Orthodox Game Design: An Overly Quarrelsome Introduction

Orthodoxy is a word with many meanings, depending upon connotation. You can use it to mean "right doctrine", "true beauty",  My personal favorite, however, is “right glory”… but I mean it in a corrective sense, like in orthopedics: a glory and beauty that corrects and strengthens, a glorious compassion in a form immediately discernible, even as it cannot be fully understood. A beauty that heals, brings someone back into harmony with creation. Orthodoxy, as I mean it, is a medicinal reality. It is imperative to understand that I do not mean some faux-pious bullshit nonsense. I mean something with trackable, real-world, results.  So when I say I am "Orthodox Christian"I do not mean I identify principally as the member of a has-been former imperial Christian Church that was universally dumped upon by any of the "Enlightenment" thinkers whose naivety directly led to WWII.

I mean, I do identify with that has-been former imperial Christian Church that was universally dumped upon by any of the "Enlightenment" thinkers. Very much!

But I think the Orthodox Church serves, channels, that corrective light. It may know the most about that light, sure, but it's a servant, not the healing light itself.

It is of the utmost importance to understand that this healing and creative light (which the smart figure out is alive and sentient and thus call God) does actually have rules, and "He" manifests under specific conditions, regardless of media. 

What does this have to do with game design? 

I'm getting there.

Chill out.

The problem is that, ultimately, you can't address whether or not a design is O/orthodox or not without talking about the elephant in the room: us moderns are stupid. We have fallen into this idiotic notion that the world can be defined principally in abstractions. This is such a laughably obviously bad idea that we now have at least two entire industries (porn and therapy, in that order) dedicated to cleaning the idea up so it doesn't break the entire population.  None of the abstract frameworks we abuse like Walter White's crystal were meant to be used like how we are using them now. They're descriptive, in the same way that you use a medical textbook to diagnose an illness. They're shortcuts so you don't have to reinvent the wheel everytime. You're meant to look at the world around you and apply your knowledge to the symptoms of the world so that way you can get about to address the situation more quickly.

So when I say there are orthodox principles to game design, I mean that game design can be used in a way to reveal existentially healing beauty to those who play the game, not whether or not someone namechecks Jesus or the characters choose to not have sex before marriage because their purity is meant to be saved and all that happy modern garbage. One is identifying a phenomena happening in the real world and the other is just a Soviet-style checkbox. I am saying there are ways to heal the soul, just as much as healing the body, if not more ways to do it.

And, when I say "games can heal and they can do it on purpose" no one is really able to argue that. You can say you don't think the term "orthodox" shouldn't be applied in that way. And that's something I can respectfully disagree with.

I'll give you an example. I came to videogames late, later than TTRPGs even (19 versus 15). Twilight Princess was one of my first games. There's a lot about Twilight Princess I don't like now, but the ending of that game is not one of them. And then this happened:

For those of you who don't know, the ending of Twilight Princess is a sword fight between the protagonist Link and the antagonist Ganondorf. It's a tense affair, and then all of a sudden you lock blades and you have to tap that A button as fast as possible. Now, I've done that "tap button fast" crap in other games before and since and normally it's boring. But the thing is that Zelda does it right. You've spent all this time solving puzzles and most of the gameplay is about trying to find the most elegant solution to problems possible...

And then all of a sudden Ganandorf is just trying to bowl you over.

And all the people in the story, this sad and broken world, your own survival, requires you to button mash "A" as fast as humanly possible, all so all your work at outmaneuvering Ganondorf isn't destroyed. 

The time for subtetly and craft is past.

Knock that jerk over and nail him to the ground with the sword.

And he then dies standing up. What. The. Hell.

I know I'm not the only one who was rather deeply moved by that climax. There's something about it that opens up a fire in the gut, where the only thing that now counts is whether or not you can mash that ridiculous button hard enough to get your shot in. You've not come this far to get overpowered by a dude at least a head taller than you thank you very much. This a moment where you are told to stand your ground or fail. The game has spent so much time telling you to be clever that the one time it tells you to just have raw gumption hits like a ton of bricks.It's a moment where the world of the game and your own interior world fuse, just for a second, just long enough to where you are Link, all the evils and travails in the world are Gandondorf, and you're going to win.

And then you do.

It's not like you lose sight of the fact that what happened on the screen is factual. It's something so much more mysterious. A part of you came out to the game and said "Yeah, I can do that too. I can fight. I'll fight till I drop." And, even though the victory on the screen isn't factual, a part of you said "No, I think I can go on now" that did not think so before. Something happened inside your soul that is far greater than the thing that prompted it.

