loren schmidt

the beginning of The Pastel City looks quite promising! thank you.

i would love to be added if you have space!

oh thank you! this looks really interesting.

oh wow, the presentation here is great. very raystorm.

oh thank you! this phenomenon of weirdly oldschool generative text techniques being good enough to be used at scale is so weird, i really thought the arms race would have made them obsolete by now.

is anyone doing work on mapping current influence ops? i feel like o never see media about this! i would love to know about manual + semimanual botnets, what political issues they are choosing, vectors of influence.

i've been working on designs for, i think, a really compelling item enchantment system, partially born of observations of such systems in various RPGs, and partially born of frustrations with item crafting in Destiny 2 and Elden Ring.

adding renders of the entities to the seen object list, inventory, etc.. (in sprite mode these will be sprites)

my to-do list for this phase of the project is like 6 pages long aah

A Rose O'Neill pen and ink drawing, featuring a giant humanoid embracing a smaller one. It is captioned "Man and the Earth."

A Rose O'Neill pen and ink drawing, featuring a giant female satyr embracing a small human male. She appears to be nuzzling him.

A Rose O'Neill pen and ink drawing, featuring a giant female humanoid nuzzling a tiny male humanoid. It is titled "Besieging the lips of the Earth."

This is your occasional reminder that Rose O'Neill, creator of the Kewpies, first published female cartoonist in the United States, and among the first cartoonists to build a merchandising empire on their work, turned out some absolutely baller, romantic-feeling size-difference monster art.

i think potentially some of the lower level enchanted items (maybe a lot of them!) could end up coming back around too, so you could learn how they work incrementally, learn the language.

some sort of connection between information gathering and a cipher could be really interesting! i have a lot of magic word ciphers in the game.

it's a great candidate for social learning too. crafting guilds etc..

also if you get a cursed item, you can fix it. and if your items get damaged by acid, you can repair them.

minor enchantment is a really compelling starter spell! you can get stones or arrows at the start of the game, enchant them and throw them if you don't have access to a missile weapon. and as soon as you get a missile weapon you can enchant that too.

full skill list, off the top of my head:
frost bolt
fire ball
stone to mud
heal wounds and poison
telepathy (spying)
nature sense
regeneration
minor enchantment
phase door (the good Amberite version)
teleport (the good 5 sorcery version)

Poschengband. i had the best run yet doing a centaur mage-archer. more enchantment + buff heavy than usual. enchanted sling. telepathy, nature sense, regeneration. about 50/50 missile weapons and magic.

i landed a really good trident with slay orc, troll, giant and detect invis.

thank you! i should have some of the base item types ("of the bird", etc.) working soon, and then i'll have more applied thoughts.

thanks for reading!

i really like the idea of having some sort of in-world reference for it! maybe in the form of tips which are in a series of combat manuals, alongside skills you learn?

it's quite possible i could achieve those with a simpler system though, and that's one thing i'll be thinking about a lot while prototyping!

and part of the goal here is to specifically shape an enchantment system which works around some of the ways i've seen such systems break in other games. specifically, need to grind for perfect base items, obligation to upgrade every single item, lack of item personality, lack of connection to story

yeah i got here a really weird way! it's surprising to me because i'm generally anti-crafting actually, and i am by nature a minimalist.

part of this is that i'm making something a bit more nitty gritty than usual (which will, i hope, still be quite elegant).

ha it is

ha what if there were a detect map spell which was able to directly sense a number of points, in a stippled disk, and then it tried to guess (in a different color) what was between them? functional player facing WFC or similar.

right now i am making it so you can drop internal organs on the floor and then i am doing necromancy, but i think item enchantment is next after that! so we will be seeing the lower level parts of this soon.

whatever the particulars, the thinking is that regional artifacts exist in the space of news, history, legend. you hear about them. and if you interact with them, you are making weighty world scale decisions about application and affecting which faction has access. it is passing in most cases.

maybe you are only able to partially utilize them unless you are quite high level, so you might use lesser regional artifacts, but the really powerful ones are (mostly) above your pay grade.

possibly you can use them but only if your character is themself already a regional power? maybe there's a heavy penalty to using them for petty goals, eg just not having one at a castle might affect its survival while you are away. or the resource cost for use is prohibitive. or they scar you.

i don't want a situation where the one ring in LotR is a random drop you wear to grind for rabbit pelts because they can't see you. i hate that shit. you make an item distinctly unmagical if you don't ground it right. you have presentation and ritual to think about.