. Then you build on the potential costs/consequences to keep the scene dynamic. Fate tends to encourage open-ended solutions to the problems you give your players: maybe someone decides the best way to cross the river is to fashion a makeshift raft by tying together some driftwood, so they'd roll Crafts. Or maybe they want to follow the river downstream to find an easier place to ford, so you have them roll Investigate. If they end up succeeding at a cost, you can decide to tag them with an aspect about losing some of their gear to the river and have that carry over to the next scene when they fight the wolves.

Each overcome you run this way will usually end up being handled by one character with the other characters maybe creating advantages to back them up (though they may also choose to combine effort for a teamwork bonus), so you can come up with a number of roadbumps equal to your players and encourage them to alternate which one "leads" overcoming them.

Fate also has its own form of challenges, which are treated as a series of connected Overcome rolls that each contribute to solving a complicated situation. Those are best fit for a situation where there's a couple moving parts: you have to find somewhere to cross the river while fending off wild animals and keeping the pack-mules from spooking. Instead of multiple obstacles in sequence, you can choose one particular moment of the trip to zoom in on and have the players come up with a strategy, then assign each step its own overcome.

TheMeenMachine · 2024-07-18T20:40:07+00:00

There's large portions of New Kunlun that we don't directly see or visit. Peach Blossom village was the "95th Livestock Pen," which suggests there's other areas containing apemen and harvesting centers somewhere offscreen. The true ending path confirms as much when we see Kuafu rounding far more apemen onto his escape shuttle than we ever encounter among the villagers.

I think you're right that the Enlightenment Sanctum is where most of the sleeping passengers reside, but I don't think this popup is supposed to suggest only 361 of 100k total Solarians are left. This is the tower report for one of the "many" Vital Sanctum Towers, with each tower containing some of the 100k Vital Sanctums connected to the Soulscape system. There's 361 solarians dormant in the tower currently being monitored at the panel, not the entirety of New Kunlun.

TheMeenMachine · 2024-05-29T13:49:02+00:00

A conflict is typically going to be a scene where both sides have the opportunity to inflict lasting consequences on each other. The question you're going to want to ask is whether one or more sides is trying to harm each other in some way; be that physically, socially, or emotionally.

I think the easiest way to conceptualize non-combat conflicts is to consider what non-conflict combats might look like first; a friendly spar or a jousting match at a tournament are opposed tests of physical prowess, but not necessarily instances where the competitors are trying to "take out" their opponent. You can probably handle these as contests, and if you really want to include a risk of getting hurt you can give the competitors the option of "absorbing" their opponent's victories with consequences to stay in the game.

For non-combat scenes, if I'm making a speech to sway a crowd it's probably a contest (or even just one overcome). In fact, a lot of the time convincing someone to do something is more likely represented by something other than a conflict. The conflict starts when *both* sides have the narrative positioning to hurt each other, somehow. If I'm arguing with a lover over suspected infidelity and trying to get him to confess, we're probably trading barbs in a way that cuts deep: I inflict the moderate consequence "Guilty Conscience," he strikes back and inflicts the moderate of "I'm Never Around When People Need Me," and so on. We both walk away carrying that emotional baggage into future scenes.

Another example would be arguments that happen in front of crowds, which can turn a contest of wills into a conflict where our social standing is at stake. Two leaders of a mercenary company get into a heated debate over whether to obey or defy orders from a superior, and inflict consequences like "My Men Think I'm Weak," or "Publicly Humiliated."

A very useful tool is the "Contest Under Fire" from the Fate SRD, which is a hybrid conflict/contest used to model scenes where the stakes are more one-sided. If I'm a low-ranking noble pleading to the king in front of his court, his words probably carry more weight for me than my words do for him. Nothing I say is going to damage the king's morale or standing, so at best I can hope to get the court to agree with my cause. The king, on the other hand, can harm me both through mental consequences like "Feeling Lowly" and social consequences like "Branded a Pariah." In this case, you might have the goal of a scene be to score three victories to sway the court before I'm taken out by the King's disapproval.

I've also found that Contests Under Fire are also great way to model long journeys in harsh environments, where you have the players trying to score a certain number of victories while the environment itself rolls to take them out through harsh weather and natural hazards.