Another example, really the example for me, was my second Burning Wheel campaign, The Revenge of the Countess of Fire. We finished the last session, and everyone just... stared... into space. There was utter silence. It was so thick you could cut it with a knife.There was a beauty to what had just happened. Marian, the villain, had just been proven to be a patsy for a greater evil, and she was wanting to end it all. She didn't see another way out. And the players, driven to pity, talked this child-drowning monster out of killing herself and trying to do something with the gift the players have given her: a chance to make a difference, the right way. Marian could make a difference, because the past wasn't king. And that was the victory they'd just had: convincing a monster to try to genuinely love, just one more time. After eight sessions of holding their noses around Marian, they had finally seen her as a person, saw what made her tick, and helped her want to try again. It was a moment that somehow went beyond the game. Not a soul was unaffected.

Some of you are nodding along, I know. You know what I mean now. You can see why it's so hard to define, because by definition you cannot define that movement in your own soul, can you? You sorta describe it, say what it's sorta doing, but that's about it. 

That moment? 

That is a moment of "corrective" beauty, of orthodoxy. You run into the beautiful infinity. And, as Victor Hugo says so freaking eloquently:

“The infinite exists. It is there. If the infinite had no me, the me would be its limit; it would not be the infinite; in other words, it would not be. But it is. Then it has a me. This me of the infinite is God.”

That beautiful infinity, that moment, is with a person.. We historically have called Him God, and  “God is responsible for all good”, says St. Cyril of Alexandria. All good. Including what happens in something as seemingly trivial as playing a game. But nothing is too small for God “not even a teardrop, or a part of a drop”, as St. Symeon the New Theologian says. All things are His, all experiences of good things are a relating to God. And, just like any relationship, there are principles, a mode of thinking, that let you do this on purpose. Which means there are principles of design that can bring you into contact with the Almighty Himself. Because, as it turns out, there's thousands of years of techniques to get you into the proper mindset.

And this means that there are principles that can be used to shift your mindset while playing a game.

Now, for anyone who has not been paying attention over this last post, I'm not advocating someone sets up a checklist of stupid things like "Do we talk about God in this game? Do the characters act in a 'wholesome' manner? Do the good guys always win?" and all sorts of silly things that so many conservative Christians would want on such a list. Or, y'know, SJWs, who are just as prudish and dogmatic as the conservatives. 

Yeah, no.

What exactly am I advocating for? Wait, you wanted me to have this mapped out? Figured out? Ha! Look, you want an honest look at this, or someone trying to sell you something? Me trying to sell you something is down below. You'll figure out very quickly I don't sell anything too well on this blog. I'm practically allergic to being a company man. Hell, I have a game I've published and I still keep forgetting to put a link up on this blog so the dozen or so people (if I'm lucky) might buy it. Maybe. Probably not. So I got news and it's either going to be refreshing or it's going to be terrifying: no I don't have this mapped out. I'll be taking this series irregularly, off-the-cuff, and a bunch of other words that I'm sure everyone will find as I go. I will make mistakes. And I will be wrong.

So you're either in for the ride or you're not. 

As for me, I'll be messing around here. We'll see where it goes!

Thank you for reading!

OKAY, SO THIS IS THE SHILL TIME. If you go away after this point that's fine! Really!

If you like what I've written and want to see it in action, go over to my Itch, and pick up my game Apex, which is a single-page game that packs a lot of punch to it. It's way better than any one-page RPG has any right to be and it's really easy to play.

If you like what I'm saying and want to see what I'm up, design-wise, I update my two games on my Discord on an-almost weekly basis. If you want to see the drafts, go on over to Discord and take a look!

Oh, what am I working on, in general? Glad you asked! I'm working on two games: Dragons and Planets and Crescendo.

Dragons and Planets is a one-shot space fantasy game for two to six people, in the tone and tradition of Star Wars, Pacific Rim, and the Matrix. Gameplay is fast, frenetic, and extremely collaborative, while being surprisingly relaxing. Oh, and it's diceless and uses your favorite book. From character and world creation to the end it takes about two hours.

Crescendo is a long-form fantasy game of character development for two to four people. Innovative journaling with easy-but-deep storytelling mechanics, Crescendo is an intensely rewarding time for those who really want to sink their teeth into their characters and the setting.

You can find the most recent drafts for both games on the Discord.

The Black Demon

There are two kinds of good shark films: serious analaogies for human pride or emotional turmoil and hilarious gore-fests with not a small amount of skin. In general you'll need to pick one, please. Seriously, there's just the two types of shark movies. Hell, really shark stories, cause Jaws was originally a fantastic book.

