Aliens! Aliens! Aliens!

 Come get some aliens! We got creepy aliens, slimy aliens, spiky aliens...stinky aliens! 

 This weekend, I wrote up stats and descriptions for around 30 alien species for Bughunts & Bedlam. Most are inspired by various works of military sci-fi. Xenomorphs, Bugs & Skinnies, metroids, System Lords, critters from Predator: Badlands and Alien: Earth, etc. 

Some were already in d20 Modern. There are space doppelgangers (John Carpenter's The Thing) and grendelspawn (Gieger aliens) and puppeteers (Heinlein/Star Trek). Coeurl (Voyage of the Space Beagle) are just displacer beasts. 

There are a bunch of aliens in Cryptids & Conspiracy (Greys, Yautja/Predators, Krytes/Critters, some more) that can be ported in.  

There's also a two page spread on creating your own aliens. That should be a good amount for a space action campaign, especially when you consider there can be hostile human factions, robots, and the like besides just fighting hordes of "bugs."

And I still need to write up sample robots and robot construction guidelines, the planet generation guide (I have notes, need details), rules for operating in Zero-G/low G/high G environments, and campaign/mission creation guidelines. Oh, the transport rules, too. Can't forget that. 

Anyway, I've got Advanced classes, equipment, and now aliens done. That's enough for me to put together a small adventure for next session.  

Foundational

 Recently, on Facebook, Jeff Dee (yeah, that Jeff Dee) has been talking about "simulationist" RPG design. 

Younger gamers might not know this but back around the turn of the century, Ron Edwards proposed the GNS Theory (later refined into what he called The Big Model, but I never understood the difference and TBM didn't catch public attention the way GNS did). GNS stands for Gamist-Narrativist-Simulationist. 

According to Edwards and his group of thinkers/designers on The Forge, good game design stems from identifying which of these three modes you want to focus on, and really leaning hard into it. Because according to The Forge, all gamers are one of the three, and will have the most fun if their games cater to that strongest desire. 

Now, for my money, Gamist and Narrativist were well defined. Gamists want to "win." They play RPGs to smash all the orcs and loot all the treasure. They want to gain levels, more hit points, better combat power, more spells, more magic items. If, as the tech-bros say nowadays, the "line goes up" they're happy. Narrativists, on the other hand, are there for the story. They want their Big Damn HeroTM to protagonize all through the DM's hand-crafted narrative (if there is a DM--a lot of the indie/story game people came out of The Forge's "narrativist" camp, and may of these games are GMless). 

Simulationism, according to GNS (as I remember it) was a desire to...not make the game realistic, as we're talking about dragons and fireballs and aliens and FTL travel and so on...make the game as realist as possible without ruining game play, but also to focus on the world-building and emulation of genre tropes and... Like I said, it was the least well defined of the three. I feel like "simulationism" as far as consistent and sensible world-building is a GM concern more than a player concern. I don't know many RPG players who WANT to limit their characters because "in the real world, that wouldn't happen." 

Now Dee is taking a different tract with what he calls simulationist design. To me it seems like a rejection of "bennies" or other metacurrencies in modern RPGs meant to give the PCs a boost. This goes all the way back to early game design, with things like Force Points and spendable character points in d6 Star Wars, Karma in the old Marvel Superheroes game (the FASERIP one), to things like Action Points in d20 Modern to Inspiration in 5E D&D.  And again, many of the indie/story games coming out of the old Forge narrativist tradition have a lot of these. Some games are ONLY this as a mechanic, with otherwise free-form play. 

A quote from Dee that sums it up, replying to someone asking about "The Rule of Cool": 

The least egregious version of it, as far as simulationism is concerned, is that “players should be allowed to try things outside the written rules, as long as they’re ‘cool’”. And under simulationism, I reject that because it places an unnecessary emphasis on ‘coolness’. You know what simulationism says that players should be able to try, outside of the rules? ANYTHING. Cool or not.

Simulationism isn’t limited to rules as written, and doesn’t need to be trumped by ‘cool’ things. Simulationism is an attempt to provide rules which *can* be played as written, producing satisfactory results as often as possible when played as written. But OF COURSE more things are possible than just the ones directly mechanized in any finite rules set.

