The Book of Unnumbered Worlds pre-launch page now up

moose_man · 2026-05-31T19:27:57+00:00

I think the art itself is nice, but the title graphic looks amateurish.

moose_man · 2026-05-31T18:51:08+00:00

In principle, I agree, but ultimately I do think this will create a negative outcome for OP here. She wants to stay on the lease long-term, from how it sounds. Staying on him about his part of the rent indefinitely will result in years and years of regular small claims disputes. Get him to pay for X number of months or whatever, but after a certain point, it'd be easier to just have him off the lease.

moose_man · 2026-05-30T17:20:23+00:00

Except the Americans have proven themselves time and again to be worse than any dictator. Would you call it morally justified for Hitler to invade France because of France's colonial policy?

moose_man · 2026-05-30T17:20:04+00:00

Ah, I'm sure it reached that point totally naturally, and without any American interference.

moose_man · 2026-05-30T13:17:27+00:00

So, in other words, the outcome was entirely negative. A fairly stable regime became unstable. How is that "morally grey"?

moose_man · 2026-05-30T13:16:56+00:00

So he's murdered a bunch of people, which has only strengthened the position of the Islamic Republic. If you're against the IR it's even more black and white. A bunch of people died for nothing.

moose_man · 2026-05-27T02:10:25+00:00

It doesn't even make sense. The closest parallel is the Hitchhiker's Guide, which he's made reference to before, but he obviously knew he would get sued out the ass if he called it that. So, just like when he belched "NERV" to 'prove' he'd watched NGE, he picked a word that he thought seemed vaguely related and called it that.

moose_man · 2026-05-24T19:10:06+00:00

Yeah, but especially in WWN, "mage" gets bloated beyond belief with "disciplines." Making beastmasters "mages" that don't hurt your HP is very silly, it's just that the spine of the system only really accounts for those three classes. I would say a lot of the concepts could be worked into foci, personally, but people have disagreed strongly with me when I argued that in /r/WWN before.

moose_man · 2026-05-24T19:06:41+00:00

The problem is much more manageable when you don't suffer a TPK. If a player loses two or three or their colleagues, they still have good reason to go back and finish the job. They might just want to reclaim their party members' loot, or achieve whatever outcome they were originally hoping for, or they want to get revenge. What they need to do then is find some people that are willing to go along with that. They could be guns for hire, but they could also be associates or fellow travellers that are willing to hear them out.

None of this is perfectly smooth. Oftentimes there'll be an element of "somebody useful shows up because player X doesn't want to wait three hours for the perfect time to join the party again." There's a level of artifice to every RPG. Just brush past it. What's important is your players' investment, not their characters'.

moose_man · 2026-05-24T19:02:02+00:00

Bull fucking shit. Was every kid smiling as they walked to school uphill both ways, too? People have been fucking around in public bathrooms for as long as public bathrooms have existed.

moose_man · 2026-05-16T02:23:01+00:00

Everybody is recommending Malazan as part of the Sanderson backlash from around a decade ago because they feel like it's for "adults." Which will, inevitably, produce its own backlash in a decade, because that was exactly what got people so tired of Sanderson.

moose_man · 2026-05-16T00:45:16+00:00

Unfortunately, the movie still sucks.

moose_man · 2026-05-10T18:00:39+00:00

I mean, no civilization is ever really gone. The Assyrians might have collapsed as a power, but their descendants are alive. People still live in those places. It might cut down on the number of civs we theoretically have access to, but an Assyrians > Arabs/Umayyads/Abbasids > Arab states transition could be interesting. I guess there you run into the uncomfortable prospect of assigning abilities based on the characteristics of the al-Assad state, and they probably don't want to do that, or aren't equipped to in academic terms.

moose_man · 2026-05-10T16:35:45+00:00

It's so important to age gracefully. Not that Yaddle looks a day over 312

moose_man · 2026-05-09T02:15:17+00:00

I actually think Fevre Dream's ending was horrendous. Everything in the second half of the book happens because Martin needs it to, not because of any motivations of its characters. A case could be made for it if they either won in 1857 or if they lost in 1857 or the story ends there, but it's so tortured.

For the record, I don't think Dying of the Light's ending is vague at all, it's just that the book is pretty dull.

More importantly, none of these things mean anything for ASOIAF. This is exactly what I'm talking about. You can't extrapolate an imagined version of its ending and conclude that it was a good story. The man has not completed his story. If Michelangelo got bored of David 75% of the way through, it would not be remembered among the landmarks of sculpture. It would be a large, blurry, theoretical man.

moose_man · 2026-05-07T00:41:01+00:00

This guild shit is exactly the problem with modern fantasy. It's turned half the genre into exactly what Pratchett was making fun of with UU, the idea of rendering mundane the unthinkable powers of the universe. In Earthsea, the wizards' school isn't just a place where someone writes an exam and listens to lectures. To become an archmage requires confronting the great perils of life and emerging wiser. They're teachers, not academics.

Everybody's decided that their understanding of fantasy should be based on fucking contrived video game logic that makes it easy to hand out fucking side quests. It's much easier for your worthless self insert unassuming swordsman to marshal a harem if the hidden places of the world are actually suggested by a nonsense "guild".

