Huh, LitRPG is a genre

 A friend of mine recommended Dungeon Crawler Carl to me (which I quite enjoyed and will keep reading, thank you) but when I did a bit of research, I found it was part of the genre of LitRPG.

And I went ‘Oh, there’s a name for it.’

LitRPG is media, usually literature or comic strip, where the setting follows the mechanics of a computer RPG. (Sometimes a tabletop RPG but computer RPGs are by far the most common.)

A book of Dragons of Autumn Twilight wouldn’t count because, while the world of Krynn is a literal Dungeons and Dragons setting, the characters don’t look at their stats or discuss actual leveling. They just live there.

In a ‘proper’ LitRPG, the characters are fully aware of the mechanics that run their world. In many of them, characters can pull status and inventory screens. All the nuts and bolts that run the worlds they’re in are clearly visible.

Within that range, definitions can still get kind of fuzzy. For instance, Bofuri (another series I want to read more of) follows the rules a computer RPG because it’s about Kaede flat out playing a video game and driving the developers nuts. And it’s considered LitRPG.

Most of the examples I’ve read, though, have the characters actually living in the setting. Many of them have someone from ‘our’ world entering the new world, usually getting some kind of special power or insight in the process. I feel like a huge chunk of the Isekai works I’ve looked at are also LitRPG.

Because the concept of LitRPG is intrinsically meta, it tends to lend itself to comedy. The idea of characters pulling up a status screen is absurd. When you can measure your health by discrete hit points, things are unreal.

With that being said, there is room for more serious elements.The aforementioned Dungeon Crawler Carl in underpinned by the seriousness of the overall situation and also has some scathing social commentary. LitRPG has some intrinsically escapist elements pretty much baked in but there is clearly room for depth.

According to Wikipedia (a place I discourage students from ever using as a primary source), one of the earliest examples of the genre is Quag Keep by Andre Norton. A story where a player is pulled into a D&D game, it is also the first Dungeons and Dragons novel, even set in Gary Gygax’s Grayhawk.

… Why have I never heard of Quag Keep?

Back to Wikipedia, it says it wasn’t critically well received. And looking at other reviews, it looks like it wasn’t one of Norton’s better books and is more viewed as a historical curiosity than anything else. At some point, I should try and hunt it down and find out what my opinion is. Still wild that I’d never heard of it.

While LitRPG seems to have grown in popularity, it’s been around for decades. I’m also think that line defining it is fuzzy. (Does Joel Rosenberg’s Guardians of the Flame count?) And it may be one of the most extreme examples of write-what-you-know I have seen. 

I also have no idea where it falls in the spectrum of ‘serious’ literature. I am sure there are academics who are studying it. Regardless, as a genre, LitRPG is entertaining and I think it has as much potential to be meaningful as any other.

Egyptian Solitaire and other pyramid thoughts

 The first activity I used the Pyramid Arcade for was playing Egyptian Solitaire. Honestly, I thought it would be Treehouse since I have a long, happy history with that game but there you have it.

Egyptian Solitaire is a Looney Pyramids variant of the classic peg solitaire. The twists are that the pyramid doing the jumping can land on another pyramid the same size or an empty space and the fact that each space has three pyramids to clear.

By the way, I am profoundly terrible at it. I do enjoy it and I can’t help but hope someday that something will click in my head and I will solve it. And it’s a perfect information puzzle so it is solvable.

The base version is a three by four grid but you can expand it it make it more difficult/interesting.

So, you use some stackable pyramids to recreate a puzzle that goes back to the 1600s, if Wikipedia is to be believed. (Since anyone can edit it, you should always have approach Wikipedia with a grain of salt) So the question is: does it do something unique that you’d need the pyramids for and is it any fun?

And I think the answer to that is yup.

Now, I wouldn’t buy a pyramid set just to play Egyptian Solitaire (I did buy both colors of Treehouse when they came out, just to make a comparison) It is a nice little something to do with pyramids you bought for other games though. (I will say that Food Chain Island is a vastly superior reinvention of the peg solitaire puzzle)

Egyptian Solitaire does highlight two elements of the Loony Pyramids and gaming systems in general. Does it let you play a game and do you need the game system to play it?

On one extreme, Ricochet Pyramids lets me play a game almost exactly like Ricochet Robots without the trouble of having that oversized box in my closet. However, I could use that rule set to play Ricochet Pyramids with some other bits. (I don’t but I could) On the other hand, I think it would be really hard to cobble together a Volcano set without anything other than the pyramids and I think that’s an absolute banger of a game.  

Egyptian Solitaire in no way reinvents any wheels but I do like an excuse to play with little plastic pyramids.