No, please don't argue it.

Look, the point is that shark movies, while they've always had an ecological subtext, are not really about ecology per se. And even if you were to somehow make a third type of shark movie, one about ecology, it would actually have to have something intellegible to say about ecology. Maybe something about how the warming waters is hurting hunting, or any number of issues that would actually be kinda interesting to do.

You know where you shouldn't be going with shark movies? 

Aztec gods out for revenge.

You wanna go and do that sorta thing your characters had better be totally on point, your commentary on ecology totally up to date, and I better be learn everything there is to know about Aztec gods by the end of your movie. You wanna do something that weird, it better be pristine. And I do mean pristine. You wanna make a third kinda shark movie? You better freaking do it right.

The Black Demon doesn't do it right.

First off, the characters are cookie-cutter trash. I mean, seriously, I could count the number of actually interesting characters... well no, no wait, I couldn't, because there weren't any. And they do all the stupid bullshit you'd expect: crooked white dudes with corporate jobs, superstitious locals, the hot Mexican wife, the bratty kids who might speak Spanish like their Mexican mom, the salt of the earth folks who of course hate the white dude... who has a sudden change of heart at the end as he sees the consequences of his actions and sacrifices himself because he's a better man now, thank you.

I've seen this movie a million times, just this time it's got a crappy shark CGI'd in.

Why is the shark barely in this particular film? I get "less is more" was done in Jaws, and I get that that is one way to do this... but it's a megalodon. Why are we skimping on a megalodon? I get that there's a budget, that that's a real problem, all that but....

Look,  can I just say "it's a megalodon" and have everyone agree that sometimes something so freaking awesome should be indulged? Even a little bit? This isn't a shark film, really, it's a freaking kaiju film. And most kaiju films make their monster as awesome as possible, whether that be with practical effects or an actual CGI budget. 

But hey, there’s another way this film falls flat! This film tries to be a supernatural thriller too! But does it feature the gods as cruel and implacable monsters, with no  true care for human life, ironically making it apparent why Christianity is where it is historically?

Actually yes!

But everything else sucks so much it doesn’t matter. 

Poor Black Demon. There’s a kernel of something interesting here. But it’s buried beneath metric tons of bad characters, confused genre and themes, and bad effects. It’s a level of excrement so deep that you’d drown in it. I’ll take death by water, thank you.

Isom 1 and 2

So issue two came in, I sat down and read, and realized I needed to go back to issue one, even though I'd just read it a few days ago. It turns out Eric July really meant it when he said that each of these issues really are just parts in one longer story. Two also works backwards, making certain aspects of issue one read very differently. So instead of trying to review issue two of Isom on its "own" merits, I'm going to attempt to engage with it the way that July seems to want us to: as an extension and re-evaluation of issue one. So I sat down and read issues one and two, back-to-back. What we have here is a fully realized setting, with great storytelling, but my God the dialogue is starting to grate on me. These two parts set up a narrative bomb, one that hopefully part three lights up and everyone runs for the hills BECAUSE IT'S A BOMB.

First off, the production seems to be higher with issue two, which is really saying something. Maybe it's because I picked up one of the "not going to be around forever" covers? I dunno. I can tell you this: I kept pulling this book out of its included bag just to hold it, and prefer it to my copy of Isom 1 in terms of sheer production. Isom 2 is the best-produced book I own, hardcover or not. I also got this book with free shipping, and it came relatively quickly. So on a production and shipment standpoint I am a very happy camper when it comes to Isom 2. Rippaverse really knocked it out of the park here, and I openly think they deserve their success on this one part alone. There's pride in this production of these books. Isom 2 is also thirty pages more than Isom 1, at the same price. July had promised that as Rippaverse got more clout he'd keep the price the same and just keep folding more content in. He's keeping his promise. I noticed. I love it.

So, like I said before, issue two relies really heavily upon your reading of issue one. It is not a self-contained story at all, so do not order Isom 2 before ordering Isom 1. That being said, I read Isom 2, and then I went back and read them together. And a lot more jumped out at me about issue one. A lot of the worldbuilding that July did in issue one was lost on me, even after three read-throughs, and I found there were actually a bewildering amount of things I had missed. The narrative role of Isom in these two issues so far is to walk into these stories that are already evolving and mess them up by his sheer ignorance and honey badger energy. Avery's lack of any fucks to give is a bomb to the status quo. That's the shtick for Isom: he doesn't really know, he doesn't really care, and he's out bubblegum and excuses. He just wants those he cares about to be okay, and that's really just about the only thing he does actually care about. So far the Ill-Advised story is about the honey badger walking into a crowded room and pissing everyone off.

