Hi Folks, there seems to be at least some fans of Big Geek Emporium around here. Certainly some linking to it.
They appear to be down -- i.e. they only have like 3 products up. Looks like a significant site crash/error. Anyone have any inside info?

I put up my games a few months ago and got one sale of most of them, which was nice.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

As a hired gun writer you can get bored with the lore, that's fine, what you don't get (or at least the corpos should have enough brain to prevent you from it) is to treat the IP as if it's yours and do canon breaking stuff.

I'm NOT a writer, I do get some ideas but translating those into a coherent work of fiction? Not gonna happen I've tried.

But I could use a non-woke/anti-woke writer to write some lore for my stuff, heck he/she could go hog wild and publish a novel with MY blessing and zero IP bullcrap. What I don't have is the money to hire anyone, so it would be a risk the writer would have to take, write, edit, publish and if it sells, great you made money, all I ask in return is I don't know 5%? of the profits AND free publicity for MY game in the books.

I only have the following creative constraints:
NO MULTIVERSES! that's why Marvel and DC are shit right now.
No IDPol whatsoever
NO current year IRL politics

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 11:02:37 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 11:34:57 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.  WoD-alikes just aren't really the thing any more.  A company called Fen Orc makes a series of Black Hack hacks along these lines but I don't know much about them.  They have some silver and electrum sellers so they have gotten some traction anyway.

I'm not looking for a heartbreaker, I'm looking for games in the urban fantasy genre. I don't actually like WoD/CoD because they're bad microfiction pretending to be games, which the fans don't actually play anyway.

Urban fantasy is still a thriving literary genre. It's oversaturated. I'm really surprised there's zero spillover into ttrpgs.

Do you mean that the most recent versions of WoD games don't get play, or that the old WoD games don't get played much now? I might accept either of those, but in the 90s and perhaps a little after that, the original WoD games were heavily played in several areas I lived.

Check out Frank Trollman's Anatomy of Failed Design series to see what I mean. He writes several articles where he explains that the rules are unplayable as written and the groups who "played" ignored the rules anyway in favor of fiat or whatever.

This even extended to the CoD groups. They used fiat rather than even reading the rules. This notably resulted in things like groups not knowing basic facts about CoD vamps, like that they can identify other vamps on sight. I vaguely remember arguing with bad faith critics about it in the 2000s.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 09:34:52 AM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on May 14, 2024, 02:32:03 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 12:33:50 AM

Quote from: Zelen on May 13, 2024, 09:22:41 PMMy stance is that lore is incredibly important, but anyone who cares about lore at this point should see the writing on the wall for Battletech.

It's a lot less damaging for "the lore" to accept a spin-off with renamed factions + characters that keeps the underlying themes, tone, style, than to continue on supporting a game/IP which is compromised by malicious actors whose expressed goals are to subvert that story/setting.

What part of the Battletech story/setting has been subverted? How has it been subverted, and what do you believe is the "writing on the wall" and anyone should see?

Oh I don't know, maybe go buy the Battletech Pride Anthology 2023? Since you seem determined to play defense for Catalyst and want to give them money.

OK, I'll give you that product. However, I still don't see how the story/setting is subverted by that. It's not as if the three setting pieces done in recent years (Dominions Divided, Empire Alone, and Tamar Rising) show any evidence that they are trying to 'subvert' the setting into anything it hasn't been in it's 40+ years.

If you want to go political, then things like Shattered Fortress show that "utopian socialist societies" like the Republic of the Sphere are full of corruption (dark deeds done in the name of the "greater good" and will self-destruct without constant application of these terrible measures).

Me > Walk in my kitchen and find a stranger, pants down on top of the counter in the classic position to take a dump

Me > "Hey! Why are you shitting on my kitchen!?"

Stranger > "How do you know it's shit? It isn't even out yet!"

Setting politics =/= IRL politics tho they may overlap to some degree.

Publishing an identity politics laden product IS the writing in the wall you were asking for. You can choose to ignore it as "it's just one thing", but you don't get to ask me to do the same.

We've seen this movie before: Marvel changes Nick Fury to a black man, some of us complain, we get told SLJ is a great actor and to give him a chance and it's not a big thing and the best actor for the role, etc, etc.

Several years latter and lots of fan money given to Disney where are we?

When they made The Master a woman? Same story.

I can go on and on with different examples and how they've played out.

Now, you can choose to believe that a current year corporation that hires woke writters won't go any more woke than the odd thing here and there you can choose to ignore and buy only the good stuff.

But that's still funding them, that's still helping them pay the woke, you do you boo I know what I'll be doing.

If you're willing to play "Adventurer, Conqueror, King", you can check the Autarch discord.

Shame, I just stopped running a 1e AD&D game in London a few months ago because some of the group moved away - we were explicitly a no politics, especially no identity politics, group. If I can get a game up and running again, I'll let you know.   

