https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08R7WR53D

My new fantasy novel is on sale today! It's set in the same world as "Striking the Root" and "Striking Chains", a world where magic is a form of biotech and a race of squirrelfolk interacts with shapeshifting griffin knights.

Next major project is probably "Wavebound 5" along with the game. Beyond that I'm not sure. I'm interested in writing a short novel that's a more traditional approach to the LitRPG genre, possibly using a ~15K word draft I already have. I'm having serious trouble writing humor right now; there's enough going on to have me worried.

Oh, and years ago I created some RPG rules for this setting:
https://www.deviantart.com/kschnee/.....agic-373680227

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CBJGVCT
I'm a little surprised Amazon let me put this one up again for free this quickly. "Wavebound Sanctum" is free through Thursday!

Doesn't seem like a good time to do major projects right now, but I'm trying to persevere.

I've been poking at a fantasy novel that I abandoned a while back, in the same world as "Striking the Root" and "Striking Chains", about a time of religious upheaval. (And griffins, and squirrels.) Over 5K words into a new opening and I have around 37K words of old material to recycle.

The "Ethos" game project had a minor breakthrough recently; see gallery. Seems like there might be a reasonably fun game mechanic if it's built into something bigger. I have a rough plan for a follow-up but am a little intimidated because this one ought to be more complex and polished than the last few. The challenge will involve managing that complexity to have a more complete game that makes me say "yes, this is worth really pushing for".

I should be finishing a humor story set in Hoofland, but slammed into a wall on that one, partly because it's humor. Been provided recently with a large number of Tales ideas, most interesting and several really good; not sure how to approach these. A basic problem with the Tales series is the conflict between in-game adventures and out-of-game futurism, and trying to find an audience for either. I'm not sure of the direction I should go with that, other than that I'm interested in jumping around 10 years forward in that timeline. Got told I shouldn't expect to break into the LitRPG market in a meaningful way, and got to re-open an old spiritual wound today about the furry fandom.

Wrote a little TF story ("The Antique Crown") and enjoyed that enough that something like it might even end up being the replacement setting for the game project. You're an adventurer focused on nonviolent persuasion after all.

Hey, FA admins. Since you're prominently telling every user of your site what your politics are, without asking if we want to hear:

Telling people that anyone who "does not believe or stand with" you politically is someone you should suspect of racism and that maybe you should "report them", is not cool. In fact it's pretty frightening.

Free fantasy book this weekend along with its sequel!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CBJGVCT
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CYDGNWG

A novice goddess tries developing her powers without getting swamped with obligations. Book 3 is out already!

Word of mouth and reviews are much appreciated. Trying also to draw attention to the Thousand Tales series about transformation and games, of which you can find an always-free book here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NCAER2M/

I've been writing a fantasy series in between other projects! It's called "Wavebound".

Ruyo, small-time merchant, has become the replacement Goddess of Water. With a barely-working shrine, an amnesiac guardian spirit, and a dangerous lack of practice, can she make herself useful and earn people's respect and love?

And what does it mean for a mortal to aspire to divine power?

Check out part 1 for 99 cents:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CBJGVCT
And part 2 already:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08CYDGNWG

Reviews and publicity are much appreciated, both for these and for my recent "The Dream of Aveire" and "Virtual Horizon"! I would love to get to the point where people are aware that my work exists.

Writing Stories As a Game

Anyway! I'd like to talk about writing a story in the form of a game. I was looking at several tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) and thinking about how to use them for a solo game, since it's so tough to set up a recurring game with a group. I also wanted the guilty pleasure of playing a superpowered Mary Sue. So I worked out a combination of a game called "Godbound" (which is a knockoff of "Exalted" but with a more generic setting), "Fate Condensed", and a deck of idea/randomness generator cards called "GameMaster's Apprentice" (GMA). I looked through these and decided to build my character using Fate based rules. That was a critical decision because she would've been way more powerful using "Godbound" assumptions, with or without those specific rules. Eg. I started Ruyo off with the power to control water and be unharmed by water. With the other rules, she instead would've been able to crush anything in a 20' cube with deadly ocean pressure while also killing a mook or two as a free action, as a starting character. Well into part 2 of the story, I've given her several power upgrades, but she's still not vastly more powerful than a starting Fate adventurer.

