the many instantiations of various spinning and weaving arts and crafts consume me. there remains no time for blogging.
the other day, this lengthy stretch of fencing (branded nicely enough with so much black, white, and red to represent the construction company Sundt, whose slogan seems to be three standalone words, "Skill. Grit. Purpose.") went up all along the drive that goes between my academic office building and various parking lots between here and places off-campus.
I'm told that they'll be building a new dormitory somewhere on top of the rocky, scrub-filled gully on the other side. it'll have more student housing and more classroom space. so cool. so necessary.
some of us in my academic office building are mildly worried that this new construction will block our most excellent west-facing views of Granite Mountain. we shall see, I guess. I remain hopeful that the slope of this gully will mean the top of the new dorm will be low enough for us to look over from our third floor offices.
as I walked back out from my office to my car last Tuesday, I noticed a little grey-brown bunny frantically searching for a way through the fence, up and down the hill in short bursts, back and forth over the blaring red curb, every so often sprinting for its life all the way across the road back to the unfenced rocks and bushes to the east.
I watched it for a solid few minutes. it hopped away in panic from my slowed footsteps, then dashed in further panic across the path of someone's big white SUV driving up past us both.
I didn't see the bunny come back that evening. so I studied the fencing as I walked. surely one little bunny would eventually find a gap to squeeze under, I thought. (the creatures seem to squeeze through pretty tiny gaps in our back garden gate, after all.)
if the chainlink were bare of this black branded tarp, then could a little bunny more easily get through? or if the corners of each fence panel were less square and more rounded, that would surely help.
I wonder if any of the planners and facilities and maintenance people worried about the impact of this construction project would have on the non-human critters in the area. hopefully at least a little bit. probably not as much as they worried about other aspects though-- the costs of labor and fencing and other materials; the design and the blueprints and the building's whole physical footprint; and the timing and logistics and how soon they can start selling spots in the new dorm.
at the bottom of the hill, the fence merely ends,. for now. the sidewalks remain open and the parking lots in regular use. for now. if the bunnies are persistent enough, they will find their way back into their hideaways in the scrub-filled gully.
and hopefully they will all find new hideaways once the gully is dug out and filled with a bunch of concrete and whatever else dormitories are made of.
and if not?
they're just bunnies. some of their cousins, whichever side of whichever fence they've ended up on, will replace them soon enough.
you'll have to imagine the raucous drones and strains of the bagpipes and fiddles in the air while all the Irish and Scottish and Welsh flags fly against the bluest sky. it was a very very sunny and warm fall day, but thankfully there was a decent breeze.
there was a little bit of knitting too, among the spinning adventures. I'm working on (and have been for like a year now) this two-color shawl from the Lyrical Knits collection. very slow progress.
in other guild news, we also have a ton of our work on display at the local library for October. five of these items are mine-- 4 little tapestry hoop weavings and 1 knitted cowl knit from handspun local merino wool.
apparently I haven't blogged about the Tour de Fleece here yet. (you can read a bit more about this July spinning challenge event thing if you like). I've partly kinda-sorta spun along with the bicyclists in past years, but I never focused on it very well or had much of note to show for it at the end.
but this year I had the whole month as free as any summer month could be, and plenty of spinning experience and equipment and goals to work with, so I made some plans.
starting with Jillian Eve's official Tour de Fleece 2024 bingo card, I narrowed her suggested challenges down to 20 that looked doable/interesting, and determined to let 1d20 pick one for me each day of the tour. here's the full list, with those the dice picked in bold and those I accomplished (whether or not their number got rolled) marked with checks + annotations. I've got a few photos of some of it, too.
✓ 1 Spin the oldest fiber in your stash (caliente red Kraemer roving)
✓ 2 Spin the newest fiber in your stash (cherry red Kraemer roving)
✓ 3 Spin outside (my back patio; the parking lot of a busy cafe one morning)
✓ 4 Spin in public (aforementioned parking lot, Fiber Creek, Sharlot Hall, various waiting rooms)
✓ 5 Spin a fiber you've never spun before (gorgeous CVM/merino blend from Cactus Hill Farm; BFL from Greenwood Fiberworks)
✓ 6 Use a new technique (drafting two rovings together)
✓ 7 Spin more than 1 hour in a day
✓ 8 Teach someone else to spin (hurrah for enthusiastic newbies!)
✓ 9 Spin a chunky yarn (well, as chunky as I could manage)
✓ 10 Spin a lace-weight yarn (usually my default so pretty easy for me)
11 Spin a plant fiber (glad this one didn't come up actually. I am scared of cotton)
12 Fractal spin (started this one late and haven't quite finished it yet... so it only sort of counts)
✓ 13 Spin a textured yarn (the pre-carded Finn was almost too textured, I say)
✓ 14 Spin fiber you processed by hand (just a sample of re-carded Albuquerque Finn-- but I tediously and lovingly carded all the rest of it for later)
✓ 15 Spin local wool (llama and alpaca from 2 different local ranches)
16 Ply with thread (someday I'll try this but I'm not in a hurry to)
✓ 17 Create yarn that tells a story (I am still not sure what I want this to mean. we'll see.)
