Wandering Adventure Party

Poking and pricking after mustard oil exposure

RPG tip from the archive: In every dungeon there are always three hidden levels for each level discovered.#dnd #ttrpg

Previous Winners Of The Annual EN World Most Anticipated Tabletop RPG Of The Year #ttrpg #dnd https://twp.ai/E6E4zz

“Good ventilation” seems to be a forgotten art in US architecture. In Europe, they were opening the windows in schools during the COVID pandemic to help cut down on transmission. Can’t do that in the US because modern school building windows don’t open (if the schoolroom even has windows). Same for modern office buildings.

Have you thought about where your monsters come from?#ttrpg #dnd #gurps #TalesOfTheValiant #5EFeed #worldbuilding #fantasyNew video, updated blog post!https://youtu.be/qtssac7ZQKkorhttps://www.ofgodsandgamemasters.com/blog/on-the-origin-of-monsters

Whenever I talk about minimalist puzzlers, people lean in. Especially people who claim they do not play video games.So here is another one: Cubot.The premise is almost aggressively simple. You slide coloured cubes onto matching tiles. That is it. No story. No characters. No fluff.Everything is white. The floors. The walls. The void. The only real visual information comes from the cubes themselves. It looks like a design exercise that escaped a prototype folder and shipped anyway.Controls are dead simple. Keyboard. Xbox controller. PS3 controller. One finger is enough. The game was literally designed around minimal input.Here is the part people find surprising. All selected cubes move at the same time. Every move is global. That one constraint is where the game gets mean in a quiet way. You are not solving one problem. You are solving 3 or 4 at once, whether you like it or not.It was built by one person. A French developer who made the entire thing solo in a few months. 80 levels. 10 episodes. Buttons. Elevators. Teleporters. Color swappers. All layered on top of the same tiny rule set. No new controls. Just more consequences.The music barely exists. Soft ambient hum. Easy listening to the point of near-absence. It is there to keep your brain from getting itchy, not to be remembered.It runs on anything. Specs are irrelevant. Your GPU can stay bored. That is fine. This is a puzzle game. The work happens in your head.I will admit this. I am tired of minimalist puzzlers. The genre is crowded with games that mistake emptiness for depth.Cubot mostly avoids that trap. It is calm. It is clever. When it gets hard, it is hard because you misread the board, not because it is messing with you.It is also short. You can finish everything in under 75 minutes if you are paying attention. Some people do it much faster.And it costs C$2.19 at full price. Not a sale. Just the price.At that cost, it does not need to justify itself. It just needs to work. It does.

@yon@sakurajima.moe That is the draw of history. Humans are not much different over the last ten thousand years. I could be dropped as a baby in ancient Rome, and no one would know me as anything other than roman once/if I made it to adulthood. You can learn a lot about humans by just looking at what they did previously.There is just a strange exceptionalism that exists around social media; People think it's a distinctly modern phenomena and disorder. But the roots of all that exist in our psyche and history. People with the means wrote obsessively to their parents complaints, and those who didn't have the means complained bitterly. People even had public boards that they'd attach public replies to. It was for many also a form of entertainment. I think it gets lost how much people, in the absence of mass forms of cheap entertainment, just talked and thought about what they heard. With only some exaggeration, even a reclusive hermit in pre-modern times would probably be considered a shameless gossip today.

@stux Trump sees the Peace Prize the same as Elon envisions himself as a founder. You can have it by buying it, no need to have taken the action which would earn you the title.

Right now, there’s rancour amongst Nintendo fans. The Switch 2 had terrible holiday sales during 2025. It’s easy to see why. Switch 2 is obscenely expensive. Switch increased in price—despite being on the market for eight years. And they’re selling flagship franchise games for $90 (C$120 in Canada). But the other issue is that there were no compelling new 3rd party releases. Yes, Cyberpunk 2077 arrived. Except that game’s been on PC, Xbox, and PS5 for years. Where’s Clair Obscur: Expedition 33?Now it’s absolutely true that many Switch 2 owners buy it purely for the 1st party games. But this is just the core audience. What about everyone else? Nintendo used to be good at marketing to casual audiences. Well, it looks like that casual audience didn’t buy the Switch 2. Instead, they went for the Nex Playground—a product few people heard of until it sold like hotcakes during Black Friday. But the Nex Playground is inexpensive and is completely controllable with motion—a feature the main console makers abandoned. But it’s not just the low end that Nintendo finds challenging. All those premium PC handhelds are hurting them too. And I’m not just talking about the Steam Deck. Remember how pundits kept saying the Xbox brand is dead? Well, maybe the console. Meanwhile, the handheld Xbox ROG Ally sold like hotcakes, prompting production ramp-ups due to short supply. This is for a base model that costs $599 and a premium that is $999. People like to say these PC handhelds are not the same market as the Switch 2. But so long as we have conversations comparing the Switch 2 to the Steam Deck, Xbox ROG Ally, Legion Go, etc., we have to acknowledge they compete somewhat. Not only do these PC handhelds often beat Switch 2 in terms of specs but also library too. Sure, you can’t play Donkey Kong Bananza on a Steam Deck. But again, you can’t Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 on Switch 2—and that was Game of the Year. If it sounds like I’m cheerleading Nintendo’s demise—no. This is a company that’s given me so many happy memories, starting from that moment my mom gave me a Game Boy for Christmas. No one wants to see Nintendo go the way of SEGA. But we can’t pretend that Nintendo didn’t make a big misstep. My wife usually gets a new Nintendo console. Last year, she opted for a Legion Go because it feels like a more premium Switch with a bigger game library. Perhaps I could have got one for my daughter if it were priced competitively. But who are we kidding? She prefers Roblox on her iPad. And as for myself? The one game I wanted—Metroid Prime 4—was just not compelling enough to spend that much money, especially when so many better games are at a lower price. If Nintendo can’t win over my family, a family that really loves video games, who else are they failing to reach?

@stux That's really painful to watch. We call her "Dog-killer Barbie" at my house.

@Nat1Advice Classic. I hope you still managed to survive!

@craignicol@glasgow.social @rysiek@mstdn.social yes. But Microsoft stopped caring about home users needs a long time ago. The whole real point of selling to retail consumers is so that users train themselves in Microsoft products, which in turn makes it easier to wrangle enterprise contracts, the real prize.

When there’s time for some doodles on a Sunday, it sure feels like a treat. Meet Hornwort “Curly” Toughshank, my Moosling Magician character in a game of Dolmenwood I played last Thursday.#handdrawn #fantasyart #osr #ttrpg #noai

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@Sentry23 yeah thats always been a huge interest!Fun fact! Back in the days i ran a Cydia repo for iOS with Metasploit etc ported to it called DarkRepoAt some point i was even in toch with the Rapid7 dev team cool times

Sometimes I'll throw a plot that's SO morally grey at my players that when its resolved they flat out refuse to talk to ANY NPCs for like a month And it's almost always an accident on my end too lol. I didn't KNOW this monster was the last of its people when I wrote the plot hook, I swear!

New #dnd / #rpg post from Strange Aeons:The Horrible Birdhttps://strangeaeons.substack.com/p/the-horrible-bird

@stux fingers crossed for you

@jschauma Keep it up! ️ Wish i could be there

Picard management tip: Suppress your inner alarm. Be the calmest person in the room.