Random Links for 7/16/21

- Mailanka wrote a post that riffs off of my "Paper Man" writing.

On Paper Men and Disposable Characters
I think this is where I put down my first "paper man" discussion, although my buddy Don W. using it dates back to pre-internet days.

My Paper Man is Dead

Ultimately, it's not about characters being disposable vs. being special snowflakes. It's about the character being a vehicle for something else, and ultimately just being a tool for shared imagination and shared fun . . . and not the point of the fun. You're not playing tabletop RPGs to make a paper man, you're making a paper man to play tabletop RPGs. The whole "waah, waah, waah, my paper man is dead" line is reminding you that loss of a paper man in the process of having fun is just part of the game. More disposable or less disposable, their job is to let you have fun. Don't lose sight of that and emphasize the paper man over the point of playing a game.

Anyway, it's very interesting to see someone's outside perspective of a way to play Felltower. He's largely describing the kind of background that led to the placement of Gram/Balmung in the dungeon, the sword-spirit, the whole backstory of the dungeon with Sterick, etc. . . . I wouldn't encourage a player to make a suicide background-creator to put things into the dungeon that were already there to find. But it's an interesting perspective on how my campaign looks from the outside.

- Want to know what Matt wrote for the PDF Challenge? Now you can find out.

- Blood of Prokopius is still writing about megadungeon denizens and scripture. It's pretty neat.

Part 2
Part 3

- This is more linguistics than gaming, but still, I like language details and this kind of detail is interesting for historical campaigns. I've heard it before that "we have no idea what (Latin/Ancient Greek/Ancient Egyptian/etc.) sounded like." Well, that's not exactly true - we have actual primary source discussions of the sounds, and the ability to recontruct sounds by tracing back from existing sounds in languages that developed from ancient languages. It's a pretty neat concept. Just because we don't have audio recordings doesn't mean we don't have a way to find out how speech sounded.

What Did Ancient Languages Sound Like?

- I'm 9-in-10 likely to sell my Bones IV Core Set. I'd enjoy opening it but I'm not thinking I'll be painting that much.

- The PDF Challenge is still going. Only a few days left. We need some more $$$ to unlock DF23, by Sean Punch.