Tyler F.M. Edwards's Blog, page 13

Song of the Month: Aurora, Stjernestøv

Aurora really needs to get better at promoting herself. Recently I’d heard something about her putting out a new song (I do follow her on social media), so I went over to her YouTube channel and promptly discovered she’s put out several new songs in the last year and has an album coming out in a few days.

At least it’s a pleasant surprise.

Anyway, one of the most interesting things she’s done recently is that she’s put out a small selection of songs in her native Norwegian. Up to now, she’s only sung in English.

Of those, my favourite is definitely Stjernestøv. Something about it gives me Lord of the Rings vibes.

Wyrd Street Tease: Blue Rose, the Vigilante

In addition to the option to create your own characters, my upcoming RPG Wyrd Street features a suite of “Iconic Characters,” who have established classes and identities. Iconic Characters are still heavily customizable in both role-play and mechanics, but they give an easy starting point that allows your character to feel rooted in the world, with existing relationships and connections.

There is one Iconic Character for each class. Today, let’s take a look at the Iconic Vigilante, a woman known only as Blue Rose.

Rose is the owner of the Rose Garden bordello and in many ways the de facto leader of the Wyrd Street community. She is fiercely protective of her employees, and as a result the Rose Garden is one of the safest places in the slums.

I think the Iconic Character system was one of the greatest risks I took when designing Wyrd Street, but it’s been very well-received by play-testers, and Rose has been one of the greatest examples of how much freedom players have to interpret the Iconics. Across the various tests, different people have played Rose as a protective momma bear, as a stern leader, or as an irresponsible disaster.

As a Vigilante, Rose is excellent at defending her allies against the worst the slums might throw at them. Most of Wyrd Street’s class concepts started as “dollar store” versions of traditional fantasy classes, and Vigilante is Wyrd Street’s take on the paladin archetype. It also draws significant inspiration from comic book superheroes.

The result is a resilient melee class that excels at protecting themselves and their friends. With the right build, they can also become Wyrd Street’s premiere mage-slayers, with abilities that increase their mental resistance, counter enemy abilities, and punish foes when they spend focus.

Vigilantes are one of only two classes in Wyrd Street that have discrete subclasses. They can choose to follow the Pursuit of Justice to gain some supportive powers, or follow the Pursuit of Vengeance to hunt down single targets with ruthless efficiency.

They can also boast some limited ranged capability through a selection of exclusive sidearms, and at higher levels they gain some powerful mobility with the Grappling Hook Expert ability.

All in all, the Vigilante’s strength, courage, and flair for the dramatic all combine to make it the perfect class to represent Blue Rose.

All that said, if you like Rose but not the Vigilante, you can always ask your GM to let you change her class. In earlier versions of the game, she was the Iconic Scoundrel, and her backstory could also easily justify her as a Drifter or a Brawler. Iconic Characters are there to be a starting point, not an end point, and they’re yours to customize as you see fit.

Before I go, I’d like to leave you with an early sketch of Rose from one of our artists. The details are still subject to change, but it gives you a taste of what’s to come.

Wyrd Street is coming to crowdfunding this March. Stay tuned to this blog for more teases and updates as the date approaches.

Song of the Month: Imagine Dragons, Wrecked

While I liked a lot of their earlier stuff, it’s been a while since Imagine Dragons put out anything that really grabbed me.

This, though… this I like. The raw emotion is palpable.

Wyrd Street Tease: Master of Fate

It’s time for another Wyrd Street teaser. I’ll be posting these every couple weeks leading up the launch of the crowdfunding campaign in March.

This time, I’m showing off the three choices of max level ability available to the Fortune Teller class. Fortune Teller is one of the classes where I took the most chances with my designs, and it really shows in their level ten options. Only appropriate for a class that gambles with the threads of fate itself.

* * *

Master of Fate:

Your insight into the forces of destiny is unmatched. You can produce wondrous effects with it… but fate remains capricious, and can still fail you. Choose one of the following abilities.

Fate, Don’t Fail Me Now:

Technique

Free action

After your health reaches 0 but before you lose Vitality as a result, you can as a free action make a desperate plea to fate itself. Roll a D20 and gain an effect based on its result. You cannot reroll this die by any means.

20 – You are restored to your maximum health.2-19 – Roll D8s equal to your Wellness attribute (minimum 1D8) and regain health equal to the result.1 – Your Vitality becomes 0, and you die.

You must rest before using this ability again.

Fortune Favours the Bold:

Passive

To benefit from this ability, you must not be wearing armour.

Any of your abilities that allow you or other characters to reroll dice now allow them to reroll twice instead of once. If combined with Major Arcana, this allows you to reroll each D4 once. It does not allow you to have more than two Tarot abilities at a time.

Additionally, basic attacks and Strikes that target only you have disfavour on their attack and Strike rolls.

