TL;DR
This month I was aiming for posting a bit sooner, so you can still support my Crowdfundr campaign: The Colony. Next month I’ll write a post-mortem analysis.
🎲From the Table - My group just finished the mini hexcrawl we started last time. It was an incredibly fun and informative *hexperience*.
📺My Media - Back to the old addiction of EU4. Who can resist the possibility of recreating Lotharingia right?
🛜Current Issues - Wizards just cut all ties to Brazil this month. No more physical D&D or Magic in Portuguese. Not really surprising.
🎲From the Table - Hexcrawling done
My group met only once this last month and we played finished the side quest. Here, the PCs are the retainers of the main party, on a mission while the main characters are on some extraplanar shenanigans. Last time, while exploring the forest, they found an old temple, with an altar and a mural. The mural explained the plot of the adventure: a magical obelisk turned the trees into monsters and had to be turned off.
After taking the wrong direction and being put back on track by a well-placed encounter, they reached their destination, the dark obelisk. The fight was very interesting, with waves of enemies appearing every turn until the mechanism was disarmed. The hexcrawl procedure was the one for 5e (badly written on the core books, a little better on the Wilderness Kit): you choose a speed and you must check for encounters and survival on each hex. Most hexes were empty and the constant rolling got tedious fast and I began “forgetting” to ask for the Survival check, or to roll for random encounters. Giving the players hints or clues for the right direction was essential to avoid boredom. Special kinds of terrain were also fun to play. I also kept forgetting to rack time (how is that quote again? strict time must be kept?) It changed how I thought about this style of play and how I’m going to proceed with the writing of The Colony:
More content between rolls: none or almost none “empty” spaces
Bigger hexes with distinct features
Rumours and hints to guide exploration
📺My Media - Back to the old addiction
I have to delete this game from Steam once more as I type this. It ruins my sleep, my work, and everything else when it's on my PC. Europa Universalis is a game of grand strategy, where you take the role of a country's leader and manage its economy, diplomacy, and warfare. The developers call it an "alternate history" game and it's very hard to quit.
I enjoy watching many playthroughs of this game on YouTube and I decided to reinstall it after being impressed by some new content on the latest patch. However, I realized that I'm still not ready to handle this game in a healthy way. Despite that, I think you should try it because:
Deep historical flavour for every nation: you’ll learn extremely specific stories that you can use as game material.
Very simple dice-based warfare you could hack.
Nice rivalries and alliances system. Once again, we see how important this is to create stories.
🛜Current Issues - WotC does it again
The publisher Wizards of the Coast declared that it would discontinue the production of D&D 5e in Portuguese. It also revealed on the same day that it would cease to print Magic cards in Portuguese as well (although the online game would retain the translation). This decision was not very surprising given their conduct in the past few years, but it was still unfortunate.
Magic has been available in Portuguese since its early days (4th Edition in 1996). Almost every product, except for some special ones, was released here. It is very popular. Gaming stores are packed with players every week. Yet, that is not enough. The community team was laid off years ago, and we have had no direct communication from the company ever since.
D&D 5e is even worse. We started playing D&D with 2e (except for the black box a few years earlier) and we have almost every book in print until now. But this edition has been more challenging. First, the negotiations between their localization partner and the local publishers went wrong, resulting in a long legal dispute. So, we received the core books five years late, when a board game company stepped in and resolved the issue. They seemed keen to catch up with the lost time but then things changed again. WotC decided to end their relationship with their international localization partner and handle everything internally.
They did not have a community team, a sales team, or any other team. We found out about a new book by accident, browsing on Amazon. The translation quality deteriorated (just like Magic did). They are now acting surprised that the new books are not selling well.
It is a sad moment for the TTRPG community in Brazil, even for fans of other games.
That’s it for today. I’ll be posting an extra letter next week with the post-mortem of my Crowdfundr and the Design Talk. Tell me in the comments: when you think of the future of RPG’s, 50 years from now, what worries you, what is the big question you want answered?