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 10:58:08 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 10:45:00 AMSorry for the angry ranting. I'll try to be calmer in the future.

I don't have anything against a writer writing anthologies set within a shared universe, and I don't have any respect for corpos that make everything about "The Message", but I've gotten very frustrated with the actual execution and fandom interactions.

Nobody is Tolkien. Eventually the lore becomes so bloated that it becomes a hindrance and even the writers get bored of it and want to do something new. Old Star Trek and Star Wars had continuity errors and expanded universes that were absolute nightmares. Tolkien knew when to stop, but everyone else is content farming.

Hasbro reboots Transformers all the time and that's not a bad thing. If they didn't have the freedom to experiment with reboots, then the IP wouldn't have what it does now. Much of the IP is composed of elements that were introduced in reboots. It's an example of how reboots can be a good thing. And the reboots canonically share a multiverse too, before Hollywood drove multiverses into the ground.

Anyway, I get bored of the same thing for years and years. I get exasperated with the declining quality caused by this content farming. Maybe I'm just in the mood for something different. Well, there's not much else because these de facto monopolies have killed the competition. In recent decades I've noticed that people in general are stupider, less creative, and lazier with every passing year. It creates this frustrating cycle: indie creators work for years only to fail because fans just jump on the big creator bandwagon, big creators inevitably shit the bed because corpos don't give a shit about art, fans have no options, indie creators scramble to take advantage of the vacuum, fans complain indies don't have decades of lore, all the while the quality overall declines.

The indies would have decades of lore ready and waiting if fans had supported them when they were still publishing decades ago. Now many of those indie creators are too old or dead to make things anymore, and the younger indie creators don't have the upbringing and wealth of experience and learning their predecessors did. The fans have no one to blame but themselves for putting all their eggs in one basket.

That's why I prefer multiverses. Every setting inevitably goes through shit phases due to writer burn out, lack of hindsight, or whatever, but having a bunch of settings gives you options when that happens. That's why fantasy gaming hasn't turned to 100% shit like scifi and scifantasy has: although D&D dominates, there are thousands of published settings that can easily substitute for Faerun or Golarion.

But the scifi and scifantasy genres are not unsalvageable. The fans can still make their own stuff if they have the conviction and work ethic, or support those who do. Most of the indie creations from yesteryear are locked in copyright jail, but you can still take inspiration. But it will be a long and hard road. Rome was not built in a day.

They don't do a Battletech reboot because reboots inevitably alienate as many as they please. Instead, they encourage you to find a place in the Battletech timeline that you like and explore it. My favorite time period(s) for Battletech range from 3049-3081 (Clan Invasion through Jihad). I'm not a huge fan of the original (late) Succession Wars period, and I really don't find Dark Age/ilClan very appealing (but there are a few good bits in there too), so I don't put much of my effort into exploring that part of the timeline. If others like those periods, so be it, that doesn't infringe on my enjoyment of the parts I like. This is largely because the Battletech rules change very little from one period to another, and the biggest impact would be on a Battletech RPG. I'd certainly play a Battletech scenario even in a time period I don't really like, but I wouldn't run (and probably wouldn't play) a Battletech RPG outside of the periods I like.

"Reboots alienate too many people" is a silly argument. There's plenty of reboots that were good, like Transformers Prime or Thundercats 2011. You might as say we shouldn't write new fiction period and just keep making endless sequels and requels. That's worked out terribly so far.

But anyway, I just don't like the BattleTech setting. There's no alternatives, so I have to give the entire mech genre a pass. Just like I do every genre nowadays.

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https://moordereht.com/product/wretched-armageddon-volume-1-war

Colonil Gothic 4th Edition

From the Fire Comes Freedom!

In print since 2007, Colonial Gothic has grown into something unique. His uniqueness is in the setting. The world is one that history many do not know because it is a hidden history.

Colonial Gothic uncovers the hidden truths and malevolent enemies lurking in the shadows, influencing events and conspiring against the world as we know it. 

Revised, rewritten, and redesigned Colonial Gothic 4th Edition is compatible with all previous Colonial Gothic editions.

Visit the Colonial Gothic page to stay updated when the campaign launches.

I'd offer a spot in my online game, but your location and times available are "very bad" (I'm in the US and we play on Friday nights).

I think the easiest way to find a normal game is to look at the system first, then the description. If you see a Castles and Crusades game, 99% chance it won't be filled with morons. Probably the same with AD&D and maybe even B/X. Once you start getting into other systems, then pay careful attention to how they shill the game. Anyone wanting 47 page back stories for 1st level characters = problematic.

Since you are in the UK, have you tried Dragon Warriors? I played in two DW games online before, and both were the polar opposite of "woke". One was run by an Irish due who cussed a lot and seemed like he'd bomb a government office at the drop of a hat, so it was pretty interesting.