✓ 18 Hold your fiber in the opposite hand (easier with the little e-spinner for some reason)
✓ 19 Spin while watching a movie (La La Land. it was alright)
✓ 20 Spin while listening to an audiobook (mostly Demon Copperhead. loved it)
in case you're as persistently
curious about abbreviations as I am, CVM
stands for California Variegated Mutant, a highly regarded and unique breed of American sheep. slightly less interestingly, BFL
stands for Blue-faced Leicester, another highly regarded breed of sheep, from the UK.
it took me a bit longer than the official tour to get anything finished, but that wasn't necessarily part of my game. I'm happy to have tried some new things and stretched my spinning skills in a few different directions. and I have every intention of continuing. who needs the excuse of a cycling tournament going on?
next goals:
finish the 4-ply alpaca (just needs washing and measuring)
wind off the CVM spindle soon-ish
finish the fractal BFL sample
ply the second half of a commissioned spin for Rose
spin more blended red (get 3 bobbinsful at least)
P.S. I also spent a decent chunk of the month working on this fun addition to my spinning arsenal. if I can figure out how old she is I'll see about naming her after another suitable ancestor of mine.
quarterfinal match 1:
Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Pathfinder 2e
does the result of this one seem obvious?
it feels more and more obvious to me the more I think about it. honestly, as much as I keep saying to myself, 'okay let's revisit this properly-- fairly-- as evenhandedly as anyone possibly can...' it just seems to tip the scales further to one side.
after all, there’s a whole chorus of 7 years of games and beloved roleplaying characters on one side, with just a single, simple, half-finished duet on the other. what else are we to expect?
I will say, however, that there is plenty I do like about Pathfinder. its flexibility and openness, plus the more-pleasing-to-me organization of the book’s sections all come together to give it a bit of an edge in this fight. if I'd met this version of Pathfinder sooner, before pandemic times, and had the chance to play even half a dozen more sessions of it, this match would be much less unfair overall. I can see myself liking the system a lot.
unfortunately, all these alternate universes of what-if maybe possibilities are not the one I'm sitting in right now.
right now, in this universe, I miss the reliable, accessible fun of D&D. I'm intrigued by all the Baldur's Gate 3 chit chat flying around (including the chit chat from these colleagues of mine who have a podcast all about video games). I have epilogues of three or four past games percolating in the dusty creative sections of my brain. I'm seriously pondering the idea of wrangling friends and family in various batches to run or help run a short one-shot adventure during upcoming holiday breaks.
so it just has to be D&D that wins. it's not so popular for no reason, even if its general popularity does seem like a fairly self-perpetuating engine at this point. if we need a particular RPG system to serve as a gateway into the hobby as a whole, this one serves fairly well.
which of the other 6 quarterfinalists will D&D have to face next? we shall see.
| SYSTEM | Dungeons & Dragons(5e) | Pathfinder (2e) |
| cover tagline = | "Arm yourself for adventure." |
"Advance your game." |
| publisher = |
Wizards of the Coast |
Paizo |
| pub. date = |
2014 | 2019 |
| original cost = |
$49.95 | $59.99 |
| length = |
11 chapters / 320 pages |
11 chapters / 638 pages |
| my exp. level = | very much lots | some |
any predictions? I have plenty, but the rules say I have to keep them to myself for now.
as an end note here, I speculate that Nyva the half-orc paladin and Damlyn the snow goblin bard would make a very interesting pair. and their systems of origin are similar enough that we could have them adventure together easily enough, couldn't we? perhaps I'll write a little vignette about them one of these days-- a short story evoking some Good Omens meets Daredevil meets The Witcher vibes, where the pure-hearted tough one and the more cynical artsy one are mostly able to follow a shared vision, but not without plenty of amusing conflict along the way.
next match-up review: 7th Sea vs Star Wars: Force and Destiny
opening match 3: Pathfinder 2e vs Mage: the Awakening
these two are systems I've played only a little bit. as a result they seem pretty evenly matched overall-- at least markedly more even than either of the prior pairs. my brain has had about the same amount of exposure to each of them. that's all we need for less bias, right?
both systems seem pretty complex and crunchy, with pretty hefty rulebooks (600+ pages and almost 400 pages, respectively). and both have grown out of/alongside other core systems. Pathfinder more or less began as a splintered-off version of older Dungeons & Dragons editions; it's got plenty of unique flavor and mechanics all its own, but the two share plenty of DNA.
