Book Reviews, Part 2

Part 1 

Instead of novels, this second post will focus on things I've found online. As such, this is not a place of honor, no esteemed deeds are commemorated here, honestly a portion of what I read is kind of trash. But some of it's tasty trash.

I'm always open to recommendations. If there's something you think I should read, let me know in the comments or by whatever other route is convenient for you.

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North of Reality / Greater Reality Area
Should you read it?: Yes. 

About: A series of vignettes about weird people/places/things/ideas. My favorite thing about them is that they all follow a kind of internal logic perpendicular to the logic of the real world. The author cites Pataphysical Essays by Rene Daumal as an inspiration, which I suspect has something to do this - it is (intentionally) difficult to get a straight answer to the question "what is pataphysics?", but I think it may share this property of seeming to construct its own alien rules.

Anyway, all the individual stories are very short, and they're well worth a try. I'd recommend starting with North of Reality and exploring via the links rather than going in chronological order. If you click on the highlighted text it contains asides.

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Pact / Pale
Should you read it?: I enjoyed these but cannot unreservedly recommend them. Honestly, reading Pale non-serially would probably be a surreal experience.

About: I am in it for the magic system. Pactverse magic operates on a few core principles:

• Wizards cannot lie, nor can magical beings, thus a lot of magic is really making deals with goblins and bogeymen &c.
• The universe is made up of animistic spirits.
• Patterns have power. If something is repeated enough it will progress from social convention to spirit-enforced fact.

There is, uh, a lot beyond that. Enough that there are detailed excerpts from in-universe notes and textbooks. This is a great example of magic that, while "soft", has a lot of detail to dig into. It's my personal catnip.

On the other hand... well, these are wildbow stories and have his typical flaws. The pacing is terrible, there's a lot of really pointless angsting, you probably know the deal.

Also: Plea to the Moon Mother, incomplete at 7 chapters long, and the only pactverse fanfic I know to be worth a damn. Reconfigures the setting to be about Siberian folklore and a now-outdated conception of AI, and is extremely evocative, for what little is there. It's been removed from Ao3, but I can provide an archived copy upon request.

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Blood is Mine / My Delerium Alcazar
Should you read it?: I may be biased on these, they're perfectly shaped to appeal to me specifically. I do still recommend them.

About: A pair of illustrated (sprite) stories which I think were operated as quests. Usually game archives kind of suck to read through, but these are an exception to the rule. The first bit of Blood is Mine also makes it look like it's going to be a cheap horror cliche, but seriously, don't let that stop you.

Now that we've gotten those disclaimers out of the way... the characters are great. The setting is great, it's an urban sci-fi-fantasy blend with cosmic scope and a bunch of interesting paranormal phenomena. The author has this habit of using recurring phrases which is just, chef's kiss, it gives them this amazing feeling of significance and gravity.

Unfortunately BiM ended with a summary of what the remaining plot would've been, and I doubt MDA is ever going to be continued. In spite of that both are still pretty great.

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Squiggle's Creative Extrapolation Essay - Not a book, but I'm putting it here anyway.
Should you read it?: Since you're reading an RPG blog you are probably in the right target demographic.

About: A short post which outlines a ~formulaic way of coming up with worldbuilding tidbits. It's a bit focused on magic systems, but the same process could be applied to whatever else you like.

This is a pretty good formula, as those go. I think it's handy in the same way a spark table might be - fun to play around with for a bit and see if anything interesting pops out.

Also: If you like this, you could check out Recursive Magic Systems, which is much longer and denser but also has merit.

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Upon the Mirror Sea
Should you read it?: Sure, it's a solid story. 

About: A story about Gibson cyberspace you access using DMT, which is also wired into the collective unconscious. It's a little fond of its psychedelia, but if you can bear with that it's a good read and has some stealable ideas.

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Dictionary of Mu
Should you read it?: There's no narrative, it's a setting encyclopedia, but the encyclopedia is good, your honor.

About: Recommended to me by Kyana of noise sans signal. It's a sword & sorcery setting on a red, dying planet that hates you. Intended to be a supplement to Ron Edwards' Sorcerer, so there's a lot of emphasis on demons, which are shadows of dead history - things that have either been completely eradicated, or which are set to become that way, like oceans or the written word.

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Polaris: Chivalric Tragedy At Utmost North
Should you read it?: I'm not sure I would play it, but it's definitely worth a read.

About: A game about an order of doomed knights in the icy utmost north, who wield starlight swords and hold back demons which emerge from the sun and the festering ancient Mistake. It's a storygame built around a set of ritual phrases, but even if you're not into that sort of thing, it's well worth looking at for the setting and backstory alone.