And you know what? It'd be so much more fun if the dialogue wasn't so freaking bad. I mean, my God, some of these lines of dialogue don't even need to be more than a word or two, and are a paragraph long. It's painfully distracting and I'm honestly about done with it. Granted, issue two is better about shutting up when absolutley necessary, but when it's necessary to give exposition or have a conversation the books go fully bad B-movie levels of dialogue. It hurts, honestly. Some of this shit is "show me on the doll where Eric July hurt you" levels of bad. And it's a real shame, because I can see what he's trying to go for and I like it! I'm really enjoying these issues, this is a slow burn done right! But please, Mr. Vocalist-Youtuber, for the love of God, shut up and let the art do the talking. Isom 2 identifies these moments more often, but when July messes up he does it worse.

I had said in my previous review of Isom 1 that I really don't like Cliff Richard's style, but his storytelling more than makes up for it. In Isom 2 some of Richard's base drawing just gets painful to look at in some spots, particularly three quarter turns. That being said, Richards pulls out the stops storytelling-wise, and by the end of issue two has done something truly impressive.  Just as I started rolling my eyes at the three-quarter portraits Richards started doing stuff with his storytellling I wish more artists even knew existed. The storytelling of Isom 2 is so freaking good I was almost cheering toward the end at some of the layouts. These are  truly fun books to look at folks. They just are. I love holding the books, opening them up, and just looking.

Now, this is all well and good, but now we have a question. Issues one and two have set up this web of events, all of which are explosive, and then ended on a real cliffhanger that could upset the whole applecart. Remember: endings are hard to write. July has set himself up for either a triumph or a failure. This guy doesn't suffer from a lack of balls, y'all! He's backed himself into a corner and is either going to come out swinging with Isom 3 or he's gonna fail, and spectacularly. I don't really see much of an inbetween here. July has absolutely no chill in any part of his narrative, and he's used the extra thirty pages to add more fuel to the fire.

Isom 1 and 2 are a lot of fun. The books are of amazing quality. I don't like the Richards's style but his storytelling is practically immaculate and more than makes up for any drafting issues I've got with his style. July clearly has the big picture very solidly in mind, and plays with the toys he introduces well, but holy crap the dialogue can get to be George Lucas levels of cringe. Given this is July's second book this is all forgiveable. He's trying to find his stride and he's relying upon those with more experience to carry him, which is hardly a crime. But honestly I'm a bit nervous for issue three. If July is smart about this he's going to delivers a fireworks-intensive third act, with some of the most intense storytelling I've seen in a long time.

But if  July is dumb about this he'll blow up the Rippaverse before it even truly starts.

We'll see.

I've had fun so far, I'll definitely be ordering Alphacore and Yaira! I'm excited to see where this is going!

Isom #1

 

There is no way to talk about the single highest-grossing crowdfunded graphic novel of all time without getting into some history.

So let's talk about ComicsGate. Grab a glass of your favorite beverage, cause this is a doozy. ComicsGate (CG) began around 2016, with a bunch of people (rightfully) saying that the folks at Marvel and DC were no longer writing comics, but mostly leftist propaganda. And that it sucked. They took issue with new token characters like Ms. Marvel and pointed out (again, correctly) that they weren't really characters, not when it counted, but propaganda machines. And let's not leave out the part where "heroes"  began acting like class-A sociopaths, right Iron Heart? Now, the problem is that a lot of these people were, for lack of a better word, assholes. Generally when someone gets mad they become an asshole. And frankly, if you've ever seen a single tweet from someone like Dan Slott, Maggs Visaggio, or Vita Ayala... it's kinda hard to not get extremely angry very quickly. So they reacted.

They were labeled a hate group. 

By people who do whisper networks to bring down other creators they don't like. 

By people who intentionally go out of their way to destroy other people's careers and boast about it. Publicly.

Yeah.

Understand, I am not defending the ComicsGate people who were jerks. But if they count as a hate group the "mainstream" is, objectively, a hategroup as well. The next few years anyone with a conservative voice inside of mainstream comics being pushed out, with bonafide legends like Chuck Dixon more or less being blacklisted for not subscribing to the next lefitst cause. There's a cruel joke here, of course: said conservatives went on to make very publicly livable amounts of money, something no mainstream writer or artist could ever claim to make. As it turns out, crowdfunding is actually profitable!