For anybody who'd like to try a similar exercise, I suggest a combination of an "oracle" that generates random idea fragments, and a rule system for specific events. The oracle has two functions: answering yes/no questions, and presenting random images, words or phrases. For instance I'd ask, "Can the crystal be repaired?" and get an answer that I then treated as the truth offered by an imaginary GM. In that case it was "No, But..." It's best to have some gradation of meaning like that, including "Yes/No AND..." to offer occasional extreme answers, and "BUT" to throw in a catch. So my answer in this example led me to interpret that as, "Not right now, but there's an obvious way to do it that will have some drawback." It's also good to have a way to set the difficulty or likelihood of something, to bias it toward a yes or no based on what you think is likely, while still being surprising.

To start things off, come up with a specific problem that could happen to your character, given the setting. You can use the oracle to pick one of several, either by throwing words together or by asking it "Is it (this most obvious threat)?" You can ask a few questions to fill in some details. Then, zoom in by applying the specific rules of your actual game system, and play out the scene. Did you generate the idea of fighting some bandits? Make up plausible stats for them, and run a combat scene. When things get at all dull, throw in some random events from the oracle.

There's also the option of trying to focus on an oracle as a unified game system. GMA can do that sort of thing. The system "Ironsworn" is set up specifically to work well solo, or for a group without a GM, because it answers questions in ways that include story-advancing drawbacks. "Mythic" works as a complete system, though you could also just use its "Mythic Game Master Emulator" and not worry about its more specific rules for things like combat.

For a "main system" if you use a separate oracle, I suggest "Mini Six", any version of "Fate", or another rules-light system that will let you move the story along quickly.

You can be as formal as you want while playing the game. I've tried to write it largely in story form, past tense, and to put rules notation within brackets so that I can find and delete it while turning it into a real story. A format suggested by GMA that I've used is to ask a question and put "Y/N/Y!/N!" to indicate normal or strong answers. And there's no pressure to write it as a story; you can take sloppy notation to describe what happens if you want.

This kind of writing can be a fun exercise! It leads to a scenario with less planning and more surprises than usual. And you have the option after a while, of trying to explain the weirdness you just randomly generated by making up a reason behind the various facts you've found. Try game-guided storytelling for a new kind of writing experience.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08BHLL49H

My new science fiction novel "The Dream of Aveire" is out on Amazon! It's about a high-biotech starship that travels the Void in search of planets to terraform, while its people live in a bottled paradise. When the ship finds a star system with hidden colonies, can a young bio-engineer bring about a happy and peaceful relationship with the colonists' unfamiliar culture? Features transhumanism, transformation, orbital mechanics, and spear fights on a spaceship.

You can read a preview from the rough draft here: https://sfw.furaffinity.net/view/33323452/

The story is inspired by the excellent cover art, which came first: http://sfw.furaffinity.net/view/26825854/

Reviews and word of mouth are much appreciated!

Audiobook edition of "Thousand Tales: Learning To Fly" is now available, narrated by the cheerful Nikki Jay!
https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Fly.....dp/B086PB1NHC/

After surviving an airplane disaster, pilot Andre decides to retire by permanently entering the world of the game Thousand Tales. As an uploaded digital mind, he can do anything, be anything... So he becomes a magical pegasus in a fantasy land. He gets caught up in a silly war that crosses over between the real and virtual realms. How much will he transform his body, his mind and his whole society to turn bored Internet trolls into real allies?

Features transformation, LitRPG/GameLit game mechanics, silliness, and transhumanist adventure. Requires no prior knowledge of the setting.

Inspired partly by the site "Something Awful", which was fond of invading MMORPGs. (Somebody please let the Ponygoons know about this book!)

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B086BBLJL9

"Virtual Horizon" is an upbeat, near-future science fiction novel about two friends separated by a world-changing game. One wakes up in a new body in a virtual fantasy world, and the other runs off to be a mad scientist on a floating ocean colony. Can they work together across the real and virtual worlds?

This is a setting about freedom, transformation, and adventure, with a major role for AI characters.

Cover art by  niada, who's running an art commission sale.

If you've read my early novel "Thousand Tales: How We Won the Game", this one will look familiar. I took it apart into two books. "Thousand Tales: Side Quests" is all the side-stories from that, plus a lot of new ones. "Virtual Horizon" is the core plotline of Paul and Linda, heavily revised and expanded from ~69K words to 134K. So there's a novel with of new material in here besides better writing on the older material.

