Yesterday I posted my Reach of the Roach God review, and it was a review I struggled with, for a number of reasons. This then, isn’t a review, but simply an expression of my feelings about the book and writing the review.

I was torn on whether it was ethical to criticise strongly so early in Reach’s release cycle. I refrained from formally reviewing Throne of Avarice for this reason when it was released. I want to provide honest criticism but also, I don’t want to deprive creators of potential sales in such a challenging financial climate. I reached out to Zedeck with this on mind before I published, but it was still foremost on my mind for the last 24 hours. This primed me for a stronger emotional response than I’d usually have to writing a review, because I wasn’t sure releasing it was doing the right thing.

I was also really excited regarding a number of Reach’s innovations because of how they reflected my own work, but I didn’t want to turn a Bathtub Review into advertising for my own work. Particularly, Reach’s stat blocks are very similar to my own in Ludicrous Compendium (I know for a fact that this was not plagiarism but convergent design), and Zedeck used a page referencing system similar to what I have implemented in the upcoming Bridewell (something Zedeck built on from Lorn Song, I understand, but that I honestly didn’t remember had been in that when I intended it).

It’s personally exciting to me to see parallels between my and Zedeck’s work because Iv regard it with a lot of admiration and respect, and A Thousand Thousand Islands on particular was the first text I read that made me feel like work like that which I’m interested in producing a) can be done and b) can be recognised as valuable.

In a similar way, I responded quite emotionally at the disappointment that the translation from zine to tome didn’t go as smoothly as I’d have liked, because I can see those same difficulties manifesting as I playtest and attempt to information design and lay out Bridewell. I fear that perhaps this particular type of system agnostic module will not survive a transition from zine to long-form, and that’s not an outcome that is acceptable to me.

All of this, and the parallel work I’m doing on Bridewell, as well as ongoing discourse on the apparently dismal state of criticism in elfgames (a comment that, as you might imagine, I take personally and argue against vehemently, although I maintain that if you want change, be the change), has just filled me with challenging feelings this week.

Anyway, that was a rather pointless and incoherent rant, but there you have it, it’s my blog and I can be incoherent if I want to.

25th June, 2023

Idle Cartulary