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sadbirbs · 4 years

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I’ve been going through the Racial Justice & Equality Bundle and I’m going to make a list of stuff I’m especially excited about, both for future self-reference and for others who might be interested.

If you’re thinking about buying the bundle -- do it! This list is catered to my tastes but there’s so much in there that I *promise* you’ll find something you like.

If you already have, feel free to add on with your own picks/recommendations, as I’m overwhelmed by the amount of stuff in there and would love help sorting through it!

Under the cut ‘cause this got long.

Night in the Woods

The World Begins With You

Vilmonic: genetics/evolution simulator

A Mortician’s Tale: run a funeral home. 1-hour playtime

Petty Puny Planet: micromanage your pet planet

Gataela: Victorian steampunk RPG with a debate-battle system

Overland: post-apocalyptic road trip survival/strategy game

A Snake’s Tale: puzzle game with cute snakes!

Mon-cuties For All: raising monsters on a farm? Love farming games and it looks adorable

The Boughs: a TTRPG setting that looks like it’ll really scratch my “city in a giant tree” itch

Minit: accomplish everything you can in 60 seconds, then move on to the next life -- a game I already wanted pre-bundle

AIdol: cute visual novel about an AI trying to find her programmer (there are a lot of great-looking visual novels in here)

Verdant Skies: describes itself as Harvest-Moon-like but in a space colony! Lots of options for activities & they’ve placed a focus on inclusive avatar-building

Brassica: another visual novel, about “political marriages and their gay alternatives,” nice art style

In the Light of a Ghost Star: rules-light sci-fi TTRPG about exploring an abandoned Earth

Rites & Rituals: TTRPG lore dealing with spellcasting -- I’m curious about the index of fictional plants!

The King’s Bird: I’m not really into platformers but this looks beautiful + birds

#birdsecrets: how could I not pick something with a name like that. A mystery-solving TTRPG

My Welcomed Guest: single-player TTRPG about being trapped in Faerie

For the Honor: GM-less TTRPG with a magical princess aesthetic

To be a HerpWitch: “a small game about being nonbinary and befriending familiars”

6 Bites for 6 Princes: a TTRPG adventure (system-agnostic) about royal family secrets & werewolves

Tricksters: 2-5 player TTRPG (who wants to make a trickstersona?)

Lancer: a very nice looking sci fi TTRPG

Peckin’ Pixels: pixel art + chickens? sign me up

Cthulhu Deep Green: Cthulhu mythos + conspiracies TTRPG

Chalice: Arthurian Knights TTRPG (wish I could bring this into one of my lit classes ...)

Astral Defense: Galaga-type pixel art shooter

Eat Girl: “surreal top-down dot-eating game”, PacMan style

Beast Dream: Pokemon-inspired TTRPG about befriending monsters and going on adventures

World Maker: single-player worldbuilding TTRPG made with an eye towards writers developing worlds (!!)

Peck N Run: more birds! You play as a sandpiper trying to feed your chicks!

Mapping the Catacombs: solo TTRPG (pen & paper RPG) adventure about exploring catacombs

Ring of Fire: mystery game about chasing down a serial killer, looks excellent and atmospheric

Bird Bakery: m a k e y o u r o w n b i r d

Death and Taxes: oh I wanted this on Steam! you play the Grim Reaper deciding people’s cases

Signs of the Sojourner: deck-building game that focuses on your experiences with other characters

Loopy Lore: co-op storytelling party game

Sleepaway: GM-less TTRPG about camp counselors protecting kids from the Lindworm

Matr1x 0verl0ad: cyberpunk solitaire, sounds like a great combo! (TTRPG/card game)

The Reaper’s Almanac: GM-less game where players write each other letters as reapers harvesting human souls

Mutiny Island: open-world RPGish game about being a pirate

Viridian Maw: TTRPG setting featuring a mutated crater

MonGirl Tile: cute strategy card game

Black Heart: a Carly-Rae-Jepsen-themed cultist one-shot TTRPG. Wild

Crystal Story: Awakening: retro-looking pixel art RPG

Mausritter: mice with swords TTRPG; my childhood Redwall obsession just flared to life + adventure included

EMUUROM: metroidvania where you’re just scanning creatures and befriending them instead of killing them

Roguescape: rogue-like platforming dungeon crawler

Sonar Smash: cute shooter featuring a dolphin! iOS/Android compatible!

