October 2017 Newsletter

Hello! Here is this month’s newsletter!

10 Quick Names for NPCs in your Tabletop Game

1. Pem Glenwing
2. Score “Hammer” Mantle
3. Parity-With-Scorn Herring
4. Sam Sandwich
5. Ellenwyn Thimble
6. Calypso Hogwash
7. Anama Le
8. Corn
9. Hail Olwyn
10. Skerring Polfish

Notes From CMRN During The Month of September

I’ve spent a lot of time watching Toast of London, a show that’s created and starring Matt Berry. You might know him from Garth Marenghi’s Dark Place, and he’s playing a similar character here; a rich, proper English man who is kind of a dick to everyone. It’s very funny, even if the jokes don’t always work. 

I also finally watched Taika Waititi’s film Boy, which is pretty amazing for a few different reasons. I told someone that it’s a little like a Tarkovsky film and a little like Mud in that it’s a coming-of-age story that hits all the notes of a very specific youth. It follows a genre, but there are some real off-beat moments (and even some comedy) that really makes it stand out against the field. It would be hard to watch this and not realize that Waititi is such a strong filmmaking force; I imagine this movie and Wilderpeople had a lot more to do with his getting the upcoming Thor movie than What We Do In The Shadows did.

I’ve been enjoying a lot of new music: Godspeed! You Black Emperor have a new album out, and so does Ben Frost. 

Danni’s Corner

Eternal: It’s Magic the Gathering and Harder than Dark Souls and PU:BG

Eternal is a newish computer-trading-card-game from Direwolf Digital. It is slick and shiny and when you click things they glow. Sometimes there are little treasure chests and they pop up when you expect them to (and sometimes when you don’t) and when you open them they explode and you get a slick and shiny thing inside them. You behold that shiny thing. It seems good.

“Is it Hearthstone?” you ask. That’s fair. Hearthstone is also slick and shiny and when you click things in Hearthstone they glow. “No” I whisper from a rainy rooftop “it is not like Hearthstone.”

Eternal is Magic the Gathering. I said it. Kunzelman might have words with me, but I’ll make a list of bulletpoints that elucidate the few differences:

The mana works differently. It’s called “power.” Power works like mana did in M:tG, but instead of tracking the kinds of magic you have (maybe two islands and one swamp, for a total of three mana) power is just power. You’ve got 5 each turn. You spend 4 – you’ve got one. In Eternal you track your influence separately. There are five colors, just like magic, and usually when you get power card (i.e., land) you also get an influence. You don’t spend influence, you just have influence. In a Justice-Time deck, you might have 4 power, two justice influence and two time influence. You don’t spend influence to cast cards, you just have influence. So to cast a spell, you might have to spend 1 power, but be required to have two justice influence and two time influence. Well, if you had 4 of those cards in your hand you could cast all four, because influence isn’t spent per turn, only power is.

That’s it. There’s one bulletpoint. Sure, the color-pie identities got messed with and things are called different things but otherwise this is Magic the Gathering.

And it’s good. It’s so good. I didn’t need anything else. The one change just made counting your resources easier and got rid of a big headache for new players (tapping mana incorrectly).

You can play the story. You just have to play computer controlled opponents that have unfair advantages over you. You get cards if you win. You lose a lot. You have to go back to the drawing board and build decks to beat these cheaters. Sometimes you lose so much when you are streaming that an internet stranger offers you advice. You take it and then the next day you win. It’s bittersweet because you know that Eternal master is going to wreck you in Ranked.

You can draft. It’s exactly like draft in Magic – you can open a pack, pick the card you want, and give the backwash to some fool on the internet and then you get the same thing done to you. That happens a bunch of times. Then you take your pile of cards and you battle and you play the damn game. Sometimes you win with Means to an End and your opponent is staring at their screen somewhere in Austria or Croatia or Australia and is thinking “am I really going to lose to that card.”

The answer is yes. You are.

Things What We Did This Month

There is, of course, the podcast.

We released episodes 34 and 35 of Mages & Murderdads!

We also started a new series where we play through the modern XCOM games! Episode 1 is here, and Episode 2 is here.

We’ve also been streaming fairly regularly over on our Twitch channel.

Danni took a slight hiatus from his Dark Souls rating videos, but they’re coming back online this week!

Thanks for watching and listening!

CMRN+Danni