Reviews and signal-boosts appreciated!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0842BCZC5/
A car autopilot AI starts to write fanfiction. Programmers debate whether to let their greatest creation get Internet access, while trying not to get shot. A genius survives a police chase only to wake up inside a game world as a skunk-girl. A game-player tries to play missionary to a world of AIs.

These stories and more make up "Thousand Tales: Side Quests", a new collection showing the "backstage" plotline of the Thousand Tales setting. It's optimistic, near-future SF about the rise of a world-changing Game and its AI overlord, and the people who join her cause or walk away. You can jump in here, even if you're not already familiar with the setting.

If you want some free stuff in the same world, also check out "Thousand Tales: Extra Lives". And then maybe read both at once to get all of the stories in chronological order. =)

(Contains some material from the original book "How We Won the Game", and >60% new material. I'm in the process of splitting that book into two volumes with a ton of new stuff and revision.)

I'm trying to find good cover art for an upcoming book, which would probably show a griffin adventurer (not anthro) in some background suggesting a virtual game world. It would need to be kind of serious/not toony in style. Time frame: a couple of weeks.

I'm getting a different book cover from this artist, with a kobold adventurer: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/32364365/ .

A reader noticed re: the latest story that "Lord of Hosts" is more commonly used as a Christian epithet (title) than the silly way I used it. That story happened because I was bored and the double meaning randomly occurred to me along with several other ideas. It's interesting to do a little audit of how I've handled religious subjects so far.

I've addressed religious themes more seriously in other stories, usually sympathetically. Several times I've used Mormon characters who're presented as good people: Meg who wants to minister to kitsune, Martin in "Everyone's Island" who's a financial backer of a seastead, Edward in "Liberation Game" who uses his religion to help to build a free society and prevent violence, and Linda from several stories who's a non-believer from a Mormon background and is stubborn but moral.

In terms of fantasy religion, "Striking the Root" has a devout character dealing with a society that rejects and mocks his "Lord" for reasons most don't even understand. "Striking Chains" in the same setting has the hero convert to a Christian-like religion and then overthrow his totalitarian empire with it. An unfinished third "Striking" book shows countries in danger of falling apart or being united in a terrible way by the upheaval of their old beliefs. And Stan of the two "Crafter" books becomes a worshiper of a new AI religion, but largely because his secular upbringing has been extremely vapid and unfulfilling to the point that hearing a good Christian hymn angers and dismays him. ("Why didn't anybody play these for me before?!") Several stories reference a forgotten hymn/anthem of the American Revolution, "Chester". ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqHHGLD_Ndk )

Overall I seem to write with a sort of arm's-length admiration toward religion: ambiguous toward it but seeing it as a more positive alternative to the bleeding hole left in a society that tears it out. Neither the Ludic proto-religion nor the Mithraic one in the "Striking" books is something I'd wholeheartedly agree with, but they're both positive forces in their settings. I'm hesitant about how much to say publicly on this subject, because I no longer feel safe expressing my opinions directly. But it's a theme that I intend to explore more in future stories. I'm also thinking about the marketing implications: how do you say "hey, come back, my work is furry transhumanist SF but it's the kind you might actually like!" to people who might already feel alienated from the whole genre?

I could use game design advice.

For several years I've been trying to build a game where conversation and peaceful interaction are the focus. I have nothing against stabbing my enemies in a game, but it'd be nice to have more options! In particular, I reacted to the Institute plotline in "Fallout 4". In that, there's a tense social situation with obvious roleplaying opportunity, yet basically no way to influence it besides murdering one or more of the factions.

There are just about zero games that even make an effort to rise above this level of NPC interaction. FO4 for instance is a big-budget, huge game, yet the characters act almost exactly like the townsfolk in a 1980s console RPG! On the rare occasions where there's some interaction in a game, it's with something like "Mass Effect" that is completely scripted in a small conversation tree. Or a bizarre abstract minigame like the one in "Oblivion". Or an Infocom-style parser that recognizes typed keywords to spit out scripted dialog lines. (One exception, "Bot Colony", tried more detailed language parsing and apparently worked poorly.) So I think there's a big opportunity here for an indie game that does one cool thing with NPC social interaction and doesn't worry about other things much. If we can find a cool idea, it can be copied later; I'd love to see smarter NPCs in the next Bethesda game for instance.