Mage, of course, is designed to work with World of Darkness and its other various add-on systems. Jeremiah has thrilling tales of extended roleplaying campaigns (the live-action kind) in which vampires, mages, and werewolves all interact within the same in-game territories. in our past Vampire chronicles, NPC mages have shown up as rather major threats, bending reality and wielding fireballs in quite a horrifying manner.
the commonality I see in Mage and Pathfinder is in the double-sided freedom and responsibility they present to their players. these massively detailed systems encourage customization in many senses of the word. player imagination and choices are important in all RPGs, but with these games, even moreso. they both seem to ask for an extra step or two of proactive engagement.
| SYSTEM | Pathfinder (2e) | Mage: the Awakening |
| back cover tagline = | "Advance your game." |
"A storytelling game of modern sorcery." |
| publisher = |
Paizo |
White Wolf |
| pub. date = |
2019 | 2005 |
| original cost = |
$59.99 | $39.99 |
| length = |
11 chapters / 638 pages |
9 major sections / 398 pages |
| my exp. level = | some | some |
husband and I, during the pandemic, turned to Pathfinder as a relatively new-to-us-both game that we could learn together and, as we learned, run for each other in an informal, two-person campaign. we planned to trade off roles as dungeon master and share in the work of creating and exploring the in-game world. Jeremiah made a halfling named Tibeth, and I made a whisper elf monk named Kasahna Dohrn. we played for a month or so, traversing forests and rivers and towns. but it fell to the wayside after a while. I do want to go back to it, someday. I have notes and sketches for a pseudo prince-and-the-pauper side quest stashed away for if we ever do.
my Mage experience does add up to very slightly more than my Pathfinder experience. two characters, two different short games--one solo and one with friends. there is the aforementioned Hannah McLaughlin, shadow name Rosemary, who started out as a normal enough teenager and bumbled her way a few yards into this dark world of magical threats...
and there is Poppy. that's her shadow name, which is the name your Mage character sheet leaves space for at the top (real names in this world being too precious and dangerous to share with just anyone). Poppy does have a real name, but I do not recall what it must have been. I created her as a savvy local businesswoman running a bakery, Awakened to the Path of Doom to wield Moros magic (the kind that some call necromancy, focused on transitions, transformations, borders). for a group one-shot some months back she joined up with two others first to mentor a brand new member of Awakened society, and then to find out how and why some mysterious evil enemies attacked him and drained away his life force. it was a short game, concluding on the most ominous of cliffhangers. I think at least one of us got yanked into another dimension, never to be heard from again.
my new Pathfinder character was not much more difficult to throw together. I had never played a bard before, and I thought I'd explore some of the ancestries unique to Pathfinder, even if those concepts likely wouldn't be my first choice in an actual game. playing a goblin just seems odd, doesn't it? goblins are grimy little antagonist minions-- they can't be heroes, can they?
stereotypical attitudes aside, I created Damlyn the snow goblin bard, with the barrister background. she started out as a fancy lawyer, got bored of it, and started adventuring as a way of showing off how smart and talented she is. her chosen instrument is the harmonica. very cool.
because I've played at least a little bit of both games, there are no summer one-shots scheduled for these, and thus my new characters haven't seen any gameplay. most likely they won't for a good while. but it was fun to make them and think about what stories I might want to enact using them as lenses.
as I look over Pathfinder's core rulebook, the word that comes to mind is 'sumptuous.' it conjures warmth and sturdiness, embossed leather and shiny buckles, hand-carved lintels and ornate knife handles, slightly wrinkled parchment and candlewax. the gameworlds of Pathfinder follow along somewhat with the Tolkein-ish high fantasy of D&D, that same very Lord-of-the-Rings style but somewhat more evolved. I find its vibe less black-and-white with regard to moral and racial structures. in fact, Pathfinder doesn't use "race" as a category at all, opting for "ancestry" as a more acceptable term for pretty much the same in-game concept.
the ornate style of the Mage rulebook shines glossy and green, its cover iridescent and reflective, half the type on its pages colored in gold. the contrasts of gilded headings and rather spare line art here give a sense of some slightly rustic, slightly refined Arthurian glamour mixed with just a tablespoon of modern grunge. it feels less sumptuous and more delicate, at least on the surface. Mage takes handfuls of urban grit from the World of Darkness core and frames each little particle of it with a lot of silvery-gold occult filigree. maybe we could call it Arthurian noir, or something like that.
{ interior of Mage: the Awakening. that font for the minor headings is straight up Zapfino-- quite classy, but not always easy to read. }
Mage narrows in on that arcane magical potential in a more grounded and gritty way-- darker and more tragic, which we should expect given its core World of Darkness basis, of course.
Pathfinder paints with broader strokes. I could repeat 89% of my aesthetic assessment for D&D here and I think all of it would still apply. in general I imagine that people play a game like Pathfinder to be straightforwardly heroic, and people play Mage for tricksy, arcane politics and keeping secrets.
have I mentioned how fat these books are? I think Pathfinder is the fattest RPG book in our collection, though I haven't actually compared them all properly. Shadowrun might be its nearest rival.
but anyway, regardless of its massive page count, Pathfinder is very nicely designed. it's got all the lovely paratextual bits one loves to see in a lengthy instructional document-- concise table of contents, headers, page numbers, navigation tabs, good cross references, etc. the order of things makes tons of sense overall, and the combo glossary/index is usefully detailed. without all of that, the sheer amount of information and options and details in this book would be horribly overwhelming. as it is, it's still a little bit overwhelming, but nothing a determined roleplayer wouldn't be able to overcome as they get used to the system.