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Bridge to eQualia
Should You Read It?: If the theme resonates with you. I quite liked it. 

About: A short detective story about escaping into fictional worlds. 

Also: I hear the same person recently wrote this thing which I have not read but intend to get to at some point.

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Sword Interval
Should You Read It?: I read this a loooong time ago, probably around 6 or 7 years, but I remember it fondly. 

About: An extraordinary rarity: a webcomic with decent pacing that has actually concluded. Let's see if I can dredge some details out of my memory... monsters are becoming increasingly common, there's a creature called the Hierophant that's trying to end the world. There's a... government organization?... killing one child every few years and each time it causes a natural disaster. And there are witches who each use a body part as the source of their magic, hair, blood, teeth, etc.

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Chasing Sunlight
Should You Read It?: Nope. 

About: A pastiche of sunless sea which has a pretty solid hook: humanity is in a lightless world surrounded by eldritch nonsense. Civilization is made possible by zint-light, whose ultimate source is a monarch that seems not entirely human himself. The protagonist saw sunlight on an expedition to the far east and is obsessed with returning.

Unfortunately, the execution is poor. The writing is clumsy, it suffers from mediocre eldritchness syndrome, and the plot is extremely formulaic: The expedition enters a place, it blows up, they make a narrow escape, repeat until the end.

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There is no Antimemetics Division
Should You Read It?: Yes, but skip the sequel. 

About: I think this one is pretty well-known, but for anyone unfamiliar, it's an SCP story about self-censoring information. Not the strongest ending (for some reason {the omnipresent mind-extinguishing anomaly turns out to be a guy who is shootable?}), and the sequel declines dramatically in quality and focus. That said, everything up to that point is genuinely very good.

Also: I believe it now has a published version stripped of SCP elements, the quality of which I cannot speak to given that I've only read the original.

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Ra
Should You Read It?: Tentatively, yes. It's by the same author as antimemetics, if that affects your calculus one way or the other. 

About: This is another one I read ages ago, and I don't know how it'd hold up if I reread it today. That said, it made an impression at the time.

Basically, magic is discovered in the 1970s, it seems to be harnessed via a combination of industrial equipment and wizards with staffs, there's an akashic plane made of black glass you can get shunted into when you work with high-energy spellcraft, there's a science fiction conspiracy having to do with how all this came about.

Also: Same guy wrote Fine Structure, which imo is not really worth it, but some people disagree.

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The Dark Wizard of Donkerk
Should You Read It?: Solid 4/5. 

About: My personal pick from Alexander Wales, who is probably better-known for having written Worth the Candle*. The high point is the interaction between magic systems. If you've seen me banging my drum about how those work better when there are multiple that interlock, this is one example of how that might look in practice.

*: Unfortunately that one's been stubbed. If you want to see it I think your best option is to plug this into the wayback machine. Though there are some extras still available.

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12 Miles Below (it's stubbed, so another wayback machine special). 
Should You Read It?: Probably not. 

About: The protagonist is part of a clan who lives on the frozen surface of the earth; below that surface there are 12 levels of subterranean architecture occupied by increasingly dangerous killer robots. He gets trapped in the first stratum and matters slowly escalate until it's a save the world plot.

It's weird how things that are released serially like this can become a part of your life. I think I started this one around my freshman year of college, and kept reading it more or less as it came out until it finally wrapped up a couple months ago. Makes it stick in your mind in a way that would be impossible for an ordinary novel.

For all that... I enjoyed it, but I'm not sure I can recommend it in good faith.

I have good things to say about it. The setting was interesting enough, it had some crafting, which I think objectively tends to be a slight negative but appeals to me personally, and it's okay at the save-the-world plot, when it finally got there. The story does meander, but not too terribly for a serial written across 5+ years.

It's just that, you know, the prose kind of sucks. Five years of bad prose is a lot to wade through.

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The Top 9 Trends To Bring Back In 2022!
Should you read it?: Yes, if you've read Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell. If you haven't, read that first and come back to this a few weeks later.

About: A short but funny and imaginative fanfic of the aforementioned novel by Susanna Clarke, framed as a modern clickbait listicle.

All I know about magic systems, I learned from the Outer Gods

All images from wikimedia commons

OK: magic systems. I love them so so so much. They have rewarded this love by making me totally insane, like one of those people who get a glimpse of Yog-Sothoth and start gibbering about how it's the key and the gate. I'm writing this blog post from an asylum and having my accomplice smuggle it out.

