Doc Destructo

Grand Theft Auto 5 Smokes Oregano

*extremely that kid voice* uh huh huh huh im so high guys, yeahhhhhhh

I have a strong dislike of Grand Theft Auto 5, the kind of dislike that once led to me tearing into someone I respect in a conversation about it, just because my roll was that in need of slowing. I was wrong and a dick in that situation, but I also want you to know right out the gate the sort of vitriol I have for a game that has just as much transphobia as the average Yakuza title, yet also as ...

Doing the Same Thing, Over and Over

Insanity might not be every hack’s favorite nail to pound, but they keep it near to their hammer.

To say the face of mental illness as portrayed in videogames is inaccurate is the sort of thing that provokes a wretch. For a lot of reasons, like the fact that ‘inaccurate’ in this case is one of those pocket hand sanitizer weasel words for capital-L Liberals who want to look as though they’re trying hard to make the world a better place without offending the...

The Real Horror of Resident Evil 7

The Bakers were a threat in a game. They were also a mirror to reality.

Forgive me for having mental illness on the brain. When you’re on an Island, a thing you find yourself thinking about a lot is the conditions on other people’s Islands, ones that you’ve been adjacent to through others in your life. Addiction is one I think about a lot, because it’s one I believe could be my own death if I fully let it get its hooks in me. I had a time putting down the ...

Mental Illness and Creativity

If there's anything that hacky videogames have tried to convince us of, it's that mental illness makes you a dangerous, possibly superhuman villain. Not at all like the reality of the thing, where it's an annoyance of frustrating self-paradoxes. Where you can be sidelined from being creative and doing things you like because your mind has decided that due to reasons not one hundred percent clear, it now only has a few safe islands from intrusive thoughts. So instead of feeling helpful and fulfil...

The Chillest Folks I Know Are FighterZ

Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name (as well as the WEAKNESSES of your SECRET MARTIAL ARTS TECHNIQUES.)

Dragon Ball FighterZ came out this past Friday, which has led a lot of folks to once again hang out with an old friend from their childhood. Particularly, the one friend that yelled a lot and exploded things with beam attacks. My short review is that it's extremely good, the sort of thing that comes out of a project that is very much ...

Rare Reagents

The sun hung low, a pale green hue. It really wasn’t hot in any appreciable way, not nearly the sort of heat emitted by an entity that should go around identifying itself as a member of solar royalty. Maybe it wasn’t a sun, and she was just assuming that. Maybe it was her mistake, to see a round ball of light in the sky above her and just naturally assume- that? That’s gotta be a sun.

But if that was a sun, then what was the endless darkness at her feet, which showed now int...

Two - A False Dawn in a Storm

My afternoon was spent between honing my aim with the javelin and descent into teenage existential dread. My aim was terrible; my dreading was superb. I was well aware of my faults as both a young man and wolf in recent months and years, and now I had also been exposed as just as much a magician. As though some cosmic joke, the folds of the fabric of reality had fallen just so that they could make a voice I could hear. This voice had taught me that fire was not truly inside my body, but both cou...

Le Monde Vous Regarde

People who seek a spotlight should be wary of how bright they are.

David Cage is the biggest charlatan in the games industry. I have said it before and I just said it again. This was my view as the outsider, an individual looking in to the man, his games and his company, judging him by his works. Just as the man himself recently asked us all to, stemming from allegations by former employees that confirms these views, and also more and much worse. Things that could b...

BASIC, Bit by Bit: Issue 3- Otherlore: Statistics

It's the new year, and that means it's time to get back into the swing of things. I took time to put my head down and do some big work on Otherlore over the holidays that you'll be seeing in this spot soon enough. Thank you all again for your continuing support. 2018 is going to be a good year for BASIC and Otherlore!

The Contents So Far:

• 1: The Very BASI...
  2018-01-11 01:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post

The Known World of Otherlore

There exist places safe from both the dangers of empires and monsters in the Known World of Otherlore. Today, we'll look at two.

Carsconny

A city state on the northwestern coast of the Continent, protected by high walls, natural cliffs and an impressive harbour chain gate known as the Hullcracker. It was once a much bigger place, a walled cosmopolis on the sea for the nobility, with a wretched sprawl spreading out beyond the gates into the...

