Patreon Post: October General Topics

Every month, I offer my patrons (any Patron, $1+) a chance to vote on what single general topic post I write for the month.  If you're a patron (or would like to join us to vote), go here.  Thanks, as always, for being a Patron.

The topics for the month:

Modular Robots Revised: I had some rather contentious feedback about my opinions on how compatible the old robots design system is with 4e.  Back when I made Modular Robots, I concluded that there's not much compatibility between the two, because the 3e model bases ST, the force that the robot can exert, on the amount of energy it has available and its ability to express that via drivetrains and arm motors, and the 4e relationship between a system's mass and its ST.  Someone pointed out that, in fact, the 4e robots have variant mass amounts, suggesting that SJGames themselves didn't see this hard relationship, so I went to check to see if those masses lined up with the values that would pop out of GURPS Robots from 3e and interesting things popped out.

This might be a bit of a rabbit hole to go down, though not as much of one as Vehicles (in part because Vehicles does a lot of the heavy lifting for us), but how interested would you be in seeing a more detailed robot design system, and this more detailed system serving as the basis for my Psi-Wars robots?

Review of Template Toolkit 2: Races: When SJGames said they were closing down Pyramid to better focus on books, I took a "wait and see" attitude to the whole affair, but it feels like we're getting a lot more works than we did back then!  This is the next in the toolkit series and directly pertinent to Psi-Wars, thanks to all of its races.

Review of Monster Hunters: Power-Ups 1: When I offered the above review last month, I got a lot of comments on how people would rather I reviewed this book, so here ya go, a chance to vote for this option instead.

A Review of Fantastic Dungeon Grappling: I backed Douglas Cole's recent backstarter, not for the product itself, but because I wanted a copy of Dragon Heresy and Fantastic Dungeon Grappling.  This might also turn into a review of Technical Grappling, as they're cousins.

What is Magic, really?: This perennial topic often works me up into a rant, which ends up half-written somewhere on my blog.  There was a lot of interest in my Cabal material; we should set that aside for now (it looks like it would take more work to clean up than just a quick couple of days), but I could discuss some of my findings in my research into the occult and put it up for you. 

Look, talk about Martial Arts some more: My Martial Arts as Power-Ups series was very well-received.  I could further discuss trademark moves as a basis for styles, or create a mini-martial arts framework for a hypothetical setting.

Slave Armies: As part of my continuing exploration of historical topics from which to steal ideas, I did some homework on the historical concept of the "slave army," such as the mamluks. I could certainly write a patreon special on the topic.

Old Blog-Rant Dustoffs: Myth of the Fantasy Heartbreaker and Why Your Fantasy Game Sucks: I often get a moment of inspiration, write furiously for about an hour, find myself written into a corner or think better of it, hit save and walk away, only to forget about it.  I've been going over some of my old drafts and these jumped out at me.  They depart a bit from the sci-fi themes my blog has been going for (I promise not to go fantasy on you guys), but if you'd be interested in seeing me talk about where Fantasy settings often seem to go wrong, and why you should totally go ahead and release your fantasy setting anyway, vote here!

Wildcard: General Psi-Wars setting topics: So, you like what I write and you don't want to tell me how to do my job, but you kinda miss talking about Psi-Wars setting material.  If you'd like me to focus on that direction, vote here (Chances are, if you vote on this, you'll get a detailed cultural discussion of the Umbral Rim, the Satemo code, and a Lithian dictionary, given my current mood)