Chinese-diaspora LARPer, worldbuilder, indie TTRPG designer and roleplay theorist. Lilissen on Curse of Strahd: Twice Bitten. Full portfolio (and monthly atelier mailing list) at https://mirror-lock.com.
Nice to meet you all, Tumblr! I'm a writer, editor, game designer, and performer in the indie TTRPG space.
You might know me as the creator of Her Odyssey, a solo journaling game where you follow the journey of a wanderer trying to find her way home - or find a new home. Built on the Caltrop Core system by Titanomachy RPG, this contemplative game is played with just a deck of cards, a handful of d4s, and a place to record your journal entries. Her Odyssey has received almost six thousand downloads and is coming to print with all-new art on May 5th!
Or perhaps you've heard of one of my other indie TTRPGs:
Pearl & Provenance, a two-player game about two nameless demigods fleeing the ruin of their old world and creating a new one together
Galatea, a solo journaling game about a living masterpiece struggling to live up to their creator's unrealistic expectations of perfection
Untitled Moth Game, a solo journaling game about a cursed were-moth seeking to rescue her true love (written as a present for cassimothwin)
You, Beyond the Pale, a solo journaling game about being a monster living alone in the wild, bewildered by a world full of mortals
DIY Identity, a one-page two-player game about missed paths in life. Must be played in an IKEA store.
The Traitor Princess, a one-page multi-player game about coping with upheaval and subliminating emotions. Must be played while donating your clothes.
I've also created my own SRD, Aspire, for both experienced and first-time game designers alike to write TTRPGs with! Aspire is built from the design principles that went into my first few games and is set up to provide a framework for narrative-driven RPGs with turning points that change both the stakes and the rules.
And if you're more on the D&D side of things, you may know me as the player of Lilissen, the secretive and frail half-elf from Curse of Strahd: Twice Bitten. Twice Bitten was a 100% Rules-As-Written Curse of Strahd campaign, played by five former CoS DMs and DMed by DragnaCarta, best known for his popular Curse of Strahd: Reloaded guides. The campaign is fully complete as of February 2022 and can be found on YouTube or wherever you listen to podcasts.
You can find all my games on my Itch page, and you can find more about everything I do (including voice acting, interviews, TTRPG design advice, Lilissen's epilogue, my mailing list...) on my website.
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that post about “you get bandits when you cut soldiers loose without pay” reminds me of the Thirty Years War, because one could say that beneath all the religious schisms and diplomatic jockeying, the heart of the thirty years war was “what happens when you have a state with just enough capacity to raise massive armies but without enough financial capacity to actually pay those armies” and the answer is that the line between professional armies and roving gangs of bandits disappears and every time you try to raise an army it just becomes another independently acting wildfire devouring the countryside. No matter how bad things get, every day I wake up and thank my lucky stars that I do not live in 17th century Europe. Or 17th century China. Or the 17th century Americas. Or basically anywhere in the 17th century.
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sometimes artists worry if their art is actually capable of making the world a better place, or if its all just wasted effort. what you need to remember is: all art is evil, and the sole aspiration of the artist should be to maim as many onlookers as possible.
Instead of doomscrolling lately I have been reading my PDFs and it turns out if you do this you learn a whole bunch of stuff. I’m afraid I must recommend it
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when i wake up remind me to make a post about the lack of blood in utena and what it means to have a world where suffering can only be beautiful or hidden
oh i should probably finish this thought lmfao. anyway of course there r the genre limitations of a shojo not being expected to show much blood, and of course the fact that the wounds caused in the duels are largely spiritual rather than physical. but there’s also something about how the entire world theyre inhabiting has a false quality to it: it’s a stage, an endless and eternal play where akio is the director. because the characters operate inside akio’s construction, wounds are only allowed to be as “real” as anything can be in this world. there’s no true bloodshed in a stage play after all; the characters need to be able to get up and perform again the next night.
i also think it signifies akio’s perpetual immaturity in its unwillingness to deal directly with difficult subjects. akio, as much as any of the other characters, is trapped at the school, perpetually unable to “graduate” and thus deal directly with the real world.
instead, bloodshed is transferred to the rose petals. losing your rose in the duel indicates an erosion of self, a loss of innocence, and anthy’s role as the gardener indicates her complicity in the violence of the duel games. is made even clear by the moments of real violence that are obscured by the endless spinning roses and reinforced in adolescence of utena when we see the dueling grounds now covered in a field of red roses, signifying the “bloodshed” that has occurred across countless duels.
oh i guess i should also add in contrast to the performative, beautiful violence of watching roses blow away on the breeze is the very real violence hidden at the center of the story: anthy, trapped by hundreds of swords piercing her, rendering her unable to move. violence against anthy is the mechanism that keeps the whole performance spinning, so that duels can be about flowers
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They should make a game which is a farming sim for the first twenty hours or so, and then suddenly the Dark Lord's forces raze your village to the ground and it turns into a JRPG
After the Dark Lord ascends to godhood, he effortlessly wipes out your entire party. he's not just stronger than you, he's on a whole different level. can the four of you ever hope to defeat him now?
ANSWER: fuck no. but what you lack in strength you can make up for in numbers. that's right, it's an RTS now
S. Kaiya J. | Mirror-lock Atelier @mirror-lock - Tumblr Blog | Tumlook
