Nekoweb

I set up a site on nekoweb. It's pretty cool I reccomend checking it out. I don't necessarily plan on switching over entirely dw. Currently I intend to use both sites and just see which I enjoy using more over time :3.

Check it out here!

I'm Back!

Heya folks, I know it's been a minute since I've been active here. My laptop finally conked it and I haven't had access to a new one until about a week ago.

In that time I haven't just been sitting around doing nothing though (that said my mental health has been the worst it's been so I've been doing a bit of nothing). I'm getting better at making music (I think) I'm working on a song right now and I made one with my bestie and I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of it. Also giving rpg maker a try (and godot but I'm less confident in my ability to make something of that so don't get ur hopes up)

Okay I'd also like to address tumblr. So as ur probably aware Matt Mullenweg (the CEO) is being a dick in all sorts of ways, I'm not the one to recount the situation it's probably only a google search away. Anyways, I'm still using tumblr, I think they'll have to drag me off that site kicking and screaming. However I'm also on cohost if you'd prefer to follow me there. If cohost and other microblogging sites go down I'm gonna stick around here. If all else fails you can hmu on discord, my url is the same as everywhere else. I'd like to not lose any friends because of this. Like call it silly but some of the people I've met through tumblr have really helped me and I want to stay in touch no matter what.

So because of all this I'm experimenting with a lot of different sites so gimme suggestions yall. I'm gonna try and get back in the habit of updating the rss feed for the site. Okay I think that's all the updates for now. Sorry to be gone so long :3

Coming Soon!

I know it's been ages, my laptop broke and I'm waiting on a new one, updates in march ^-^

How to Create a Campaign

It's been a while hasn't it? In fact it's been quite a while since I made a ttrpg post so lets do that

I've been thinking recently about how I write campaigns and thought I'd share my wisdom with the world. Essentially it boils down to two methods depending on if you want a sandbox campaing or a "railroad" (It's not a "railroad" but I'm not sure what other term to use there, more on this later). A sandbox campaign usually lasts longer, though it doesn't have too, the downside being that it's more likely to fizzle out than go out with a bang (this again, depends on a lot of factors and isn't always true).

Starting with sandbox because that's what I'm running at the moment. You obviously need a concept first, a general idea of the world you're playing in and the feel of the game. I like to follow the rule of 3 when prepping any game so I'll come up with 3. They could be super specific, listing out a number of different worlds and the details and such, or they could be a bit more vague like "Would you folks prefer to play High Fantasy, Low Fantasy, or Science Fantasy". What I do next is aask my players if they have any requests. I usually have some ideas knocking around already by now and it's good to see if anyone shares them (In the game I'm running at the moment this took the campaign from science fantasy warfare to ghibli inspired post-post apocalypse). The key, as in may things, is communication. Especially at this stage keeping secrets will only harm your experience. I like to get my players to make characters before going any further and find out what they want to play so I know what to focus on. Once I know what people want to play I note down factions and NPCs and then try and tangle them all together in the tightest knot I can. From there I build the rest of the world around them so tht the world itself if built to facilitate these characters.

I compile all the knowledge of the world that the PCs would have (This should be most if not all of what you have at this point) and send it too my players. This usually sparks more ideas about the characters and the game gets even more interesting. Once everyone has a pretty decent idea of who they are and their place in the world, I start working on villains. I try to use those created by the PCs first, and tie them up with a couple of my own invention.

After this you should have a massive sandbox world for your players to run around in!

The other "railroad" method is better for a lot of groups. In this method before talking to your players at all (well maybe after checking what they're interested in) you decide what the campaign is about, who the villain is etc. You then go to your players and say "this is what this campaign is about, make your characters such that they fit in and are motivated to ruin this guys day". Pretty simple really. If you have the right players for it this can create much more purposeful feeling campaigns whereas the sadox can feel messy, but it all depends on your group. Sometimes even the same group can favour different approaches depending on the game.

All in all, just talk to your players about things, GMs that get obsessed with keeping secrets only harm their games.

Gloom Division Hype

So, one thing about me is that I have an unhealthy obsession with i DONT KNOW HOW BUT THEY FOUND ME. This morning, we finally got a bunch of news about the next album, GLOOM DIVISION. In a week or so we'll be getting the first single, WHAT LOVE? which is gonna release sometime around 1am in my timezone so I'm not sleeping :3.

Here's my thoughts on the tracklist why not

DOWNSIDE honestly no clue what this is gonna be like, it's the opening track so it's surely a banger. I'm intrigued
GLOOMTOWN BRATS I get the feeling I'm gonna be forcing my friends to listen to this one. Dallon can't deny he's emo now.
INFATUATION Supposedly Dallon's favourite, considering how obsessed I've been with Kiss Goodnight and Clusterhug this is definitely exciting.
WHAT LOVE? So, while the title initially implies it's a song about a loveless relationship or something like that (and it might be) we also had a teaser with the caption "What love could get this violent?" which makes me think it's either about an abusive realtionship, or similar to Mx. Sinister, and about obssession and stalking etc.
SPKOTHDVL obviously a play on "Speak of the Devil" I am very intrigued, I have no clue what the song's gonna be about but I'm definitely gonna be paying attention to it.
SIXFT Six feet, so a grave. The MCR fanatic inside me is excited, I like songs about death.
FIND ME I'm a bit lost here, my guess is it's another love song, but I wouldn't be surprised if I was wrong about that o one.
KISS AND TELL Ironically I don't think this one's a love song. Based solely on the name, my guess it's gonna be kinda like Second Boys Will Be First Choice in that it's framed as a story being told, probably involving some secrets. I'm inspired to draw something.
A LETTER HERE WE GO THIS IS AN OLD BROBECKS SONG. You can actually go download it from here (that's my page, it's not mobile friendly at time of writing) but yeah, that's beautifull, and I can't stop thinking about it.
SATANIC PANIC Oh ho ho here we go. Anyone who plays D&D or is really into pokemon is all to familiar with the Satanic Panic. I doubt this song is that vague, it's probably about something related to satanism or being accused of satanism or something like that, but it does make me excited.
SUNNYSIDE This is either going to be the happiest, or the darkest track on the album, calling it now.
iDIOTS OF Oz So, first thing I notice is the capitalisation. The lower case "i" at the start is obviously similar to the name iDKHOW. But there's a lower case "z" as well, I'm not sure what that means, I'm more confused than anything but I like the mystery.