A Note Through the Holidays

I hope you're all having a good time. I've got my head down officially, working on getting Otherlore in a state that I can have to you by January. So if updates seem sparse, I swear, it's not because I'm not working.

It's because I've got the SAD, and winter is a hard time for me.

Well, no, not just because of that, also because I'm doing my damnedest to get some folkloric roleplaying in your hands for 2018! Looking forward to showing you all what I've got!

-Doc

Marvelous Materials of Otherlore

In today's Otherlore update, we'll take a break from breaking down the mechanics of play in order to get back into a bit of the flavor of the setting- good to mix things up every now and again to keep your brain moving. Here, we're getting in to some of the stuff beyond leather, wood, linen and iron that exist in its Known World. Enjoy!

Rivengold  

Those who pan for gold are looking not only for fortune, but for legend. For it is said that in some rivers, particularly t...

Scream Like You Deserve It

It Takes a Lot to Be a Loser with All Your Might

If you know me, you know one of my big things is that violence has a tone. The short version of this is that there’s more separating the violence of Tom and Jerry cartoons from than that of Eastern Promises than the amount of blood hitting the walls. While that itself seems ridiculous and self-evident right off the bat, you have to consider points finer than blunt. Namely, yes, of course, Tom and Jerry has a cat w...

One - Welcomed Wolves at the Door

The old man died rambling about eyes in the dark. Tormented to the end, a death of gnawing fear that pursued him even in his sleep and stopped a heart that had seen too many winters to bear the strain. The last kindness of the local folk was to give him a warm bed to die in and someone there to hold his hand when he went. “Eyes in the dark,” he said. “Watching.” His last word came out like the whine of an old hunting hound gored by a boar it was too slow to feint, a confused sort of pain...

Menaces of Otherlore: The Svriga, the Leorex, the Wardead and the Mute Watcher

A deadly stranger on a late road, a bedazzled fool's conception of a lion, militia fighters made fierce and proud in death, and the striding eyes of an eternal Nightmare.

Svriga

“Don’t mind the footsteps, mind that the torch stays lit.”

The dead must have cause to rest, or else they must be laid to rest, that their time has a definitive end. A life lost pointlessly, without aim and through sheer entropy is a sentence stopped midstream ...

Menaces of Otherlore: The Trow

"The shape manifest of every mistaken movement spotted beyond the lantern’s light, of every fang-curved glint of moonlight, of every strange scratching heard at the window in the small hours.”

We tell our children that we come home when the sun comes down, because in the woods and mountains lurk things of tooth and claw that would like little more than to make a meal of a little one. We tell them this because perhaps we think making a bedtime story out of wolf and jag...

Menaces of Otherlore: The Hanging Tree

“You made an example. It came to show gratitude.”

People take for granted the blurred line between life and death in the Known World. Most folk, being decent, have proper words to say, rites to perform and methods of disposal that sends all parts of the dead on to their Next Life. Most folk, being decent, could find a body frozen by the roadside, have their heart sink and their mind say ‘poor devil,’ leading them to perform that final kindness for a perfect strang...

The Toggle Locks Say a Lot

 The devil in the detail of intentionally bad weapon design. 

Ahoy Spoilers: Don't read this if you haven't played Wolfenstein 2 and you're the sort that cares about going into matters blind.

Wolfenstein 2 came out. It’s a great game and an utterly amazing storytelling experience, and it’s absolutely worth playing, double moreso if you want to see an actual leftist AAA videogame in the wild. Fucking unicorn, this thing, so y...

Menaces of Otherlore

The Known World is a strange place, one that has ways of echoing both the conscious and subconscious of the mortals that populate it. Beyond the Primal forces harnessed in acts of magic through sheer understanding and willpower, and the fuel for the extraordinary that is tangible Faith, the power of hope and trust shared willingly, there are other, more fearsome mechanisms at work. For just because the Free Folk are caught between the Holy Throne in the southwest and the Nightmare in the northea...

Asshole DNA: Omikron: The Nomad Soul

Choke on your koopy sandwich you miserable bastard.

David Cage is the biggest charlatan in the games industry. His continued persistence and existence in this field is the most baffling mystery to date, and perhaps the biggest example of executives being wowed by flash over substance. He is a man with an idea of what games should be, which is “bad movies.” His adherents are the sort to claim that his work doesn’t get enough respect, and very quickly devolve ...

