grym

don't have anything to add from what others have said, or any crumb of wisdom to pull from my life to help yours.

But all you've said here resonates so much with me, it's like an echo. I've been thinking about it a bit longer, and I've (finally, slowly) managed to make decisions about it. Hopefully you can too!

oOoooh this looks rad!

Musicbee with wine! I have never been able to find something that does it all as well as musicbee, and I've tried almost every single linux music player. I have a huge music library, I add a ton of music regularly. I need auto-tagging, i need to be able to sort, filter and search, a very customizable interface, all of the mp3 tags including obscure ones, gapless playback, configurable fade-in/fade-out, etc etc. With the exception of a few little nitpicks like not integrating well with the KDE media widget, and some occasional annoyances with pipewire, everything works great.

Hell yea.

I used to play on 1.12 modded but now i'm on 1.19/1.20 stuff, I know there's a bit of a mod gap with a lot of the big classic mods stuck on older versions and they might never update, so there's a whole new ecosystem of mods for recent versions. I have played Create: Above and Beyond as well a tried a few other create packs, they're pretty fun but I didn't go far enough into them to know if they're expert enough, but they didn't feel grindy for the sake of grind to me (especially if you've played 1.12 modpacks like gregtech and such, none of the recent modpacks ever come close to the level of grind you'd have in old modpacks).

There's a new one that looks really cool called Create: Arcane Engineering, which looks to be pretty expert, all about combining tech and magic. Not necessarily grindy, but from the start a lot of basic steps are much harder to make and you are basically required to automate things, which Create is really made for. There's some things that feel kinda dumb/annoying in how hard they are to get and automate tho so i'm not sure. It has a big quest book with a bunch of parallels branches (often separated magic and tech that end up joining together, you have to use both fully at some point to progress), and a bunch of stuff that seems more tailored for servers where players are encouraged to specialize on things and trade.

Edit : I've also heard good things about Create: Astral for space exploration. There's a lot of create modpacks, it's basically the core mod of any tech modpack now. There's some big mods on the Forge side that don't exist on Fabric or don't have alternatives yet, it depends what kind of mods you prefer.

I typed a big comment under Yurt_Owl's comment. I can give you some recommendations if you want, what version do you play, what kind of mods/modpacks do you like ?

There's a whole new golden era of modding emerging right now. Two things, Fabric (or Quilt) and Create.

Fabric is just a better modloader than forge, forge is really slow and resource-hungry, Fabric (combined with all the optimization mods everyone installs) runs incredibly well even with tons of mods, shaders, etc. The modding community for modern versions of MC is much more mature and a ton of mods are more stable, released for multiple mod loaders, using shared libraries, etc. Much better experience to get and install mods and stuff just works most of the time.

Create is straight up the best tech mod ever made for minecraft. Incredibly well put-together. And it now has a growing ecosystem of addons and expansions and modpacks built around it, along with a bunch of official addons being worked on that will go into stuff like vehicles, actual physics-simulated floating airships, spaceships, underwater, etc.

There's rarely been a better time to get back into modded MC honestly. I recently installed Prism and got back into it, had not played MC in years. Get Prism, get 1.20.1 or 1.20.2, get Fabric loader, go on Modrinth and have fun. Get basic optimization mods like Sodium, Indium, Lithium, ImmediatelyFast, Iris for shaders that run really well, Memory Leak Fix, FerriteCore, EntityModelFeatures & EntityTextureFeatures, Enhanced Block Entities, Continuity, etc. Get the QoL like EMI, controls/mouse/camera stuff, etc. Get incredible terrain generation with stuff like Terralith, optionally Tectonic. There's really good alternatives to Terralith but I personally love Terralith+Tectonic and how good the mountain ranges look. I got Create, then just browed around for addons and whatever looked fun.

Like, not having played MC and modded MC in a long time, I'm absolutely amazed by how good it is now. I can run a modpack with a ton of mods, 64 chunks of render distance, a good shader, and it runs WELL. Insane. I can even push it a little and get the really wild mods like Immersive Portals and it works, it runs well if I lower my shader performance options, the only issue for now is that there's some graphical bugs between it and Iris shaders but those are being worked on.

And on top of that, I recently discovered this new building mod called Axiom that's just been released and basically replaces WorldEdit and also does everything I used to do with VoxelSniper, but it's all 1 mod that does it all extremely well and conveniently, with a really good UI and no commands to type. All of it working seamlessly in-game. Wild.

So yea I guess I typed a bunch of paragraphs about how I'm playing minecraft, woops.

Absolutely. But then again there's a reason a lot of the "core races" of stuff like DnD are very weird and problematic if they're just considered monsters.