The first thing I understood when I made eye contact with Yog-Sothoth is that everything is a magic system. D&D classes? Magic system. Laser guns? Also a magic system. Immovable rods, superpowers, pokemon, mecha, they're all magic systems.

The second thing I learned is that there's no such thing as a magic system. The world just works in a way that lets you throw fireballs. On earth I can do it with gunpowder and a long fuse; in fourhumourslandia I could summon a ball of unfinished aether and yell at it until my choleric temperament converted it to elemental fire.

(That sort of thing tends to be possible in our fictional worlds because we like including some sort of entertaining supramundane bullshit. You shouldn't be "making a magic system", you should be coming up with cooler supramundane bullshit, which need not necessarily have anything to do with "magic" or "wizards").

Then Yog-Sothoth turned me around and said: Whisperling, your supramundane bullshit must serve the needs of your game. Suppose you want to run a game about sky pirates. This game must take place in a setting where there is such a thing as a sky pirate adventure, and it would be fun if that setting were to have fantastical elements relevant to the sky pirate lifestyle.

Like this

There are many viable sky pirate settings. In some, people have saber duels on the upper deck of a zeppelin. In others, dogfighters in one-man airplanes gun down enemy necromancers. Your job is to choose amongst them and form a specific vision of the world you want to create.  

While keeping hold of that vision (but not too stubbornly, let it evolve over time), you can flesh out the details of your world, and by extension the details of any fantastical elements you wish to include.  
  
Perhaps you could compile a set of setting-appropriate classes for players to choose between. Musketeer, Pilot, Berserker, Tattooist, Visionary. Or if your setting is flexible enough to accomodate any of the million classes out there, you could let your players bring whichever they like. That's a perfectly acceptable solution. Remember the first lesson of Yog-Sothoth, that classes are actually a magic system.  
  
But I hail from the forum game mines, where we have neither classes nor systems! I believe those things are boring, that extradiagetic advancement is the devil, and that I will like my sky pirates better if I do something else instead! Of course, I still want characters to have badass special abilities. Wouldn't be much of a sky pirate game otherwise.  
  
My preference is to come up with supramundane bullshit that exists within the world, that the players can diegetically use to do cool stuff in the same way they could diegetically use a knife for stabbing.  
  
Let's say that there is a substance made of concentrated malice, and instead of bullets guns shoot 'hexes' made out of this malice stuff. And you can use malice for other things, too.

• Malice responds to your grudges.
• If you whisper to it every day and bind it in paper curse talismans inscribed with the name of your enemy, you can shape it into a curse that pursues its target like a living thing and makes their life hell.
• If you wear a hex cartridge in your breast pocket, you can take its malice into your heart and grow it by killing people you hate, and this will make you stronger and faster and more spiteful.  

  
Maybe there are magic tattoos that you can get by making a bargain with spirits of the air.  

• Every tattoo has a unique ability. There are whole books of the things, but the spirits will only give you one, and you have to know which image to ask for.  
• Your tattoo is stronger when you impress the spirits. They love drama and narrative and big personalities. But their favor is fickle, and if they lose interest it will not last.  
• As the cost of this bargain, if someone with a magic tattoo stays on the ground too long they'll start to wither away.  
• If you win the attention of a specific spirit, usually by playing into its favorite tropes, you can speak with it and make further bets and bargains. Spirits can manifest as wind-animals with thunderstorm bodies and hailstone teeth.  

 
Anyway, you can go on like this for a while, and then whether it's a "magic system" or not, you've got a bunch of fun setting-appropriate toys to play with. IMO having this bespoke stuff for each game is much more interesting than saying "eh, it's a kitchen sink, anything goes" or shoving the same old D&D magic into everything.  
  
You might want to tie some mechanics to these toys, as appropriate. Maybe shaping malice requires a lot of skill, and your ruleset tells you to roll for difficult and risky things. So when making a curse you could require a CHA roll to prevent it from rebounding back on you because it hates everyone and everything.  
  
Finally, know ye this: magic systems like being connected. If you can take two or three or four and let them interlock with each other, the result is often better than the sum of its parts. 

 

 

Behold, an air spirit! (Actually an underwater panther).

Anyway, after Yog-Sothoth beamed all these ideas into my brain and was about to leave, I said: "Wait! Please! When people talk about magic systems, don't they want a single unified structure that explains how all magic works? I have to give them something, or they'll eat me alive!"

