iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler

Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 06/03/2026

Seized by an idea for yet another TTRPG

CRUCIBLE: AN CEOFHID

The Empire of Moon-and-Stars claims dominion over the world, propped up on the pillars of old warrior clans, the blessing of the High Temples, and sanctity of the Mother-Tree. But reach is not grasp; a multitude of kingdoms froth at the borders like ocean swell and further-flung protectorates chafe at the influx of bureaucrats and soldiers. There is peace, yes, but peace as empire would have it, fragile and crueller than the eye can see.
Thus do some seek the between-places. The wilds, the lost villages, the sacred sites hewn by no human hand.
An Ceofhid; the mists-and-forests.
This is the wandering-way, threading in and out of the world of mortal law. Where those who would cultivate mystic power do so beyond the dogma of the High Temples. Where you, o wanderer, would go; duel rivals in rings of elder trees, seek hermit-masters for secret techniques, brush the skin of civilisation once more in roadside inns and border-towns. Yet be not reckless, for the verse of filidh cut deeper than steel, and the binding geas of Dlí Ceofhid ensures the rites of the way are kept with threat of terrible curses. Beware the deepest clearings, the eldest stone, the places where root and mushroom ring the soil, lest the Kindly Neighbours join you to their sport.
Travel the world, wanderer. Seek wisdom. Seek power. Cultivate the Patterns and become yourself. Resist temptation, resist hubris, for the way is hard and the shortcuts sweet, but at the end of every crooked path waits the tyrant called I.

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Reposted by Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler

Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 30/07/2026

Yeah, I love this place, it's cozy and the seafood chowder is so goodGROWR. GRURR. WROWF. Fuck, I'm sorry, looks like someone WROWF triggered my alert state but they must be standing GRURR somewhere outside my pathfinding GROWR so I'm stuck repeating my alert grunts GRURR until I lose aggro WROWF.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 12h

Ah, thanks for the correction. I must've been misremembering something from the Requiem ST section--like a block for something which was functionally a werewolf but did not, for example, have a Primal Urge or a powerset recognisably drawn from the Forsaken text.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

It is a glorious day on Sacred Terra, and you are a horrible Kroot.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

But it needs live playtesting to figure out if it's working, and where to tweak.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 02/10/2026

This is something I've been experimenting with in my Gaelic myth/Wuxia fusion game. Everyone is a little bit of a Fight Guy, and I've tried to build things so that a clever non-Fight Guy player could win an exchange, but two dedicated Fight Guys duking it out is a white-knuckle spectacle.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Ooh I'll have to check that out. I was immediately sold on Grief Like A Stray Dog just for the title.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

If the title of your game makes me think "I would listen to all fifteen minutes of that single" you have made a sale.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Grief Like A Stray Dog is a game I bought on the strength of that title alone.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 29/09/2026

Name your game like it's a Godspeed B side. Name your game after a half-remembered line from a poem you liked. Name your game after a sick mot juste a character delivers 30 hours in.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Anyway, going to stick it out because I am curious about the story and I like the atmosphere, but this experience has heightened my quibbles with other elements of the game like monster design.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Pretty much every puzzle in a game, especially survival horror, is unique with specific logic. You don't get better at the puzzles. Doing one puzzle does not make you better at future puzzles. Now, I am an idiot, so maybe that's unavoidable, but I'd rather beat my head against a souls boss.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

I just check out of any puzzle that requires me to memorise stuff. I might have given it a try if I wasn't still salty about the time wasted on the stalker zone. My enduring annoyance with puzzles in games is how rarely they cohere mechanically.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

So after corpserunning my way out of a stalker section, I walked into a puzzle I almost liked. But! It required me to look at contextless clues arranged on a wall, sequences of letters, then run back to the previous room to correlate them with other clues.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Did you misjudge an angle, bump into a locked door, or walk into an empty room? Fuck you! Spend several minutes in a closet or die. The way this hide-and-seek bullshit slows things down feels disrespectful of my time. You can outrun the stalker, but not so much the smaller guys.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Townfall's autosave triggers make this a bit aggravating too. Essentially adding a kind of boss runback to mandatory stealth sections with a stalker than can instakill you, and is always moving in the same general direction you are. Always behind you, or around the corner.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Townfall exacerbated this by having a handful of small, killable enemies around. In concept, I actually liked that. In execution, the AI is designed to keep you under threat. The stalker always knows your approximate location, and moves faster than comparable enemies in similar games.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

After getting caught a couple of times, the stalker is no longer scary or interesting. The puzzle, such as it is, is no longer interesting. So the corpse-runs begin; sprinting around to locate the interact points, dying, and reloading with a memorised route.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Inevitably, every run-and-hide horror game burns out my patience and goodwill by having at least one area with three interact points, scattered across some rooms and corridors, with an unkillable stalker roaming around. And of course, it's dark as shit.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Halfway through, I think, and Townfall has pissed me off enough to drop difficulty to minimum, brute force a section, and look up a puzzle solution. Minor strcutural spoilers.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 27/09/2026

