Trundling through life

So, there’s a little game called Dredge, that’s coming out in just a few days. It’s kind of like if H.P. Lovecraft wrote Animal Crossing: You find yourself on an island, and your boat is wrecked. The townsfolk there are willing to loan you another vessel, on the condition that you pay for it by fishing…totally normal fishing, and not trawling the seas for unnamable horrors that might drive you mad before your debt is squared away. It sounds like fun. And to try and get in the best mindset for it, I’ve spent the past week or so reading classics like “The Shadow Over Innsmouth,” watching movies like The Lighthouse, and digging through my Steam library for nautical-themed horror games. Which brings us to today’s word.

lollop, verb – to move in an unsteady, clumsy fashion

Learned from: Hunter’s Journals: Pale Harbour (PC)

Developed by Grindwheel Games

Published by Grindwheel Games (2019)

The Hunter’s Journals series apparently comprises five games, casting you as a monster hunter in a variety of different settings–a monster hunter who, despite the game’s assurances of your skill and renown, seems quite likely to die at the slightest misstep or lapse in judgment. At least, if Pale Harbour is any indication. This one tasks you with discovering the source of the abominations from the sea that have driven the inhabitants of a small fishing village from their homes. One such encounter with one of these beasts has it lolloping out of a house in pursuit of you, after you’ve wounded it.

I know this is the exact thing that it does, because this game (and series, I’d imagine), is more or less a digital Choose Your Own Adventure-style book, with some light RPG mechanics thrown in to give it some replayability. Aside from Stamina, your character really only has one stat: Skill. On most difficulties, these are determined randomly at the start of the game. Stamina is health, and Skill is your base competency at most things, which you roll two six-sided dice and add them to this value for your result. Both of these attributes will diminish as you play, but neither of them will save you from the instant-death dead ends you’ll find yourself at before you die in combat, most of the time. The story’s interesting enough, and it’s all narrated…though the voice actor’s delivery sometimes leaves a little to be desired.

The sudden deaths may be off-putting to some, but if you grew up with these kinds of books, there’s a lot to like here.

The art is also a bit…YA graphic novel-y, but there are worse ways to spend six bucks.

Small town businesses are weird

My wife and I are members at the local food co-op, largely because you never quite know what you’re going to find there. From locally-grown produce, to fair trade baskets from Africa, to Buddha’s Hand citrus fruits from…I don’t remember where. Anyway, walking through there is always an experience. Every so often though, you don’t even have to head there to get a little taste of the unexpected. Case in point, they’re having a “Cheese Madness” event right now, with samples and brackets where their top cheeses face off against one another, until only one is left, voted in as the ultimate cheese. I’m not sure why they chose cheese for their March Madness parody, but it does bring us to today’s word.

rennet, noun – an enzyme used in the making of cheese

Learned from: Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (Playstation 4, mobile, PC, XBox One)

Developed by ArtPlay

Published by 505 Games, Netease (2019)

Bloodstained is Castlevania in everything but name–even to the point where it was produced by Koji Igurashi, one of the heavy-hitters behind the later Castlevania games. It’s got the atmosphere, the complex maps, the varied combat, but it also includes some subsystems that were absent from most if its inspiration: namely, crafting.

Gather up the right materials, and you can create things you’d expect, like new weapons and armor, but you can also cook food to use for healing and permanent stat boosts. If you’re particularly masochistic, you can try to recreate an increasingly complicated and vague series of recipes for an old lady who can barely remember her own name, let alone the food she used to enjoy. So she’ll say she wants to taste the “portable snack” she used to love, or something “fluffy,” or something as obtuse as a “novel idea.” She rewards you if you get it right, but some of the recipes in Bloodstained are a pain to put together. Some are simple, like using wheat to make dough, to make noodles. But say you want to make a pizza…well, you need that wheat to make the dough, but you also need tomatoes, whatever the toppings are, and milk and rennet to make cheese. But you can’t just have all the base ingredients in your possession; no, that would be too easy. Unless they’ve patched it out, you needed to make every intermediate component by hand, before you could get to the final product. The rewards were usually worth it, but getting there was an uphill battle sometimes.