Okay, Yog Sothoth thought at me, we can get into that. When you're creating a magic system you're walking a tightrope between abstraction and specificity. On one hand, there's generic fantasy magic that's 100% vibes. On the other hand, there's Brandon Sanderson circa mistborn, or the MU spell list.

Yes, this is the soft magic/hard magic binary, but you can't just collapse an entire system down to "soft" or "hard". You need to pay attention to how you're navigating abstraction and specificity in your creative process and know how to use each to best effect.

One of the reasons people tie themselves in knots trying to create a Unified Theory of Magic is that they start with the idea of generic soft magic that can do anything, and then try to come up with hard rules that emulate it. That can't be done, 2+2 cannot equal red. Then they sit there mumbling things like "magic is programming" or "the rules of my magic system are that it can't do resurrection or time travel", because they don't have any way to bridge the gap.

There are other approaches that work better. Here's an incomplete list:

• Accept abstraction, but add evocative details or bits of mechanical definition where they provide the maximum toyetic benefit. Spells are critters. You have an affinity for Bones and can attempt to cast any bone-related spell.
• Just go 100% hard magic and write allomancy 2.0 or MU spell list 200.0. (Fun fact: usually these systems still have to be powered by an abstract force that just has specific rules about how it manifests).
• Use hard magic that can be leveraged to create more complicated effects. If you wanted to actually execute the "magic is programming" concept instead of using it to convince yourself that your soft magic system is hard, you could make a set of basic functions (think printfire()) that casters build into real spells using control flow.
• Add a layer of GM interpretation to let rules do abstract or unpredictable things. Ex: fuse two items and get an output that combines the properties of both.

The common thread is that you're using abstraction and specificity in strategic ways, instead of fumbling around trying to make one act exactly like the other. The other common thread is that you have to pick something and commit, you can't just go in circles contemplating aesthetics forever. That way lies madness.

Speaking of madness, Yog Sothoth was still hovering there, and now it was examining me contemplatively. Maybe we have gotten ahead of ourselves, it said. Let's take a step back. What makes a magic system good? 

"Well," I argued, "There are the obvious things. Is it pleasing for players to interact with? Is it good for the GM to run? Does its presence invite extrapolation and creativity?"

Yog Sothoth gazed at me and said: That response is correct but over-general. You could ask those questions about any element of your game, and they would trivially be applicable to each. What makes something a good magic system, rather than good encumbrance rules or a good candlestick?

"Well, we've been over this, if encumbrance rules and candlesticks are also magic systems-"

Yog-Sothoth writhed unimpressedly.

"Okay, okay, fine. As I understand it, the characteristic features of a magic system are its flexibility and the depth to which it can be explored. They're what distinguishes it from something like a magic item or a superpower. These aren't unbreakable rules, but classically, a magic item does one thing and that's pretty much it. A magic system is built to be capable of lots of things, and it's rewarding for players to spend time experimenting with its mechanics to do them."

The divine presence gestured for me to continue.

"But I still say candlesticks are a magic system. Like, you can light them on fire and they provide illumination. Then you can use them to light other things on fire. And they burn down eventually because the fire consumes the wax as fuel. That's about as mechanically rich as some magic systems."

Yog Sothoth looked at me, aghast, and said: You have learned too well. And it threw me back to earth.

Now, could someone please get me out of this padded room?

20 More Things MD Could Be

 

 

With thanks to Sylvanas of The Red Lantern for asking what MD actually are. Sometimes you've just gotta make a list of things. 

The 6 I already posted in the GLOG server, for archival purposes:

1. Bits of your soul that you've shaped into gambling chips to wager for demonic abilities.
2. Witch organs that grow in your chest cavity as you progress as a MU, which can channel an unpredictable amount of power each day before succumbing to spiritual poison.
3. Generally-applicable magic formulae you prepare each day, like magic squares or ABRAXAS or whatever, that can interact unpredictably with each other or leak from your memory after being used too many times.
4. Magic knucklebones given to you by the first devil you made a pact with.
5. Imps hidden in your shadow, which return to hell when they get tired or bored.
6. Precautions you've taken to prevent the entities you deal with from eating you, like a protective amulet or really horrible-tasting herbs. There are {max possible MD} workable methods in the setting, and each time you gain an MD it represents getting the hang of a new one.