And so all that simulationism requires is that when characters try to do things, their chance and degree of success should be informed by the difficulty of the task and the character’s abilities. Regardless of whether the written rules cover it. Whether it’s ‘cool’ is irrelevant.

 

I get what Dee's saying here, but I have a hard time distinguishing this from Gamism as far as GNS is concerned. The game has rules, you're playing a game. From a designer/GM perspective,  yeah, you want a rule set that has reasonable and well-defined rules. But as a player, how would this be a concern as compared to a rule-set that allows for cartoonish superheroism with metagame currencies? 

Let me get this straight. I'm not criticizing Dee at all. He's got the best understanding of "simulationism" I've come across in the past 25 years. 

I think this points to the foundational flaw of GNS/Big Model thinking. They have things backwards. They think good game design flows from pandering to the wants of the players. But you don't know who your players will be when you're designing a game. And even Edwards admits that most gamers enjoy all three of his pillars of game design to a greater or lesser extent. Gamist players enjoy the story, and appreciate a logical, consistent game world. World-builders have fun facing and overcoming challenges, and seeing how the actions in game affect the status quo of the world. And even the most loosey-goosey narrativist wants some sort of mechanical system within the game (wouldn't be a "game" without one), and a big part of creating a compelling drama is having a consistent world that doesn't violate suspension of disbelief. 

They're all intertwined. So why would "good" game design seek to isolate and hyperfocus on one of these three things? Seems like a bad design principle to me.

New GM Workshop May Be Back, Baby!

 Yesterday, a member of the Busan Gaming Discord server was asking for advice on how to start running games. Several of us chimed in. Then another player said they're also interested in learning. I mentioned the workshop we had planned that was cancelled. I suggested we do something like that as a standalone event. A few others agreed. 

 So, 

 [Pending discussion of when, where, and who will actually be doing this, that is.]

All Systems are Go

 I finished editing my Missions & Mayhem core rules draft, as well as Cryptids & Conspiracy and Bughunts & Bedlam modules based on the feedback I got from the Busan Con 2026 players. I also just ran an adventure I wrote with the revisions, but the players (my usual group) wanted to jump right in so they used their old version characters. 

No problem. What changes we needed to make on the fly were minimal. 

This was a car chase adventure. There ended up not being much car-vs-car combat action. Instead, Denis' Hero used a rocket launcher to clear a path for the party's vehicles (a semi on loan from the company they were working for, hauling a load, and driven by Charles' Hero) and a motorcycle (Jada's Hero) and a sports car (Steven's Hero).  

There were some chases, a few gun fights, an attempt by an agent from a rival company to steal a sample of the cargo, and a final chase/gun fight at the Mexican border as the party attempted to finish smuggling drugs INTO Mexico (pharmaceuticals, not recreational drugs, but still). 

Everyone had a good time. After the adventure, I had them level up to 5th. And we converted them to the new version of the rules at the same time. The conversion was pretty painless. I'd removed a few proficiencies, but for the most part it wasn't an issue. The eliminated proficiency slots transferred to proficiencies the characters hadn't trained yet, so it was pretty easy. 

I think the main core rules, except for a typo or two (found one already) are good to go. They just need some illustrations and formatting. Oh, and a cover. Need to figure out what I want to do for covers for these games. 

Cryptids & Conspiracy isn't quite done yet, but it's close. I need to write up the sample adventures (ones I ran my group through) and add a bit more advice about how to create adventures or manage a campaign. 

Bughunts & Bedlam is still pretty bare bones. I have the advanced classes, rules for androids, and weapons done. The rest of the equipment & vehicles, space travel rules, guidelines for creating planets/moons/space stations for missions to take place on, and a whole bunch of alien, robot, and NPC stats need designing. Then I'll need to add the campaign advice and sample adventures. So it's a long way off. But if I can get the gear section and a few aliens/robots as opponents done soon, I'll start play testing it even if there are holes in the game. 