I definitely don't want a game relying on pre-written clever dialog, because that's not at all innovative. Maybe I can be partially innovative by doing some good writing atop another system, but there has to be that system or it's just another pile of lazy design from the 1980s.

So far I've built roughly 9 demos of the same general concept but with very different emphases:
-Talking to people to get points in various skills
-Talking to get specific "facts" linked to skills, then share them to earn favor
-Collecting specific "evidence" that can be used to attack or defend an idea, and can be used to counter enemy arguments at the right time for extra effect
-Collecting "memories" by non-conversation tasks, that you then use to defend yourself against verbal attacks that sap your confidence
-Finding somebody who offers a resource, then telling them "hey, can you do a favor for this other guy?"
-Maintaining "harmony" for a group by keeping the people happy and friends with each other

So far, zero of these are clearly fun! I'm aiming to "fail quickly" until I hit on a small, simple idea with a glimmer of fun worth expanding on.

Here are some game scenarios that I imagine, again with a different tone and focus in each:
-Cursed Centaur: You're at a magic school and are, for some reason, unhappy about being cursed to be a centaur. You talk with the teachers to learn enough magic to un-curse yourself.
-Otter Island: a friendly village of otter people to talk with. There's little tension, but you need to help keep the group's morale up and make friends who'll support your attempts to explore the island.
-Zombies: Survivalists need to keep their group sane and cooperative despite extreme external threat.
-Institute: You travel between a shadowy science lab full of jerks, and a dangerous wasteland, to get resources that will help you persuade the jerks to change their group's policies about slavery and kidnapping. Handing wasteland junk to them will make them like you more but it won't actually change their minds.
-Wasteland Trader: Can you talk with violent wasteland gangs and work out a trade they'll honor, then keep doing that at a profit?
-The Dark Cult: You've infiltrated an evil group and need to wreck it socially by turning people against each other.
-Faerie Court: You're a diplomat in a beautiful, frightening hall of soul-eating faeries. Can you map out who's allied to who, and get enough support to earn magical tools and an alliance before they use their emotion-warping illusions to drive you insane?

Note that there're a few axes/scales here: (1) how hostile is the social group? (2) how stable is it without your help? (3) how much of an external threat is there?

Some gameplay aspects that I think are useful include:
-Meaningful choices. I should have several options with varying rewards where none is objectively the best.
-Player skill. You're not just making numbers go up; you the player are making better decisions as you play.
-A way to lose. If there are no stakes like the group falling apart or a big external threat, where's the tension? An arbitrary timer? Your mood falling too low? Ostracism?
-NPCs judge you based on multiple factors. Your robot butler tracks your morality separately from your handyman skills, so cannibalism doesn't get overlooked just because you're good at fixing guns.
-Internal state on NPCs. We can't yet do true AI, but again, "the bar is on the floor".
-NPCs interacting with each other, spreading an idea or shifting alliances.
-Constant judgment of the PC's clothes, hygene, dialect, and interests.
-More than one thing to do with each NPC. A conversation doesn't consist of you walking up to them and quizzing them about skills until they get bored; there is social banter and favor-trading and argument.

So, I think there's a big opportunity here but I don't yet see a fun way to exploit it from my exploration so far. Still brainstorming.

I have a rough draft of a science fiction novel that I'm not happy with. I could use impressions/suggestions on the text I have now, which is around 70K words long.

https://lexington-games.itch.io/dra.....econd-demo-out -- New demo is out of my amateur VN. Password "golem".

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07SKTHX6B

New story collection, featuring not just edited versions of the existing stories but three long new ones!

https://discord.gg/ssxvtEY
I started a Discord server to talk about writing (not just mine), story critiques, games, and possibly some tabletop-style roleplaying!

Looking to commission a simple piece of cover art for a book of transfomation-themed stories. Probably a half-body picture of someone partly transformed, simple background. Any interest?

I've been having fun playing with a little AI text generator, https://talktotransformer.com/ , plugging in story fragments to see how it continues them. It seems to limit itself to about 400 words total, so you can only give it a paragraph or two. This is a freewheeling, silly word association thing as far as I can tell, that doesn't have any idea of plot but can pick up on genre-related words so that giving it "magic" might make it say "wizard" on its own. I've gotten to meet AI researcher Douglas Hofstadter, who's warned extensively about overhyped AIs that don't really have any understanding of what the English words they're using mean.

