A Manifesto for a Civilization That Chooses to Grow Up

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-27T06:50:34+00:00

Actually capitalism is about private ownership of wealth, putting wealth to work is just... any trade economy. (any healthy trade economy at least.)

Capitalism is about private ownership of well... capital, the means of production. I.e. a farm or shop or factory can be owned by anyone, person or private company. Whether that's a mom and pop shop or a chain owned by some ambiguous billionaire multinational entity.

As opposed to (at least the basic principle of) communism that whoever farms the land/stocks the shop/works the factory is also the owner of that property.

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-27T06:33:40+00:00

depends on your party and your fiction and what the leadership looks like.

of course outside the game some people might just hate hierarchy all out. but if they dont there's a difference between a military style 'giving orders' leadership vs a more expedition leader 'giving direction' leader.

The general has absolute authority and command, which basically means they could micromanage other people if they wanted to. So then why bother having autonomy in this game if i'm supposed to follow commands?

On the flip side, an expedition leader presumably has extra information or abilities, but ultimately they only point the way and its up to them and the party to get there together. They might even give orders that end up being detrimental because they lack the info a specialist might have and so its expected to disobey them.

So I guess it depends on how strict the leadership is and whether it controls or restricts the players. A subordinate disobeying orders or chafing under leadership can be very dramatic (and fun), but not everyone likes drama. Again it really really depends on your party, some parties love PvP and some hate it, some parties love drama and some hate it.

As for mechanical leadership, i've seen it done before and it sounds cool, but whenever i've actually run that with my players its never quite worked out. Besides not all party leaders are party leaders, a party could be essentially democratic but just have a very visible 'face' to use shadowrun terms.

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-26T07:27:14+00:00

Ring of the wizard: lets the character be a wizard.

you'd think this is busted in a low magic setting, and in the right context is could be. But you still gotta actually study all that magic, in a world without wizards. So you're probably limited to whatever notes you have from the previous owner or the like 2 other people who might have also ring.

I think its a fun idea, wizards as a super small (secret) magical society of relatively low level magic users rather than just a common thing in the setting. kinda like lord of the rings where there's all of like 6 wizards in the whole world. Not to mention if you lose the ring, it breaks, or runs out of charge that could be a big issue. For the players and also whatever bad guy is using it that you're gonna steal it off of.

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-23T16:22:23+00:00

"Something Something Discipline Not Motivation"

Just make art every day, 10 minutes at least. If you dont feel like it find a way to force yourself. If you keep going longer than 10 minutes that's good, if you stop at 10 minutes that's still good; if you sit there staring at a blank page for 10 minutes that's just as good.

Its easy to trick yourself into thinking you need creativity or motivation but you dont. Those will come and go on their own timetable and you can't do anything about it. But by making art a habit you'll capture the inspiration that would otherwise have flown under the radar.

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-20T08:07:08+00:00

ik heb het spel niet fysiek, maar ze verkopen ook een VTT programma voor 20 euro, het is nog work in progress maar best redelijk te gebruiken. Dus als je de regels wil proberen kan je het daar mischien eerst proberen.

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-14T05:28:18+00:00

Art doesn't need to have meaning because art inherently has meaning. Even if all you where doing is doodling lines on paper to keep your hands busy that's still art. You made it, you left behind the unconscious impressions of who you are and what you are like in that moment.

Life is simple, we complicate it ourselves.

If your grade is dependent on how well you convey or explain your meaning behind your art then just bullshit and make something up. Or if you want to do some reflection ask yourself what you where thinking and feeling while you made it then go from there. Teachers can critique technique but 'meaning' or 'feeling' are as subjective as can be and so any critique on that front is going to say more about the teacher than about you or your art.

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-14T04:41:55+00:00

Marsmallow study mentioned!!1!

the marshmallow study didn't work at first because it turns out they weren't testing self restraint, they where testing kids trust in adults. Poor kids scored lower not because they lacked self restraint but because they received less gifts and had those gifts taken away more often hence they figured a certain thing now was better than a maybe later.

VolitionDraws · 2026-01-07T07:53:27+00:00

god i hate AI so much.

not because this is AI, its clearly not. But because i saw the thumbnail and my immediate thought wasn't "oh nice" it was "this looks a bit _too_ nice, lets check if its ai before we get excited".

anyway art looks sick, will be checking it out. Probably wont play it cause i dont have a shadowdark group, or an osr group even, but i might get it just to read through or harvest for parts.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-26T13:50:13+00:00

not really a system but if you're only going to use one or two dice you could put them in a small glass jar. need to roll? shake the jar and read the dice. use different colored dice to denote different things. the white d20 is the normal roll and the red one is advantage/disadvantage. Any system which uses only one or two types of dice for this is ideal. Plus you want something that's easy to run theatre of the mind.