Enter Eric D. July, a black libertarian musicisn and culture war commentator. As is always the case for prominent dissidents, I pay attention to July, not because I agree with him politically, but because all dissidents, at root, have a point, somehow. Like most dissidents, I don't think Mr. July is correct about much of anything, because he's in the forest, looking at individual trees. I also think libertarianism is a naive ideology. But, unlike a lot of the dissidents, July had true confidence. The man had gone through hell multiple ways, and you don't fake the type that kind of experience. July's concerns, while sometimes off the mark, were always grounded in assumptions I've always fundamentally agreed with, that of the need to make money in comics and actually loving the medium.

When July declared he was going to start a comic book company, called the Rippaverse, I was a bit... skeptical. I knew July to be a businesman, so I didn't doubt he couldn't figure something out, but he very openly wanted to take on the mainstream and win.

I mean, look at this page from Isom #1. Pretty clear what his intentions are, aren't they? Not exactly the picture of subtlety.

Now, the next part of this is where it gets interesting. See, when Isom #1 launched, a year ago, it broke 3.5 million in pre-orders. There was one, just one, article from the mainstream "news sources". Reddit banned any talk of the launch, because they had lumped July in with the ComicsGate people. July wasn't the first one they hadn't done it to (see Alterna Comics!), but this was the first time that the absurdity became obvious... assuming you were watching.

And I was.

The things they called July were awful. I'm not going to post them here. But you can find them. The "inclusive" mainstream called July Uncle Tom and much worse, becoming exactly what they had always accused the conservative movement of.

Go ahead. Look. It's around.

Truth is a bitch, ain't it?

Despite all this, or probably because of it, July's first book pulled in 3.5 million bucks. And during all of this I didn't give a red cent to Eric July. It's not that I disagreed with his words... but I wanted to see his actions. And it took a year, but 2023 dropped and July began to make serious moves. He opened up an additional warehouse, contracted Chuck Dixon for not one, but two books, got the Yaira book up and running, all while working on Isom #2. I watched. And waited. 35 bucks for 96 pages seemed a bit of a hard sell, considering July had never written a comic in his life and I couldn't get seem to get any actually objective review to tell me if I might even enjoy the book for being, well.... yanno... A BOOK. Because, at the end of the day, July isn't here to fight a culture war. If he wanted to do that he'd just keep making YouTube videos. He's here to write comics. And I had no idea if I wanted to try his work at all.

And then Isom #1 went on sale.

So I ordered it.

What follows, now that we got the legwork out of the way, is an honest attempt to review Isom #1. There's been a lot of buzz around the book, and now, while people are finally trying to be objective about the work, I feel the reviews are lacking. So here's my attempt to do it.

First off, this book is extremely high quality. Here's the mailer the book came in:

Were they worried about people trying to bomb their books??? This sucker is sturdy.

The book itself is of amazing quality. Not good, not even great, amazing. The book feels so good to hold. I know that sounds weird. But it's very very clear where the price tag of 35 bucks went: this is a damn wonderful book. I like holding the book, just to hold it.  The colors are bright, there isn't a chance in hell of the text smearing, ever, even after this book survives the nuclear holocaust and me and the cockroaches don't. July wanted the book to last, and it's gonna. The packaging and physical product are far better than anything else on the market currently, and it's not even close. I'm not sure when they're going to announce that Isom #1 could be used as a radiation shield during a nuclear blast, but trust me it's coming.

Now, onto the art. Cliff Richards pencils and inks. While the style is okay, not being stylized or realistic enough for my tastes, Richards's storytelling is awesome. I didn't need to do the squint test on 95% of these pages; my eyes flowed very easily acrost the pages. There's an ease, a grace, to the storytelling here that I really enjoyed. This is slow-burn done really, really, really well. Honestly, there were moments where July should have just shut up and let Richards off the chain even more. We'll get to that more in a minute, but this book is fun to look at and is worth the price of admission alone.

Yes, I jsut said I'd buy the book at 35 bucks just for the art's storytelling. Isom #2 is now coming in, so my money is where my mouth is.

The story itself is where things get trickier. Isom #1 has some truly impressive requirements: it's not just the first part of a three-book arc, it's openly supposed to set up an entire superhero universe. The book is openly called a "launching pad" right on the opening page, so this isn't me just guessing: Isom #1 is the hook for multiple lines of books, all at once. In 96 pages. I'm sorry, but that's an impossible goal. I don't know of anyone who could pull that off, it's why the freaking Avengers movie comes so relatively late in the MCU lineup! Again, this is an impossible task. Seasoned writers ain't gonna be able to do it, nevermind a first outing (this is July's first comic), which means that the book is hosed before it even starts. Some things just should not be attempted. The question isn't whether or not July fails his narrative requirements, it's actually how well he handles the failure. You could either go all-out on world-buidling, while not really focusing on Isom, or go really hard on your titular character and throw in just enough world-building to where people want more. 