It’ll soothe what ails you

I recently received Fire Emblem: Engage for my birthday. I’d played through a bit of Three Houses, the previous entry, and while it was interesting, something about the whole military academy setting never really gelled with me. While I applaud Three Houses for at least experimenting with something different, I found myself missing the classic Fire Emblem experience: a more focused story, stakes that are laid out early on, more emphasis on the combat. I know it’s a controversial choice for some, but I was happy that Engage went back to that tried & true formula. Which brings us to today’s word.

vulnerary, noun – a medicine used in the healing of injuries

Learned from: Fire Emblem (Game Boy Advance)

Developed by Intelligent Systems

Published by Nintendo (2003)

Like most people in the West, my first exposure to Fire Emblem as a franchise came through the Super Smash Bros. games: specifically SSB: Melee on the Gamecube. Back in the early 2000s, everyone knew Mario, Donkey Kong, and Princess Zelda…but who the hell were Marth and Roy? Despite having never heard of them, or the series they were from, Roy ended up being my main in that game. And after awhile, I decided I should maybe learn a bit more about this “Fire Emblem” thing.

The only problem was, I didn’t own a Game Boy Advance, and as a poor college student, I couldn’t justify buying an entirely new system, just to try one game (a decision I still regret to this day, considering how good that handheld’s catalogue of games is). So I turned to…other means, to dip my toes into the Fire Emblem waters–specifically, a fan translation of the original Japanese ROM of the first game.

It’s because of this, that I initially wasn’t even sure that “vulnerary” was a real word. It was clear what these healing items did, but I kind of expected their name to be a mistranslation of something, given the source of the game I was playing. I looked it up soon after, and found that yes, it is a real word, but it wasn’t until some time later that I discovered that it was, in fact, the official translation Nintendo decided to use in their official releases of these games, even to this day. And while the earlier games are hard to find (some still haven’t received official English translations), they’re all well worth tracking down if you can. Even if you start later in the series, most of the games aren’t connected, so you can still jump in at any point and have a fun, engaging (see what I did there?) strategy RPG experience.

Except for Fire Emblem: Fates. The games in that branch of the series actually are connected–and the third part is nigh-impossible to find, now that the 3DS eShop is closing down. Unless you decide to get into the series the way I did, I guess (though, for legal reasons, I have to state for the record that I do not condone that).

Though, finding this, right here, complete in the box will set you back a couple hundred bucks. Just saying.

Die a hero, or live long enough to become a villain

If you’re like me, you’ve probably enjoyed watching the stratospheric rise in popularity that Dungeons & Dragons has enjoyed over the past ten years or so. Regardless of your thoughts on the quality of some of the products *cough*Spelljammer*cough* the fact that so many new people were coming into the hobby was objectively a good thing. It made for a healthy community, full of endless creativity and sources for new ideas and settings…and that’s all poised to change.

If you don’t run in those circles, you might not know that, over the past week or so, social media on the topic has been exploding about Hasbro/Wizards of the Coast, and their decision to rewrite the license that let third-party sources develop content based on D&D‘s mechanics/settings. Without dwelling on the details, the new license seems to render any previous versions invalid, replacing them with one that is far more restrictive, far more costly, and includes a clause that basically says…well, I think this is pretty cut-and-dry: “You own the new and original content You create. You agree to give Us a nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable,
worldwide, sub-licensable, royalty-free license to use that content for any purpose.” Emphasis, mine. You can read the full text of the Open Gaming License, version 1.1 for yourself here: http://ogl.battlezoo.com/ The text I quoted is in section X, subsection B.

This sort of thing hurts. I’ve been playing D&D in some form or another for nearly as long as I can remember–be it the tabletop game, video game adaptations, choose-your-own-adventure books, or what have you. And thinking back to the days when the franchise wasn’t operated by a greedy, faceless, multi-billion-dollar company brought to mind today’s word.

hauberk, noun – a chainmail tunic

Learned from: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Treasure of Tarmin (Intellivision)

Developed by APh Technological Consulting

Published by Mattel Electronics (1983)

Aside from maybe ogling the art of the Creature Compendium at a bookstore as a child, Treasure of Tarmin was my first introduction to D&D. It was also my first introduction to the idea of gaming in a 3D world. The game took place in a dungeon of varying size (depending on the difficulty you selected), that you ventured into, searching for a treasure guarded by a minotaur. Each level was laid out on a grid that you traversed in first-person view, one square at a time, fighting monsters, finding weapons, discovering hidden doors, and searching for the ladder that led further downward. Hopelessly simplistic by today’s standards, it blew my young mind. With a hunger mechanic, inventory system, ammunition (arrows) you had to keep track of, and more, it was pretty complex for its time. There were tons of items to find, most color-coded by their strength, including various types of armor: shields, helmets, gauntlets, and hauberks.

