Niko _____ Works

Note: for the sake of brevity I'm going to assume you've read the Valeria Loves review of Fabula Ultima, since I'm writing this with the mental context of "Fabula Ultima as Ema expects it to be played."

As of writing, my Fabula Ultima group has gotten through session zero (which, as I'm learning is pretty standard, ended up being two sessions) and three sessions of adventuring. I won't regale you with the details—as I said in My Lessons 0, I don't want this to be a direct after-action report—but according to my players they've generally been enjoying the experience, even with the usual system growing pains. Now that rubber's met road, though, I have a better sense of both what I'm finding difficult, what I'm finding easy, and how I'm having to mess with the rules-as-written to better fit what I'm trying to run. So, I want to take this post to collect those thoughts and maybe sketch out some general takeaways.

I don't really know how to open this article smoothly, so instead I'll just get into my core thesis: most TTRPG reviews, whether professional or peer-to-peer, don't actually tell you much about whether or not a game will work for you. This is the confluence of a number of factors—in addition to every critic's experience being informed by their unique personal history, TTRPGs depend much more heavily on who you play with than what you're playing—but that doesn't render the task of reviewing TTRPGs impossible nor futile. Rather, I find that current TTRPG text analyses are incredibly superficial, frequently engaging solely with the text as-presented. Reviews across the spectrum of production quality contain the same features at their core: an overview of the major rules headings, a discussion of the core mechanics, and some opinions on the general aesthetic of the game (using "aesthetic" to refer to the print quality and/or the game's alleged tone & theme). If you're lucky, a review may further include some discussion of the design context in which it was produced and some personal insights based on play experience. Lacking in every review I've seen is the answer to one question: what does the book expect from you as a reader?

Apologies to everyone who follows me by RSS, for I have flooded your feeds with a random smattering of posts from the Cohost days. There are still roughly 70 posts remaining to transfer, too. >_> Another time though. New content should be coming by the new year, with TTRPG stuff being the priority. I might also do a tarot experiment just to knock the rust off my writing gears before I do the angel smut I have planned, but that's probably not gonna be happening any time soon; my lab's funding suddenly got precarious, so now I'm entering the job market again before I suddenly have no income. Stress ahead, so it goes.

Hope y'all had a good Solstice, best of luck with the limnal week, and may 2026 bring better days.

This was originally posted on Cohost April 8th, 2024.

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With the Helldivers 2 community hitting a major in-game milestone today—the total defeat of the robot enemy faction—I'm seeing the Discourse on fascist satire pop up ever-closer to my personal circle. So, hey, let's put down my 2p and see what happens. Putting it under a cut as a pseudo-CW for folks, 'cuz like, yeah, this can get exhausting. No tags 'cuz I'd rather this be discovered by people with close-to-my beliefs than have it hot dropped into the Discourse directly.

This was originally posted on Cohost December 21st, 2022.

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I'm too lazy to find the post right now, but I remember at one point someone on here posted about how they never understood the appeal of Klondike (the classic, most-recognized solitaire card game) because players frequently have no control over whether or not they win. And... I dunno, I recognize and respect the complaint, but it's stuck with me that like, this complaint was only leveled at Klondike when I know many more games like that. Frankly, I actually quite like them. These are games where the whole point is not necessarily winning or losing, just going through the process of playing to kill time, be doing something with your hands, or have a mindless "third thing" to focus on while you have a conversation. A brief dig didn't find any formal discussion or term for these games, so I'm going to call them "processive games," highlighting that the point of play is the process, not the result (with further discussion later). With that established, let me take you on a tour of some of the processive card games I play routinely. I am... regrettably too lazy to take pictures of all these games as played, so I apologize in advance if my descriptions are confusing.

This was originally posted on Cohost December 12th, 2022.

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(Inspired by a scientific paper quote in this article about autism traits in ADHD, "structural abnormalities in the brains’ white matter nerve bundles were associated with more severe symptoms of both ADHD and ASD.")

First, a brief introduction to experimental design. In biological (and especially biomedical) research, our experimental questions often boil down to "what changes when we do X?" X can be a new drug we're testing, a deletion of a gene, an exercise regime, really just about anything. There's a lot being hidden inside the phrase "what changes," of course: what do you measure; how do you measure it; when do you measure it; when do you decide what, how, and when to measure in the first place. That's not the point of this morning (well, now early afternoon) ramble, though. I want to focus specifically on "changes," themself. Let's walk through a hypothetical situation.

This was originally posted on Cohost July 25th, 2024.

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Previously...

Let's begin at the beginning. The "city" of Vunder is young, less "a thriving metropolis with accessible happenings" and more "an aggregation of suburbs around a bar- and office-filled downtown." Its population was the result of slowly accumulated resources rather than any industrial boom, meaning no city government had ever cared to fund such lower-class institutions as "public transportation" or "community spaces." The service workers and starving artists of the city were thus left high, dry, and—most critically for your story—lonely. So it was that friendships, roommates, partners, and community were found not through face-to-face encounters, but everyone's necessary nemesis: dating apps.

This was originally posted on Cohost June 30th, 2024.

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Let's begin at the beginning. You took this job for the usual reasons: bills to pay, mouths to feed, rent to burn in a landlord's furnace somewhere. The fixer was professional, your fellow bandits charming behind arbitrary code names. You were brought in because you're small, small enough to fit through the industrial air vents on the roof. Not the first time your size has gotten you places, and probably won't be the last. The job itself was fairly standard, insofar as any organized crime was standard. Rooftop vents and a pair of bolt cutters would get you access to the top floor; from there you would find the fanciest office available, use your misspent youth to break in, then leave Glitch's creation plugged into the back of a computer. Repeat for a couple offices, just to cover bases, then make your exit before anyone was the wiser. Muscle was on overwatch on the roof, Eagle was keeping track of timetables, Glitch was on standby for tech support. Keep it simple, and the client would have their bounty in a week.

Unfortunately, no plan survives reality.

This was originally posted on Cohost August 24th, 2024.

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Previously...

Zephyr is not typically a “moderate danger” hero, but things click together when he gets to the address: Moss’s warehouse home and workshop. Punishment then, for improperly evaluating a threat – and if he gets killed in the process, well, he’s an object lesson for the next recruit.

… Presumably he has some kind of secret escort to keep him from dying too easily; UCCD wouldn’t let him die over one mistake, right?

This was originally posted on Cohost on June 9th, 2024.

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The Union City Capes Department was the best place for a person to end up at if they had superpowers. A person with the speed of the wind, manifesting at the impressionable age of 11, could get safe housing, some proper education, and steady employment as one of the city’s finest heroes. Such a person could contribute to society by scouting dangerous environments, supporting the fight against foes too strong for speed to tackle, and investigating reports of villainous lairs where higher profile heroes would stand out. Such a person could trust that UCCD’s intel was accurate, appropriately evaluated, and provides critical advice on how to approach the situation.