Gradually bounced off of the MU* I played after Arx, so now I’m between games. Waiting for something that appeals.

Because this is topical for me today with the final part of Wind and Truth coming out (yay, finally, I can start it!) …

Cannot possibly recommend the company Graphic Audio enough as an audiobook experience. It was my gateway drug back into reading after an embarrassingly long stretch of fractured attention span. Their tagline is ‘A Movie in Your Mind’, which it pretty well succeeds at. They make everything a full Radio Play experience, with sound effects and music and a sprawling cast of voice actors for each book.

The only downside is that they do tend to retain the same voice talent, so if you bounce around between some series, you’ll be like, “Hey wait, why’s Wit here? Oh, no, he’s not. Just the same voice.”

Either way, cannot recommend it highly enough. The actors really swing for the fences, and when it lands, it lands so well.

I’ve been listening to the audio books myself the past month!

Endlessly impressed with the one-man-show that the narrator is capable of putting on. I think it does sag occasionally (The Iron Tangle comes to mind), but it’s been such a different tone to my previous binge of the Cosmere that I’m all in on the dark comedy romp that it is.

God damn it, Donut.

@kalakh GarouMUSH, when an entire hive of giant hornets were corrupted and rampaging, and the only way to get them to stop was to kill the queen and smuggle out the uncorrupted queen larva, and my coward of a ragabash stealthing through the entire complex tunnel system, grabbing the queen larva and bolted like he was carrying a football and running for his life while being trailed by hornets while all the fighty types kicked ass outside of the hive.

@Herja Arx, Pretty much anything having to do with Sydney’s family, but definitely the final moments of Petraea hit me like a gutpunch, and having her lose one of the last little shreds of her family far more quickly than she expected to was absolutely gutting. The writing was on the wall that she was terminal, but having that timeline move up from ‘maybe a year or so’ to ‘this is happening today’ was just so shocking, and everything that played out in those last moments was just awesome to witness and be a part of. And really, what’s the point of having long hair if you can’t wail and scream and saw it all off in a moment of loss?

Let’s see…

PridesMUCK, finally taking revenge on the person who killed my character’s mother, only to find that vengeance was hollow and just made her feel empty and dirty.

RedwallMUCK, the entire earthquake event, rallying together with survivors to try to make sense of the disaster and plan what was going to happen next, with a bunch of people who really didn’t hang out together living in close refugee quarters, and the ensuing squabbles.

Super Robot Tensei MOO, when my taciturn, logical, and otherwise completely emotionally unavailable character was told that the former leader of the cult of personality that made her join up with the military that led to her being complicit in war crimes (yay!) was too useful to the faction she was a part of to have tried for his crimes or executed, and she just lost. Her. Shit. At the leader of said faction, snarled, cursed, cried, threw her ID badge on the ground, gathered her things, and was off the station and was off into the sunset by the end of the night.

…So, yes, I think I like my big melodramatic payoff scenes an awful lot, but I think that’s part of the joy of character dramas!

@howyadoin said in So, probably don't want to browse MSB right now:

Oh no my what about my hog pit nostalgia

Ah, the cause of several of my anxiety attacks while playing Arx because I thought people were talking about me. (And they almost never were.)

@Alamias

Oh, nice, I’ve had my eye on this one!

In hindsight, I was really waaaaay too young to be on the wild west internet of 1996, but roughly around the same time:

• Redwall MUCK - For when I needed to be a total edgelord and brood in the shadows or have swordfights with ne’er-do-wells, whilst being a squirrel, the objectively best Redwall species.
• Furcadia - I was blown away at the idea that you could RP with a graphical representation of your character, and spent so much time making ‘Dreams’, and stealing all of the pillow objects and hoarding them in a single building so no one could sit down.
• Prides MUCK - I also really loved The Lion King, but was intimidated by the rules of TLK MU* when I looked that up. So, this felt like a better fit. A very mixed bag of great players and infamously bad ones.

