Trick's Tales

 Here are some random provisions, sundries, and treasures from my Mongolian Empire-inspired game.

 I did editing for the intro adventure of a project that's now live on Backerkit ! It's a post-modern fantasy city setting inspired by Prague, full of cats, and the adventure is a complex story of a ship and its sailors/passengers across 4 different moments in its history. I spoke with Sparkle, the lead writer on the project, about Prague's influence on her work, the importance of diversity, and the experience of translation, both across languages and systems. The team is based in Czechia, so they first translated the 60-page preview into English themselves, then had me revise it for clarity and cultural sensitivity. It was a fascinating experience to work on a translation project, and the worldbuilding has a distinctive combination of tones: both whimsy - talking cats! dust fairies! a magical being made of doormats! did I mention the cats! - and real darkness - inequality, debt bondage, suicide. It feels like if Terry Pratchett wrote about darker themes in addition to the ...

I think fantasy political ideologies should be hard to map onto real world political ideologies. This is inspired by Disco Elysium and Esoteric Ebb, both very very very good games about politics that nevertheless feel somewhat politically unimaginative. So have some new fantasy and sci fi ideologies and factions.