I think we can do both. You can have a large variety of cultures, ancestries (I really like how PF2e does it), species, etc.. that are generally relatable (they don't have to be humanoid or very normal, just something you could play as and not entirely alien), which avoids the problems of treating what are often archetypes/parodies/exaggerations of existing cultures as essentialized groups with tied good/evil attributes in a very awkward moral system, and ALSO have tons of weird and alien monsters, species, creatures, etc.

I think the current tendency of revisiting the DnD canon and "races" in a very critical way is good, but I also don't like the tendency to flatten everything into sexy humanoids.

I think most of the TTRPG writing needs a lot of work tbh. A ton of stuff to critique and reimagine, and a serious lack of quality and serious worldbuilding.

Look I don't know how useful or "good" is it to be extremely aggro on twitter/nitter like Roderic usually is, but he's right.

I can never really fault him for it, it's a dumb social media and there's not much point to it if you don't actually engage with people and are able to criticize what they say, especially when talking about influencial people with a platform. And yea, he's very aggro, but his original response is not really directed at JP as a person, just angry and critical at the ideas he's peddling, and for good reason.

JP's reponse is a pretty typical one for western leftists. Criticism is seen as an attack, it is always reinterpreted in an individualistic lens. Attacking someone's really dumb or dangerous idea is immediately rolled back with "woah there calm down maybe you could be civil" as if the person criticizing is being mean, rude, or violent, when often (as is the case here) that's not the case. If you're going to talk about political things and ideas like there, and someone tells you publically "This is completely wrong and dangerous what the fuck", your response shouldn't be "Why are you attacking me?". Criticism is not a conflict, it's not a fight, it's not personal, and it is extremely important and necessary.

I have a main hook in the campaign that's kind of a large background problem that impacts almost everything in some way, something that brings a lot of change. I had a ton of rough ideas for what would be in different regions of my campaign setting/map and conceptualized those as "quests", just a name to put on one cool idea/mystery and tease it players. At the start of the campaign there's an immediate hook and thing that happens which ties into the main large problem and teases a lot of its mystery, brings a lot of change and danger but they players don't really understand it full yet, and forces the players to want to do something or go somewhere. Then depending on which "quests" they seem to take an interest in, what hooks they bite into, that's where they go and I can detail the place they'll go to more.

For example, my current campaign :

• At the start, for one reason or another the players are present near a clash between two armies, a war has broken out between two minor kingdoms in a vast, wild and untamed region full of history and mystery (doesn't really matter why or how they are here, as usual the players understand that they need to bite into the original hook or there's no way to even bring their characters together). As the armies charge, the players have a strange kind of vision, on both sides stands a strange knight in golden, shiny armor, standing on a diseased horse. A golden mask covers his face, but flies betray the decay hiding under it. The knight screams of glory and victory, and charges. The armies clash. It's a bloodbath, and suddenly a sort of necrotic storm is felt, a sickening feeling felt by every living thing. The fallen start to rise, and both armies have to retreat as they start being massacred by a rising undead horde. This becomes known as the butchery of Iar'Limb. I'm skipping some bits but basically there's a bit of setup for things around them that have been and are happening, the kingdoms, the war, some history, etc. A big thing happens, the golden knight, the undead storm and the new army of the dead. The players attempt to help in whatever way they can but they know they have to run away too, they can't face this threat yet.

It's quickly clear that the entire region is affected in some way, everywhere rumors of magic acting up, spirits angered, planar rifts or undead energies, and somehow it all seems to be related. The general idea now is: explore and find stuff out. Some people might know more, some mysteries can be investigated to reveal a piece of the larger whole, some people might help. A lot of different factions and NPCs roam around and deal with their stuff, the local problems, the conflicts, their own goals, etc.

For example the place they start has a few "quests" I tease from the start : the old caravan that one of the players knows has a mystic that could know more about shadow plane/undead stuff. One of the players was a soldier of one of the two armies and has now effectively deserted, so they want to leave the area quickly, they head to a nearby town where a lot of refugees are already gathering, the whole region seems in turmoil. In the town they learn of demons on a nearby hill that are haunting and corrupting local inhabitants, a fisherwoman talks of dead or diseased fish from upriver, a mad and rambling man runs in the town square shouting about the town in the forest appearing and disappearing in-and-out of reality, and hands the players a weird piece of some broken clockwork machine, etc etc.

The only thing I had ahead of time was a rough idea of what the main hook is about, but even that not entirely. Some details and fun encounters to quick off the first session, a quick map of the nearby down and some NPCs. My hexmap at this point is just my campaign map with the hex grid, maybe a couple ideas jotted down here or there, or large groups of hexes like "this region is all about fey stuff" and "this region will be witches and spooky forest creatures", etc. Then I had a bunch of rumors, cool ideas and quests to tease, and maybe a little note about how it could tie back to the main plot, but nothing more, don't want to prep for nothing.