Noise1: hacker-typing stealth game

Desktop Goose: I saw this one in a tumblr post going around a while back. It’s a goose. It lives on your desktop. It’s horrible

Night in the Storm: you’re a lighthouse-keeper trying to keep the light on all night; looks gorgeous

Democratic Socialism Simulator: play as the first socialist president of the United States

Interstellaria: real-time space-exploration and management sim

One Page Lore: Fantasy Folk: lore for fantasy races that provides alternatives to or removes problematic tropes

OneShot: surreal/meta puzzle adventure game (keeps getting recommended to me on Steam)

Cromwell: Reigns but you’re Oliver Cromwell

Desktop Meadow: transform your entire computer into a beautiful meadow w/ birds, flowers, & mail

Ex Novo: city-building/map generating multiplayer pen-and-paper game (good for developing settings for further use)

Spring Falls: a puzzle game about water, erosion, and watching things grow

Corvid Court: bird-themed TTRPG about being criminals in a corrupt city

Celestial Correspondence: you log onto an angel’s computer and read their emails

The Ghost Houses of Phylinecra: system-agonistic TTRPG adventure/setting

1-6 Oozes in the Dark: D&D 5e module for level 2 characters

Stand Up: Persona-inspired TTRPG

Nott & Dagr: Norse-mythology puzzle co-op

Neon Blight: cyberpunk rogue-lite/gun store management game

Oxenfree: I’ve already watched a playthrough so I probably won’t actually play it, but a rec for anyone who hasn’t

#games #ttrpg #rpg #itch.io

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bastardtravel · 6 years

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August 11, 2018. Manchester, New Hampshire.

After seven hours on the road, pausing only to explore an Old Ones cult site, storm a terrible castle, and eat distressingly dry corned beef at a Greek diner that still advertised one of their menu items as “Michael Jackson’s favorite grinder”, we were in dire need of respite.

Establishing a forward operating base was our first priority. For my part, I can sleep anywhere. My bonfire days in the Frozen North frequently necessitated pitching a $10 K-Mart tent over gravel, then drinking bottom-shelf whiskey until you didn’t realize you were sleeping in a puddle of rainwater and broken glass. That’s not a knack you lose. It’s like riding a bike. The Girl was always more discerning, and became doubly so after our experience in Phoenix with the inept criminal front halfway house hotel. We agreed that she can veto any of the lodgings I book. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll hold a flashlight under my chin and tell her spoOoOoky stories about hostels in Ireland.

She insisted on the airport Super 8. I was hoping to stay in a quaint deep woods motel called “Unsmiling Jed’s Sleepaway”, attached to sister business “Unsmiling Jed’s Discount Plastic Surgery Silo and Chili Kitchen”.

If I can’t protect it, I don’t deserve to have it. That goes double for life.

A friendly foreign woman checked us in at the Super 8, then proceeded into utter bafflement when I asked for a first aid kid. I chewed myself up pretty good climbing Bancroft’s Castle, and I’d spent the last half hour bleeding into an oily dog blanket to avoid ruining my upholstery. I’m pretty sure that’s how plagues start.

There were no band-aids here, or antiseptics, or possibly medicine as a concept. There was a three gallon tub of hand sanitizer. I thanked her for the offer but gently declined.

We went up to the third floor. The hallways were lined with people sitting on the carpet outside their rooms, shouting and smoking cigarettes. The room itself was clean and the air conditioning worked. All my boxes were checked. The bathroom reeked of weed, which some would interpret as a bonus. I scrubbed my wounds raw in the sink, tucked away the precious cargo of wine and peaches, and set out to investigate downtown Manchester.

Streetlight technology has not yet made its way to Manchester, so we spent twenty minutes missing exits in ocean-floor darkness. It looked worryingly like Wilkes-Barre, which is not where one would choose to vacation, were one sane.

Downtown erupted from nowhere like graphic pop-in on a video game running at its lowest resolution. One second you’re in leatherface country, with nothing breaking the abyssal darkness but the occasional half-broken Jiffy Lube sign. The next, you’re on vibrant neon market strip, replete with hipsters and the homeless.

We knew we had hit downtown proper when we passed by the “craft grilled cheese bistro”.

only programmers will understand!!!! like and reblog if u get it

Since I am an adult man, grilled cheese cannot be dinner. Both “gastropubs” we tried, despite their bitchin Greek mythology names, offered generic terrible burgers and a draft list that consisted of Coors Light.

“I’m so hungry,” the Girl told me. “I’m gonna die.”

“We all will,” I assured her. “Soon.”

Yelp claimed there was a brewery five blocks away. We walked off the only lit street, into absolute, encompassing blackness. It would’ve been spooky if I didn’t always kind of hope some Putty Patrol mook would lunge at me from the dark while I’m far away from home, having told no one where I’m going and left no paper trail.

There were no incidents. No one was murdered in self-defense. No one knows what we did last summer. The Stark Brewing Company was in the basement of a grim looking office complex, and it was vacant save for two other wanderers.

We sat at the bar and ordered a flight and an imperial stout. I was pushing for finding an actual restaurant, but the Girl ordered “Penne with vodka sauce”, which was not the right color, flavor, or texture to be anything but penne bolognese. The Girl didn’t seem to mind. I ate a pulled pork sandwich.

The beers were warm, but I didn’t care. It didn’t matter what the beers were, so long as they were beers. And not Coors Light. The brewery themed all of their beers off of dogs, for some reason, which I believe to be the ideal business model. According to the bartenders, the brewery had been open for 25 years, but hadn’t yet received their big boom. I was outraged. The beers were excellent, and would probably be even better if they weren’t room temperature, and the taps were not only named for specific dogs, but also provided pictures.

To say nothing of the bathroom, which was covered in sharpie beer lore.

