Canageek (Roleplaying account) @Canageek@tabletop.social

@Canageek I played Ars Magica 1-2E for like 5 years (much of it PBEM). Fantastic game & setting. Tends to be social-graph-crawls where you magic-murder your way thru hostile factions. Literally where Vampire came from.

Get the Whimsy Cards if you can, they're sort of the adventure generator.

3E and later are bulky with dumb rules, and change the balance to make Companion & Grog (mook) fighters much more survivable, which is silly in a game about wizards.

@Canageek I played it, but it was very dream-like and we did better at that with Lords of Creation. But Yaquinto also made Swashbuckler & Adventurer, fantastic man-to-man combat games with programmed movement (like forward 2, swing, R, F might be a turn's commands, then everyone plays out their commands simultaneously).

This isn't to say it can't be done well: One of my all time favourite series is Legend of the Galactic Heroes. It has a legitimately good person taking control of an empire by force and making himself a dictator. HOWEVER, it makes it VERY clear he is an aberration and that societies not run by the people will naturally become abusive, and stopping him, EVEN though he is an excellent ruler, is a major feature of the series.

There has been a lot of talk about how things are changing with the return of the Primach of the ultramarines who is an actually good guy.

But. But.

You've replaced an incompetent and clearly evil dictatorship with a competent one. You see how this is not better, and is, in fact, worse, right? Like, the ununanced depiction of an enlightened dictator is by default fascist propaganda, right? Like, the idea of one strong, wise man running things is their whole mythology?

I think the Tau were supposed to be good guys when they were introduced, a race of people willing to sacrifice and work together for the good of everyone who worked with them, but they've decided that they are actually creepy and exploitative. Which makes me sad.

A large part of the original 40K thing was not only does fascism not make the trains run on time, it has arrested the train for techoheresy. It has been replaced by a team of oxen pulling a bunch of cars chained together. The cars all work, and could just drive on the road, but turning them on is illegal. Not for any good reason, but an unrelated obscenity law makes inserting a long, straight object with a rounded budge at one end into a slot for purposes other then procreation a crime, and a law regulating the creation of keys mandates they be long and straight with a rounded budge at the other end.

However, they made the mistake of making things LOOK cool, which drew on the temptation to make them BE cool, and now the imperium are default good guys

the company that made the software for my self-driving car went bankrupt and it's now incapable of moving because it has drm that requires access to the company's servers

Dammit. Watched an Ars Technica interview with Dan Abnett and the way he talked about 40K and myth cycles and whatnot is EXACTLY how I think about 40K. This is making me want to read his books.

At the same time, I'm still kinda bitter about 30K setting down a definitive version of the Horus Heresy instead of leaving it in myth.

(Yes, I know how problematic 40K is. I'm also aware it started as anti-Thatcher propaganda. It's complicated.)