Well the book goes with what I think is the correct approach: it focuses very closely on Avery Silman, Isom, and uses the story to introduce Yaira and the Alphacore. The problem is that neither of these extra elements are actually interesting. Yaira shows up for a few pages, along with the Alphacore and... isn't really used. And, I mean, Yaira's got a ton of hype already! Here's some fan art of her, from here.

Like, why are people so excited? I genuinely don't get it. I'm honestly not sure what the hype around these characters is about. This is one of those moments when the hype around the Rippaverse honestly feels unearned. What on earth, from the page, would make us like these characters? I know I'm interested because I know Eric's hired good writers and artists to make the books, so I'm hyped for that, but from these pages alone? I mean, who cares? Eric could have swapped Yaira, at the very least, and actually have made the story make more sense. The story beat she shows up in is necessary, and I like it, and I really like how the fight she shows up in is drawn even! But she particularly didn't need to be here. Alphacore making any form of entrance makes sense given the narrative, but Yaira is fan service in the worst way possible.

Fortunately Avery himself is a really interesting character. A former superhero turned rancher, Avery is the type of grouchy "don't yank me out of retirement" character I automatically find myself liking. The thing is that July could have just left it there, but doesn't. Avery's really well sketched-out, with a huge chip on his shoulder that gets him in trouble, along with a sense of honor that puts him back in trouble. It's got a lot of potential, and July takes that potential and fleshes it out with entertaining fights and some actually sweet scenes. His supporting cast are grounded and fun to read about. The actual heart and soul of the story is well-done, and what more could you ask for than that?

Now, the thing is that several reviewers have commented that the pacing of the book is slow and not much happens. That's something I really disagree on. The book is meant to be a slow burn, as per the mission statement of Eric July. And the plot is a good, slow, burn. He takes his time, sets things up, and by the time you're done with the first issue you got a really good idea of who Avery is and what's at stake. The plot achieves its ends and does it well. What really needs work, however, is the freaking dialogue. Good gravy, there's pages in this book that don't need any dialogue at all, because they're so well drawn and laid out... and there's dialogue. And it's not good. Flat out, not good. And honestly it never could have been good, because these are the pages where you shut up. The art saves these pages, fundamentally, but in the hands of a lesser artist they'd be painful pages to read. July was smart to pick Richards to back him up, to patch the narrative for his first time out.

There's also some bonus pages in the back of the book, for a concept called Norfrica. Not gonna lie, I didn't really get what was going on here. I get it's a pitch, but a pitch for what exactly? I feel a bit thick reading it, because I know he's trying to pitch another title, but honestly I'm not sure why I should care about these characters, or their power of the "lyrics being real". I was thoroughly underwhelmed. If there's a good creative team behind it I'll consider buying it, because I like what I read about Avery... but certainly not on the strength of these pages. There's also a nice pin-up of Yaira at the end. It's a nice drawing, but again, not getting the draw, at least not yet. Some parts of this book just scream "You should already be hyped!"

Nuh-uh.

You earn that shit from me.

Now, let's not get this confused. I like this book! Had I know how much I'd like it I'd happily have shelled out thirty five bucks for it. The book quality and the art alone is worth the thirty-five, and I really don't say that lightly. I like how July swings for the fences, swings hard, and just keeps swinging. He hits at the important stuff, borks the small. You can't ask more for a beginning attempt.

Now, the question is "Does this book warrant the 3.5 million dollar craze?" On its own terms? Hell no. The book simply isn't that good. So why did it bring in this amount of money, besides the book being 35 hard-earned George Washingtons?

This. This page right here.

Look, folks, the simple fact of the matter is that this book found an untapped market. There's apparently a bunch of would-be readers who obviously connected with the above ethics, which this apparently untapped market felt are not currently being honored by the Big Two. So, regardless of whether or not you like this comic book or not, whether you like ComicsGate or not or even think in those terms (which I do not think healthy)… that’s a lot of money left on the table. 

Given that Isom #2 hit 2.2 million dollars in pre-orders, and that there’s at least two more projects coming out before the end of the year, I think it safe to say that the Rippaverse ain’t going anywhere. Isom isn’t a fluke. This book is a good first outing, and is about to be accompanied by veteran teams who openly want to take the comic world by storm. They may even succeed. 