I remember the hauberks not looking like much, in the crude, pixelated representation the game was capable of–I think they looked more like scarves than anything. But I have to hand it to the artist for taking a crack at accurately showing what a bunch of loose chainmail would look like, laying on the ground, instead of just drawing it as a shirt. A lot of thought and effort went into this game, from the wide variety of monsters, to the inclusion of traps, to the fact that you could keep going past the minotaur into deeper and deeper randomly-generated levels, as deep as you wanted to go.

It was a wonderful game, complex but accessible, and always with a new adventure to be had. I mean that about D&D as a whole. Seeing what the game is about to become is nothing short of tragic, because some of the best content is often created by third-party studios. And I can’t imagine anyone would really want to keep making content, when it can be taken from them at any time. This will hurt the hobby, but there is hope.

Dungeons & Dragons isn’t the only game in town. There’s a multitude of other systems out there, offering different takes on traditional fantasy, but also sci-fi, horror, spy fiction, and everything in-between. Sure, it won’t feel quite the same, but with some searching, you might find a system and setting that fits you even better. D&D has always been a game about exploration; I think now is the time to take that theme to heart, and go discover what else is out there.

Farewell, old friend. It’s been good while it lasted.

A word of caution

On this random Sunday, I’d just like to dispense a bit of advice: you never can really know when something you do or say could have unintended consequences. This might sound like I’m advocating living in a constant state of anxiety, but that’s not exactly the case. That sort of thing tends to be my general state of being, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Just, be mindful, because you don’t always know what other people may be going through. Which brings us to today’s word.

chary, adj. – exceptionally wary or cautious

Learned from: The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (Released on virtually everything that can display graphics, since the PS3 era. I’m not listing it all.)

Developed by Bethesda Game Studios

Published by Bethesda Softworks (originally 2011, with many, many re-releases afterward)

These games are full of books. Books about history, and poetry, and cooking, and travel guides–there’s a lot here for anyone with the patience and interest to seek it out and read through it all. That said, I don’t think I would’ve had the foggiest idea of which book the word “chary” showed up in, if I hadn’t scribbled an extra memo next to it in my notebook. If I was accurate, this word shows up somewhere in volume 2 of The Real Barenziah, in reference to how some townsfolk feel with regards to the titular character.

Now, if you offered me a million dollars to tell you just who Barenziah was, or why your average citizen might be overly wary of him, I would not leave the conversation a rich man. Heck, I can’t even say for certainty that Barenziah as a “him” at all, it’s been so long since I read this particular story-within-a-story. And that’s something I seem to remember from Skyrim as a whole: a lot of the ancillary, background material seemed significantly more detailed and fleshed out than the events taking place during your adventure.

In fairness though, I never finished it. After about 20 hours of primarily fighting the same reskinned “guy with melee weapon,” “guy with ranged weapon,” and “guy with magic” over and over again, I lost interest. If I find a subterranean nest of bug people, fighting them shouldn’t feel essentially the same as fighting a group of bandits. But it did. I guess I just wanted more of a chary feeling, venturing into the unknown, instead of the boredom that settled in.

I couldn’t find a screenshot of that exact page, so enjoy the hexadecimal codes for a bunch of crafting materials, instead.

‘Tis the season of giving…

…and of getting back to things. Hello, world, I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long. It’s like skipping time at the gym: You let one day slip by, and before you know it, months have gone by, and you’re 20 pounds heavier. But it’s the middle of the Holiday season right now, and I wanted to do a little something for both myself, and anyone who might happen upon this. Plus, holidays just so happen to be relevant to today’s word.

alms, noun – charitable donations to the poor; specifically: donations of leftover trenchers from the previous evening’s feast

Learned from: The Faery Tale Adventure (Sega Genesis, Amiga, Commodore 64, PC)

Developed by MicroIllusions

Published by MicroIllusions (1987 – Amiga, 1988 – Commodore 64, 1989 – MS-DOS) Electronic Arts (1991 – Genesis)

I don’t remember a whole lot of The Faery Tale Adventure. The terrible spelling on the cover caught my attention at my local video store when I was little, and set my expectations low, even to my young mind. But, it was an RPG, and I hadn’t played it before, so I gave it a shot…and was summarily rather lost, because someone had lost the instruction manual, and this was back in the days when those were actually important.

