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Before embarking on a quest, all good Dungeons and Dragons players know they have to check their privilege. After all, isn’t it fun to inject radical identity politics into your fantasy game?
That seems to be the idea behind “Journeys Through the Radiant Citadel,” a set of new Dungeons and Dragons adventures that take place in the titular location. It has a hyperfocus on race.
Dungeons and Dragons is a fantasy adventure game where players join together to fight monsters, save kingdoms, and embark on quests all made up by a storyteller called the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master weaves together a story with the help of his players, and occasionally, official Dungeons and Dragons stories called modules.
USA Today released a fawning article about the new narratives with adventures “shaped by the lived experiences of the most diverse group of writers ever assembled by [the company that makes Dungeons and Dragons] Wizards of the Coast.”
Are the stories and adventures any good? Who knows and who cares! They were written by minorities and that’s all that matters.
OMG… *groan* Now I get it!
Watching The Fellowship of the Ring tonight. I wish I had a group to play a serious, dark high fantasy AD&D 1st edition epic campaign with. I think I can feel October coming - I get this itch every year around this time - I feel the energy of Land Park and Sacramento and the Placerville Foothills I’ve talked about in other rooms here. Apple Hill time. Change of seasons and all that.
Big harvest moons. Yup. I’m not sure why this time of year spawns this in me.
Tue Aug 23 2022 21:23:29 MST from TheDaveRobert PLANT is a DRUID, haha guys, GET IT?
Right before my buddy shipped off to the Kosivo UN contingent we played some epic old D&D and AD&D modules. It was less fun than I thought, once you get past the novelty of using THAC0 again. We had just played quite a bit of 5E so I guess I'm liking a lot of the 5E setup. Not sure about D&D One initiative, it seems to be trying to move D&D out of the Theater of the Mind realm and more into online stuff and I'm a real fan of parties breaking modules using creativity in a way that video games don't allow or encourage.
I have no interest in game engines beyond AD&D... or at least, OSR game engines. Champions, AD&D, Gamma World. I never moved on to any later editions beyond the earliest - and so it wouldn't be "novelty" for me - it would simply be what I know FRP gaming to be - how it is done.
I tried a couple later generation gaming engines. Warhammer, Vampire the Masquerade - and didn't much care for them. Going back to AD&D 1st edition for me would simply be... picking up where I left off.
But likewise - I prefer the original CFRPs - Ultima III, the D&D Gold Box series, Bards Tale - better than the current FRPs like Skyrim with their weird progression/class systems and skills and crafting and all that bullshit.
I know I'm the outlier here - that most people really eat that Minecraft kind of resource management and progress-tree advancement shit up... but I am a huge fan of...
"You're now 6th level - here are your attribute adjustments, here is your new hit die, here are the new spells available to you, these are the scrolls from those available - you can learn those as your regular spells, or you can shop around for others from the available list you would rather have... but you've got to transcribe the ones you want permanent into YOUR spellbook..."
If I'm playing a warrior, I don't want to moonlight as a blacksmith. If I'm a wizard, I don't want to spend my time wandering around gathering and mixing reagents as an alchemist.
They almost made it like a Safeway self-checkout kiosk... you're doing ALL the work now...
I want to roll dice and kill entire colonies of men, women and children Orcs safe in the knowledge that they're a monolithically evil race and the only good ones are dead ones.
Fri Sep 09 2022 09:55:40 MST from thanatosRight before my buddy shipped off to the Kosivo UN contingent we played some epic old D&D and AD&D modules. It was less fun than I thought, once you get past the novelty of using THAC0 again. We had just played quite a bit of 5E so I guess I'm liking a lot of the 5E setup. Not sure about D&D One initiative, it seems to be trying to move D&D out of the Theater of the Mind realm and more into online stuff and I'm a real fan of parties breaking modules using creativity in a way that video games don't allow or encourage.
I think the furthest I got with additions to the AD&D rulebooks was that our campaign added some of the character classes and encumbrance rules from Unearthed Arcana. Like... AD&D version 1.2
Found myself thinking about AI today.
We're near a mini-singularity - and that is the point where AI will be able to design a module, a campaign, and GM that campaign, played by other AI playing PCs as well as NPCs.
That will fundamentally change the nature of video gaming, gaming, and role play gaming.
The thing is, it might already be there.
This ties into my idea of wanting to recreate the entire pen and paper experience, potentially with a tabletop VR experience, with virtual paper, dice, GM screens, and other players - either actual players or AI agents.