What would it take to make a worthwhile AI story generator? I see three main approaches to that. One is to focus on a specific canned story structure. I've heard of it being done using fairytales, which tend to be formulaic to the point that somebody made a sort of flowchart for Russian ones. There'd be some notion that there's a character with a specific name, and tracking of some notion of status as the story gets built, eg. Ivan has completed two of the three challenges he's been set. My own little experiment "Captain Zudd" ( http://kschnee.xepher.net/cgi-bin/captain_zudd.py ; hit F5 rather than the reload link for a new story) does something like this by tracking whether Zudd is at sea, or on an island, &c, then picks an event that matches that location and might send him to another.

Method 2 is a program that has some notion of picking a few character traits and tracking characters that do things. It could be as simple as making up the fact that the hero is named Andre, and is a pilot, and turns into a pegasus. A collection of words that has some associations between them could do things like saying that a PILOT has a PLANE which is an object, and that OBJECTs can become BROKEN and this is a bad thing that a character wants to undo. (A similar bit of code could spit out, "Bill was a knight. His sword was broken. He wanted to get his sword fixed," or "Alice was a doctor. Her patient was poisoned...") I have imagined a simpler system about a martial-arts world where a hero goes through formulaic scenes of training, fighting and travel, with tracking of his status. Basically "Progress Quest" but cooler. If we add to that idea, some notion of what words mean, then the system could do something like having the hero find a BROKEN AMULET and then mention it when randomly finding an ARTIFICER.

Method 3 begins to get into actual AI. Have a simple game character that moves around collecting food and water and avoiding lava. Begin to give it the ability to understand multi-step plans, such as "to OPEN DOOR, pick up a KEY..." And then, begin to train it the same way on a more abstract plan like "to WRITE STORY, make up a PROBLEM..." An AI like this would only know of "low food", "low water" and "damage" as problems, but that is completely fine. If the system could generate "Bill was hungry and he wanted to get food, but there was lava in the way", that would legitimately be part of a story -- and it would come from a level of understanding and experience that no other AI system has to my knowledge ever done. This method is really where I hope we can go, someday. I could see some version of 2 and maybe 1 becoming more than just something to laugh about on a Friday night, though. In each case I recommend not caring about pretty English; bare-bones sentence structure with a coherent plot is much more interesting than schizophrenic rambling.

To build something like 2, I would track character names and status. Work in terms of scenes where the hero tries to get a listed Good Thing or undo a Bad Thing. There's no deep understanding of the words, but something that says you can fix POISON with an ANTIDOTE which you can get by using the ALCHEMY skill if you have HERBS, or giving HERBS to an ALCHEMIST. (The AI may or may not have any idea that an ALCHEMIST has the ALCHEMY skill.) Part of what's interesting here is that although there's no connection between the words and tha AI having a "real experience" to draw on, the words still have some connections to each other that aren't in the story itself. You could potentially ask the AI something like "What else could Hero have done to fix the poison?" and have it correctly list all the options it knows, or ask "What if the dragon had burned Hero?" and have it continue the story from that what-if.

I bought three books during a recent sale. Two were LitRPG things that I got for research purposes.

"Dragon's Price": The Better Bits Of Final Fantasy

"Dragon's Price: Rise of the Horned Serpent" (by Daniel Potter of "Freelance Familiars") is fantasy, billed as inspired by "Final Fantasy". It has no game elements; it's just high fantasy with airships and dragons and crystals. Specifically, about a sky-pirate crew trying to survive a dragon attack and then escape from the monster's lair; surprisingly that's the entire story in book 1. I did enjoy it though, because it does what the FF games did in their better moments: show us cool stuff with people firing elemental crystal blasts and having airship fights and visiting weird places. In hindsight, FF's actual plots are pretty awful: evil dude wants to conquer the world with crystals but secretly a second evil dude wants to destroy reality, and you have to go kill him by hitting him with swords. Thankfully, "Dragon's Price" does not do that. Instead there's a little dragon-servant society that makes up much of the book's plot, and that was interesting to see. The draconic villain is not just a cardboard monster, has an agenda, and is developing an unusual hidden empire that I'd like to see more of.