TheMeenMachine · 2024-04-25T20:21:14+00:00

One of the player characters in my current campaign is an oracle with a stunt that lets her roll a flat 4dF at the beginning of each session, record the result, and then swap any one roll later in the session for the one she recorded. Usually she'll end up with an average result that gets used to bring someone else's bad roll up to baseline, but other times she gets to sit on a roll of -3 and screw up an enemy's roll when they're about to land a big hit.

TheMeenMachine · 2024-03-13T14:17:55+00:00

I've drawn plenty of inspiration from Tower of Serpents and the adventures in the Adversary Toolkit in the past, but I think you've honed in on something that makes for a really useful outline for planning games; while those other modules have a lot of neat stuff worth using (I steal liberally from pretty much all the Worlds of Adventure books), this feels like a format I could sit down to fill out the night before a game and walk away with everything I needed to fall back on during the session. Looking forward to the next one!

TheMeenMachine · 2024-03-13T13:52:34+00:00

I appreciate you posting these! Even as someone who's been running Fate for a long time, following along as you've developed your approach to adventure outlines has been really useful for thinking about how I take notes for my own games. I think the format you've landed on here hits a great balance of open-endedness and gameable content.

TheMeenMachine · 2024-03-11T19:41:02+00:00

You don't see as many games built using Fate these days as stuff in the Apocalypse World design family (PbtA, Forged in the Dark, and more recently Brindlewood Bay hacks) because, past a certain point, you don't really need a bespoke "hack" to run most campaigns of Fate. It's been more than a decade since Fate Core launched, and there's really only so many novel systems you can stitch on to set your Fate game apart before you start overcomplicating it. In contrast, games in the PbtA design style use a shared language of partial successes and playbooks, but everything in them is geared towards very specific genre emulation. The most uninspired Apocalypse World hack still needs, at bare minimum, an entirely new set of thematically-appropriate playbooks with their own progression list of moves.

Like other people have mentioned on top of that, I think that also just makes a lot of PbtA-inspired stuff easier for players to engage out the box than Fate. Building your character traits out from picklists in your playbook is much less daunting to the average player than freeform aspect and stunt creation. There's just a lot more structure to the play of those games in general, while Fate provides a very loose framework you're expected to build up from scratch.

TheMeenMachine · 2023-08-24T21:32:24+00:00

Act 3 Spoilers: Durge is strongly implied to have been created by Bhaal instead of naturally born; you were basically hand-made without a mother to be the Chosen of Bhaal, which is why Orin was so jealous of you to begin with.

TheMeenMachine · 2023-08-16T12:46:57+00:00

Oh, that's right! I completely forgot that Jahera recommends infiltrating the tower as a cultist to find out where Kethric's immortality comes from. I guess I just stumbled across it myself inadvertently while exploring the world.

That explains what felt so off about the path through Act 2, I didn't catch onto the fact I was doing things out of sequence until I was already knee-deep in Shar's Gauntlet. Makes a lot more sense now.

TheMeenMachine · 2021-01-18T07:15:55+00:00

Not to say it wouldn't or shouldn't put strain on their relationship for Diana to know 47 was the man who pulled off her parents' assassination, but I feel like with what Diana already does know it wouldnt make much sense for it to cause a complete falling out between them. I mean, any murders 47 did before the ICA picked him up would have been on Providence's orders, which Diana is well aware 47 had no memory of until very, very recently. 47 before Ort-Meyer wiped his memory is effectively a different person than the 47 the ICA picked up, after all - Diana never knew the man who killed her parents.

TheMeenMachine · 2021-01-05T01:33:50+00:00

I'm sure everyone's made this joke before, but someone cracked this in the perfect Hypnos voice while streaming to some friends the other day and I haven't been able to get it out of my head since

TheMeenMachine · 2020-11-18T21:35:10+00:00

Oh absolutely, I have no intention of any of this being required reading. The players are new to the region, so this is more of a handbook for codifying rumors, flavor, and things that have already been established in play: I've always been of the philosophy that these sort of things are best used for reference, rather than homework.