Twist of Fate:

Technique

1 action

Through an act of great will, you can force your will upon the threads of fate, causing the flow of time to subtly alter at your command. During a combat encounter, you can cause two characters of your choice other than yourself to swap their positions in the turn order. Characters who have been swapped this way are not considered to have completed the current round of combat until their next turn has ended.

You must rest or recuperate before using this ability again.

The threads of time do not react well to being altered. The first time you use this ability, your maximum Vitality is permanently reduced by 1. Subsequent uses of this ability do not incur this penalty.

Wyrd Street Comes to Crowdfunding in 2022

It’s been a bit since I talked about Wyrd Street, the tabletop RPG I’ve been designing, but today I have good news: I have secured a deal with Realmwarp Media to launch a crowdfunding campaign in the new year.

Wyrd Street is a d20-based action adventure RPG about lower class heroes fighting for their loved ones in the slums of a fantasy city. It’s a game about intimate stories and making a difference at the small scale for those who need it the most.

Realmwarp Media is an independent RPG publishing team that has already spear-headed several successful crowdfunding campaigns for RPGs using Fifth Edition and other rule systems.

The launch of our crowdfunding campaign is still a few months away, but I’ll be posting various teasers between now and then. To start with, I’d like to share the description for one of the monsters you’ll encounter in your adventures through the slums of Morhold: the Rot Demon.

Rot Demons are vile spirits drawn to garbage and decay. About a foot in height and covered by leathery skin of a sickly yellow hue, they are little more than broad mouths supported by three stump-like legs. They exist only to further decay by taking up huge mouthfuls of garbage, chewing it, and then regurgitating it as an even more disgusting slurry.

Rot Demons are capable of speech, but their intelligence is minimal. They usually only speak when attacked or disturbed, and even then they mostly parrot simple phrases like “go away,” or else launch into a stream of the most vile curses and insults imaginable. No matter what, though, Rot Demons only ever speak in a dull, glutinous monotone.

Rot Demons are not especially aggressive, but they will attack if their feeding is interrupted or if someone tries to drive them away from the trash heaps they call home.

I love these horrible little buggers. They’ve becoming something of an unofficial mascot for the game.

Song of the Month: Chvrches, Killer

Late last month, Chvrches released a “director’s cut” of their Screen Violence album with three new songs. Of those, Killer is the one that really stood out to me. It feels like it should be in the trailer for a dystopian sci-fi thriller about a grizzled antihero who’s about to bring the whole damn system down.

Are you entertained?

Processing Lucifer’s Final Season

By the standards of today’s binge-watch culture, I’m already a bit late, but I did want to get in some thoughts on the final season of Lucifer — recently uploaded to Netflix — before it completely fades from relevancy.

I have mixed feelings on the show’s ending, and I think it will be quite a while before I fully decide how I feel about it. I lean towards being more pro than con, but it definitely has its issues.

The main thing making this so difficult is that the sixth and final season is a massive, jarring change in direction compared to the rest of the series.

Lucifer has always been a light-hearted dramedy with a healthy mix of “case of the week” standalone episodes and ongoing plot. Since moving to Netflix, the balance has shifted a bit more towards drama rather than comedy and plot versus standalone stories (to the show’s benefit), but it’s been pretty much the same show at its heart.

Season six pretty much throws out the case of the week format (no great loss in my book) in favour being almost pure plot. You might think that makes for a breakneck pace, but it’s actually a very slow, meditative season. I do think this was the right choice for the story they meant to tell, but it does take some patience.

Similarly, while there are still some laughs to be had, the final season leans far more on emotion and pathos. Again, not necessarily a bad thing, but it feels very different from what’s come before. Almost like a totally different series. It’s still good — great, at times — but it doesn’t have that tongue-in-cheek sense of fun that so long defined the series.

Ultimately, this is the season where Lucifer finally grows up. So much of the series had him learning lessons, only to mostly be back to his old immature self next episode. This is the moment where he finally learns the lessons for good and becomes a mature, healthy person. It’s pretty gratifying, but again, sudden. It would have been better to spread his development out more evenly over the course of the series rather than have it all happen at once.

To be blunt, the final season is also contrived, corny, and full of plot holes. It’s very much a story that works best if you don’t think about it too hard.

Now, here’s the thing: The above statement could describe every season of Lucifer, and I’ve generally been fine with it. It’s always just been junk food watching, and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not smart, but it’s fun and it makes you feel good. That’s a perfectly valid form of art.

But the silliness of the plot becomes harder to swallow when the show makes the shift to towards straight character drama. You can have ridiculous stories in a comedy, but when you’re trying for something more serious, it’s a lot harder to overlook. You can do one, but not both.