I don't want a game like Skyrim. I want *actual* AD&D, an actual FRP. The problem for a lot of potential players is getting schedules and times together to actually engage in genuine oldschool FRP gaming on a consistent basis.
You could have AI *agents* with *agency* to play your characters when you couldn't make it to a game night. Learning AI would be able to improve its responses over time. "I didn't assist the other PC and that caused the entire party to struggle and therefore the other players were cool to me when I needed assistance," or "I did help the other PC and then when I needed that potion I did not have it, and that caused my character to suffer."
We are *almost* here, too. AI is getting pretty good. It would be a rough game - like being GMed by a kid who was between 11 and 16 years old, and it would be like playing with PCs of a similar age.
But... I think it could be done.
You guys - I can't keep track of all of your family members - and sometimes I catch myself right about to offend almost all of them with my inappropriate sense of humor. 
Fri Jan 06 2023 11:37:49 MST from ParanoidDelusions <paranoiddelusions@wallofhate.com>You guys - I can't keep track of all of your family members - and sometimes I catch myself right about to offend almost all of them with my inappropriate sense of humor.
Yeah that's our other brother James, he's on the autistic spectrum but it's easiest to just assume he's mentally retarded and roughly about 12 years old in his head.
He's very good at knowing where anything is in the house, he's happy to help you move stuff, and he can't ride a bicycle much less drive a car. No direction sense. He sometimes goes on walks and gets himself lost. A couple times he did that while we were camping and we had to form a search party.
I figure he's my responsibility at some point. Right now he lives with my aunt and grandma. I've been seriously considering moving back to help take care of him and the upkeep on the house, but I haven't talked to any of my family about it.
He has a thing he does where he's essentially a magnifying mirror for the emotions around him, so if you're chill he's happy and if you're stressed he's angry and if you're angry he's violent. My parents never seemed to figure this out so they're terrible at dealing with him, but I'm great at it.
He does art full time at a program designed for retarded kids. They have a gallery you can go to and buy things, and if you buy his art he gets a commission. Some of his art is decent. Most of it looks like this.
Don't get me wrong - I thought it was awesome, including that it was called Blue Chungus and it looks quite a bit like a giant cock. My wizard would have *loved* to have this wand. I just figured he *was* one of the younger kids in your clan, which is quite large and hard to keep all straight - and I *almost* made a dick joke about it before I realized I was dealing with one of your younger members. :)
It is all good with me. I've been accidently saying inappropriate things around Glimmer/Lisa's young (to me, at the time) daughters since just about the beginning. It is just in my nature to not think, "is this appropriate for the audience?" before I say it.
As for your description of his developmental and learning disabilities - my daughter in on spectrum but very high functioning - and she is learning to cope - but she exhibits a lot of what you describe, although probably to far less of a disabling nature. As a parent, I fucked it up when she was young because she was undiagnosed, and she is high functioning so it masked her developmental disabilities - it just came across as being lazy or entitled or otherwise just disinterested in basic shit. Like, in high school she couldn't make herself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich - and that is when it *started* to occur to me that maybe she had some issues. A couple of years later, she self diagnosed, then she demanded we take her in for clinical assessment, and they came back and said, "She is the only self-diagnosis we've ever seen that was ACTUALLY on spectrum."
And then I felt like shit for trying to parent an autistic child like a normal kid - which *doesn't fucking work." But things got better.
Mon Jan 16 2023 11:53:25 MST from TheDaveYeah that's our other brother James, he's on the autistic spectrum but it's easiest to just assume he's mentally retarded and roughly about 12 years old in his head.
He's very good at knowing where anything is in the house, he's happy to help you move stuff, and he can't ride a bicycle much less drive a car. No direction sense. He sometimes goes on walks and gets himself lost. A couple times he did that while we were camping and we had to form a search party.
I figure he's my responsibility at some point. Right now he lives with my aunt and grandma. I've been seriously considering moving back to help take care of him and the upkeep on the house, but I haven't talked to any of my family about it.
He has a thing he does where he's essentially a magnifying mirror for the emotions around him, so if you're chill he's happy and if you're stressed he's angry and if you're angry he's violent. My parents never seemed to figure this out so they're terrible at dealing with him, but I'm great at it.
He does art full time at a program designed for retarded kids. They have a gallery you can go to and buy things, and if you buy his art he gets a commission. Some of his art is decent. Most of it looks like this.