Most of what I recall from the gameplay is aimlessly wandering around a massive world (for the time), as one of the three playable characters, who might have been brothers or something. Well, that, and the beggar who tried to kill me.

I was traveling along some random stretch of road, and there was a guy standing off to the side, who asked me if I had any alms for the poor. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, but I think I said yes, because I was supposed to be the hero in this story, and this man was clearly a beggar…except when I answered, several other guys jumped out of nearby bushes, and they all started attacking me.

During the fight, I remember wondering what I did wrong. Did I actually not have any of whatever “alms” were, and was this guy pissed off that I lied to him? Were “alms” some sort of bad thing? Was this a secret code for a quest I hadn’t discovered yet, and I answered incorrectly?

Later, I looked up the word, and put the pieces together: I’d done the right, charitable thing, but this guy was just a bandit pretending to be a beggar, and I fell into his trap. It’s a moment that stuck with me all these years, and it’s the only solid memory I have of The Faery Tale Adventure.

What brought it to mind, all this time later, is a book I recently read: Medieval Holidays and Festivals, by Madeleine Pelner Cosman. I was trying to get inspiration for celebrations to work into a Pathfinder game I’m running, when I came across mention of what exactly alms are. Durable plates were expensive back then, so many feasts were served on plates or in bowls made of bread, called trenchers. At the end of the meal, the flavor-soaked remnants of the trenchers could be eaten, or donated the next day to the needy. These days, alms refer to any charitable gift to the needy, but during Medieval times, it had a more specific connotation.

And hey, I may have even given you a bonus word this time around, if you didn’t know what a trencher was. Happy holidays, everyone!

With a cover this generic, is it any surprise I don’t remember much from this game?

Blast from the past

Growing up in the ’80s, I was too young to fully comprehend the horrors of impending nuclear annihilation. Granted, those were the last years of the Cold War, and it ended when I was eight years old, but still, my main takeaway at the time was that the Soviet Union was bad…except, someone from there made Tetris, so they couldn’t be all bad. And once the USSR dissolved, I kinda just went on with life, dimly aware that something potentially terrible had been averted.

Fast forward 30 years, and we’ve got the Russians invading Ukraine, and Vladimir Putin implicitly threatening to make this go nuclear. There’s no ambiguity about this in my mind, anymore. Which brings us to today’s word.

megalomania, noun – an obsession with obtaining power, wealth, or importance

Learned from: Tyrants: Fight Through Time (Sega Genesis, Amiga, Atari ST, Super Nintendo, PC)

Developed by Sensible Software

Published by Virgin Interactive Entertainment (Image Works for the original version, 1991)

I didn’t exactly learn this word from playing Tyrants, but rather from an ad in an old gaming magazine. Similar to Odium being called Gorky 17 in other regions of the world, Tyrants was known overseas as Mega-lo-mania. Both titles fit for a variety of reasons.

Tyrants/Mega-lo-mania was an early real-time strategy game, where you play as one of four gods, differentiated only by their portrait and color palette, with the task of defeating the other three on a variety of islands. You do this by influencing your followers to develop increasingly sophisticated weapons and defenses through a variety of technological eras, from stone axes up to ballistic missiles. While simple by conventional standards, the game featured a surprisingly large tech tree that could even lead you to developmental dead ends, depending on what you decided to research. It also featured some pretty braindead AI, to the point where if you were really backed into a corner, you could just keep spamming the “form alliance” button at the god attacking you, until the RNG would eventually make him give in. If only we could do that in real conflicts…

Don’t let the door hit you

So, we’re down yet another teller at work. Granted, this particular guy was no huge loss; he had a tendency to wander away from his window if there was nothing going on, his attempts to call people over to his window when he was there were half-hearted at best, and he barely seemed to know how to do the job when he had to do it, anyway. Still, we can’t seem to keep a decent staff, because people keep getting fired or leaving. Which brings us to today’s word.

egress, verb – to leave (also noun – an exit)

Learned from: Shining in the Darkness (Sega Genesis)

Developed by Climax Entertainment

Published by Sega (1991)

Shining in the Darkness is a game that took me years of renting to beat. Back in the days before standardized game pricing, you might get lucky and find a game for $40, or you might get gouged for as much as $90, depending on the title, its development costs, number of copies produced, and the alignment of the stars, for all I know. This one fell closer to the pricy end of that spectrum, though my parents probably spent close to its retail price on rental payments, by the time I finally finished it. Yay, irony.