I find Mage a difficult book for a few reasons. as far as intimidating levels of information and detail go, the chapter on magic alone is almost 200 pages of spell descriptions and mechanics. some of the same wayfinding design elements are here, too, but they seem less effective to me, mostly down to the relative lack of contrast. the type and line spacing feel small, the columns a bit on the crowded side, and the gold headings aren't the easiest to discern. all the real useful wayfinding is in the index. which is alright, but could be better.
both games come with added risk of decision fatigue: Mage moreso in its basic character creation process and Pathfinder moreso in its later advancement options. some people (even me on the right afternoon, perhaps) might find all those decisions delightful.
like D&D, Pathfinder uses the same set of 7 polyhedral dice, with the d20 as a centerpiece. and like its base game, Mage uses d10s.
so what's different? gameplay-wise, Pathfinder follows in D&D's footsteps fairly closely. explore, encounter stuff, fight, and get creative with downtime, in whatever ratios you like. the main differences I see are in its character advancement systems and its action economy-- both more granular and therefore a little more flexible. each class comes with an outline to follow for character advancement: new feats and skill boosts, etc. but players often have lots of choice for which feats they want to take from each specified list of options. and instead of the basic actions, bonus actions, and reactions of D&D, Pathfinder breaks things down further into free actions, single actions, reactions, and 'activities' (either two-action or three-action versions). it seems like a lot to keep track of, but you do get used to it.
the Pathfinder character sheet does invite the player to keep track of what seems like million things, from the progression of attributes and skills, to specific feats, spell components, and nuances of proficiency. the attributes and skills themselves are simple enough-- almost but not quite the same as D&D's,
but as we've established Pathfinder likes so much to be, it's more granular. each skill, every weapon, and any piece of armor you might use in this game comes with four possible levels of proficiency-- your character can be untrained, trained, expert, masterful, or legendary. and this level of granularity means you get to choose specifically where you want to focus as your character advances and gains skills. but with great options for flexibility comes a great deal of math.
one more thing that I liked a lot about Pathfinder is the process of character creation has you choose ancestry and background before choosing your class-- it makes so much sense to think through it that way, and it helps make your character feel more like a real personality, not just a mechanical construct.
what does Mage add to the mechanics of regular World of Darkness? similarly to Werewolf, we get to choose which of 5 unique arcane paths our character will Awaken to and which of 5 unique political orders of mages we'll align ourselves with. (the 5 x 5 matrix of options is a staple of these early World of Darkness games, it seems).
and then of course you choose (to some degree) your magical powers. the Path you choose dictates which Arcana you'll have access to, but from there you are free to balance those Arcana in a few different directions and to choose the merits and advantages you might tie to your magic.
the system of Arcana is highly interesting to me. there are ten, arranged into gross/subtle pairs along the points and lines of the pentagram: Death, Fate, Forces, Life, Matter, Mind, Prime, Spirit, Space, and Time. whichever pair your character learns, you can choose which is primary by assigning more or fewer dots to that line on your character sheet. beyond those two Arcana, you also get to choose a third to round out your abilities.
one of the most tedious decision-making pieces of creating a Mage character, for me, is choosing rotes: the "ready-made" spells that a mage can cast most easily from the Arcana she knows. even if your character only has access to less than one-third of the 200-pages-worth of possible rotes, that is still plenty to go over and decide about. and those 200 pages of rotes isn't even all the possible magic your mage can cast during any given game session. improvised spells can be almost anything! you're really only limited by your imaginative and descriptive capabilities (and the prerogatives of your lead storyteller, of course).
Mage swaps out the essence and primal urge of Werewolf with gnosis and mana-- resources spent to enhance your magics in various ways. instead of Morality or Harmony, we have Wisdom. using magic wisely and carefully will prevent Paradox and prevent mages and humans alike from its dangers. the same Virtue and Vice system is also at play.
decision fatigue aside, gameplay for both these systems may involve a few more nooks and nuances than the prior games I've reviewed.
of course all my broad strokes descriptions and assessments above are going to break down if your DM or storyteller wants to run things very differently. I have no way of accounting for those endless possibilities, do I? it's been tricky enough to boil down the expanse of possibilities that the game systems themselves are offering here.
in my admittedly limited and
very-influenced-by-my-life-partner's-views perspective, Pathfinder has a
reputation for being crunchy and numbers-y and mechanically on-purpose quite min-max-able. I have a sense that it is designed to be even more combat-focused than D&D and even more exacting, perhaps more 'realistic.' I didn't think I'd enjoy it very much, but for the few months we played it was quite fun. we made it our own. and I found myself getting used to the crunchiness.
I really love the idea of Mage. waking up to a world that is exponentially deeper and more mysterious than you ever dreamed just sounds cool. tapping into an intellectual, spiritual reality and making exciting things happen in the name of saving the world... yeah why not? some of the introductory paragraphs of Mage put it like this:
"The modern scientific worldview tends to treat ideas as secondary realities, less real than matter. The magical worldview knows that ideas are more real than matter" (p. 34)
and I love that. ideas with real physical influence? heck yes. thinking and willing some awesome result just hard enough, leaning at just the right angle on the right mystical buttons, and watching your power bend reality into what you want it to be? sign me up.
my experience with Mage hasn't (yet) measured up to just how cool it sounds on paper. this is in part because in practice, I'm quite intimidated by the wide open possibility this game throws at me. being prepared to grapple with all that, while balancing the strictures of the mechanics fairly, and somehow also roleplay effectively has been too difficult.