Horror can be a fragile genre

 I was about two thirds of the way through Wylding Hall by Elizabeth Hand when I asked myself ‘Am I reading an M. R. James homage with hippy folk rockers?

Which is a crazy question to ask since any given ghost story written in the past century or so has a good chance of being influenced by James. Still, that was when I decided to write about it.

Wylding Hall is a story about a folk rock band that spends a summer at a decaying country manor to work on an album and the bad things that happen to them.

And there are a lot of elements that make me think of James. The book is told as a series of interviews taken long after the events of that summer. There are strong hints that the library in the manor contain forbidden secrets. The manor clearly has plenty of dark history. And we never get a clear explanation of what happened. 

All good stuff.

However, I ended up feeling like the parts were better than the sum. In fact, the very last scene, literally the last two pages, managed to make the entire book fall flat for me. I won’t spoil it beyond that but, yeah.

Having said that, there are many individual scenes that succeeded in creeping me out. The reoccurring motif of dead song birds was very effective. The culmination of inexplicable photographs that form the climax of the book uses minimal details to maximum effect.

And the scenes that work wouldn’t work in isolation. They need the slow burn leading up to them to work. There was a lot in the book that was very promising. Unfortunately, a lot of those promises never got fulfilled.

Ultimately, I wish that Wyldness Hall hadn’t missed being an honestly great book by just a few missteps.

A particularly nice dungeon crawl from Alexander Shen

 Alexander Shen has made a lot of dungeon crawl-themed games and puzzles. Dungeon Run: Pocket is at least the fourth one that I’ve played from Shen that involves drawing on some sort of map or maze.  

Okay, in case this as much of the blog as you read, it’s one of the better dungeon crawls I’ve tried  from Shen.

I have the PnP version. It consists of a deck of ten monster cards and a deck of twenty-six treasure cards. Oh and a book of 197 maps, which consist of a starting staircase, monster encounters (designated with numbers for monster level), treasure chests, walls and open spaces.

After you pick out a dungeon, you shuffle the treasure deck so it’s ready for the game. Then you shuffle the monster deck and deal out four monsters in a row. They’re going to be your denizens for this dungeon. And the order you draw them in is their level. So you can have a first level dragon and a fourth level chicken. All ones are the same monster and all twos and so on. And virtually all of the monsters have some sort of special effect.

You start at the stairs and move one space at a time. I couldn’t find anything in the rules about backtracking so I just used a pawn, but you could also draw a line for your path as well. When you move onto a treasure trust, you cross it off and draw a treasure card, which can have a good or bad instant effect.

When you move onto a monster, you fight it. Nothing happens if you are a higher level than it. If you are the same level, you get a victory point. If it is a higher level, you take the difference in damage, but you get two victory points.

The game ends when either you decide you’ve had enough or you die. If it’s on your own terms, your victory points are your score. If you run out of health, which could happen unexpectedly with a bad treasure chest, you get no points whatsoever.

So, what makes Dungeon Run: Pocket any good? Honestly, more than anything else, it’s the two decks of cards. The random power level of the monsters makes the puzzle aspect a lot more interesting and makes replaying the same dungeon worth doing. And the treasure deck adds a push-your-luck element. Plus Shen’s goofy artwork on the cards adds a lot of flavor.

The large number of maps is a mixed curse. On the one hand, it’s a lot of content. On the other hand, I don’t want to print out what amounts to a book. This isn’t the first time Shen has offered basically a book’s worth of content. (Since some of these games can be published as books, it’s not a big surprise) That said, even printing a handful of maps will give me a lot of play value, particularly with the replay value the decks add.

Alexander Shen specializes in short little brain breaks. And if that doesn’t interest you, Dungeon Run:Pocket isn’t going to change your mind. But it stands out as a particularly good one.

Looney Labs included the kitchen sink in Pyramid Arcade

 I recently made what I feel is one of my most indulgent game purchases in years, Looney Labs Pyramid Arcade. I had been interested in it ever since I saw the Kickstarter back in 2016.

After a regular deck of cards, the Looney Pyramids are my favorite game system. (Dominoes and the Decktet are pretty awesome too) I started playing with pyramids back when they were still called Icehouse (Get off my yard, you young whipper snappers! The gaming table’s in the house! Catan’s waiting for you)

And the reason why I didn’t get Pyramid Arcade right off the bat was, well, I basically owned almost everything that was in and could cobble together the rest. I had already bought at least one cache of every color that Looney Labs had made and I did back the Kickstarter at a level to get the new one.

However, if there is one flaw in the system (and this is a very subjective flaw), it is that the pyramids don’t really stand alone. Almost every game requires some additional components. A board, some cards of some , dice, etc. I don’t consider this to be a legitimate failing. Yes, you can play hundreds of games with just a deck of cards but purity of gam system definition doesn’t actually affect function.