But they're not going away.

The DnD Movie is Too Good

God, the paladin is so well done.

Cinematic adaptations of books are difficult to pull off. The two different media are very difficult to translate between. What makes a story good as a book frequently makes it a terrible movie, and vice versa. Games are this problem on a whole other level. Unlike a book, where there are hundreds of years of literary criticism to draw from for adaptational purposes, game criticism is a much younger form, with people still arguing there is no such thing as actually bad or good game design; obviously we have a ways to go yet! At least with the “thaT’s oNLy YOur opiNION” folks who say such silly things about stories and movies you can point at established schools and ask them to do some learning or get an adult. Modern game designers still have to contend with “you can’t figure out fun” people.

Is it any wonder that most game adaptations are so bad then? People are trying to ape events, without asking “How does the game make us feel?”, because nobody really has a popular framework to help them understand what’s actually important about the game they’re trying to adapt to a movie! Right, Prince of Persia???

The new DnD movie is a really good B movie. It knows it’s a B movie. It’s happy with its popcorn flick status and decided to really own up to this shtick! I wasn’t bored at any point. The characters are wonderful, the humor has a wide range, the fights are well thought-out, and the themes of the story are poignantly hopeful.

It’s not too often these days every character has an arc, no matter how small it is. “The team” each have an arc: Edgin has to learn how to actually be father material, Holga must learn to accept family outside her own tribe, and Simon and Doric together start learning how to be more for each other. None of this is masterfully crafted or anything, but given how frequently the fundamentals are ignored it’s a breath of fresh air to see competency in 2023.

No, I’ve not seen Across the Spider-Verse yet, why do you ask?

So, no, I’m not claiming DnD is a great movie, writing wise. Actually, I’m not claiming it’s great at any one thing at all!.. particularly the CGI. OUCH. Just ouch. Is it the same overworked and underpaid team of “not-slaves” CGI team worked to lichdom by Marvel? Cause if it is we’re gonna have a zombie uprising in a few years as more dewy-eyed artists get their souls ground into phylacteries. The displacer beasts particularly were embarrassing, not to mention that hand fight, which would have been better done by LEGO.

Fortunately the humor is really good. The Jarnathan gag particularly had me laughing, because it is exactly the stupid shit an RPG player would think of. None of the jokes were that modern cringe meta nonsense; I actually got to know people through their sense of humor, something I thought had died with Joss Whedon years ago. Even the freaking paladin was funny! As in he was actually possessed of a sense of humor and could troll as well as the rest of the cast… in his own way.

Now, despite my diatribe against the CGI, the actual fights and other set-pieces endeared themselves to me. Call me a sucker for effort but there’s actually some imagination here, particularly with the Portal Staff. 

I will break reality for this staff. Reality. You heard me.

Someone really sat down and blocked out the locations, really thought about what they could do with them that was fun, and decided "to hell with the budget, let's have fun!" So yes, I now I've been harping on that whole crappy CGI thing, but honestly I'd prefer that they try and do something fun with bad effects to a boring and pretty movie. 

Or, y'know, a modern Marvel movie, which is boring and ugly.

Honestly, the themes of the movie, the core message or whatever, is one of my favorite things about it. Edgin is the heart and soul of the movie, and I feel like they do a good job with him having to let go of what he wants and addressing what the situation needs. He's the cypher of the movie, and this is honestly where I feel that the film shines the strongest: relating it all back to him. The movie has a strong focus on "letting go and doing what's necessary, no matter how you feel about it" that actually does go into the poignant and genuine territory, without forgetting that this is a Wendy's thank you, and I didn't necessarily come here for some deep exposition on the human condition, but for badly-done Displacer Beasts. I got my Displacer Beasts, hey look there's some actual emotional genuine stuff! BONUS!!!

Oh, and I have to say this as a pally main: I love the paladin in this movie. He's all the best paladin mains I've ever met, all rolled into one, with an extra dosage of humor. Honestly, anyone who wants to know how to play a paladin needs to watch this movie, no matter the game you're playing. It's great to see my people get represented well.

So I had a good time.

But that doesn't make the DnD movie a good adaptation. Sorry.

Here's the deal: adaptations are good if you can take what works about the original thing and translate it to your new media. A movie can be well-done, but be a terrible adaptation, and vice versa... or you can be Lord of the Rings and be a deeply flawed trilogy of movies and a bad adaptation with a kickass soundtrack. One can argue that I presented subjective stuff and pretended it's objective, but I'm not talking about whether or not the film is enjoyable: did the moviemakers identify the themes of the source material and translate them, or not? Yes, or no? You can get an objective answer to that question, by and large. 