and so despite how evenly matched these two appeared in the beginning, my review is clearly leaning towards one over the other.
next match-up review: Changeling: the Lost vs. Star Wars: Force & Destiny
opening match 1: World of Darkness vs Wrath & Glory
these two systems are the most recent I’ve played in, so they get to be the first reviewed. they feel like bookends, in a way: Wrath & Glory is most new to us, while World of Darkness was husband Jeremiah’s introduction to roleplaying and its books some of the oldest in his collection. my experience is far less extensive than his, but nevertheless our World of Darkness game-stories have been some of my very most favorite.
a note or two of framing: with these matched-up game reviews, I am purposefully embracing (mimicking?) the very squishy, laid-back approach modeled in the wonderful Tournament of Books. and while I'm also writing more or less to the same 'general public' audience the rest of this blog is ostensibly written for, we should probably recognize, in deepest honesty, that I mostly write stuff here for me. and for the sake of it.
dear whoever else is reading this, welcome to my thoughts.
that said, what purpose do I imagine these reviews will serve? primarily one of entertainment, for myself and for whatever audiences may wander in. my goal shall be to write well and evocatively about this unique set of semi-fictional books so that readers may find themselves intrigued, or not, as their tastes and interpretations may dictate. I'll not expect everyone to know everything about roleplaying as a hobby, but I will assume you can infer enough to go chase down your own internet search results for anything I'm not explaining at total-beginner-level detail.
in my introduction outline post about the tournament, I did lay out a loose approach to guide my considerations and provide a little consistency across the series. I may not conduct every element of that process in the same order every time, but I'll touch on them all and make that the basis of my written review. what follows here is a little table of metadata, summaries of characters I've made in each system, and then my thoughts on their aesthetics, approachability, and mechanics.
| SYSTEM | World of Darkness |
Wrath & Glory |
| back cover tagline = | "Your greatest fears aren't make believe; they're real." |
"A grimdark future of glorious adventure." |
| publisher = |
White Wolf | Cubicle 7 Games / Games Workshop |
| pub. date = |
2004 | 2020 |
| original cost = |
$24.99 | $59.99 |
| length = |
8 chapters / 223 pages |
14 chapters / 383 pages |
| my exp. level = | medium-high | barely any, almost none |
our current World of Darkness chronicle, "North of Eden," has been running since March of this year. in mid-May, friend David ran a single session of Wrath & Glory for us.
my prior and first ever Wrath & Glory character (Sileema Ramzee, inquisitorial acolyte) was therefore pretty recent, but for the purposes of this little tournament she still counts as part of the past. tracking my prior World of Darkness characters isn’t so simple— most were technically made for various World of Darkness companion systems: Mage, Changeling, and Vampire. only a few truly started out in the core World of Darkness system:
I’ll write more fully about my other World of
Darkness–adjacent characters in future match-ups; for the moment, here
is a list of all their names as a preview: Sierra Adler, Victoria
Abigail Evanston Bell, Margo Wallace (all three vampires), Synthia Starling, Liv (changelings), and Poppy (another mage).
my brand new, tournament-specific characters are simple. I created both following the books’ basic instructions, keeping them both at starting level. for World of Darkness, this means choosing basic stats and no additional XP for upgrades in attributes and skills. for Wrath & Glory, it means a Teir 1 archetype.
making characters in a relative vacuum is a little odd. more commonly, there’s the whole context of grounded gameplay and some direction provided by a lead storyteller, game master, whoever. usually you at least have a sense of the kind of adventure this imaginary identity will fit into, so not having that is strangely freeing but almost too much so. limitations are possibilities, after all.
left purely to my own devices, I chose attributes and skills and other character details based on what seemed novel and amusing. bits of advice from dearest husband led me to look toward elements that I normally might be turned off by—those that might let me explore the aspects or angles of the game I hadn’t or likely wouldn't actually want to play in real life. so after a few evenings' work with rulebooks, pencil, and paper, we have...
for World of Darkness, Briella Jameson, an athletic activist who just wants to rock climb as often as possible and find all the ways to help the unhoused folks in her city...
and in the 41st millennium, Kukka the orkboy, a combat-crazed minion with aspirations of someday leading the whole Snakebite clan into glorious, bloody battle.
would these two be friends? I think likely not, if I had to imagine it. in any case, these are just test characters— concepts created for the purpose of comparing the process for each system. they don't and can't quite even exist without stories to live in and contexts to shape their motivations. for both, the whole world is in stasis, waiting for a storyteller to start manipulating the strings of conflict and consequence around them.
we could accurately describe these two gameworlds as dark, gritty places infused with no end of supernatural weirdness. they have that in common at the surface, yes. but the settings for each of these games have pretty different vibes. even the books themselves— the art and style their pages paint for us— strike quite different tones. the World of Darkness core book is slim and fairly monochromatic, greys and blues and a gauzy shadow around every corner, black and white text with a little grunge in the typography. it has an oldschool feel, tapping into a Lovecraftian, almost-but-not-really-steampunk something. on the other hand, Wrath & Glory is ten times more colorful, its pages ornate with grand, militant imagery. there is an ecclesiastical, orderly, but also bloody and mangled sense to the whole thing.