And 20 more for the road:

1. Clots of magic in your brain.
2. Stars smiling upon you.
3. False identities the universe unmakes in your place, when it catches up with you.
4. Wizardly devices you macgyver and hide about your person.
5. Mouths to speak incantations with (after the first they appear on your forehead, the backs of your hands, etc. If you expend all your MD you are silenced).
6. Inconsequential memories burnt as fuel; your max MD is the number of memories you can expend each day before giving yourself dementia.
7. Bottled mouse souls.
8. Lightning bolts bound to your staff. (Lightning is wily, and to do this you must outsmart it or bargain with it).
9. Toadstones you've swallowed.
10. Magically potent feathers/scales/etc from your familiar.
11. Birthmarks forming a constellation on your arm, which fade as you lose MD and reappear as you regenerate them.
12. Coupons snipped out of extradimensional junk mail. To become a wizard you have to reach a higher plane of consciousness just long enough for someone to sell your contact information.
13. Fireflies perched on your magic ring, which dim as you expend its power.
14. Higher-dimensional strings you pull taut when casting.
15. Distinct colors in your aura.
16. Shrines you've made a pilgrimage to.
17. Wishes purchased from a well.
18. Sealed boxes of pure quintessence.
19. Favors owed to you by beings of elemental air/earth/water/fire for performing the proper rites each dawn (but don't offend them by demanding too much at once).
20. Nightmares trapped in your dream catcher.

the blackness behind your eyes

  

Leonora Carrington

 

This game was, at one point, to be called Invisible Powers, though that no longer feels quite correct. The city is called Diomira, after the first of Calvino's invisible cities.

Diomira snares sleepers. When you dream of this place the dream goes on forever, and you're alone on a subway car that's just pulling into the station.

You emerge onto the platform (also empty), and then out into the street. The sky is dark but it ripples with orange-purple-green aurorae that give off a bit of light, and the rest of the illumination is provided by streetlights and neon signs and other such things. It might be raining, in which case the rain is black, like ink, but it fizzes and if you touch it it soaks into your skin.

Here are some facts about the place, in no particular order:

IMAGO

1. Nobody sleeps. If you dream you wander places stranger than Diomira, and who's to say you'll come back? Use these eyedrops instead, they're almost as good.
2. If someone does sleep, then to an outside observer their body will appear to transform into rose petals/a skeleton/shards of ice/etc and back several times over the course of the night.
3. You don't need to eat, though if you're sick or injured it might be necessary in order to heal. Nobody ages normally, because...
4. There are people with rows of shark teeth, people who stand seven feet tall, people with their pupils swollen large enough to fill their eyes. Everyone changes if they stay here long enough, and where else is there to go?
5. The city also warps and twists and grows over time. Very little of it was built. The buildings are not usually laid out in a way sensible to humans.
6. Diomira is encircled by black phosphene fog the same color as the sky. You can walk into it, but out there are the blind places where it's impossible to perceive anything, even your own thoughts.

PHOSPHENE

1. Lots of weird technology, guns that burrow into your stomach and motorcycles that run on liquid light.
2. The aurorae never go out and are never all that bright, but they have periods of intensity and dimness which are colloquially referred to as 'day' and 'night'.
3. Sometimes they form rings or blobs or little flickering dots.
4. Occasionally the aurorae reach down from the sky and touch something, leaving it blackened and burnt. Unlike lightning this happens in slow motion and makes no sound.
5. More diffuse traces come down with the rain, and this is what tends to be refined into fuel, neon gas, etc.

TIMECHANGER

1. Much of the tech is made in hell-realms, which are...
2. Nested places inside Diomira, where time runs faster like in Inception. Unlike in Inception they exist outside anyone's head. You might get into one by walking an odd number of circles around a cracked fountain, or by descending into a building's many consecutive basements.
3. Hell-realms can be nested inside other hell-realms. As the layers of recursion accumulate, time runs ever-faster and escape becomes ever-more-difficult. Go deep enough and sleep is safe (albeit dreamless), but you can't leave even by dying, you just wake up the next morning with your slit throat still gushing blood.
4. Hell-realm populations are eclectic. Some are humans changed beyond recognition by accelerated time, or living products of neon tech.
5. There are also gallwasps - sapient wasps/centipedes/etc, often coiled up inside fleshy puppet bodies, supposed to be immigrants from elsewhere.

FEVER

1. Drugs are widespread. At minimum everyone takes something to stay up, even if it's just eyedrops made of distilled rain. 
2. These're magic Diomiran drugs and most of them play into the 'change you over time' dynamic rather than the 'addiction overdose and death' dynamic.
3. Which doesn't mean they're safe.
4. They do things like, letting you see in the dark, rendering your bones cartilaginous and flexible, making it possible to remember everything you've ever experienced.
5. Hallucinogens are more dangerous than sleep. If you took LSD you'd probably turn into dust and dry leaves and never return.

SCRIMSHAW

1. All the wildlife is really really strange.
2. Mammals ('furred beasts') have 6+ legs and lots of teeth and mostly appear in dreams.
3. Tar octopi live in the black fog outside the city where nothing else can think.
4. Lots of big insects, likely associated with the gallwasps.
5. Giant lizards. Not dinosaurs or crocodiles, more... frilled geckos grown to prodigious size, gargoyle-dragon-ish things, knotted snakes.
6. What people refer to as 'crows' are actually wingéd little blobs of darkness with a sharp metallic bit for a beak. They are not kind.

WORMKIN

1. The plants are all greyish viney things, with fruit or nodules that glow the same colors as the sky. They're all edible, though not necessarily palatable.
2. There are worms from out in the blind places that are compatible with everything.
3. (such as the city. if you pull a telephone off the wall, the cord will be a long long worm)
4. (such as your digestive system. you can eat one if you kill it thoroughly enough, even though its biology is like nothing on earth. this is the only convenient source of meat. well, not exactly meat. protein).
5. (such as your brain, if you didn't kill it thoroughly enough. or if they get in your body by other means).

SHIVERGLASS

1. there are magicians, who are intensely secretive and distrustful even (especially) of each other. they dream without sleeping and know a little bit about how to navigate the blind places (which is where dreams are, and where the dead go).
2. a cabal of magicians is supposed to have created or maybe found Diomira, shortly before they all succumbed to paranoia and killed each other or went into hiding.
3. The founders' symbol is a moth bounded in a circle, which is a thing that sometimes appears on old buildings or in dreams.

EIGENGRAU

1. Dreaming is not well-understood, but is feared for good reason. You can dream of hunting or being hunted and be grievously wounded when you wake up. You can dream of worms and carry them back with you.
2. Unusual ways of making art or staring into mirrors are also not very safe.
3. Not everyone who came here, came from Earth.
4. (Most people are second-gen or third-gen or sometimes time-dilated-hell-realm-hundredth-gen residents, so this may not immediately be obvious).
5. It's impossible to use the subway. The trains don't depart when anyone is looking.

The Forum Game Encyclical

In response to Hilander's Analog Online Play Manifesto

  

Parallel Construction
I came to the OSR/GLOG honestly, but by a weird route. It went something like, freeform roleplaying on Scratch -> Text Based Games forum -> Bay12 Roll to Dodge -> Discord -> link to Goblin Punch.

I've played 5e a couple times, but have never been into any edition of D&D. I might try GLOG at some point and I expect that would probably be neat.

(Yes, this means I wrote a ?glog class? without any real experience of glog. Let it be known that I am a liar and a fake).

Anyway, I have some peculiar ideas about TTRPGs that are shaped by my having known them as "forum games" for most of my time with the hobby. In that frame, online games aren't a poor substitute for in-person play, they're a different and independent thing.

How to
I've already written about how to PbP, but you don't have to read that, because I'm going to one-up Whisperling from February 2024 and summarize it in three bullets:

1. Follow a turn structure: Each player submits an action -> GM rolls dice, responds to all actions simultaneously as a batch -> Repeat. The exception is talking with NPCs, you can respond to that unbatched and as frequently as you like.
   
   
2. Consider what counts as a reasonable timeframe in which to post and skip players who are too slow. Be a bit ruthless, because momentum is everything. PbP games die super easily and they do not speed up after they slow down.
   
   
3. Keep the system simple. It should fit in the first post of your forum thread (or in a #rules channel on discord). Absolutely nothing that requires multiple rounds of back-and-forth between player and GM per turn.

If you want to see how it looks in practice you could skim threads from the Bay12 Roll to Dodge Hall of Fame, which is ancient but should provide decent examples. Discord works the same, just make separate channels for IC / OOC / reference documents.

Why to
You're thirteen and you've stumbled upon places where there are interesting things happening, where people are doing stuff like Perplexicon or Our Salvation or Roll to Magic (beloved, long-gone). Some is silly fun; lots of it is unique and compelling and inventive. There's an entire life to be lived here and you want in on it.

The thing I love about forum games is really, just, how unmoored they are as an artistic tradition. Sure, there's cross-pollination with D&D, but the roots aren't the same. There are different premises, different worlds, totally unlimited by questions like "is there a system published for this?" or "would people meet in real life to play it out?"

Here are some more examples, if you don't believe me. They're doing wildly varied stuff and doing it with aplomb, just by using very basic dice systems and hewing closely to the GM's view of the world.

