Token Magic The name is a bit of a work in progress, as is the concept, but its place in a mechanical and cosmological context is pretty solid at this point. One of the design goals of this “magic system,” if you could call it that, was to backport some of the more classic OSR spells into my game system, Be Not Afraid. Because the setting takes place in a modern-day world imposed upon by the supernatural and occult—and because traditional D&D magic doesn’t really fit into any modern practice or real belief structure, nor does it even much resemble its Vancian roots—I designed this system to lend the spells a degree of plausibility.

Most of my conceptual brewing is like panning for gold: rolling the idea over in my head again and again to refine it before putting pen to paper (or keyboard to screen) and shaping it into something hopefully understandable to my fellow man Other times, a concept strikes out of the blue, arriving almost fully formed and ready to be developed. This was one such occasion. As I was having breakfast and saw a meme comparing American to Japanese isekai, it hit me…

Mythic Underworld vs. Gygaxian Naturalism is a Stupid Debate To put it as gently as I can, both sides of this debate are quite misguided—at least at the extremes. Now, I’m not on Twitter/X (or whatever the kids call it these days) because I prefer to retain my attention span and avoid being a dopamine addict fueled by outrage. But even I hear news through the grapevine from my RSS feeds and podcasts.

Art was generated using Flux Schnell “Vision’s mostly a lie anyway,” he continued. “We don’t really see anything except a few hi-res degrees where the eye focuses. Everything else is just peripheral blur—light and motion. Motion draws the focus. And your eyes jiggle all the time, did you know that, Keeton? Saccades, they’re called. Blurs the image. The movement’s way too fast for the brain to integrate, so your eye just—shuts down between pauses.

Last time I’m going to apologize for not posting in a while, even though nobody probably reads this, life got busy. The Problem Anyway, one of the things I think about a lot is how much skill systems kind of stink, and one of the reasons I think they do is they either overly complicate things or abstract them away too easily. They are quick and dirty ways of handling things the game system or setting is not interested in focusing on.