World of Darkness strikes me as very film noir—artsy in its portrayals of depravity and corruption. Wrath & Glory, based in the less-familiar-to-me universe of Warhammer 40,000, eschews artsy in exchange for excess. if nothing else, the world of Warhammer is extremely a lot. the word everyone uses here is grimdark: dystopian horror turned up to eleventy hundred million. it almost doesn’t make sense to build a roleplaying game in this world, one might think. when your average military grunt is lucky to last 15 whole hours in combat, how on earth do any plucky adventurers manage to trust anyone else long enough to form an adventuring party? and that disconnect is one of my critiques. the conventions of a collaborative adventuring RPG system feel somewhat shoehorned into a precariously agonistic and brutal context.
on
the other hand, why should these systems of make-believe need to make that
much sense? as long as we're having fun, we may as well roll with it and see what
happens. what I gather second-hand from dearest husband's dabbling in
Warhammer proper is a picture of flashy, hectic, intergalactic warrior
factions slapping at each other as desperately as possible, collateral
damage be praised. is that fun? it must be for some people. Henry Cavill is a big fan, apparently.
of course my perspective is only one, and quite a limited one at that. thankfully friend David's one-shot of Wrath & Glory did not revel so much in the tortuously, excessively endless hierarchies of otherworldly war and pestilence and exploitation. in that playthrough, Warhammer felt almost like a more somber, haunted version of Star Wars. we did have fun. and this is the great thing about RPGs at their core— they are flexible, malleable things. every story can bend itself into something a little bit different to suit the people playing it.
similarly, my "film noir" label for World of Darkness may not match what everyone else sees when they look into it. my own bookish, academic background may indeed color my view of that world's shadowy archives and its alternatingly grunge/emo/punk aesthetic. and my experiences roleplaying in various instances of this world have added their own lenses. I'm drawn to what seems mysterious and romantic about it; there is tragedy, and darkness, and even horror in this world too, but those negatives edge the world so vividly as to make it all seem beautiful.
both core books are relatively approachable and well organized. World of Darkness
focuses from its first lines on the deeply human and transcendently
mystical properties of stories and storytelling. it is a game that
invites you to collaboratively shape a beautiful plot arc across the
haunting not-quite-emptiness of every deep, dark, shadowy unknown. the core book is the simplest of them, and once you learn that framework you can play with it in myriad ways.
Wrath & Glory
leans more into the uniqueness of its setting (see above about its blatant a-lot-ness) and the endless
possibilities for customizing one’s experience within such a mad,
hopeless, violent future. its process and set-up seem a little more
hand-holding, more limited at first. the book provides a selection of
archetypes that can be carved or smoothed out into unique personas for
each player to pilot through the warped and violent chaos of it all.
story seems less important than identity and mood, somehow.
in
both books, interspersed with the rules and procedures for playing in
both of these core books, there are vignettes or excerpts or letters or
quotes from in-world sources. various genres show up: academic papers,
diary entries, epigraphs, first-person present-tense interior
monologues. I'm not sure if all RPG books do this sort of thing, but I’m
going to watch out for how other systems may or may not use similar
meta-textual content to evoke a certain verisimilitude.
the
other convention of RPG books I want to watch out for is the two-column
layout. I'm tempted to say most if not all RPG books use this design
choice to save space and make their mountains of content more readable
(or both). we'll see if it's true for my tournament contenders, anyway.
if you have a counter example for me, please do point us to it.
I
imagine my commentary on the book design and formatting of these
publications could easily take up dozens more paragraphs, but that’s not
what this tournament is about, so I'm gonna stop before I get too
carried away.
they may proscribe different dice, but the gameplay mechanics of these two games are actually fairly similar—a fact that friend David remarked upon when he first suggested the system to us. World of Darkness uses d10s exclusively and Wrath & Glory d6s exclusively. for each test or challenge, you’ll roll multiple dice based on a combination of attribute, skill, any bonuses, etc. and then any success (an 8 or higher for most rolls in World of Darkness; 4 or higher for most in Wrath & Glory) counts as success. multiple successes may mean your character succeeds to a greater degree.
World of Darkness characters all have a basic set of 9 attributes in Physical, Mental, and Social categories, with 8 skills in each category as well. the numbers you choose for those traits form the core of your character, and from there you'll calculate health points, willpower points, and morality. (now that I think about it, these three kind of sort of map out a character's wellspring of physical, mental, and social energy... like, if you run out of health, you're incapacitated physically. if you run out of willpower, you lose your ability to resist manipulation. and if your morality drops too low, your ability to socialize normally is damaged because most folk will see you as a despicable villain. hmm.)
on top of basic stats and skills, each character also gets a handful of merits or advantages— extra abilities or resources to round out who they are and what they can do. there's also space for equipment, gear, weapons, etc. if your game requires those to be spelled out.
last but not least, World of Darkness also uses a Virtue and Vice mechanic based on the traditional cardinal virtues and seven deadly sins. it's not my favorite part of the system, to be honest, mostly because I always struggle to apply it in my actual roleplaying. and that bias tempts me to label it as gimmicky and unnecessary... but on the other hand those rules do serve a purpose in supporting meaningful roleplay and rewarding it with mechanical benefits. when a character enacts their virtue or vice, they can regain willpower points, and those points can be extremely handy for adding dice— 3 whole d10s— to any challenge roll. for example, my character Miranda has used 6 of her 7 willpower points and only normally regains them at a rate of one per in-game day. I can regain them for her faster, and thus benefit from the 3 extra dice more often, if I roleplay Miranda's faith (her determination to find meaning in even the darkest of circumstances) or her pride (her knee-jerk insistence that her plans are always the best ones). but it's not always easy (for me) to steer a collaborative story toward those self-centered moments. but perhaps I'll continue getting better at it.