The Warrens of Oric the Awesome - Dungeon crawler with deep lore and a class/soul star system that's... sort of reminiscient of homestuck? if I had to draw a comparison?

Roll to Create a Supersoldier - Extremely well-run scientific marvels and horrors, nominally in pursuit of superhuman combat potential.

RTD Horrors - You are one of several eldritch horrors competing with one another to complete a summoning ritual and conquer the earth.

Various things by Weirdsound - Gnolls, wizards who do magic by expending their memories, an academy for young gods.

You are a Monster RTD - Players are monsters that evolve into stronger forms by overcoming adversity and absorbing the life force of other creatures.

Necromechanic - Necromantic crafting epic, still lives as a long series of games on discord.

Titans of Creation - Deities expend all their power and eventually die in the process of creating a world.

I like the OSR blogging scene, but sometimes its rigidity makes me weep. Lots of treading the same ground of classes and spell lists and encumbrance rules when there's so much else out there to be explored.

So what does this have to do with running games in text specifically?
You don't have to run these kinds of games on a forum. It's theoretically possible to meet up in person or over voice to play them. But you probably won't.

Without the pressure of having dedicated sessions to play this specific game, it's easier to pitch weird premises that don't have much system to support them. Plus, there's a forum's worth of people who might be interested.

As demonstrated by Necromechanic or Roll to Create a Supersoldier, you can also play with more complicated ideas than you otherwise might, because everyone has more time to think and occasionally to draw pictures. 

Voice in the Void
I also just have a personal fondness for text. I like reading. I like being the person behind your phone screen, without any attached characteristics. I like being named Whisper and dipping in and out of conversations and finding communities that are monomaniacally focused on the stuff I'm interested in. I've met most of my favorite people this way.

The Discordance
There's an elephant in the room, which is that Discord has done enormous violence to the forum ecosystem.

Discord is great in its own way; there's a lot you can do with real-time chat that's much harder at the speed of forum discussion. For one, making friends, real-time chat is great for that.

But it also means finding new people is harder. These days I mostly recruit from a stable of players I know, and I can't see what games are on offer just by looking at the front page of a subforum. I guess my old haunts are still out there, albeit quieter, and SB and SV do, uh, exist. But something has definitely been lost.

Whisperling's Arbitrary Forum Game Principles
~ Use a bespoke setting. It doesn't have to be worldbuilt, you can use a two-sentence elevator pitch, just have fun with it. Try radically different premises.

~ Play worlds not rules! I was really hyped when I found out about the FKR, but they turned out to be kinda boring. This is a good principle though. Bespoke system, keep it simple, pick a die size and maybe some stats.

~ Forum games die a lot, don't feel too bad about that.

~ I read this post which advocates limiting turns to the size of a bluesky post, and honestly that might be a good idea. Smaller and more freely-flowing turns tend to be better than the opposite, even if writing a big chunk of text can be tempting sometimes.

~ Run something weird and complicated at least once. Minimalism can get weird and complicated if it continues for long enough.

~ Don't pay money for RPGs? It really isn't necessary.

~ Things to try: Organize a conspiracy over DMs. Participate in a PvP deathmatch. Start an elaborate feud. Try a minimalist game like Roll to Spend Points. Come up with multi-paragraph conditional plans. GM for people who've run games for you.

Lemurians

For Institute of Occult Sciences

  
It may look cute but it's an omnipotent jerk 

Lemurians are actual, literal lemurs. You can distinguish them from their common relatives by their perfectly white fur, their massive bioluminescent eyes, their intelligence, and of course their presence beneath the earth, a place which is otherwise pretty devoid of arboreal mammals.

Like the other root races of the underground, Lemurian civilization existed well before humans made their own descent (from the surface? from the treetops?), and is much diminished. Unlike the maggot-men or the polyps, they weren't undone by some great disaster or transformed into something else; they just turned their attention away from the physical world.

Lemurians have mastered the power of using information to manipulate reality. The principles they use to do this are similar to the lucid science studied at the institute, but in Lemurian hands the art more closely resembles reality-manipulation or psychic powers. They can rewrite genomic sequences, implant an idea in someone's head, conjure objects from nothing, and beam themselves through time. (In fact, many colonies skip across history like a strepsirrhinian Brigadoon).

 

The tool they use to do all this is their glowing eyes. Light is a medium for transmitting information, and to a practitioner of lucid science, this makes it something between a hand and a scalpel. Lemurians have a complex series of nictitating membranes that they can use to modulate the color and intensity of their eyeglow, and thereby form patterns that act upon the informational aspects of reality.