Even more than I had originally believed, Pyramid Arcade collects everything and the kitchen sink in one box. It includes ten different boards (I’m counting double sided boards as two boards), nine dice, two decks of cards, a drawstring bag and a chunky player token.

And yeah, years before the Pyramid Arcade came out, I put together in my own pyramid kit. But Looney Lab made a better one. 

So, while it’s easy to argue that I didn’t need to buy Pyramid Arcade (and even easier to argue you don’t need to buy any games lol), it’s going to be fun to have it around

Of Mice and Men. Is a valuable historical artifact

 For literally years, I kept seeing references to Leonard Maltin’s Of Mice and Magic when reading about the history of animation. Up and to a certain point, it was (perhaps is) considered the definitive history. Finally, I hunted down a copy so I could read the darn thing.

Of Mice and Magic is an examination and history of theatrical animation with a number of major provisions. First of all, it barely touches on television animation. Second, it focuses almost exclusively on American animation. I am aware that a lot of revolutionary animation happened all over the world but that isn’t covered in this book. (What is generally accepted to be the first feature length animated work is a lost 1917 political satire from Argentina, for instance) 

Finally, and this is huge, the edition I read was published in 1980. There was a later, updated version in 1987, which would be interesting to look at. But, either way, Maltin ends before many, many incredible events that changed the world of animation. Really, the first edition was written at one of the lowest ebbs in the world of cartoons.

Taking all that into account, Of Mice and Magic is a fascinating, engaging and (perhaps most importantly) educational look at the history of making cartoons. And, within the limitations that I’ve already laid out, it is pretty darn comprehensive.

After a pretty solid introduction to the origins of American animation, Maltin breaks his history down by the major studios that produced cartoons. Each studio gets its own chapter and includes detailed lists of personnel. Over a quarter of the book is the filmography of all the studios.

(Honestly, in a pre-internet world, Of Mice and Magic had to have been an invaluable resource)

Maltin definitely has strong opinions about cartoons and also clearly knows what he likes. However, the book has so much factual information that it’s still useful even if (or when) you disagree with him.

I learned quite a bit about the actual mechanics of hand animation from the book, read about studios I’d only vaguely heard of, and now know a lot more about the golden age of American animation.

While it’s not a flaw, the fact that the book is over forty years old means it cannot cover many, many events that changed the landscape of animation. In 1980, Disney was pretty much the only studio making feature length work and some of their best years were still ahead of them. Television cartoons hadn’t even been deregulated, let alone become a place for cutting edge work. It amazes me how much has changed since the book was written.

At the same time, it was written when many people who were part of the golden age were still alive and could still tell their story. Within the scope it covers, it’s pretty comprehensive. It’s a book that has been a resource for so many books and articles that followed it. 

If you are interested in the history of animation, Of Mice and Men is an essential read.

Dice Flow is a fun little math

 Alexander Shen has an amazing knack for making neat little games and puzzles. They’re never big or impressive but they are always interesting and quite often fun and distracting. Shen has done my sanity a lot of good over the years.

Dice Flow is a roll and write that consists of two math processes. I can’t call them equations proper, although each one is made up of equations. In both cases, you roll six dice and pop the numbers in to figure out a final number. Add the two final numbers together to get your score.

Not only does that sounds kind of complex, the actual play sheet itself looks kind of complex. However, Shen’s silly cartoon characters (Hi, Sadie Cat!) explain everything pretty clearly. One play through, which shouldn’t even take five minutes, and everything makes sense.

I am not going to actually go through the actual maths. For one thing, it would feel fussy. For another thing, that would just be giving you the game.

I went into Dice Flow with very low expectations. It looks like (and flat out is) just some math problems. I wondered if there were any choices at all in it. I felt like, at most, it might be something I might use in the classroom.

However, where you plug numbers in makes a big difference. I sometimes use a dice roller on my phone but Dice Flow is one of those games where I like using physical dice so I can rearrange the numbers. 

And I was surprised to find that I enjoyed doing this bit of number juggling. It probably doesn’t hurt that it really isn’t that complex and only takes a couple of minutes to bang out a play. It definitely doesn’t outstay in welcome.

Now, on the downside; even by Shen standards, Dice Flow is a very light game. More than that, while you do have to make some decisions, it’s not hard to optimize your die rolls. I enjoy the little that it is but there is very little.

However, it’s a free, one-page game. Honestly, I have already gotten more out of it than it took to make a laminated copy. It’s a nice little brain break. If they make more Dice Flow pages, I’ll play them.

https://alexandershen.itch.io/dice-flow-vol-1