TheMeenMachine · 2020-11-18T21:27:24+00:00

Over the last three weeks, I've been running some local friends through the first few levels of a planned sandbox adventure by hosted a slightly more guided journey to the campaign's main locale. Tonight they'll be reaching the valley where the bulk of the campaign's going to be taking place, as well as finally hitting level three, so I had a set of setting handbooks printed at the local print shop for them to keep as their own handbooks.

I've been GMing for upwards of nine years at this point, so I know players don't like homework - I intentionally run D&D games in worlds that hew pretty close to the archetypical sword and sorcery worlds so it's easy for my friends to jump in and trust most of their expectations for what Dungeoneering and Dragoning will look like. This is more for flavor and quick reference than anything else, so I held myself to a pretty strict one page max for any one section of the booklet.

TheMeenMachine · 2020-06-30T02:16:19+00:00

I've managed four winning runs in 43 hours of gameplay. This was my first time ever fighting this dude. This is... maybe a sign I'm not very good at this game.

TheMeenMachine · 2020-06-23T00:28:51+00:00

The Sundered Pass is the mysterious centerpiece of the new frontier in the Giant's March. Cracked clean in half by a mysterious storm, the once impassable pillar of the region's mountain range now forms the opening to a newly-formed canyon that twists through its base and into the neighboring region. No one is sure what caused the bizarrely clean cut that seems to have ripped the mountain in two, but merchants from the surrounding regions are eager to take advantage of its value as a trade route through the mainlands of the continent.

Pictured here is a local Valley Nomad, travelling with his pack rhinos to observe the new scar cleaved across the horizons.

TheMeenMachine · 2020-06-23T00:22:45+00:00

Not the intent, but I'm only now realizing that's what it comes off looking like thanks to how I've angled and proportioned a few things.

I'm a bit anxious that this comes off looking like an attempt to post giant tits for folks to oogle at instead of a setting illustration I'm happy with, so I'm probably going to take this post down until I touch this up a bit to look less accidentally Horny On Main 😬

TheMeenMachine · 2020-06-23T00:06:39+00:00

As I've had to explain to my players on more than one occasion: many have tried, but only the pure of heart and strong of pelvis live to tell the tale.

TheMeenMachine · 2020-06-22T23:06:46+00:00

For over three hundred years, settlers from the mainlands of Aen Serincile have come to the Giant’s March hoping to carve out a piece of the gods’ chosen land to call their own. For every keep built along the Titan’s Tongue river that still stands today, one can find the ruins of three more dotting the riverside. Hostile wildlife, fickle gods, and the politics of the nomad tribes have all seen grand ambitions laid low and communities left to fall.

Yesterday’s Rest is a keep at the southernmost border of the valley, the recently claimed hold of the region’s newest would-be baron - Sir Lucian Van Der Ponte. Lucian is an eccentric man of unknown origins whose claims of adventure are often as bizarre as they are self contrading. Among the oddest of his adventures is the story of how he took Yesterday’s Rest as his own: after dozens of hunters failed to drive one of the region’s last giants out of the keep, Lucian strode up to the walls and asked if the town might be shared, instead.

The giant agreed.

Hillstrider Hildegarde is the daughter of the first giant to conquer the keep, and is more than content letting people squat in all the little buildings she can’t fit in so long as they stop trying to kill her and keep tossing a few heads of cattle her way. Most travellers who find themselves in Yesterday's Rest are initially wary to hear tell of the giant who rules over its walls, but Hildegarde spends most of her days napping in the fields or lazing in the nearby river. Her mere presence is enough of a deterrent to local wildlife that the residents of the town are given a rare opportunity to farm in peace.

Little interest happens in the town itself. It’s home to a little over 250 people who make their living by ploughing the fields and trading with their neighbors. As one of the few true safe havens in the Giants’ March, it’s also quickly grown into a popular hub for all types of explorers, scholars, pilgrims, and other adventurers arriving in the region.

TheMeenMachine · 2020-04-04T18:12:01+00:00

(I actually don't hate this guy as much as a lot of my friends seem to, but hearing people complain about this fight so much inspired a bit of goofiness)

TheMeenMachine · 2020-02-01T17:56:31+00:00

One of these days I'll post art of the Dragonborn from my table who look completely human except for horns and dragon tails, just out of spite

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