Random thoughts 1: Realis, Guild Simulator 2025, Environmental Catastrophe

Hiya. I survived Covid and I feel like making a blog post to talk about stuff I've been thinking about and working on. 

First up, I've been meaning to talk about the Realis campaign I ran a few months back. It was amazing, I had a great time with the system. I ran a short little story set in The Fisher Moons. I've tried to write a little bit about it, but each time led me diving into research about Theory and left me thinking “I'm not smart enough to write about how good this game is.” Which is honestly right up Realis’ alley. So I'll put that on hold until I've done some more reading, and hopefully run it again/finished up The Fisher Moons setting. If you take anything from this, Realis is an amazing game that everyone should play at least once. 

I've also been thinking a lot about how ttrpg’s are such a big tool to let people play with Genre Lit (yes I have been listening to too much Shelved by Genre). While these thoughts stew, I've also been on my journey through every Final Fantasy game, and this has put me in the jrpg headspace. While there I ran across Sword World, specifically the Fellow systems it uses. Simply, if a player is going to miss a session, they can make an NPC of their character. They can't die, but they also can only take 4 actions during combat, each with its own little dialogue provided by the Player, and decided upon randomly with a die roll. 

Of course my first thought was “I wanna play this solo” and so I've begun working on a way to do that. Through the premise of running an adventurer’s guild, your goal will be building up these fellows and sending them on missions. Now I'm probably making it more complex than it needs to, but I've been digging into baseball franchise sims and trying to draw a little inspo from those, to drive forward the Guild Manager aspects. I can tell this is going to be a really long project that requires a lot of balancing, but I think it's going to be neat. Especially since there really isn’t already something like this, ttrpg or video game. If there is, let me know pls.

Lastly, I was really moved by a new La Dispute song called Environmental Catastrophe Film. Its making me think about how to translate its themes into a horror game, so I’ve been brainstorming some Liminal Horror monsters. This might turn into something, or it might just be some personal writing exercises. Either way, cool song, listen to it.