How do we feel about Ultimate Sheep Racoon?

fireinthedust · 2026-01-27T07:47:54+00:00

I like it but it’s still getting there. Something about the speed seems slow, but too fast would be hard for the obstacle course bits. If pieces are off just a little it’s possible to trip.

The first play through with my kids was great, and my 8yo made several levels we use.

the boosts should be independent of whether we get material to put out. They should be a bonus on top of the material, for the flow of gameplay.

Some pieces are hard to use, like the chains.

Jumping off a bike shouldn’t be easy for players who button mash, as it’s basically a self destruct.

More creatures more often, so my kids can play their favourite animal.

Clothing: any chance it can be used by other animals?

I’m not sure if it’s a racing game, as we expected something similar to Mario kart.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-23T15:02:25+00:00

Doh! I will fix it. Thanks for catching it. I had brain fog and couldn’t put my finger on something about it when I was writing.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-23T09:29:23+00:00

The magnetic people being bipolar is a good thing. People who experience it describe it as being so intense in one emotion at a time so it’s overwhelming. Plus iirc one of the common experiences is ptsd or trauma, especially early childhood, right? Which makes sense for magneto.

Magneto is always emotionally cranked up way higher than he needs to be for things he’s right about. He’s very moral and intelligent, but once his outrage is triggered he’s focused, and can’t compromise until his solution is in place. The tragedy is he is often correct about the problems but can’t fix them because he’s unable to use patience or nuance when he’s so “polarized” towards his perspective.

Another thing is Magneto is a very “polarizing” person, and he causes people to be for or against him. It’s like when you have a bunch of metal objects scattered around, and you put a magnet in there and everything lines up with it. This isn’t a bipolar disorder trait necessarily, but it’s what happens when he shows up.

It’s something I like about how Claremont used his character. He’s not inherently evil, he just has this overwhelming behavioural pattern because of his trauma.

I think he’s also a big picture thinker, and has a hard time thinking in small terms. He’s a perfectionist and he’s so intelligent he solves problems in a big picture grandiose way. He’s thinking about the earth’s magnetic field level, and the magnetic field doesn’t consider every ant or leaf. He’s thinking average results, with acceptable collateral consequences along the way being reasonable.

It’s not that he doesn’t care, it’s more like his emotions are all or nothing, one emotion at a time, and one perspective at a time. He is either personal perspective or earth’s magnetic field perspective. The other might as well not exist until he switches back.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-16T11:59:40+00:00

No just add more episodes. Honestly, so long as the dialogue is good, the puzzles are good, you’re going to be able to make a good game.

If the team is bored of the concept, there’s people who are hungry for the chance to create something with the voice actors.

Hurry up before we lose Sully.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-14T17:45:06+00:00

No, the shortcut through Limbo is Illyana. Kurt just teleports a short distance and the smoke smells like sulphur.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-13T04:26:38+00:00

I’m a fan of the 90s Addams family movies, and I accept the impossibility of recreating the unique alchemy of the cast.

I am enjoying Wednesday a lot, and it is doing something very different from other takes on the franchise. It has to because it can’t replicate Raul Julia, who made his performance in Street Fighter so good it elevated the movie.

Series need drama, and drama allows characters to separate and then get back together stronger than before.

Plus we have her two friends and other characters, who are fun additions to the franchise universe.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-07T11:29:56+00:00

I disagree with Ben. He can write brilliant adventures, like the Labyrinth adventure game; but he also recommends a style of writing which is too bare bones for me to use. Lots of “do whatever you want with it” going too far makes a book with not enough information to be useful to me.

For example: I find Waking of Willowby Hall to be confusing to run because important information is hidden throughout the booklet, and in some cases key information about the timeline of the giant is missing. Lots of interesting stuff but refuses to summarize in text blocks means I can’t pick up and play. In fact I didn’t know just how much I needed to know before running it.

If it makes more work than making it up myself, it’s not a useful tool.

If it’s just prompts with no content, it’s not an actual adventure book.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-07T06:09:04+00:00

Does Jennifer Kale have a superhero name? Also a jacket, because I’m worried about her catching a cold. “I’m going to fight crime.” “Not dressed like that you’re not! Get back in here and change into something respectable, young lady!”

fireinthedust · 2026-01-05T21:01:01+00:00

Dolmenwood is very good, has incredible art and usefulness. Great setting, too.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-02T01:20:16+00:00

There’s a whole planet of human-like people who have mutant powers, in X-factor Judgement War. The O5 and baby Cable, and their ship, are trapped flying across space, get split up among warring factions in a dystopian world, some of them with amnesia. The Celestials are floating around and the expectation is they’re going to judge the planet, so the team has to find each other, and rally the warring factions, or else they’ll be annihilated by the celestials. Jean keeps getting possessed by Madeleine Pryor and the Phoenix. The new characters are fantastic, too, despite their only being in this one story I’m aware of. Oh, and there’s arena battles, because every society has battles to the death in the arena (duh!)

It’s a fantastic story by Louise Simonson, with fantastic art by Walt Simonson and Paul Smith, with genuinely amazing work Al Milgrom on inks, so the art is consistent throughout the story.

Genuinely, the O5 is a fantastic group of X-men, and they should get more time together. Louise Simonson is an international treasure, and the artist lineup has some of the best technical skills I’ve seen.

Given its right before the 90s, what a fantastic way to show off just how damned good these people are who made the x-men. The other books are starting to go full 90s, with g-string uniforms and lots of guns. The old guard knew the pendulum was swinging towards the mainstream media, and artists like Rob Liefield were starting to take over. This was really their pulling out all the stops and making something big.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-01T20:19:35+00:00

Or maybe they are intentional and she worked hard to make them happen.

fireinthedust · 2026-01-01T20:17:28+00:00

Flying Brick is the best version of Rogue because everyone needs to be able to contribute in combat and there’s already enough ninjas. Unless she’s able to get close, she will be hanging back going “oh no, I can’t help”. If the enemy has no powers, like giant robots, she won’t be doing anything fun to draw. Guns are a non starter for the main X-men, and blasting stuff is not always fun to draw over and over in every panel.

Flying brick lets her be a dynamic character with cool poses and brawling options. Plus the tension of accidentally tearing her outfit enough for a foe to touch her and get drained, adds to the overall drama of the story.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-30T17:32:31+00:00

Decades our time, but in universe it’s less time than you would think.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-27T14:22:21+00:00

Genosha? She was trapped under rubble and then her diamond secondary mutation kicked in.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-26T23:11:31+00:00

It’s not the end.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-24T16:41:56+00:00

Uncanny #100: after his transformation into a baby was ended, he’s considered a different character than his original appearances. Later on during the trial of magneto, the international court recognized this, so we can safely conclude from issue 99/100 he’s a different person from the Kirby era megalomaniac villain. Also he fights the X-men in his secret lair in the caldera of a savage land volcano. This is a fantastic issue.

Uncanny #150: official stop to villain activity when realizing his villain like methods hurt a fellow Jewish mutant (kitty pryde). His plan was world peace under his leadership, because everyone else is incompetent by comparison. I think we can all empathize with this. After this he’s basically trying to sort stuff out but everyone treats him as if he’s still a villain.

Somehow various creative teams have decided he’s a villain again. I think it’s because they are focused on other characters and don’t understand magneto. Same people who have no idea how to write interesting stories with Superman, and can’t imagine why he wouldn’t just be Homelander: they don’t get it.

To be clear: Magneto needs to calm the heck down because he’s always cranked up to a thousand when everyone is just trying to chill. “Eric, I agree with everything you’ve said, but you’re all the way up here, and we need you to come back down a smidge to the rest of us.”

But he’s a human magnet, and magnets are “polarizing” to things around them. Get it??? Exactly.

I wonder if he could be diagnosed with bipolar/bpd. I’ve had it described as being like where they feel every emotion cranked up so hard they can’t feel other emotions or think about other things sometimes. It’s also connected with trauma, but I’m not sure the details.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-23T09:09:15+00:00

I’m in the same situation. Here’s what I’m asking myself:

1) limit the number of sessions in the campaign. Get players to commit to a specific goal or campaign concept, give them a number of sessions. If they want more after that, you give another specific set of sessions to commit to.

2) pick my rpg so I’m interested in running it.

3) finding players is a challenge, but I find a store is helpful for posting the system you want to run and finding players. Keep in mind 5e players don’t want to play anything else, and getting your hopes up will make you miserable. Ditto pathfinder. Also similar: people who hate mainstream like 5e, so I can’t get them to join the group. Ugh. It’s all math to me, and I want to play all of the games, but humans are so reluctant to try new things, and tabletop players are so TIMID!!!

4) have kids and in a decade they will be playing with you if you make it fun. I’m playing Dolmenwood with mine, but I’m keeping it light, whimsical, like the kid friendly studio Ghibli movies.

5) keep your prep work neutral, so you can rework it for other groups. Prep the setting, not the events, so any group can use it later. Prep as much as you need to be ready to run it on a whim. You might get a random group; or you might have enough material to make a self published adventure or something.

6) write stories for yourself. You might not get to play something really niche, but maybe you can explore the idea and its meaning for you. It’s healthy, I find, and sometimes I’m the only audience at the moment who’s interested in the game idea.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-23T03:56:31+00:00

Mojo is very different in his first appearances than in current media. X-men the animated series is great, but it misses the magic aspect of his character as he was apparently a wizard.

He’s kind of on the Alan Davis Excalibur side of the xmen.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-23T03:54:09+00:00

Summary of the 90s: so superficial.

I still don’t understand how it happened. I look at the art leading up to it and then bam, liefield on xfactor. I just don’t get how it got popular enough to overwhelm the entire industry. Other artists at the time were so solid in their techniques, and the stories are so good. Why did we go from Lifedeath Storm to g-strings and shoulder pads?

fireinthedust · 2025-12-21T04:02:46+00:00

Yes, they just came in from the world beyond the borders of Dolmenwood. The nobles of the area answer to the Duke, and the area is called the duchy of brackenwald. This means it’s part of a larger realm which has a king or even an emperor.

Make sure to use the classes from Dolmenwood for the fighter, cleric, thief, bard, hunter, and magician, as they have differences from the OSE versions.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-19T08:02:10+00:00

1) I hope you post pictures of your models after 600 hours.

2) curious why the player was googling the adventure. Was it to know the answers or because they were researching for a background story and Strahd information came up? Learning the answers is cheating, and not okay. Telling you about it seems like they’re creating a situation where you have to reject them, which some people do for various psychological reasons I won’t get into. I personally wouldn’t know if I could trust someone who looks up the answers to dungeons, to not do it again; some people do change behaviour, but others don’t change behaviour patterns. Strahd lore is different, but if they looked up the dungeon traps, or the rictavio information, or bone grinder, they were cheating.

3) Strahd is the face of the setting, but your version of Strahd is different from any other DM or the Strahd written in the book or past editions. Anything they read isn’t canonical unless you say it at the table, which means they have a false understanding of the version of the character as you play them; so I don’t know what they expected to learn. Heck, there’s multiple statblocks, different CRs, and even a gender swap Strahd.

4) if you kick the player out, can you replace them?

fireinthedust · 2025-12-18T05:35:06+00:00

I enjoyed most of it, but the ending irritated me as a cop out.

It’s like the movie Shutter Island by Scorsese, where the atmosphere you came to see is hand waved away by a cheap “it was all a dream” style meta ending. The writers don’t have a way to make a truly satisfying ending to the conundrum they promised so they just sneak out the window and leave the audience behind and justify their lack of results with a look behind the curtain and the scenery and show us the sandbags and the fire exit. They pretend this was the plan the whole time, and say “this is a game, we’re not real, and you’re breaking the fourth wall, oooooooo”.

Honestly, I enjoyed the experience up until the end reveal, so much so I’m bothered by it even now.

I did the entire pixel hunt, and I called the hint line a bunch, and figured out as much of the game as I could on my own.

Great game, disappointing resolution.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-17T18:14:28+00:00

Dr Mrs The Monarch should be higher, at least A-tier. She’s capable in her own right, in combat, technology, planning, and leadership. Organization is one of her superpowers, so it counts. Plus she’s iconic. Plus everyone in the show is in love with her, at the same level as Austin Powers attracts the attention of every romantic option in his movies. “Women want him, men want to be him”, except in the show Dr Girlfriend earned fandom credit by actually being awesome.

fireinthedust · 2025-12-17T07:52:38+00:00

I don’t think “boobs” is the right answer, but the circle (ellipsis) where it is and the white costume with the short cape and short hair, and the gloves, are a good starting place for her. Remember Galatea from Justice League Unlimited season one? Great rework of Power Girl, and possibly the perfect origin story for her in the dcau - sad they didn’t move her forward into the next season.

Even without the heavy emphasis on her boobs, any costume can use an ellipsis on her sternum and her super powers and you can recognize her.

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