After that first session, since one of the NPCs they met is an old sailor that one of the players knew from a previous adventure, they chose to spend more time with him and look into his hooks/quests, which tied to the demon hill, so they went and did that. I then detailed the hexes between where they were and the demon hill, I don't like filler and the point of them is not to spend an eternity in each hex but to represent a fun voyage with interesting things to encounter and stumble upon. Even mundane things will always tell them a bit about the region, its history, tie to some local problem or quest, etc.

Next session they traveled in that direction to find the demon hill, found a few things here and there in the hexes that built up the world around them more, some colorful NPCs, some places that developed the history of the area a little more, or just cool fun stuff. I especially like stuff that they can make their own and not things that are "depleted" once encountered. Like a magical stone that seems to be able to absorb curses, which is tied to some settlements around it, has a little bit of history and lore and NPCs which could have quests about it, but most importantly the players mark that down on the map and say "we'll know to come back here if we have curse problems", and of course on demons hills they find cursed items.

This is getting really long so I'll stop, but basically I frontloaded a rough map, rough regions of hexes with a few cool ideas scattered around, a bunch of smaller plots and mysteries that tie back to a big long-term mystery that the players want to resolve, and then I just improvise and "zoom-in" a little bit on a specific region or patch of hexes when I know the players are going to go there.

The hexmap itself isn't a major dungeon in every hex, those are scattered evenly with a few per region which all tie together in some way. The hexes in between are a sort of "area of influence" around those major hexes, they tease the plot of the big hex, add some detail, immersion, color, or cool stuff to find. If they know they want to go from A to B and they know where B is, then the "exploring" part is less important and can become tedious, so I don't put much effort in it, I emphasize the wonders and tribulations of travel. Where it really shines is when they know something important is nearby but not exactly where, and they have to look around, interact with everything to learn more, and will thoroughly explore a small patch of hexes.

The hexmap serves as knowing where the players are, there's usually only one or a few "sites"/things per hex. It's also how I track where the factions and roaming NPCs are over time, or how the big problems roll through the region (like the army of undead slowly spreading through the region as the days advance, and the players hear rumors and news about it, and how it impacts the rest of the region), and when they travel or explore I have a simplified routine like how long it takes to cross a hex/why, what they automatically find or have to search for, or some check I roll to see if they have an encounter and what kind (not necessarily a fighty one), etc. It's more a prep and tracking tool, and helps to keep it all straight in my head. It seems to be working wonders because the players at this point fully assume that everywhere around them is coherent and prepared and there'll be cool stuff to find, they've very immersed and are eager to learn more about the places they explore or the mysteries they are trying to unravel.

Thanks for your response :)

I agree with most of what you said, I think my case is not entirely applicable however, since I'm playing hexcrawl in PF2e. I understand your dislike of hexcrawl and it is a difficult type of game to run, you can't really run it in a traditional way with a prepared plot, even though the plot will emerge gradually. My hexmap doesn't really have any filler, but playing a hexcrawl does require the players be invested and interested in exploring and discovering things, and learning about the land around them in detail, even if it's not directly important for the plot. It's a very different kind of tone and not suitable for all plots and types of players.

It's less about "forcing" encounters or having boring contents, it's simply that when there is a large level-range in a region where players might go in any direction and explore anywhere, even your map is full of interesting stuff like mine, I can't really set/prepare the levels ahead of time too much or a lot of the stuff prepared will have to be adjusted or thrown out because it doesn't match the level of the players. So I don't really include levels in the stuff I do prepare long-term, I just setup a web of interesting interconnected stuff all over the place, and the precise level of encounters/stuff to do is prepared just ahead of the players. I can still say something like "those mountains are very dangerous for your level" and if they do go there, I'll set it at higher level than them in a way that makes sense and where it's clear it's going to be very difficult, but if I set it up long before they ever go there and arbitrarily decide "this mountain is a level 10 area" then it won't just be difficult they'll be killed in seconds, so It's better to adjust as I go I think while keeping a relative safe/dangerous vibe to places.

Anyway it's not that important, just a pretty common frustration of the hexcrawls I like to do which focus on exploration is that systems where levels matter a lot (like PF2e) make it harder to run and you kinda have to scale things relative to the players at least a little bit. All of what you said still applies!

Also regarding the setting of Golarion and the increase in writing quality in second edition, check out for example the book "Knights of Lastwall" which has badass undead-fighting knights like Clarethe Iomedar (nonbinary) or their badass mother Kalabrynne Iomedar (trans woman) who's on the cover :

Another personal favourite is the minor god Alseta who is literally the god of transitions, including gender transitions : https://2e.aonprd.com/Deities.aspx?ID=30

There's a lot of little things that are gradually being added and the younger writers, designers and freelancers or Paizo are very queer.