Wrath & Glory gives characters 7 attributes (strength, toughness, agility, initiative, willpower, intellect, and fellowship)— which seems like so many even though 7 is obviously fewer than 9— and 17 skills, each connected to a key attribute more in the manner of the D&D system. those base stats feed in to calculations for maximum wounds and shock, defense abilities, resolve, and conviction.
having only played the one
short session (so far) in this system, I'm less familiar with its nuances. but another cool mechanics thing to mention is the Wrath and
Glory points system. Wrath points accumulate for individual characters
and allow players to re-roll dice, heal their character, or take narrative
control of the scene in some small way. Glory points accumulate for the
whole group of players in a shared pool, and anyone can use those points
to add dice to their rolls or to deal more damage in combat. the shared
resource of Glory points is pretty interesting. will players consider their party members' needs when drawing from the pool, or will everyone feel entitled to take from it what they want in a more competitive way? lots of options.
as we all know, three weeks and two character sheets up against years' worth of play = potential for a highly unbalanced evaluation. but of course judging these two systems against each other like this isn't fair at all. what could be fair? there's no such thing. and my goal with this project isn't fairness— it's exploration and consideration and writing it all down along the way. that's enough.
I'm not going to give ratings here or anything. at most I can sum up that I find one system more comfortable and beautiful and full of potential, while the other is mildly intriguing despite its puzzling loudness, so far. I have had more chance to find my own style within the former, and barely any with the latter. so even though I won't even officially choose a winner yet, we all strongly suspect it would be World of Darkness, do we not?
but I will only announce the first 8 winners and losers at the very end of all 8 opening round matches. it will be more dramatic and suspenseful that way. and it gives me more time to marinate in the decision itself, which perhaps will make up for the highly unbalanced nature of this whole thing.
next new one-shot (tonight!): Werewolf: the Forsaken
next match-up review (soon!): Dungeons & Dragons 5e vs Werewolf: the Forsaken
there's not been much of anything new in my courses for several semesters now... but at long last, this spring, I am teaching a very brand new course-- brand new both to me and to everyone:
HU 145: Themes in Humanities (the art and history of podcasts)
HU 145 is a sort of catch-all lower-level Humanities credit, required of all students so we can make sure our pilots and engineers have some well-roundedness about them. I have specifically themed my version of this course around "the art and history of podcasts," because why the heck not. it has been so, so fun to plan for this little 100-level intro course. nothing like it has ever been taught on this campus. and maybe nothing like it has been taught anywhere, since I have been making it all up as I go.
the welcome note / course description I wrote for students / the course catelog goes more or less like this:
This semester, we will explore podcasts and other audio productions from a critical perspective. We will practice our listening skills while examining the conventions of radio and audio production, analyzing the styles and genres of specific productions, and thinking carefully about the cultural contexts in which audio media circulate ideas and contribute to public (or not so public) discourse. Tracing similarities and differences across the history of recorded sound, we will discuss how audio media has been used to record historical events and stories, to foster fandoms and communities, and to shape or re-shape human cultures.alongside two sections of that awesomeness, I've got one good old standard section of COM 221: Technical Report Writing.
my students all seem pretty cool so far. it's early in the semester-- we're all still getting to know each other. I trust that learning is happening, little by little, in all of our spongey curious brains.
--
relatively unrelatedly, I'm gonna toss some recent photo bits in this post. do enjoy the randomness.
foggy winter morning, not long ago
weaving, upside down
red toenails, contemplative pug puppy
the sun and the sky and the mountains somewhere down near Tuscon
blooming orchid. light-starved succulents.
my first Tunisian crochet project: a shawlette of ruffles. (this is the yarn-- isn't it lovely?)
a month or two ago I came across this almost-finished fingerless mitt in one of my craft piles. the rest of the thumb is all that needs knitting (still, I confess, even now at the time of this writing).
but it did need a partner. I have two hands, and if one hand is cold the other probably is too. you know how it is.
but because finishing the thumb of this fingerless mitt did not sound like the most entertaining knitting task at the time, I instead fished up the leftover grey yarn from another craft pile and started on the cuff of the second mitt. I figured I would get them both to the same point of thumblessness and then do both thumbs in succession. easy. a perfect plan.
so that's what I did. or rather, started to do. and then...
mishap the first:
I absently knitted right past the point where I should've started increasing for the thumb gusset section... so I had to tear several rows back and then go find the actual pattern to reference properly, rework it, and then...
mishap the second:
somehow I lost one of my double-pointed bamboo needles. little Hamilton is most likely to blame... but did he chew up a whole knitting needle? or did he just hide it insufferably impossibly well somewhere?