Will I buy the second one? Maybe. I'm a little squeamish due to two remarks at the end that seem to say, "The second book is going to be about a bad guy doing creepy mental torture", but maybe I'm misreading it. (I had put down MCA Hogarth's "Even the Wingless" for similar reasons despite liking the writing style and setting.) I can definitely recommend this volume though.

"Party Hard": Game Fiction With Some Interesting Twists

"Party Hard (Pixel Dust Book 1)" by David Petrie is super edgy, according to a little game I've been playing with the LitRPG genre. I ask, "How far do I have to read down the list of standard playable races, on the Pathfinder RPG rules site, to find your main characters?" In this case there's a party of six: four humans, but the hero's best friend is playing the unpopular Fairy race, and one of the others is a Reynard who is human with animal ears plus tail. Also, one of the six (the Fairy) is playing an opposite-sex character and this is more than an occasional joke. I appreciate this effort to do something a little original with the character builds. That includes the classes: we have a Fury (gunslinger), a Coin (grappling-hook rogue), Venom (quick-damage mage as opposed to Cauldron), and the most generic is a Shield (energy-barrier specialist). I also award points for the unusual gimmick that the game is played while sleeping, making it affect people's real-world lifestyles in an unusual way.

The plot is mostly standard: Bad guy threatens a beloved game, and good guys have to complete an in-game quest that somehow stops this. In this case, a businessman hired a genius who invented this amazing technology, then fired him once the business was making money rather than letting him continue to innovate. But the twist here is that the businessman is the good guy; the genius has been doing unethical crazy experiments and it really wasn't necessary to interfere with the already-popular game to continue trying his mad science schemes. So, again, there are some unusual ideas here that help keep the story from being stale for me.

I enjoyed the character interaction. Read me a series of descriptions of how the hero is using his super cool magic spell to do lots of damage, and I'll get bored. Tell me instead about how Hero A is making a point of shielding Hero B while feeling guilty about Hero C, and what each of them sacrificed to get certain unique items or help the others past a trap, and how they react on meeting each other for real, and I'm much more likely to care what's going on. "Party Hard" succeeds at that.

What did I dislike? The plot isn't really resolved. There's what TVTropes called a Council of Vagueness, where villains mutter to each other with phrases like "All according to plan... We have an agent in place... Activate our secondary doomsday scheme." We never do find out quite what the villain was trying to accomplish, and that strikes me as less of a sequel hook than a refusal to wrap up a plotline and show its consequences. I also dislike the "oh no, somehow that person can't log out anymore!" trope because of the handwavy soft science it requires, and that element does rear its ugly head eventually. All in all though, I enjoyed this book.

"World-Tree Online": Nothing To Draw My Interest

I started reading "World-Tree Online" by E.A. Hooper. The hero is an old gamer who wants to escape from mourning his dead wife by logging into the amazing new video game, which dilates time to give people the experience of one month per real hour. You can play for weeks during a lunch break. As in "Party Hard" the notion of distorting people's perception of time is unusual and interesting, because it could greatly affect the real world. How does this story fare on having unusual and interesting races/classes/powers? Well, the hero starts playing, takes one look at his proposed character (just like him but younger and better looking) and hits Accept. Then he must play this super-innovative game by picking one rigidly defined class from a list almost directly copied from D&D: "Warden ('a tank class'), Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Ranger, Rogue". As an experienced gamer, the hero thinks this is pretty cool. I'm not sure why. Yes, full-immersion VR would be neat to experience, but otherwise the gameplay in the first 10% of the story is entirely standard. Kill monsters, take stuff, raise stats.

The POV then shifts to a Sheriff, a rare class of moderators who have surprisingly limited powers. If you're tasking someone with stopping attempted rapists within your game, and giving them unique enforcement powers, why would you limit those to rules like "you have to aim successfully and there's a one-minute cooldown"? The justification seems to be that the game-makers didn't want to appoint mods at all, were forced to, and made them as puny as possible.