Objectively, the game wasn’t anything special from a story standpoint: the king’s daughter has been kidnapped by an evil wizard, and you take up the quest to delve into an enormous dungeon and rescue her. But it was the presentation that kept me coming back. The artwork in this (and the later Shining Force games) had a style I loved, the soundtrack occasionally pops into my head even today, and the characters actually had interactions beyond simple “here’s your quest, now go, brave adventurers!” And again, the dungeon was HUGE–requiring you to draw your own maps if you had any hope of figuring out where you were going. If you didn’t (or if you got too beat up), you could cast the Egress spell to pop back to the entrance and regroup.

A map to the credit union where I work, if any brave adventurers want to take up a quest.

This too shall pass

Recently, one of my coworkers was out, having surgery to remove a kidney stone. It’s a process I hope never to have to go through (though, surgery almost sounds better than passing one naturally), but it does bring us to today’s word.

ptyalolith, noun – the hard buildup of minerals inside the organs or ducts

Learned from: Vigil: The Longest Night (PC, Playstation 4, XBox One, Nintendo Switch)

Developed by Glass Heart Games

Published by Neon Doctrine (2020)

As the title would suggest, Vigil is a dark game. It’s a 2D platformer, with a heavy emphasis on exploration, that casts you as a member of the titular Vigil, tasked with fighting against an encroaching darkness that seems to have enveloped the world. It would seem you’re not terribly good at your job, but all you can do is your best. Even when your best includes consuming the kidney stones of a dark god to increase your abilities. The Ptyalolith from the Other God feels like an item that would be more at home in Bloodborne, or Blasphemous (both games I’m sure I’ll post more about in the future), but it’s far from the strangest item in the game–you can end up wearing a grapefruit rind on your head, while dressed in a nun’s habit and wielding a broom as a weapon. While it’s a beautiful game, there are times it really doesn’t know what tone it wants to have. Still, there’s a lot of equipment, and a variety of play styles (some of which are pretty broken for a lot of the game), so it’s worth checking out.

Even if the title card does make it look like one of those “find the hidden object” games from the mid-2000s.

Is it too late for New Year’s resolutions?

Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated, though man, this past year was a doozy. I must have spent 3/4 of it either working longer hours to train people in, or working longer hours because we flat-out just didn’t have enough people. This shortage seems like it might finally be behind us (for the moment, at least), so I wanted to finally get back to some creative projects. In all honesty, I probably could’ve picked this back up a few weeks ago, but well, bodies at rest and all that. Which brings us to today’s word.

skiving, verb – progressive tense of “skive,” to slack off or avoid one’s duty

Learned from: Xenoblade Chronicles (Nintendo Switch, New 3DS, Wii)

Developed by Monolith Soft

Published by Nintendo (2010)

The fact that I haven’t finished Xenoblade Chronicles yet makes this word even more fitting. It’s not that it’s a bad game, or anything–far from it. With its mix of sci-fi and fantasy, engaging combat, and unique setting (pretty much all land masses are on the backs of two dead titans), it’s actually a very enjoyable title…even if the antagonists were more menacing before they started talking in thick, Cockney accents. That just feels weird, coming out of a hulking, murderous machine. But I digress. Some other game came out that distracted me while I was playing it (maybe Shin Megami Tensei V), and I just haven’t gotten back to it yet. I’d like to, though.

Anyway, in one of the earlier parts of the game, the main character is getting berated for not pulling his weight. Admittedly, in a world under the constant threat of invasion by nigh-unstoppable, mechanical behemoths, skiving is a bit more egregious than neglecting a little Internet blog, but I can still identify somewhat. And while I won’t be saving the world from a looming danger, I’m still going to pick up the slack and get back to doing things that matter to me. Expect more updates soon!