The DnD movie is a terrible adaptation of any modern version of Dungeons and Dragons, even 4e (which it is arguably the closest to).

For one thing, there's actually a fair amount of nuance to the characters.I played DnD a good ten years before jumping to other systems, and I never saw the particular kind of poignancy the movie does. And frankly, I doubt anyone has, and the reason is very simple: this particular type of emotional intimacy is very hard to do without either a group that's okay with an almost-unheard-of level of emotional closeness, or mechanics that can nicely steer you in that direction so you can skip the awkward warming up steps. I'm NOT saying you can't have a group pull it off, but literally everything in the game doesn't help you do it, and with that pile of "not helpings" it turns into "actively discourages".

Also, the combats are fun and fast! When has that ever happened in a modern DnD game??? I love the crap out of 4th, and it did intricate so well, but it wasn't fast. 5e doesn't have half the bells and whistles of 4e (and it needs them), but the actual mechanics for combat are (and this is me being extremely kind) boring as fuck. Roll. See if you did damage or if the fight was nullified by your spellcasters, do damage. Rinse. Repeat. Yawn. Check your phone... oh I got hit? Oh, I don't like that. Have no consequences? Cool, I'll keep checking my phone while the DM tells his story. I have no idea how the DnD writers, who clearly had written from their own RPG experiences, managed to get "fast and inventive and fun set pieces" from their time with any modern DnD edition. And the earlier editions don't even do combat as sport, they did combat as war and wouldn't have done any of these setpieces at all!

But the greatest "you clearly didn't get this from DnD" is the coherent theming. Look, folks, I've been a Burning Wheel GM for ten years. Burning Wheel is possibly one of the best games for building thematic coherence from table time... and even what they're doing here in this movie would be hard to pull off. At least with the Wheel there's a good possibility of it happening, provided you're intentional and all that. Burning Wheel can give you this kind of coherence easier than most, but it's still difficult. Short of railroading the holy shit out of all your players and doing the absolutely worst of trad gameplay it's almost impossible to get any real narrative coherence out of most roleplaying games, nevermind the mediocrity that is post-TSR DnD.

If this was a faithful adaptation of Dungeons and Dragons, particularly 5e, it would be a mostly lifeless mess of railroading from a burnt-out DM, characters that were a combination of bad pastiches and stupid jokes, and some of the least interesting fights you would have seen in your life. A faithful adaptation of DnD would honestly put the world to sleep and kill the brand. And that may not be a bad thing at this point, given that WOTC like hiring the Pinkertons when they don't get their way. Some fates are indeed worse than death. I don't even like Pathfinder but even I know they're a far worthier candidate... not to mention more accurate to the kind of story this movie tells.

Now, someone (probably everyone) will be reading this and going "Holy shit this is spiteful". You're not entirely wrong?  I do resent how the RPG with the biggest share of players on the planet is astoundingly mediocre. I do actively resent that most of what my friends call "campaign tales" is actually just a collection of player horror stories as they struggle with systems that clearly were not designed for anything other than shallow brand recognition, reaping the consequences thereof. I especially resent that a movie that's actually quirky and fun gets to be associated with something not quirky or fun, but is actively a drain on the mental health of more than a few DMs who are brave enough to try it (the number of DMs for 5e is dropping for a good reason). Whether we want to admit it or not, this movie is an advertisement for Dungeons and Dragons... and it feels nothing like this movie, at all. If this was actually a commercial you'd go "Oh, that's false advertising" and be pissed off with me. You can argue the back half of this post is way too spiteful, but you'd also have to then tell me the obvious isn't true: that they're trying tot tell you "our product makes experiences kinda like this". And I'm not really going to play ball with that. That's a level of doublethink I find unacceptable, and I had a short fuse on such things to begin with.

There are games that feel like this movie, and  the best fit is probably Dungeon World. If you like this movie and want to try out a roleplaying game go get Dungeon World and have a blast! Dungeon World is a good game and I wish you many sessions of fun stories with you and your friends. This movie does resemble the table play of real games! Really good games! They just happen to not be Dungeons and Dragons.

I genuinely love this movie. I plan to share it with my kids when they're just a tad bit older. But you know what I'm going to tell them?

"The title isn't right. They should have called it Dungeon World: Honor Among Thieves".

And then I'm gonna play Dungeon World with them.

And we'll laugh and have a blast.