I may never know.
but what I do know, after the discovery that we'll just have to count as...
mishap the third:
... is that all this recent mitt knitting was completely pointless!
for lo and behold-- after searching at three different craft stores in three different states while I was traveling in May, and after finally purchasing new double-pointed needles of the apparently rare size of 2.5 (or 3mm)-- lo and behold what did I find when I tidied and sorted out my horde of craft things the other week?
I found one full and complete version of this same fingerless mitt, just waiting for its thumbless partner to match.
here they all are together, an almost trio. I don't think there is yarn enough for two full pairs. I'll have to think of something else for this grey yarn. something simpler. without pesky thumb sections.
(none of this was at all as thrilling as my wintertime knitting mishap of eight months ago, by the way.)
in the meantime, the poor, unnecessary third cuff shall be ripped back one final time.
and eventually, someday, I'll have to get on with knitting that unfinished thumb after all.
this machine followed me home today.
I wish I knew more about its history, but the museum curator had only this story to tell:
... once, not very long ago, an elderly gentleman donated it carelessly, haphazardly, with some mild hope that it could find a use or purpose among the museum's collections, but also with perfect willingness to chuck it in a dumpster if not.
the curator could not leave this old thing to such a fate, but nor could he keep it for the museum. its lack of reliable provenance and the museum's lack of storage space meant that someone else would have to rescue it...
so I did.
the machine itself has plenty of stories etched all over its varied wooden parts. after poring over a few books from the guild's library, I'm learning to recognize some of the signs-- grooves along the flyer where twisted fiber has rubbed against the wood over and over again enough to leave a mark. the extra-smooth dip along the front of the treadle where someone's foot put energy through the crank and drive wheel, into the twist that made the yarn. there are even tiny bits of fiber left on the bobbin hooks, from who knows how long ago. my guess is that it's wool fluff caught and torn and matted around the metal, but I'm not sure at all.
after carefully propping the pieces of this wheel into my car's back seat, I rushed over to the local yarn store to see what books they might lend me. this evening, I read through the entirety of The Care and Feeding of Spinning Wheels. I know what all the parts are called, now: wheel posts, tension screw, footman, maidens, and so on.
this poor lost wheel is less broken than it looked at first. I've already acquired a new drive band for it, thanks to Karma at Fiber Creek, and for now some cotton string is holding the footman and treadle together. a few missing pegs will need replacing somehow, which doesn't seem too difficult.
the whorl and bobbin shaft seem quite rusted together, so that may be a challenge to deal with. one of the small bobbin hooks is broken, but that isn't so important in the grand scheme of things-- all the rest are there.
the wheel's front leg is crusted with wood glue from some sort of drastic repair, but so far it's sturdy enough. maybe I'll see about replacing or repairing it more elegantly, someday.
here's a photo of it all assembled again, after a basic cleaning and dusting.
it needs more cleaning, probably some sanding and oiling or polishing too. then I can see about using it...
my brief evening of research has informed me that this is a Saxony wheel, maybe a century old, or more. it looks quite similar to this one, but much less damaged. this one is pretty similar too, though it looks newer (or at least cleaner-- my new pet has sections that are caked in grime).
I have tons more research to do. what are the odds I can finish all the cleaning, refurbishing, and polishing of this beauty before fall semester starts?
in December, as part of my end-of-semester/birthday/holiday celebrations, I picked up a simple drop spindle and two 4-ounce packets of Kraemer Mauch roving in two colors-- "pomegranate" and "oregano"-- from my local yarn shop (Fiber Creek).
and then I used all the youtube videos and blog posts to figure out how to turn it into yarn. I'm still learning, practicing, and enjoying the simplicity and beauty of the whole process. add twist to bits of fiber, and it becomes something else.
something differently usable.
and now this is what I'm using that pomegranate pink yarn for. a lovely crochet hat.
mid-June in Arizona is not a time one needs a hat, but that's okay. what else does one do with only 140 yards of handspun pink yarn?
this is the hat pattern I love, from a blog called Yarning for Sanity. I make mine less slouchy than the photos there show, and it fits my head and hair and face just delightfully. I have made several hats from this pattern and at least two (one red, one grey, and maybe a blue one too?) are currently kicking around in our coat closet.
I love the hat this pattern makes, and I simply love the pattern itself (though on this work-through I have made a few adjustments that make the V-puff stitches line up more thoroughly from beginning to end). this crochet pattern ultimately writes itself into the object you're making as you make it. once you're five rows in, you don't need the words anymore-- the stitches become readable in themselves. it's easy enough to remember what goes where at which intervals. otherwise, just a few quick references to check row counts is really all you need. lovely.
the idea of reading objects is very cool. reading craft projects is especially cool-- at the very least it makes it easier to know what you're crafting and whether it's coming out as it should.
and with regard to others' knitted objects, in if a given piece of knitting is legible enough and a given person is literate enough in knitting stitches, that's magic. inspiration! reverse engineering! creative remixology and all that.