And here's the art for ya!

I LOVE THESE so much, this album is feeling like it was made for me and me specifically.

I will be back when WHAT LOVE? drops.

Bearblog

a mutual introduced me to bearblog a little blogging website that I really like. I set one up for more personal posts than what's here (some posts might go there and here perhaps). Check it out if you want at https://astralsea.bearblog.dev

Sorry for very few updates to the site recently, I've been busy as all hell

Responsiveness (responsivity?)

I have no clue how to spell that and I am not going to look it up

I'm testing and trying to get the site to function properly on mobile, it works well enough at the moment but the menu that's normally diplayed at the side is turned into a button (yeah this is a layout someone else designed, I've modified it quite a bit though) and there's no response to it being pressed, working on it.

Oddly, there's a visitor count I tried to add a while back that doesn't show up on Firefox for PC, but does for firefox android (the visitor count still isn't correct though, I'll probably remove that soon

There's gonna be a new episode of Fionna and Cake tonight, hopefully that motivates me to re-write the post I wrote about it before my computer crashed

Excited about Fionna and Cake

Fionna and Cake is coming out on the 31st and I could not be more excited. Now obviously the show is focusing on the adventure time multiverse but sosmething I'm really excited to hopefully see is the gender-bent versions of some characters.

We've seen Tree-Trunks before but he didn't get any lines, but I can imagine him being the internets favourite character if he actually shows up.

Another thing is, perhaps we'll see a girl version of the Lich? I don't know how likely it is considering Fionna and Cake are getting their own villain who (as far as we know) isn't related to the Lich (My guess is the red guy has some connection to the Citadel)

I'm also weirdly excited about whatever the show''s intro is going to be. Like,the original shows intro is so iconic, but I fully expect Fionna and Cake to do something completely different

5e, CR, WBN, and Daggerheart

Boy we sure do like acronyms in this community don't we? I was looking into Darrington Press' upcoming system Daggerheart and whilst looking for it and simultaneously listening to Worlds Beyond Number I was seeing a lot of videos about how people are "dissapointed by campaign 3" and a few thoughts began to solidify in my head.

I personally have stopped listening to CR very regularly purely because weekly updates that are upwards of 4 hours long are just a bit much for me, but I have caught up enough to know what people are talking about. While reading though something occured to me, "Could it just be the way CR is handling the campaign in 5e?". Now I'll admit I don't think it's just that, I recon there have been a few slip ups this campaign that have caused some people to feel less interested. But I think I can illustrate this by comparing it to Worlds Beyond Number.

So Worlds Beyond Number is a 5e based game, like Critical Role, but the big difference is where Critical Role battles the mechanics of the game to accomodate the story they want to tell (A large number of reflavoured features etc.) WBN just pulls back the mechanics that aren't needed for the story. They do away with the traditional ideas that 5e assumes (well some of them) and replace them completely. Take Ame's class the witch, rather than reflavour warlock or druid, they say she's a witch and just give her the abilities one would assume a witch would have. They change the way magic works for certain characters, they aren't afraid to change the core mechanics of the game (that being said I don't really see why they're using 5e in the first place). I could go on but hopefully you get the point.

Before we get to Daggerheart I want to mention something about 5e and the hate it receives (funny, around the time 5e was released I wouldn't believe I'd be saying that). Yes, 5e has a lot of problems and is an inherently flawed system made by a scumbag company (remember that the designers themselves aren't to blame, it's wotc that's the problem) but I've started to see people irrationally hate it, refusing to engage with content because it has the gall to use 5e. Not a lot mind you, and no offense to these people I think they're just getting carried away. Just maybe take it down a notch? (un-bam/ref)

Daggerheart gives me hope. I don't ecxpect it to be a phenomenal mind blowing game, but I fully expect it to be a good, solid system built precisely for the stories CR wants to tell (I'm excited to try it out when it releases, I doubt it'll become my game of choice but I'm excited nonetheless). The Character creation using cards seems a little gimmicky to me but who knows, maybe it really will speed up character creation. The Dice system sounds interesting if you engage in it properly, creating custom tokens to represent your bonuses sounds really fun and I might steal that for all my longer running games. I hope CR uses the Daggerheart system in their next game (I woudl e very surpirsed i they did not) because I think it'll really reinvigorate things

Anyways I'm not ragging on C3, it's fine I just reckon it's not made for 5e

Accessibility in the indieweb

There's a blog post I want to draw attention to because I think it points out a massive issue in this sphere and especially neocities.

If you've taken a quick look at the neocities explore page, you probably noticed how almost all sites are covered in blinking flashing images. Don't get me wrong, I love them. Buuuut the problem is very few of these sites contain warnings about their flashing images. I'm not here to tell you what to do with your site but please be considerate about who might see your page

Anyway read the post it explained this a lot better than I did

New blog page

A new blog page to replace the old blog page!

I'm sure anyone would agree this is a lot nicer, I'm trying to diversify the look of the site some, so that's something to look forward to. Gonna try and keep things organised and post here more often. Maybe, tumblr still exists so it's difficult to remember to post anything here.