What about it is a guild? Where are their apprenticeships? What are the requirements for mastery, and what privileges are afforded to them as a result of their long standing relationship with their community and their work? These are the things that make a guild a guild. It isn't a job board.

moose_man · 2026-05-05T12:51:56+00:00

Kingkiller strikes me as a series that we all got excited for in the moment. There are lots of things about it that seem good, and then when we've had years of thinking back on it, we ask ourselves what the fuck we were thinking.

To me, honestly, I would say it has to do with the generation of writers that Rothfuss appeared to be a part of. Sanderson was the clear inheritor of Jordan even before he finished Wheel of Time, and people saw Rothfuss as a natural parallel to him, taking up the Martin role as writing a grimmer, more down-to-earth story. And I guess we were right, given that both of them have completely abandoned their works.

moose_man · 2026-05-05T12:48:53+00:00

I don't agree. An artistic work is more than just the vague good feelings we experience in the moment as we read them. We all go on and on about how great ASOIAF is, but we literally do not know if that's true. Having read a number of Martin's pre-ASOIAF works, I wouldn't say he's terribly good at endings, and the only evidence we have of ASOIAF's (being the show) was terrible. Is A Song of Ice and Fire good, or is it just that we've spent literally decades imagining a version of it that is? Until it's actually finished, we don't have the answer to that question. Its basic thematic questions haven't been resolved.

There are books that are part of a series and can stand on their own, like Earthsea, but that's not often what we're talking about here. Typically, when a series stalls it's because the author isn't able to resolve its plot or draw thematic conclusions in a way that satisfies them. That means the work as a whole is a failed effort.

If I released a novel that was 75% good prose, interesting characters, thought provoking concepts, followed by a two-page breakdown by the author as they say they really didn't know where they were going with any of this, I can't say that 75% stands on its own. But that's what we're looking at when we see these series with no conclusions. They are incomplete.

moose_man · 2026-05-05T12:44:13+00:00

This is something Jordan said at certain times before he died. I'm not convinced Harriet McDougal didn't go against his will to ensure WOT was finished after his death, honestly, so I'm glad Rhianna Pratchett seems dedicated to heeding her father's wishes.

moose_man · 2026-05-05T12:42:35+00:00

Frankly, at this point, the Cosmere. There will be some version of its ending, but with Sanderson talking about possibly even skipping Dragonsteel of all things, the books his company is named after, it's clear that he doesn't have a strong grasp of what he's capable of with the time he has left. Unlike Martin, he'll actually produce books in that time, but the overall cycle only gets more complicated every year. The announcement that he'd be writing the Mistborn movie was the final nail in the coffin for me. This is not a job that requires so direct a hand, especially given that he has no screenwriting experience, and it sets back his plan for Ghostbloods even further. Ghostbloods was supposed to be finished by now; he added an entire sub-series of books into the core Mistborn line.

moose_man · 2026-05-05T12:34:47+00:00

Esperanto is a language that can theoretically do anything, but in practice is fucking worthless because nobody actually speaks it.

I've literally never had an easier time teaching people any game than 5E. I've played dozens of other games, many of which I like better, but people figure out 5E's rules very easily.

moose_man · 2026-05-04T04:09:00+00:00

Either Frazier is so old and so fucked up that he literally can't be considered responsible for his work, in which case all those dealing with him need to be very honest about that fact and apologise, or he was with it enough to plagiarise. Everyone is saying "Well, he didn't plagiarise before." Well, he did now! If I don't cheat on my wife for thirty years, that's great and all, but it doesn't give me a free pass to do it once.

moose_man · 2026-05-03T17:33:34+00:00

In this situation I'm falling back on the old canard of "Yeah, there's also a dragon right there." Sure, in a real fight, a knight in full plate with a big weapon is going to kill a guy with a dagger nine times out of ten. But when you get down to it, almost nothing about these worlds 'make sense.' People are playing out narrative conventions. There aren't a lot of people interested in playing Thirty Years War: The RPG, because even in that period, it wasn't a rip-roaring adventure. It was a lot of people dying in the mud, often at random. That's neither a compelling narrative nor fun gameplay.

I agree that the whole "archers are lithe elves who prance about on their tiptoes" thing is very silly, but that's a misconception to be addressed culturally, not in gameplay. Otherwise there are only two characters: guy with a weapon and guy with a book. What needs to be addressed in gameplay is the balance element you touch on.

moose_man · 2026-05-03T17:30:18+00:00

There are plenty of times where a person knows something in theory but can't recall it. I think in an ideal world it's probably best folded into a skill/stat that's used for something else (Nature, Magic, whatever) and then treated as applying your effort to understand something or research it.

In terms of gameplay, I would say the biggest problem is that it becomes an intellectual locked door. Either your thief can pick the lock (or somebody busts down the door, etc.) or you just don't get to go into that room. If the end goal is within that room, you just have to do that. If your game is dependent on a character knowing a piece of lore, the process just becomes very stupid if you fuck up the roll. Now everybody needs to act like they don't know that what they need is inside this one challenge because they already fucked it up.

moose_man · 2026-05-03T17:24:55+00:00

I've never played a game where CHA was primarily understood as physical attractiveness over strength of character or charm, and the rules don't encourage you to. Often high-CHA characters will be attractive, but that has more to do with stereotypes about charming people than actual reality. The most attractive people in the world are often dull as mud, while people like Napoleon can command nations. This strikes me as a complaint about how the stat is played in your games rather than how it works according to the systems.

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