It also rankles that we never got an answer on why God created Chloe. I guess it’s meant to be some “so all of this could happen thing,” but it really feels like they just abandoned that plot thread. Come on, guys, it’s only the single biggest question in the entire series…

However, if you are willing to overlook the over-complicated plot and the various things that just don’t add up, it is a pretty satisfying season emotionally. We get to see Lucifer finally grow up and become the Lightbringer he was always meant to be, and that feels good.

Most of the other characters get really satisfying conclusions to their story too, with the possible exception of Ella, whose story deserved more screen time than it got. But I’m an Ella fanboy, so I’m biased.

Dan especially stands out as perhaps the best part of this season, and in hindsight perhaps one of the best parts of the series as a whole. I’m a pretty harsh person, and redemption arcs often wrankle me because I rarely feel they’re deserved… but this is a redemption arc done right.

Who would have thought Detective Douche would have turned out to be such an incredible character?

All in all, I do think the final season is more good than bad, but it’s not so easily digestible as the rest of the series has been. I suppose in some ways it’s good that it provokes so much thought — I definitely wouldn’t have expected to still be mulling the ending weeks later like I have been.

On DMs Guild: The Dark Shepherd and Halloween Sales

My latest original subclass, the Dark Shepherd warlock patron, is now live on Dungeon Masters Guild.

Dark Shepherd patrons seek out the lost, the outcast, and the corrupted and offer them safety and a chance for redemption in the twilit spaces of the realms. It is the third (and final?) player option I’ve published inspired by my character in Curse of Strahd. If Demonic Bloodline represents her past and Pact of the Coven her present, the Dark Shepherd is what I see as her ultimate destiny.

To celebrate the spooky season, The Dark Shepherd is 50% from now until November 1st using the following link: https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?discount=9a565783f0

You can also acquire The Dark Shepherd alongside my other subclasses at a discounted rate via the Ashen Grimoire bundle.

The Guild is also hosting its own site-wide Halloween sale, and many projects I’ve worked on are discounted, including Captain Snowmane’s Guided Cruise Through the Domains of Dread and the Reanimator Artificer.

Song of the Month: Metric, Grow Up and Blow Away

The title track from my favourite album.

Final Thoughts on The Gates of Good and Evil

After many delays — both on my end and the publishers’ — I have finally gotten around to finishing the last two books of Ian Irvine’s The Gates of Good and Evil quartet, The Perilous Tower and The Sapphire Gate. The Gates of Good and Evil is itself the latest continuation of the sprawling Three Worlds Cycle that began with The View from the Mirror.

Look, ma, I’m a cover quote.

Ian Irvine is one of my favourite authors, and I’ve loved the Three Worlds setting since I was a teenager, but this latest series underwhelmed me in the first two books. Sadly, that remains true for the final two, as well.

Irvine remains a master of action and pacing. The books are still page-turners, and there are some genuinely thrilling and epic moments, but overall, the story fails to reach the heights achieved by previous books in the saga.

As with the first two entries in Gates of Good and Evil, the villains remain one of the most fundamental flaws. The Merdrun simply aren’t compelling. They’re just unusually nasty humans. They’re too evil to have much nuance, but too mundane to have much flavour.

There is an attempt made to add some depth to them via a new character through which we can see the Merdrun’s point of view on things, and it helps, but it doesn’t really do enough to change their fundamentally uninspiring nature.

I also continue to be disappointed by how much Maigraith has been squandered as a character. The entire Three Worlds saga has been building her up into this epic, terrifying threat, and in this series she’s just… petty and pathetic. She does get a halfway decent conclusion to her story, but overall I’d still consider her treatment in this quartet to be an incredible disappointment — perhaps the greatest error Irvine has made with this entire franchise.

In theory the most exciting part of these last two books is that (thanks to some time travel shenanigans) they bring back nearly every major protagonist from the entire Three Worlds Cycle. This should make for a really epic experience, and it has its moments, but there’s just too many characters and not enough for them to do. Many iconic figures are squandered as irrelevant cameos.

Most egregiously, Nish — arguably the greatest and most memorable hero of the saga — does literally nothing. He could have been removed from the story entirely, and nothing would have changed. He’s just… there.

On the plus side, we do get a lot more time with Xervish Flydd, who never fails to be entertaining. Gods I love that cranky old bastard.

In a vacuum, the Gates of Good and Evil is not a bad series. It’s got some definite rough edges, but I’ve read and enjoyed worse. On its own merits, it’s a decent fantasy action-adventure.

But compared to the quality of the previous entries in the Three Worlds Cycle, and considering all the potential of bringing together plots and characters from the entire saga to date, it’s hard to see it as anything but a disappointment. It pains me to say it, but it’s true. It’s not that it’s bad; it’s just that it could have been so much better.

Confusingly, the ending to book four declares it the conclusion of the Three Worlds Cycle, but Irvine has already announced his intention to write another series (albeit an interquel and thus not technically a continuation, I suppose), and one of the final chapters foreshadows the return of a major villain. So… I guess we’ll have to wait and see.