L. Rhodes @lrhodes@merveilles.town

That's not to say that #ttrpg settings shouldn't engage race, nor that they shouldn't do so through the notion of fantasy "races." But they need to do so directly, and thoughtfully. Otherwise, the ability to play as dwarves, elves, ents, what-have-you becomes an open occasion to role-play biological determinism. Those ostensibly racial characteristics become, in a very literal sense, the content of your character.

There are a few mechanical bonuses when you're playing as an elf or a dwarf in DW, but they don't amount to much unless you make them. In the meantime, you've added this whole notion of race that is biologically and culturally deterministic. Which demands engagement, but rarely receives it — at least, not in a sufficiently meaningful way. #ttrpg

One thing that bugs me about Dungeon World — and, consequently, one reason I'd like to play it with an original setting — is that it more or less retains the "fantasy races" convention from D&D, which is all sorts of fraught, but also brings very little to the game apart from the appeal of inhabiting a cosmetically Tolkienesque world. #ttrpg

Oh! And Arc: https://momatoes.com/arc-rpg/

Settings-wise, that covers a lotta ground. And I've called a lid on new orders for now, at least until we've run a few campaigns in some of the settings I already own.

Though I wouldn't mind finding really interesting settings in the gothic horror, post-apocalypse, urban fantasy, space opera (Legacy, maybe?), and kids' fantasy genres. #ttrpg

Ultimately, I'd like to build a stable of 6-12 interesting #ttrpg settings I'm comfortable running. So far, I've run:

• Ultraviolet Grasslands
• Dungeon World

I have hard copies of:

• Yokai Hunters Society
• Mothership
• White Hack
• Slumbering Ursine Dunes
• Witchburner

On the way are:

• Blades in the Dark
• Troika!

And I've got PDFs of:

• Pariah
• Lancer
• Sleepaway
• Obachan Panic
• Mausritter

Yes, I have a problem.

What I'd really like is to run Yokai Hunters Society for my group. It's PbtA-adjacent, so there'd be only the slightest learning curve adjusting from Dungeon World, and it would useful to have it for monster-of-the-week one-shots between larger campaigns. Beyond which, I get bored very quickly with the generic fantasy setting implied by DW. #ttrpg

Reading through The White Hack (which I bought for running any old-school settings that might strike my group's fancy) has really given me a feel for how much streamlining goes into making a system "rules lite." #ttrpg

"If the problem with those features were that they were confusing to new users, the correct solution to that would have been teaching the user about them. You know, an onboarding process. Which by the way is also another thing that is completely missing from the iOS app at this moment." https://asininetech.com/2021/07/31/irreconcilable-differences/

#theStudio Mining this comp for artists I've never encountered before. Some really great stuff on here. https://7klassik.bandcamp.com/album/wind-layers

The Harry Potter series really understands that legacy admission is the dream of every child.

Kept wondering why my phone battery was zeroing out by evening. Turns out I had my brightness pinned at 100%. D'oh!

Even more ironically, perhaps, Rodinson's purpose in minimizing the role of religious abolitionists (even to the point of eliding their existence) is to undercut the Occidental view of Islam as essentially theocratic. Religious ideology, he's saying, has very little real influence over government, which is driven by motives related to temporal power.

Were religious abolitionists the only, or even principle, force behind the end of US slavery? Obviously not. But Rodinson — on the heels of a warning that sociological causation is too complicated to reduce to one ideology — is diminishing the role of religious opposition to nothing, in order to maximize the appeal of a Marxist interpretation. Ironic, really, and it puts me on guard.

Excuse me? Maybe elsewhere, but in the US, at least, there were prominent religious abolitionists who absolutely advocated for the wholesale eradication of slavery. There's evidence to suggest that they helped precipitate the actual end of slavery here — hence, the popularity of "John Brown's Body" as a Civil War marching song. Nor, AFAIK, had slavery outlived its economic usefulness to the ruling class — which is one reason they keep cooking up loopholes, e.g. prison labor.

Reading this: https://www.nyrb.com/products/muhammad …and feeling all sorts of skeptical based on the author's handling of sociology in the introduction. For example, this: