Recommendation Round-up! (Patreon)

I'm working on a new project for Darrington Press right now, so most of my time is again taken up by things I can't really talk about. But what I can do is pass along recommendations for games and videos and shows I've been enjoying!

I got a Steam Deck for my birthday, having had my eye on it for a couple of years now. So far, we've been using it with a dock to play PC games on our big living room TV, including a collaborative run of Disco Elysium and taking on a professional racing team in Motorsport Manager (having enjoyed Waypoint/Remap's run with Oberhoff racing).

Perpetua is the new show from Friends at the Table, my favorite actual play group. Friends at the Table (aka FatT) is legendary for their critical worldbuilding, and this time they're playing the revised version of Cartograph to build their setting, which they'll then be playing Fabula Ultima (the self-proclaimed TTRJRP, aka inspired by Japanese video game rpgs like Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, etc.). The series already has some very promising setting material, like what if there were different types of elves for each damage type? Then you get a physical-type Swole Gym Bro elf. The season just started, so you can get in on the ground floor with the show, or take this as the opportunity to give FatT another try.

Stephanie Plays Games is a YouTube channel focused on running and playing ttrpgs (mostly D&D, but that's kind of what you have to do to get traction on YouTube in ttrpgs). I had been seeing her videos pop up on my algorithm, but the first one I clicked through to was this one on campaign prep. I really like her framing of thinking like a director, and this video is part three in a series where she talks through the whole prep process, from pre-session zero to building a campaign character guide for your players and more. I think a lot of this advice could be useful for Daggerheart GMs as well as many other games outside of D&D.

Speaking of Daggerheart, the game is now available to order from indie bookstores and B&N and the like, so if you haven't already ordered your copy, you can get it on Bookshop.org and support indie bookstores.

Knights in Tight Spaces is Ground Shatter's sequel/follow-up to Fights in Tight Spaces, one of my favorite games of 2021. Knights takes the premise into a medievel fantasy world with familiar D&Dish elements. The limited color palette from Fights expands into a shaded, more colored-pencil style, and expands to give the player control of up to 3 characters at a time. You can play with a Fights-like brawler, a weapon-and-armor-laden warrior, a trickster rogue, a spellcaster, etc. I like the new palette/art style, but some of the interface elements and play experience of this iteration are not working as well for me. I think it is worth checking out if you liked the first game, but I am sad to not currently be able to give it a more enthusiastic recommendation (based on my 6.5 hours with the game so far).

The third season of the Wheel of Time tv show has started, and they're really trucking along. The first scene of the season would be a season finale in any other show. WoT continues to have some really strong casting, and their costuming ranges into less standard western fantasy things but also into pseudo-modern in ways that make me wish I had their costumer on speed-dial. It remains to be seen if/how this season will complicate the extremely binary and cissexual gender politics and cosmology of the books, but when I leave that element on the side, it's been very cool so far.

What have y'all been enjoying of late? Games, books, music, shows?