The Antithesis of DIY

 A few days ago, I came home from work to find my wife had spent most of the day watching YouTube videos about how to leverage AI into making extra income. She has some ideas of how to use AI to advertise the small business she's trying to start up. I don't begrudge her that, as we definitely don't have a budget for advertising. But she was pretty insistent that I should also use AI to help me produce and market my RPG products. 

I'm not a fan of "AI" as it currently stands. As I often say, it's very artificial and not very intelligent. I will admit, though, that the current crop of LLMs are MUCH better than just a year or two ago, at producing some simulacrum of human output. 

We've probably all seen examples of AI generated text that is impressive, and some that is not. Similar with images and video clips. Flynn often uses AI to generate pictures of his RPG characters. It's not that he doesn't have artistic talent, but the AI saves him a lot of time on something that isn't that important to him. He likes having a cool picture, but not enough to spend days or even weeks creating it. Again, I don't have a problem with that. It's for his personal use, not anything he's trying to sell. 

When it comes to producing content, though, even if it's something to be given away, I don't want to let AI do my creating for me. Ted posted a great essay on AI in RPGs the other day, conveniently. I'm in agreement with him. Yes, an AI could write, illustrate, and probably even format your RPG for you. I've been working on Missions & Mayhem for months now. Since last November or December, I forget exactly when I started (I should check my old blog posts). I spent most of 2025 working on the second edition of Flying Swordsmen, converting it to the d6 system. [It's still coming! Eventually...] I could have completed both of these projects months ago if I'd allowed AI to do the work for me. 

But would they be any good? Would they play well at the table, the way I want them to play? I doubt it. And would I actively turn off a portion of the RPG community by doing so? I'm pretty sure I would. 

The OSR and the Indie game scene both thrive on the DIY spirit. And generative AI is the antithesis of DIY. It's the ultimate plagiarism machine. 

Now, does AI have its uses? Yes. I admit to using a couple of AI generated images in my TS&R monster books. The elementals in TS&R Ruby for example. I couldn't find good images in the public domain. And when I tried modifying some images with GIMP, they looked like crap. Take a look at the golem illustration to see how bad I am at this stuff...although the golems came out looking much better than the elementals I tried to make did. But I state that up front in the front matter of the book, and it's a Pay What You Want title. Don't want to pay for something that has even 1 AI generated image in it? Then don't. Download it for free. 

Working on Missions & Mayhem, AI search has saved me a lot of time with gear and vehicle pricing. I don't need to sort through pages and pages of sales sites or whatever to see how much a fire extinguisher or a speed boat should cost. The AI assisted search can give me a plausible average price. I could make up a number, but this way I've got something reasonable. The game text itself, the rules and mechanics, I'm writing all of that myself.  

What's the difference? Well, in one instance AI is saving me a bit of time to provide a number that isn't super relevant to game play. In the other instance, AI would be doing my thinking and expressing of the ideas for me. One is lazy, the other is cheating. I'll admit to laziness, but I'm not about to ask people for money on something I'm cheating to produce. 

My wife was baffled (to get back to her). I had to explain the whole DIY ethos to her, and how using AI to crank out a bunch of slop game rules or adventure modules would turn a segment of the gaming population away from my work. 

I'm already producing games in a niche (Asian-themed fantasy, or Modern day action genre) of a niche (old school rules) of a niche hobby (RPGs). Yeah, there are the Shadowdarks making millions on Kickstarter and whatnot. And if I were to run a Kickstarter for M&M or FS2E, I'd only be shooting for a few thousand to help pay for art and layout/editing. I could probably make that happen. But I suck at promotion. 

Chanbara has been available for eight years now, and it's only an Electrum seller on DTRPG. My wife suggested I use AI to strategize marketing for it, M&M, and eventually FS2E. I might end up doing that, as it's really not my forte. I'm more of an Arneson than a Gygax.  

But I'm also now more committed to DIYing my games. 

I still plan to pay a few artists for artwork for Missions & Mayhem. But I'm also thinking I should just do a bunch of art myself. It won't be great, but it will be real art by a real human being.  My game may not be slick and polished with my own artwork gracing its pages, but it will be real.