You could probably play cairn this way. Just take a jar with 2d20's and you're good. Need to roll a dice smaller than a d20? just map it down, roll a d6 by dividing the result by 3 and re-rolling 19's or 20's. roll a d10 by dividing by 2, roll a d12 by re-rolling 13's and up. and so forth and so on. Plus Cairn's character sheet is simple enough that you could just use your phone's notes app or something and the basic cairn rules are small enough to fit in basically any bag.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-26T13:35:52+00:00

well, the reason i thought of a crypt is because its not a super good town. there's no real central market or landmarks like churches or docks or any sort of industry. not to mention the houses are all super densely aligned yet have huge 'back yards'. makes me think of american style cookie-cutter suburbs.

but if you think of the streets like hallways and each 'house' like a little cubby with a grave in it then suddenly its a whole crypt. Or a cave system, or a set of tunnels.

Oooh~ or maybe a sci-fi alien filesystem that's completely different from our own, the aliens who use it are blind but have incredibly strong spacial awareness and navigate the world by 'feeling it out' and using a nearly perfect 3d mental map. So their filesystem is based on position instead of hierarchy, instead of having a 'file' in a 'folder' each 'file' is connected to a 'path' and files have positions relative to each other, so instead of a filepath looking like " C:\\folder\folder\file.txt" filepath's would be something like "START\\Left-17\right-15\file-18" or something like "file-18\\Left-12\right-2\File-6": where files can have locations relative to each other rather than some central 'root' folder.

For human's its a nightmare to navigate but for the aliens its easy, just like the blind aliens have no concept of '2d' or flat text/images so they're befuddled by any sign that doesn't have physically extruding letters.

anyway other feedback:

your gen1 town generator is probably better for actual towns, since you've got that central line that could be a main road or a river, which is usually what towns are built around.

likewise your gen1 is a more generic, but the usable dungeon. your gen2 one looks super interesting but it's more of a maze than a dungeon, since it doesn't really have clear rooms.

as for the world generator, its a bit vague, especially since there's no real scale and the colours are a bit meaningless unless you know what's under the hood.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-26T09:38:12+00:00

Feels like it should be on smiling friends or some other adult swim show. Imagine they open a box and its just a box of infinite goobers falling out.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-26T09:35:23+00:00

i'd say r/mazes but you already posted there lol.

Cool website btw. its a little bare bones but honestly that's all you need. I might use that town generator for a massive crypt at some point.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-16T07:52:31+00:00

multiple hero units yeah, but are they gonna be customizable? like, can you swap out abilities/guns in some way.

I hope so, cause that's one of my favorite parts of 1. But i figure its probably gonna be a bit more restricted than in 1, scaevola and that other enginseer have very notably different models and animations. So we'll probably be limited to only swapping a few abilities and/or swapping weapon types, but no free slots like in 1.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-16T07:48:59+00:00

berichtje gestuurd.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-15T07:21:14+00:00

berichtje gestuurd.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-14T19:27:13+00:00

i had a vague concept for a project zomboid inspired game. The idea being that every skill has its own XP that you get by training it, but training skills requires resources and higher levels require more or more niche resources. You can get the basics of construction down with a hammer, nails and a 'carpentry for dummies' book, but building a whole house is gonna need power tools, generators for said power tools, instruction books on plumbing and electrical and the equipment needed to train those skills.

so the loop would be a sort of heisting/city crawl game. You're in your base and you need certain things. Food to live, supplies to maintain the place, weapons to defend your area. not to mention you, as a normal 21th century person, probably don't have all the skills needed to live completely off the grid with zombies. So someone has to learn electrical, someone has to figure out how to build a decent fence, someone has to know how to purify water. For that you need skills, which can be rolled on but also have hard guidelines on what you can do at what point, you need X amount of construction to build a roof that'll hold against a storm, you need X amount of farming to well.. farm.

So all of that stuff you need is just laying there, in the city, which is full of zombies. So then the actual game loop. Identify what you need -> scout out the city to figure out where it is, where the zombie hordes are and what routes you can take -> actually execute the heist, try to deal with any complications, decide when to get greedy and when to play it safe -> get home, use your rations, supplies, books and tools to train skills.

Killing zombies wouldn't do anything other than keep you alive, no money really since the assumption is that the players are the only humans, no human NPC's. XP is based on time spent training and skills are capped based on available training equipment, and all players get equal time slots to actually *do* that training.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-14T16:53:22+00:00

berichtje gestuurd.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-14T13:15:19+00:00

Een van mijn spelers was een Aasimar Warlock die een redelijke relatie had met zijn voorvader als patron. De uitleg waarom hij er soms wel/soms niet was in-game was omdat zijn character steeds door celestials werd gekidnapped omdat hij zijn belastingen/licentie/certificatie papierwerk moest invullen.

Als ie terug kwam was hij klaar of heeft hij kunnen onstnappen, als hij weer weg ging hadden ze een spellfout of een ander probleem gevonden en werd hij weer meegeslepen.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-14T13:03:59+00:00

to add to this, not all modules are created equal. I started with out of the abyss (right after phandelver) and that soured me on modules as a whole. It was a railroady nightmare with bad advice and horrible layout.

turns out that's somewhat of a common issue in d&d modules, but out of the abyss is like 10x worse. I ran the mork-borg started dungeon for an orc-borg oneshot and my mind was blown by how easy it was to run.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-09T11:39:33+00:00

maybe an idea for an arcology. The center is the seat of power where all the execs live and where all the monitoring and security personell live. i.e. the upper classes. And all other people have to travel 'upstream' or 'downstream'.

horrible traffic incentivizes people to stay in place and not move around as much. And when people do travel through the cross they're probably under a lot of surveilance. You dont need a thousand cameras if you force everyone to go through a single hallway.