Spookygames: Cry of Fear (Sound of Gun)

Know what’s scary? That fraction of a fraction of a second between your trigger breaking and the rifle firing when you realize you don’t have your earplugs in.

Cry of Fear is one hell of a portfolio piece for its developers, Team Psykskallar. With only three core members and several other contributors, they put together an atmospheric horror experience that at times manages to meet the best in the genre eye to eye. That it happens to be a free game, built in G...

Gods and Otherlore

Sometimes I wonder if I overthink things, and that I’m letting things grow out of scope. I’m prone to streamlining processes over doing things as any sort of high-fidelity simulation, because I prefer things that flow and play things fast and loose over things that revel in fine details. So when I find myself building systems that go deeper than a roll or two, that account for things like size discrepancy and physical restriction, I also find myself wondering if my work’s not gett...

The Wrestling Game of the Future

Which Ironically Contains a Lot of Slam Masters

Part One of a series I’ll be crossposting between The Greatest Podcast in the History of Our Sport.

To say that wrestling games are an enthusiast genre is putting it mildly. The reason for this is simple- since almost its inception, it’s been one dominated by BRANDS and now, more specifically, it’s dominated by a BRAND and its one series of questionable quality. The musky dominance of an oversexe...

DOOM and Clarity

Because Red Mist is Better Than Self Doubt

The biggest load of horseshit fed to the parents of people of my generation was that violent videogames were creating a generation of crazed killers. Aside from being the same old trash about jazz, weed, rock and roll and hip hop once again spun into a new way to stoke suburban fears of Kids These Days, it was also telling as to the priorities of the Western World- there was a lot of hubbub around Dave Grossman’s writings about the ...

BASIC Ideas

Better get used to me making these puns, there’s more on the way.

Never get the idea that I’m not the kind of person that self-edits. I know things kinda go to the contrary from what you all have been seeing out of me thusfar, but you should trust me, I do. One of the biggest recurring questions I ask myself with regards to things that should be clear but often aren’t, like “who am I” and “what am I doing here,” is “why even bother with making your...

Realizing NPCs: The Agent of Chaos

Your murderclown shtick is old. No, shut it, it is. Put these cowboy boots on, we’re going to be Anton Chigurh now. 

We understand that fear stems from distrust in what is unknown. People like to mock others over their fear of the dark, which is not only cruel, but also kinda dumb. After all, what is more unknown than a dark void, which could be concealing most likely nothing but also quite literally anything. You know that when you look into a dark basemen...

Asshole DNA: Watch Dogs

The Only Thing That Stops a Bad Guy with a Gun is an Asshole With a Phone, Several Guns 

I’ve felt scorched by games in my life, things I’ve tried to rationalize as being Actually Good, Really. You know how much I paid for Dead to Rights? $82. You know long I persisted in the belief it was “pretty okay, you know?” Too long. I know better now, of course, it’s terrible, but it’s also home to a boss named Longshoreman X, and that makes it special. 2017-08-23 02:03:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Failing Forward on a Critical Failure

Because “Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies” Should Be Your Exit Strategy to a Bad Game, and Not a Regular Event.

My view of table RPGs is that they’re an event where a group of people get together to entertain themselves, some playing the role of specific characters within a world, and one playing the entire rest of the world itself, in whatever bits of that world are immediately apparent. There’s nothing necessarily adversarial about this foundation, though there...

Better Understanding Weaponry: Rifle Addendum 1 - Rifle Configurations

Because Life is Complicated in Every Conceivable Way, Why Wouldn’t Rifles Be Too?

Last week, I laid out the groundwork for better understanding the human race’s main infantry weapon, the rifle. Now, I’m going to outline all the way that groundwork “isn’t always,” because even without actually building and designing them, guns themselves are sort of a trade. And if you work in a trade, you know nothing is ever as simple as it’s laid out at the 100 lev...

The Basics of BASIC

Dang, that's basic.

I'm an English major. This means many things about me, one of which is that numbers terrify and confuse me. Another is that I'm prone to verbosity if left unchecked. BASIC is a roleplaying game system that is my current focus as a developer. I am nothing if not unchecked.

The Intent

• A system that is numerically small, with low numbers and smaller equations. Attributes and Skills don't go higher than 5 in BASIC, ...
  2017-08-08 03:14:07 +0000 UTC View Post