February 2019 Newsletter

Hello!

Welcome to the February 2019 newsletter. There's lots of stuff going on in Ranged Touch world, so let me lay it out for you.

Mages & Murderdads continues at pace. Danni is generally displeased with Torment: Tides of Numenera, and a new episode of that will come out on Thursday. CMRN made a bit of an error with my scheduling, so if you're on the Mages & Murderdads podcast feed you have already heard this one. If you're a pure YouTuber, then it'll be new!

Game Studies Study Buddies is also going great. Last month was Gina Bloom's Gaming The Stage, and later this month there will be a new episode on De Peuter and Dyer-Witheford's Games of Empire. It's a big jump from classical theater to games as tools of control and neoimperialism...or is it?

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

We also have a new announcement this month! We're starting a small game publication on our site called The Outlands. It is geared toward people who want to publish their first piece of games criticism, and you can see how to submit here. 

Our first piece published at The Outlands is by Marielle Neisler and is titled "Queer Pain: The Missing and the Mechanics of Self-Harm." There are some content warnings and spoilers for the game.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

We've recorded the first episode of Helpful Homonculi, CMRN and Danni's tabletop role-playing podcast funded by the generous Ranged Touch Rangers. That's you! It will come out this week.

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

We've been a little light on YouTube content through January, but CMRN and Danni did do a video where they played a sealed tournament of the newest Magic set and talked through their choices, decisions, and strategies. You can watch it here. 

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

Danni's special content this month is a great, mammoth review of The Perilous Wilds, a supplement to Dungeon World made by  Lampblack & Brimstone.  He's going to close us out this month...here's his review! 

 --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 

For the last several weeks I have been scribbling in a journal that looks like this in purple, red, and blue ink (color coded for thoughts, dangers, and discoveries, respectively) trying to figure out the political history of a city called Citadel. I do this on trains and in the words of Kunzelman on the inaugural episode of Helpful Homunculi - my fellow passengers are almost certainly “deeply disturbed by the sight.”

Here’s the thing though: I didn’t even make the Citadel. The Perilous Wilds did. 

Well, really my players in my new campaign and I collaborated to form the skeleton of the world, but it was through a really cool process in The Perilous Wilds. Through a formal, six step process the GM and players create the site they start in, their homes - broadly construed, places that are important to them, and more. My bard, it seems, fell in love in a run-down coastal town before the fantasy-equivalent of the foreign service called him away to a new assignment. There’s a black obsidian door at the top of a terrifying stone staircase at the peak of the tallest mountain - no one has been inside. Now I relish the opportunity to fill in the details of this map and see what happens when old lovers reunite or old passageways are opened.

Wilds isn’t just a map creation tool - it basically reworks the way overland travel happens in Dungeon World. 

In basic Dungeon World, the “Undertake a Perilous Journey” move looks like this:

Undertake a Perilous Journey

When you travel through hostile territory, choose one member of the party to act as trailblazer, one to scout ahead, and one to be quartermaster. Each character with a job to do rolls+Wis. 

• On a 10+:
• the quartermaster reduces the number of rations required by one
• the trailblazer reduces the amount of time it takes to reach your destination (the GM will say by how much)
• the scout will spot any trouble quick enough to let you get the drop on it
• On a 7–9, each role performs their job as expected: the normal number of rations are consumed, the journey takes about as long as expected, no one gets the drop on you but you don’t get the drop on them either.

You can’t assign more than one job to a character. If you don’t have enough party members, or choose not to assign a job, treat that job as if it had been assigned and the responsible player had rolled a 6.

Distances in Dungeon World are measured in rations. A ration is the amount of supplies used up in a day. Journeys take more rations when they are long or when travel is slow.

A perilous journey is the whole way between two locations. You don’t roll for one day’s journey and then make camp only to roll for the next day’s journey, too. Make one roll for the entire trip.

This move only applies when you know where you’re going. Setting off to explore is not a perilous journey. It’s wandering around looking for cool things to discover. Use up rations as you camp and the GM will give you details about the world as you discover them.

It is a lot of info in that one move. 

In Wilds, this move is broken up a little differently:

Undertake a Perilous Journey 

When you travel through dangerous lands, and not on a safe route, indicate the course you want to take on the map and ask the GM how far you should be able to get before needing to Make Camp. If you’re exploring with no set destination, indicate which way you go. Then, choose one party member to Scout Ahead (page 26), and one to Navigate (page 27), resolving those moves in that order.

Ok, so it looks like some stuff is really broken off here - let’s look at Scout Ahead:

Scout Ahead 

When you take point and look for anything out of the ordinary, roll +WIS: 

10+  Choose 2 from the list below. 

7-9  Choose 1 from the list below. 

6-   Mark XP, and GM makes a move.

• You get the drop on whatever lies ahead
• You discern a beneficial aspect of the terrain—shortcut, shelter, or tactical advantage (describe it)
• You make a Discovery (ask the GM)
• You notice sign of a nearby Danger — ask the GM what it is, and what it might signify

At first, when I flipped to this section I was a little disappointed - “Make a Discovery? So, it involves the same unstructured leave-it-do-the-GM play as the original DW move?” But this is not so! Dangers and Discoveries are codified in Perilous Wilds. They are defined and, whats more, there are tables where you can generate them. @Rickenharp on twitter has even made an online generator that uses these tables at https://perilous-wilds.geekwire.net/welcome. In the words of Adam Koebel: https://twitter.com/skinnyghost/status/738871035802451968

So what does this mean for play? It means I’ve generated a dozen or so Dangers and Discoveries that I can pull from when my players decide to just head out into the woods or down into a Dungeon. I think this will also feel really organic and empowering for the players, because it will be there rolls that cause them to find/be confronted by/stumble into these wondrous/horrible/terrifying things.

There’s more to Perilous Wilds - you can take elements from it piecemeal. New rules on Hirelings, a redo of the Ranger class to fit the aforementioned rules and the new rules on overland travel, as well as a ton of tables and name generators inspired by Yoruba, Hungarian, Indonesian and Finnish. 

Here’s the one criticism I have of a product that would otherwise be wholly delightful - the art, done by Keny Widjaja, is generally very whimsical and cute and appropriate, and I really liked the cover-art, but the depiction of darker-skinned characters leans heavily on tropey “tribesman” depictions. I’m a big fan of depicting all kinds of different skin-tones, genders, and body types in all different kind of garb and equipment in my fantasy, and this rubbed me the wrong way. Further, Widjaja’s particular “cartoony” style when applied to these characters has a deeply unfortunate resemblance to blackface (It wasn’t just my interpretation - multiple folks I showed agreed.)

Other that the blemishes in art, I would recommend Perilous Wilds. Even if you don’t use Dungeon World as your system of choice, I think it has some cool ideas about combining randomness and collaborative storytelling that can work on your tabletop.