Kinda charmed by the idea of a dating sim where the protagonist summons a succubus for obvious reasons, but it's her first day and she's shy.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Guan, you can call my codec frequency any time you need a refresher on the principles of the S3 Paradigm. For now, though, you need to get get into that motor pool and recover your rocketcycle. It's the only way you can reach and destroy Golf Cart Two in time.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

Talking to women is easy. 1. Shut up 2. Listen 3. Repeat the last thing they said, or a keyword, with a rising inflection. This is the S3 Paradigm, or Solid Snake Socialisation.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 20/09/2026

I loved lifecycle servers. Loved that early game where everyone is paranoid of huggers and I'm in there in a vent going hoohoohee

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Holy shit I thought you had to dodge that. Beautiful tech

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

Me, about to greet two guys for whom I have some contempt: Well, well, well, if it isn't-[a third fellow steps from behind the other two and I course correct]-Fuck, Suck, and Swallow.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

It plays good as hell and the Japanese VA for Musashi nails it, as do the facial animators. Actually all the animators. Story is a serviceable excuse for sick combos and being bossed around by a woman with supernatural lip filler.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 14/09/2026

European guy with a giantess kink hearing Country Roads for the first time and booking a trip to West Virginia at the prospect of geologically significant milfs

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Honestly, they match freak. I'd be happy for them if they weren't repulsive in other ways, but I can't help having some kernal appreciation for the fact he seems like the only money-poisoned creature with genuine affection for his family.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I think I might find Mage easier to run, atmospherically, but I lose steam when it comes to making good mysteries. I'm even less confident playing it. But I wrote four or five one-shots for Requiem like it was the most natural thing in the world.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I'm well aware. Well-intentioned orientalism is still orientalism. I fully understand they were trying; I had much the same attitudes at the time! I just think it's cool that a more diverse team is choosing to address the missteps.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Although I can't look at Changeling 2e, too aware of what it almost was and how spectacularly the writers were fucked over. Admittedly "the writers wre spectacularly fucked over" describes basically everything that came out after The God-Machine Chronicle (my beloved)

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

I really like the 2nd editions of NWoD across the board. I like the 1st ones too but as you say there were definitely misses. I was always more a Vampire guy, but Awakening really won me over, and did Forsaken.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

For sure. I think the relative uniformity across splats was partly that they'd hit on an elegant framework for what they wanted to do, and partly a sanity saving measure for devs. And handy for players picking up a new splat, of course.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Never stopped a single one of us running multi-splat games or writing NPCs per their own rules, of course.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Oh! Actually, I just remembered I've been following this project for a while which, among other things, tries to address some of the weird orientalism in original flavour Werewolf. songoftrillium.tumblr.com/werewolfesse...

songoftrillium.tumblr.com

Werewolf: the Essentials

The release of Werewolf: the Apocalypse 5th Edition has evoked a sense of urgent inspiration in me. I found the news inspiring because it marks the launch of a new product that rings so close to the.....

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

IIRC there's a clause somewhere in NWoD that specifies when splats interact, the player splat has rule primacy. So werewolf NPCs per Requiem's rules didn't quite work the way Forsaken do.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

That's a really good way of putting it. I managed to slog through but it was fighting my inexplicable intrinsic hostility to stories about writing the whole time.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

I thought 1 was mediocre and never understood the hype, but what I've played of 2 has been a huge improvement across the board and if you've endured the first game then 2 is likely to be a good time.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

True, actually! Similar principle when I'm designing mentally RTS to fall asleep; it's great to have Basic Dude Faction done well so everything else contrasts. Never gonna forgive the retconning of Cyrodiil though. I am not prone to grudges but I cannot let that shit go.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Flying whales that exude cocaine cut, and for what? Yet another pass at ripping aesthetic from the LOTR movies like anyone cares. Todd Howard delenda est.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

Do we think I could get hired as a writer on Mortal Shell 3 because of all the things I like about MS2 it really needed a sicko for item text and environmental storytelling

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 31/08/2026

My other big writing ambition I'll never achieve is the horror archive. A box of dossiers, inventories, transcripts, incident reports, invoices, etc. that a suitably obsessive reader will find contains a horror story.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

I surmise that most monsters depicted in Backrooms media of all origins do not represent apex predation of that environment, and I would therefore simply run screaming toward them to assert dominance.

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Huh I wonder if there's an argument that Nosgoth was a moba but I guess it was more like a heroshooter deathmatch

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Not even a little bit, and I might be misremembering the name. It lasted all of like a month, I think. Never found more than one match

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Sad Ghost, Smutpeddler @sadghost.bsky.social · 30/08/2026

Only living ones? Because I can think of two dead ones that were sorta interesting; Sins of a Dark Age, and... I want to say Nightbreed? It was a vampire themed one with Daybreed and Nightbreed factions, and some unfortunately titled Half-Breed heroes between them,

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