Every day

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So I said I'd blog every day and then I spent all day playing Valheim on a shared server. Which was some well needed social interactions (thanks to Discord).

I did an experiment after some copper ore collapsed due to gravity so I tried digging down under a whole deposit. Turns out copper floats. Also Copper Deposits are huge!

Copper Floats

So if you're playing Valheim make sure you're not leaving copper underground.

Anyway. That's about it for me today. Tomorrow is the last day of my improptu holiday then I start my first contracting job, new things and all that. I'm feeling very positive.

Also I've got some players for a Numenera games so fingers crossed I can manage it without going screwy. Plus I can blog about it which will give me something to write.

Valheim and lessons for RPG's

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I'll write a blog every day he said. How hard can that be?

Well if I don't mind actually talking about stuff that I think about rather than my normal trick of just leaving it in my head? Maybe not too hard.

Scimon TrollslayerSo I'd like to talk about something I mentioned on Sunday about running a game based on building a community. This is something I'd been thinking about for a while mostly from reading Numenera Destiny. But I've also recently being playing Valheim (like 3 million other people apparently). And the more I play it the more I want to distill it's gameplay into a table top game.

Here's my character in my local game, yes he's only got leather armour, in my defence I took this a couple of days ago. But he's still wearing leather armour (some of it troll hide leather) because I need more bronze. And this is one of the things about the game that I like. You character fights creatures for a few reasons but they are all ultimately linked to surviving.

You hunt boars, deer and neck (little lizard people) for food and leather. You fight Greylings and Greydwarves mostly because they try and stop you from cutting down trees for wood and you need wood, lots of wood. If you want to build a nice house to live in you're going to need to chop down a small forest.

And then there's the dungeons, why would you want to go into a burial mound that's full of skeletons? Armed skeletons that really seem to not like you. But you need to go down there, if you want to stop using a flint axe you need bronze and for that you need a smelter for smelt ore. And to make that you need to use a thing called a surtling core, it seems to be some kind of magic heat generator.

And at least in the early game the only place to find surtling cores is in burial mounds, past the skeletons.

Burial Chamber Entrance

So down into the burial mound you go, sword and axe in hand. It's dark, there's twisty passage and groaning sounds. You're sure that at any moment the roof is going to cave in. And did I mention the Skeletons? And the Ghosts?

Now the argument could be made that this is what D&D is except the reason to go down into the dungeon is treasure. Gold coins that are lying around that you can use to but stuff. It just feels... less personal. Whereas if you are going into the dangerous ruins to find the magical runestone that your village shaman needs to cast the spell to being back tha rain? That's personal.

So yeah, this is the kind of thing I want to run. A game where the characters are part of society, where they do the things they do to help others. Of course the trick is to write adventures that do that... that's the hard bit.