Then, everybody gets notice of a software update that'll take 30 real hours, during which time logout is disabled and time dilation is cranked up to ludicrous levels and pain sensation is at 100% and all but one mod is nerfed. Why this combo of awfulness? There's a super AI running the game and it's just gone nuts or been maliciously reprogrammed, naturally the creators of a super AI have no control over it, and there's an implication that it's trying to establish better neural connections or something. In reviewing "Party Hard" I commented that I want to read about the "why" of combat more than the "what". Here, when I got to a scene of the hero watching an arena battle, I started skimming because I didn't care what was happening.

So, we have a blank-slate main character, with generic class/powers, in a standard plotline about people trapped in the game for unclear reasons, where the game itself is generic. If any of these elements were unique I might be interested, but as it is I have no reason to care. I know that this hero is grieving, he's elderly and he's a gamer, but that's all I know about him. What I know about the game's selling points is... the setting has worlds arranged along a tree structure, and combat is supposedly based on realistic physics rather than comparing numbers, but we're explicitly shown how a Power Level 250 attack can't beat a Power Level 300 shield.

I started skimming around 9% in and put this one down around 11%, so that's my number rating.

I think too much of fantasy is endlessly rehashing Tolkien, generations later. I've got nothing against his work; he made up all kinds of memorable cultures based on old folklore. But instead of doing the same thing, fantasy stories now tend to copy-paste his work. So we get elves or dwarves or orcs who are "like Tolkien's except X". Even when somebody tries to be original with those races -- I'm thinking of "Warcraft"'s take on orcs -- they're still like Tolkien's orcs but X. I've started playing a game of asking, "how far down the list of player races on Pathfinder's SRD rules Web site do I have to look, to find all of this story's main characters?"

Nor is it simply a problem of species/race; it's also about culture. We're so comfortable with dwarves as male bearded Scandinavian grumpy miners that even their preferred weapons are well defined. The rehashed stereotypes limit the creativity of the stories including them. Would Tolkien have wanted everybody to keep recycling his ideas instead of inventing their own?

I would like griffins and centaurs, yeah -- or races of selkies or harpies or nagas or kitsune or the options I'm not even aware of from less obvious cultures! If we're using existing species, let's develop some of them into more interesting and detailed cultures so that in a generation, everybody knows tropes about harpy-people just as they know what your ISO Standard Elf is like.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07QMHQBBL/

A slice-of-life story about growing up, making friends... and being repeatedly killed by monkeys because you're living as a digital ghost inside a game world.

Greatly expanded from its original version.

I'm working on a "visual novel" project, a type of interactive story. You can find a first-pass Twine version that's pure text at http://kschnee.xepher.net/code/twin.....gon_golem.html . But the "real" tech demo is https://lexington-games.itch.io/dragon-golem , password "golem". This is a simpler project than the "Crafter's Heart" one that I mentioned in an earlier journal. That's a deliberate choice: it needs to be something I can be confident that I can put together, given funding for real art/music to replace the placeholders.

I expect to post an expanded demo soon.

On a different note: Any ideas on a slightly different direction for Thousand Tales, namely: same setting, ideally the POV of Sunset, but focusing on a scenario that has safe, conventional, D&D-like rules and classes and races? Maybe some sort of storyline in which the coyote is playing not Thousand Tales, but rival game CoolSwordia Online for some reason as part of another mission?

While working on the space SF story "The Dream Of Aveire", the original commissioner pointed out that I'd done the same foolish thing I'd made fun of in other people's work: assume that in the future, everybody is obsessed with pop culture from the writer's own era. So I had a whole story arc where the heroine visits a fantasy land, and what characters does she meet? A knight on a dragon, and a kitsune mage.

Which raises the question: what interesting story concepts might become cliches in future fiction, in the same sense that people write about "cowboys" and "hackers" and "princesses", with about as much period accuracy at this? http://xkcd.com/771/

Some ideas:

-The Spanners: Patriots, technologists, drone operators, soldiers and protesters of the 21st century who upset the growing power of surveillance, globalization, and a variety of corporate cartels. These chaotic figures included everything from actual terrorists to gleeful hackers who menaced major banks and governments with a variety of illegal or just plain annoying tricks. The stories of the Spanners play up the heroic angle instead of the outlaw thugs, and tend to assume there was a lot more solidarity of goals than there really was. The typical Spanner character is a shaggy figure in a trenchcoat with a drone robot, a mask, yellow stripes, and a wrench insignia somewhere combined with two or three contradictory logo patches. (Think, "early 21st century protesters as written by someone who thinks the dudes with the hammer-and-sickle, the yellow vests, and the yellow rattlesnake flags were the same people, and were awesome hackers".) Stories about them include heist stories, rebellions, and plots to blow up the Internet.
-The Griffins: Early uploaders and AIs who operated frequently in the real world using robot bodies and teaming up with humans. They liked griffins for some reason. They're seen in fiction hunting the worst Spanners, rescuing abuse victims, preaching on behalf of the first AIs, treating plague victims, and protecting uploading centers. Their stories are often about the conflict between virtual paradise and real-world dangers; the current story's people play up the idea that they were heroic back then and then somehow retreated into their own little worlds. The stories make it look like they were almost all griffins in shape, and that their robot bodies were significantly more awesome than in reality.
-The Extra Men: Men from China who were unwanted at home, and went to Africa to serve their Party by taking gradual control of a whole continent. They're compared to cowboys, Cossacks, Boers, and the Chinese story "Outlaws Of the Marsh" (Suikoden) as romantic people who turned their back on their old home, the center of civilization, to get involved in a new adventure abroad. A typical Extra Man has a mix of anachronistic Chinese clothes and African fashion and is a gunslinger, a farmer, and a small businessman all in one, looking to get married and build a new society. Their stories are about the mix of national pride and the pull of a foreign land, and the conflict between individual honesty and the resentment the Men got for being colonizers. These stories usually ignore the fact that there were Extra Men coming from India, too.
-The Ceres Pirates: Oh, those wicked rock-hoppers who colonized and fought for control of the great icy asteroid! They nearly killed each other off completely before there was any semblence of peace, and even then there was all sorts of exciting spying and sabotage. Four countries and as many corporate or AI alliances were involved. Cybernetics, AI, and hardy biotech life were all used to gain dominance there, leaading to several disasters with self-replicating machines, mass drivers, fusion reactors, tailored plagues and hijacked ships. Any Ceres Pirate worth the name was a cyborg with at least one robotic limb and some sign of gengineering and scarring, always armed and watching his back. (In reality those disasters each happened at least once, but not regularly once per weekly episode.)

Tonight I played three rounds of "Dice Throne", a game of fantasy heroes dueling. Someone in the room called it "Battle Yahtzee". It's a fairly simple game that we were able to play quickly, partly by the simple method of reducing each side's starting health. https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame.....one-season-one

The basic idea is, you roll 5 dice and can reroll any of those dice twice to get one of 6 or so combos, which do damage and other effects. Eg., rolling a "small straight" (4 dice form a number sequence) does something, while 3 of symbol A and 1 of symbol B does some other move. You also have a "Battle Points" resource that can be spent to play various cards. That's a bare-bones description, but there's an elaborate theme to it for each character, and they all play somewhat differently.

In my first game I was the Moon Elf, an archer whose powers give her tokens labeled "Evasive" that boost her defense, and inflict "Entangle", "Blind" and "Targeted" on the foe. I also played as the Huntress who has a tiger sidekick, and the Artificer who is obviously Junkrat in his mad science outfit from "Overwatch". They each play differently, with their own tokens for special effects. My opponents were the simple Barbarian, the military Tactician, and the Vampire Lord. The theming and the varying mechanics and complexity reminds me of "Sentinels of the Multiverse", which is a good thing.

There's a balance between trying to do direct damage, and setting up status effects. Also, there's a constant struggle with the Battle Points to activate one-shot powers like "get an extra reroll" or "undo a status effect", versus buying upgraded versions of your basic moves. Since we were playing with 30 HP to start instead of the regulation 50, our games downplayed move upgrades somewhat, but we still used them. The main tactics are about the press-your-luck dice rolling: "I have almost the right symbols to do Move X. Should I reroll these two dice or keep these?"

My only real complaint is that the scope of the game is a straight-up fight. There's no other goal, so don't expect any questing or movement. That's not necessarily bad; it just means it's a focused experience and not what you want if you're up for a long, complex quest. On the plus side, I got in three rounds in one night.

I enjoyed this and would like to play again. I'd want to try a 4 or 6 player game, with teams or a free-for-all. If I bought this I'm not sure which I'd go for: the $23 sets that have two characters each, enough to get into the game without the main set, or the $46 main set with six characters. It's nice that I have the option.