The bartender and waitresses swore a lot more than you would normally expect in this context. The Girl maintains they were swearing at us. I disagreed.

“They were swearing <i>with</i> us,” I mansplained.

“We weren’t swearing,” she countered.

“But if we HAD been.”

As I’ve grown larger and more sinuous, I’ve tried to cut back on how often I cuss at strangers. Cultural relativism is the understanding that not everyone grew up among the coalcrackers, and good-natured oaths like “how the hell are you” or using the fuck-word as a conversational placeholder, while subjectively soothing, can set off fight-or-flight in the small, soft, and bourgeoisie.

I try to maintain direct proportionality between my barbarism and my well-heeledness. Neither the wait staff nor the other two customers shared my bond, and the middle-aged guy on my right proceeded to tell me how his hometown of Denver, Colorado is the greatest fuckin’ city in America, next to maybe Southern California. Which is not a city.

We talked about our homes and travels for a while, then I got my pulled pork sandwich and they left. The sandwich was slightly warmer than the beer, which beat the alternative.

An armada of children came into the bar.

“Oh, shit,” the woman tending bar said. They were visibly teenagers, and on the wrong side of it. They had that gangly awkwardness you get around fourteen or fifteen, and if they were trying to play it off, they were woefully bad at it. There were also nearly twenty of them. It looked like a field trip.

People in their twenties don’t travel in packs of more than six. It’s hard to transport a throng, unless you have a party bus, and why do you have a party bus when you’re twenty-eight? You’re twenty-eight and party buses have always been sad. Get a job. Also, it’s hard to get that many adults to agree on something.

It can be done. You can say, “Hey, adults, you want to do some drugs?” And in a sufficiently sized crowd, you’ll manage to pull twenty or so who will follow you to your house or whatever. This is called an “afterparty”. It doesn’t go to bars at 9pm.

Have you felt out the social zeitgeist recently? Look at a random handful of current memes and it’ll be pretty clear that most adults consider socialization to be a required burden, like paying emotional taxes. “Going out” is the price of living in a civilized society. You’re not going to scare up twenty people, then put them in a party bus, then take them to an abandoned bar half a mile outside of where the actual nightlife is.

“Hey, we’re just about to close,” the bartender said.

A reedy blonde in a top that seemed to consist mostly of straps screeched, “But your WEBSITE said you were open til ONE!”

Screeched.

The bar fell silent. Well, more silent. The Girl and I traded looks, her horror for my delight.

“Uhhhhhh,” the bartender said, but with excellent elocution, as though that were the word she had deliberately chosen. “Okay.”

They sat the itinerant mall food court in an enormous corner table, whereupon they requested shots.

The waitress who had sworn at/with us the least came back to the bar and said, “You guys said you were from Pennsylvania, right?”

We nodded.

“Can I see one of your licenses quick?”

She compared mine against the obviously fake ID one of the tweens had given her. After a moment she said, “Yeah, you can see, the font is different. And the picture looks like it’s photoshopped.”

“Yeah, no one’s license picture ever looks this good,” the Girl said, studying the fake ID.

“Except mine,” I added. They ignored me. I didn’t take it personally.

The waitresses disappeared into the back. Five minutes later, the only dude working at the place was gendered into being the bad cop. He sulked over to the teens.

“You guys gotta leave,” he said. “We know your ID’s fake. We’re not trying to get fined. You gotta go.”

For maximum accuracy, imagine this said in Toby’s voice from the Office. Shamefaced, the flash mob of children dispersed.

We paid for our room temperature beers and left the poor, foul-mouthed brewery to close at 9:30 on a Friday. The Girl and I accidentally stalked the battalion of teens through the street, but only because we were all moving back toward the only lights in the city, not unlike moths. They turned a corner and vanished, presumably to find an arcade or laser tag or some sort of large carousel.

The Girl and I followed the sounds of some obnoxious bros announcing, “It’s like a fahkin sketchy ally, dewd”.

It was, in fact, the least sketchy alley I’d ever been in. Cat Alley was the best lit venue in all of New Hampshire. It was clean and well-maintained, and it was covered less in graffiti and more in an outdoor art gallery dedicated to cats.

There were more, but they didn’t all warrant a picture.

Portland Pie Co loomed from the endless darkness like a beacon in the night, hearkening back to those days lost in Maine during the Great Lobster Drought of 2017. We split a bourbon barrel ale which did me in. It was bedtime.

On the way back, toward the end of the main drag, a man made of pure light rode by blasting EZ-Listenin from his Tron bicycle, also made of pure light.

I can’t prove he wasn’t Jesus.

Heartened, we returned to the hotel, where no one was smoking or yelling in the hallway anymore. Excellent.

Next stop, Portsmouth.

Love,

The Bastard

Into the Abyss August 11, 2018. Manchester, New Hampshire. After seven hours on the road, pausing only to explore an Old Ones cult site, storm a terrible castle, and eat distressingly dry corned beef at a Greek diner that still advertised one of their menu items as "Michael Jackson's favorite grinder", we were in dire need of respite.

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