I’ll keep the personal side pretty short, because I have a lot to cover this month!
Last week I took a vacation. I didn’t go anywhere — I just stayed home — but it was needed. I know last month I mentioned going to conventions recharged me, and it really did, but it also exhausted me. Plus, as exciting as both UK Games Expo and Onyx Path Con were, they were both work. I realized I was still pretty burned out, so I needed to take some real time off and just fuck off without thinking about work at all.
I am now much refreshed, and ready to get back into the swing of things!
Which is good, because oh by the way this dropped.
It’s a historical exploration of Dungeons & Dragons, with a focus on the legal side of its history and its impact on the tabletop RPG industry as a whole. Which was an incredibly niche idea when I pitched it in 2022. And then recent events from Hasbro made it… uh… much more relevant, very quickly.
I’ve been working with Extra Credits over several years now, but this is a massive episode. I believe it’s the longest EC episode ever at around 22 minutes in length. That’s three times as long as the episodes I normally write! Plus this one required a lot of research, and a lot of joke revision. There were a few meetings across three time zones (US, UK, and Japan) to make it all work. But everyone on the team went above and beyond and turned it into something really special.
I’m just… weirdly proud of this. I’ve always enjoyed digging into game design history, and it’s something I know a lot of people aren’t excited about. So having a group like the EC crew not only get it but throw so many resources behind it is amazing. Because I really do believe that knowing how games have evolved helps us to understand where they can go. Yes, “Dungeons & Disasters” is a clickbait title, but that’s the reality of navigating YouTube these days. Yes, my interesting historical stuff is buffered by a lot of pop culture time travel jokes, but if the core topic didn’t work, jokes won’t save the video. The EC team believed in it, and now this amazing and funny episode exists.
To be clear, I’m just one part of this. It was absolutely a team effort. The whole team contributed written gags, and then Matt added more with his performance, and then the art team added in visual gags, many of which weren’t on the script at all. It’s the best possible example of a team really firing on all cylinders and wanting to give absolutely everything to make this just right. It’s something that I’m blessed to regularly have in my tabletop RPG work, and I love it when my weird little ideas turn out to have an audience (like a certain game about dogs in armor have shown).
But that’s not all I have to talk about!
News Roundup
I mentioned Onyx Path Con in passing up above there. It was a great time! And because it was an online convention, all the panels are being posted on YouTube for everyone to see. There’s a convenient link to all the panels here. If you’re just focused on getting Eddy content — and since this is my newsletter, that’s a reasonable assumption — I was on Opening Ceremonies, the Realms of Pugmire panel, What’s Up with Onyx Path?, the Storypath Q&A, and the Pathcast Live.
The Steam Summer Sale is going on. I bet you didn’t know I had something in that, did you? But it’s true: The Pugmire interactive novel, “Treasure of the Sea Dogs,” is 40% off right now!
Finally, one of my writing projects is also out in the wild! I wrote the rules section of the Trinity Continuum: Adventure! Jumpstart. The rest of the team did an amazing job making a fun, exciting adventure that really brings the core game to life.
My Media
I’m still working my way through Deep Space Nine (hey, it’s a long show!), and I’ve made it through close to a dozen of the Battletech novels I mentioned last month. But my vacation was mostly eaten up with Mega Man Battle Network.
For those who don’t know, MMBN was a series of six games (or ten, depending on how you count them) that game out primarily for the Game Boy Advance. It’s a kind of action RPG/deckbuilding that came out before a time when either of those things were really codified. A few months back all the games were released in two massive collections on Steam, so I treated myself to them.
First off, these games play amazingly well on the Steam Deck. Sure, they were designed to originally be games on a portable console, but that doesn’t always mean they end up being great ports. This one works really well, and was particularly easy on my battery, so I ended up spending hours playing them over my vacation. I ripped my way through the first game, and I’m about halfway through the second.
As a designer, I really respect the core gameplay loop. It never gets really stale. Sure, it suffers from the classic “invisible random encounters” that plagued older JRPGs, but because you get random cards… er, battle chips… every time, each fight is different. Sometimes you can blow everyone away with one well-timed shot, while other times you’re scrambling to stay alive long enough to draw the chip you need to swing the tide.
On top of that, it’s a weird kid-friendly 90s cyberpunk setting, kind of? Basically, it’s a vague future where everything is networked together and overrun with viruses. You have a “Navi” which is your online avatar, and those Navis use the battle chips to defeat the viruses. Of course, only plucky middle school kids can save the world. On the one hand it’s a cute way to contextualize dungeon crawls in a sci-fi game, and on the other it’s a fascinating look at the decker/shadowrunner dynamic that many cyberpunk RPGs fail to get right.
Seriously, if you’re at all into retro JRPGs or deckbuilders, check these games out.
With that, I’m off to reorganize my battle chip folder again. See y’all next month!