I’ve spent the better part of the last year utterly gobbling up everything in Brandon Sanderson’s Cosmere (Stormlight Archives, Mistborn, Warbreaker, etc.) catalog, and I am so freaking sad that there don’t seem to be any Cosmere-based games.

Having an already-established world with a well-thought-out magic system that you can do tons of interesting things with?

It would so be my jam, right about now.

Are we talking about purely IC reasoning?

Because in my experience, avoidant behavior is often less about not wanting to butt heads with different character ideologies, and far more often to do with not wanting to deal with a player who has proven that they are difficult to interact with.

As for cliques, I think it’s something of a losing battle to try to dismantle the human desire to tribalize, and one we’re unlikely going to solve within the confines of a text-based RPG.

I thought about this thread when I was in a scene where someone was clearly struggling to get their point across.

You know the type, the RPer who’s a little bit new and is flailing a bit, has some phonetic typos, and is coming off a bit flat, but they’re very earnest about it.

This thread made me appreciate that they’re clearly putting in the effort to write their own stuff rather than just slamming it into ChatGPT to try to keep up.

Struggle on, new writers. We do see you improving with every session.

@tsar

Not sure what you’re in to, but for uplifting shows that still have an emotional core, it’s hard to go wrong with A Place Further Than the Universe.

Four girls, for various reasons, deciding to set their goals on joining an expedition to Antarctica. There’s some emotionally charged scenes in it, but for the most part, it’s about finding yourself, and the things that motivate you.

Alternately, based on the action-heavy stuff you mentioned earlier, you might want to check out Mob Psycho 100, if you haven’t. Turns the entire idea of power progression on its head. It, too, is about self-actualization (With a whole bunch of fights in there, too.) There are no side characters or throwaways. Every single person has their own shit going on, and even characters or archetypes that most shonen fare would introduce and then forget about, the show circles back on. The fighting, while present, is not the point. The point is to become a better person, and to put in the work.

Some stuff happened and I’m staring down the barrel of an eye-wateringly large dental bill. Financing is reasonable so I’m not entirely fucked, but hey America? Can we stop pretending teeth aren’t part of our overall health?

Fuck’s sake.

@L-B-Heuschkel

Wait, is this a thing? Oh, fuck AI. That’s how to give sentences flavor! Nuh uh. A million percent not changing.

I really enjoyed Deltarune Chapter 4. An unexpected amount of character depth and some great music. More fool me for thinking there were only 4 chapters, though. Guess I’ll be waiting for the 5th chapter in 2026! (And… for 6… and… 7…)

I have… thoughts about the ending of Expedition 33.

Spoilers, don’t read if you haven’t beaten it:

Spoiler

Anyhow! That’s a lot of words, but with those words said: The game was a solid 9/10, with 10/10 combat, art direction, music, and vibes. Super imaginative and refreshingly weird, and the amount and quality of the music is a triumph. The moments that hit hard hit like a freight train, and I’m going to be thinking about lots of these characters for a long time.

@KDraygo

Deeply frustrating all the same. I mean… 9 awards, including… Best Score. For Solo Leveling. In a period that included Apothecary Diaries and Frieren. No. Get right outta here with that snub.

The Anime Awards’ days of not being taken seriously are certainly coming to a middle.

Not even worth being mentioned in the same sentence as the rest of those shows, and of course it wins.

@SqeakyClean

People on the internet can indeed be fake. But it’s worth trying, all the same. I have online friendships that have endured for several decades, and they’re often the people who will sit up with me at 3AM on my darkest days and keep me afloat.

Whatever’s been happening, try not to let it get you cynical.

@Jennkryst

May the next one be even remotely as progressive!

One. Setting aside all the social aspects, going higher is a balancing nightmare, and there’s no way to square the drastic differences in player power without extensive homebrewing.

Have the other spheres represented by GMs (and only GMs), and don’t have them overshadow player power unless it’s in service of a Big Bad that will eventually be faced.

And just in general? Never stick Mage or Changeling in with Vampires or Werewolves. The power differential is just stupid.