If that seems overly abstract, consider an analogy: A book has a physical aspect, which is made up of paper and ink, and an informational aspect, which is made up of words. If you could edit the informational component, replacing one paragraph with another, then this change would propagate to the paper and ink, which must now be arranged in a way that spells out different words. This is how Lemurians and lucid scientists are able to reconfigure material things.

To Lemurians, practical applications of these techniques are all very prosaic - not necessarily simple, but secondary to the more obscure philosophical studies they pursue in abstract space. 

 

Lemurian colonies are miniature jungles. The trees are bone-white, like the Lemurians themselves, and have hollow interiors which can be used as shelter or to store small objects. Lemurians have few personal possessions, but they do collect food, jewelry, scrolls, and art objects.

(The trees are bioengineered, resembling surface flora in form but not in function. While the underground does have plants, no sunlight means no photosynthesis, and no reason for anything to evolve in the shape of a tree. Instead plants get nutrients from parasitism, carnivory, tidal effluvia, and a collection of deeply weird transmutative processes that verdant science has yet to figure out).

These places are always eerily silent. Lemurians move very quietly, and they communicate by staring into their interlocutors' eyes and projecting thoughts telepathically. The only time they make noise is when they're in pain.

In the center of the colony there will be structures made of transparent crystal, usually in the shape of organic whorls, arches, and spires. The configuration of these crystals reflects the structure of abstract space, containing definitions of the colony that can be used to hide it from the perception of outsiders or shunt it forward in time.

 

Lemurians are meddlesome, and they don't seem to think of humans as real people. They might offer some scraps of technology in exchange for services rendered, but they're just as likely to play outsiders against each other, embed hypnotic suggestions in your mind, or erase an inconvenient visitor from reality. 

It's unclear how this squares with their habit of adopting human children. These foundlings are given Lemurian eyes, treated almost as a member of the colony, sometimes even taught a little informational magic, but then abandoned when it's time for the lemurs to move on.

100 Modern Things It'd Be Messed Up to Put in Your Setting

Supplemental links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_historic_inventions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spurious_inventions
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_lost_inventions

1. Great pacific garbage patch
2. Neodymium magnets
3. Synthetic gemstones
4. Factory farming
5. Kola Superdeep Borehole
6. Spy satellites
7. Nuclear submarines
8. Orthodontics
9. Radio stations
10. Soda
11. SETI
12. Contact lenses
13. Cell phones (alternatively: landlines only)
14. Record players
15. X-rays
16. Skyscrapers
17. Neon signs
18. Meteorology
19. Billboards
20. Hydroelectric dams
21. Mustard gas
22. Plastic
23. Deep sea cables
24. Steamships (esp. icebreakers)
25. Programming languages (but not necessarily computers)
26. Email
27. Standardized tests
28. Ski lifts
29. Large hadron collider
30. Molecular gastronomy
31. Oil wells, offshore drilling
32. Social media addiction
33. Quadcopters
34. Wildlife tracking collars
35. Triangulation
36. Handheld video game consoles
37. Air pollution (pea soup fog)
38. Cryonics
39. Department stores
40. Vaccines
41. Organ transplants
42. Solar farms
43. Machine guns
44. Dynamite
45. Wikipedia
46. Water towers
47. Motorcycles
48. Acid rain
49. Ozone depletion
50. Solar flares
51. VR/AR
52. ATMs
53. Vending machines. Claw machines?
54. Film photography
55. Spray paint
56. Absolute zero
57. Movie projectors
58. Biplanes
59. Fiber optics
60. Mutually assured destruction
61. Guillotine
62. Canned food
63. Arms races; the manhattan project
64. Blast furnaces
65. Model trains
66. Y2K
67. Fingerprint analysis
68. Academic journals
69. Yearly checkups
70. Inhalers
71. Cybersecurity
72. Voyager 1
73. Microplastics
74. UV light
75. Cosmetic surgery
76. Carbon dating
77. Freudian/Jungian/etc theories of the psyche
78. Microchip implants (like for pets)
79. Junk mail
80. Anti-homeless architecture
81. Brain surgery
82. ICBMs
83. Bottled water
84. Identification documents - passports, birth certificates, state ID cards, etc.
85. fMRI
86. Motion detectors
87. Sleep studies
88. Hermetic seals
89. Global supply chains
90. Fog machines
91. Land mines
92. Cloning
93. Cigarettes
94. Gene drives
95. Pesticide runoff
96. 24 hour news
97. Freeze dried food
98. Thrift stores
99. Phone books
100. Periodic table of elements