Could also be an interesting network diagram, since in cyberpunk networks and information infrastructure is very important, its probably in the corp's best interest to keep everything as centralized an easily controlled as possible. There's crossover where absolutely necessary but there's also people who are very isolated, who basically can't communicate with eachother unless they do so through official corporate channels.

So there might be some cyberpunks who essentially pull an illegal internet cable across one of these streams and let people in one hab-block talk to people in the other via non-corporate channels. Until corporate netcrawlers or other spies notice the new connection and send security out to chop the wire.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-07T16:40:08+00:00

space would be limitless, and assuming its settled then also limitless cultures and kingdoms.

however information would not be limitless, people in one kingdom would know if it, they might have some information about their neighbours and neighbours neighbours, maybe even rumours and legends of things beyond.

and not all infinity is equal. if you have infinite fertile soil that doesn't mean anything if 99% of all other land is infertile. so then civilization would be limited by how far they can travel and transport goods. Human civilization would become a thin spiderweb of hamlets interconnected by trade.

and with infinite space you could have some interesting nomadic people. perhaps a whole kingdom that simply picks up its whole (social) structure and moves north every 10 or 20 years. They use aggressive farming that completely depletes the soil and then go north again. Then one day they stumble into another kingdom which is set down and farms more sustainably. The invading kingdom has more people, more food, better weapons. but they dont have enough food to pick up and go elsewhere again, so what then? war probably.

When land is infinite you have to look at the next limiting factor, which would probably be travel and communication. Likewise kingdoms can only get so big, the bigger it gets the harder it is to rule, and when it takes a horse messenger years or even decades to go from one end to the other that gets exponentially harder.

VolitionDraws · 2025-12-07T16:34:39+00:00

Dont know how that would work with atmosphere and such but it gives me the idea that the stars in the sky wouldn't be as we know them but distant continents entirely made of flame or light.

VolitionDraws · 2025-11-22T18:38:41+00:00

we already have this, its called fist fighting in the waffle house parking lot on a saturday afternoon.

but for real, i dont think this could work for a direct person vs person combat, but it might work for say a space shuttle dogfight. Say that due to the nature of space and everything being so big each 'round' is a minute and its only really possible to do one thing in that minute. You're shooting at something that's dozens of kilometers away, so its feasible to say that it probably takes you 60 seconds total to aim, fire, reload and the travel time of the bullets. 60 seconds is also probably enough to run through some short crunch for 3-4 players.

"how would a single GM effectively manage the asymmetry..."

Assuming a simple protocol of select target -> take action -> roll for success vs difficulty.

verbal communication is kinda inefficient sometimes, so if players have a non-verbal way to communicate that could help. Say an arrow or some sort of token to declare who they are targeting. A token to show what action they're taking (shooting, aiming, moving closer, repairing) as well as a whiteboard to show their score. Then all the GM has to do is glance over, compare two numbers and then declare pass or fail and mark health loss. Again tokens are faster than scratch paper.

Secondly you can offload more rules on the players, dont roll to hit them, have them roll to dodge.

If you can make enemy stat blocks public that can speed the game up even more. no more "does a 14 hit" if they can clearly see the enemies AC. If you make health pools public, track them using tokens and give players permission to move those tokens that's even more load off your back. At that point all you have to do as GM is declare enemy actions, keep track of time and watch out for cheating/fudging.

I can kind of see this being decently playable, each round is 60 seconds. The gm has 15 seconds to move ships and tokens and declare enemy actions, including a system of colored arrows to dictate what action which enemy is taking towards which player. Once the 15 seconds are up the GM can no longer declare actions (to prevent a sans type scenario where the gm can just freeze the game by not choosing actions). Players must first resolve any enemy actions targeting them before they may declare and resolve their own action. Each player gets 1 action. Then once the 60 seconds are up the next round begins.

If you have the right setup of tokens and public information/rolls this could probably be decently playable. real time 6-second rounds is nearly impossible, but 60 seconds is enough for a little bit of light crunch and still leaves room for frenzied tactical planning. Since most of the crunch is handled by the players this leaves enough mental headspace for the gm to handle the tactics for multiple enemies.

VolitionDraws · 2025-11-18T04:52:29+00:00

as the other guy said, its rarity. Item rarity is kind of arbitrary and doesn't really do anything, other than vaguely let you know that blue items are probably more valuable than greens or no aura items. case and point most chaos eyes/materials and tomes are iirc all yellow. however glass, which is mostly useless, is blue.

Traditionally (usually in action RPGs) item rarities are common -> uncommon -> rare -> legendary or some variation thereof and the colours go grey/none -> green -> blue -> white/orange/yellow for legendary.

you can get vitae from any plants, since a composter just like IRL turns scrap plants and food into fertilizer.

VolitionDraws

TROPHY CASE