A Day With Jay Dragon's Wizard Madness Simulator: 7 Part Pact

The Seven Part Pact is a roleplaying game

The Seven Part pact is a LARP

The Seven Part Pact is will get you into astrology

The Seven Part Pact is a series of minigames

The Seven Part Pact is an examination of societal power structures

The Seven Part Pact is a cognitohazard

The Seven Part Pact is Jay Dragon's Wizard Madness Simulator

    If you're a particular kind of RPG sicko, or if you follow the Possum Creek Games Patreon, you may have heard rumblings from some TTRPG creators over the last few years joking about interacting with Jay's new game and then catching Wizard Madness, suddenly becoming unable to articulate how when pressed directly but being very vehement that The Seven Part Pact had consumed their mind. Surprisingly, given how many people I know have played a version of the game so far, there is frighteningly little written about the game that is publicly available: Rascal has a post about it, but it's only available to the higher tier monthly subscribers. Darling Demon Eclipse has a four episode playtest preview up on her YouTube channel which is at this time currently the only way to see how the game might be played, and of course at the time of this article the version of the game they played had been out of date for some time meaning you may only glimpse a shadow of the current shape of Wizard Madness as it exists today. No, indeed the potentially the only quickly digestible way to learn anything about The Seven Part Pact would be to read Dwiz's recounting of his Shapeshifter's Duel with Jay Dragon directly - a duel in which I attended, sat upon the Celestial Council, and helped shape Dwiz's ultimate fate.

    My friends, I too have the Wizard Madness, and I'm going to do my best to make sure you catch it.

What Does A Day of Wizard Madness Entail 

    7PP (which will be how I refer to the game for the rest of this) is an unholy marriage of one of the genre of LARP-adjacent boardgames and a TTRPG. The rules of the game are spread across seven zine-length character-specific rulebooks accompanied by their own individual boardgame, plus a main rulebook and a Grimoire which contains the spells available to you at start of play. If that sounds like a lot to interact with - it is! But the good news is that the game is structured in such a way that you really need to only care about what's in your specific rulebook, because everyone is working together to ensure that everyone knows the parts of the rules that are relevant for whatever comes up during the course of play. It's fascinating, because you can go an entire game having no idea what anyone else is actually doing outside of what they tell you about in any scenes that you have together, and yet a small thing that happens in a single scene may cause ripple effects across everyone's corners of the game and when that happens the veil gets pulled back and you get to see how the whole machine fits together.

Months of Wizardry

    In terms of what actually happens in gameplay, an Orrery is set up that tracks the location of the planets across the sky. This is updated each month (or if a Wizard uses their power to modify it), and the location of the planets and the Sun as they move across the map of the astrological houses have different kinds of impact on everyone's board state and upon the ability to cast magic itself. Everyone takes a moment to update their board state at the beginning of each month, and then they are given several tokens that they can use to indicate how they will spend their time that month: Will they spend time with their family or loved ones in order to gain a bonus to their ability to cast spells? Will they spend it interacting with their board game, harvesting resources or preventing societal collapse or maintaining trade routes? Perhaps they will spend the time visiting another Wizard to discuss their wizardly affairs and cast spells? This phase is both the longest part of each month of game time and also where all the best bits happen, because you will very quickly see exactly how shakily the world holds itself together and how little time you have to act to stop it - and where you get to roleplay as your horrible little magic blorbo with everyone else. And you just keep doing this while the world hastens towards destruction and Wizards begin fulfilling their ultimate, secret destinies.

A Council of Wizards, A Celestial Audience

    As many of Jay's games are, this game both is and is not GM-less. It is, insofar as you are largely responsible for your own boardgame and managing your own affairs through play. It isn't, however, because in any scene in which you are not an active participant (or if all Wizards are present and you are called on to assist) you assume the role of the Celestial Audience - essentially, you're there to provide rules adjudications as they come up throughout the scene as they pertain to what your Wizard is responsible for, or sometimes broadly. For example, the Sorcerer maintains both the Lore of the setting as well as tracking the current stability of magic across the setting, meaning that if someone were to cast a spell from a school that had fallen out of balance then it would be the Sorcerer's responsibility to warn them of the consequences, and has final say on rulings where the results of magic would be ambiguous. The Celestial Audience is also how you make sure that a room full of people doesn't devolve into side conversations and chit-chat - even if everyone isn't the focus of the scene happening, they may still have important context to add to it. 

What Can 1001 Imps Do For You?

        You may have noticed I haven't really talked about casting spells in this game where you are Wizards doing Wizard things which should, ostensibly, be about casting spells right? Herein lies the real "What Are We Even Doing Here" of it all: this game is about seven men who have incalculable power and use it to enforce their will upon the world while everyone hopes that they will do the right thing when the time comes. Most of the Wizards present could play the game without casting a spell at all, which is something that the Lore of the game even touches on - most of the Wizards do surprisingly mundane things in their own domains: The Mariner maintains shipping routes and keeps tabs on pirates and giant beasts in the world; The Sorcerer removes unsanctioned magic users from the realm and keeps the traces of magic corralled to innovate on magic itself; The Warlock basically just gets to play Game of Thrones off in their little corner; The Necromancer travels around banishing the souls of the dead so that they don't get out and cause havoc; The Hierophant functions as a religious leader that mostly tends to the needs of the people; The Sage simply exists to guide the world back into equilibrium and guide the other players towards their fates. Only The Faustian has an immediate call to potentially use magic - because they deal directly with The Literal Actual Devil (less the Christian concept of The Devil, more of the folkloric trickster Old Scratch) and both try to curtail The Devil's schemes while also kind of acting as a foil to The Sage by trying to get other people to act in certain ways.

    But the thing is, the call of power is a loud one, and sometimes you really, really don't want to do something the hard way. Sometimes, you just want to Summon 1001 Imps to solve a problem for you, and that's where it gets ya - because the moment you begin interacting with magic, the moment everything goes off the rails in ways you will not be able to predict. That's not to say complications won't arise in other ways - but once you start using magic to solve your problems the only way to solve the problems that those problems cause is with more magic, and you're gonna keep doing it until you figure out how to stop. 

A Play Report, Of A Sort

    I agree with Dwiz in that trying to produce a full and accurate play report of our game would likely be unhelpful and boring to read. I would, however, like to hit some of the high points of the day - and I do mean a day, because it was a huge nine-ish hour long marathon session - starting with the Wizards In Attendance:

-myself as The Sorcerer

-Dwiz as The Warlock

-Jay as The Sage

-Natalie as The Faustian (and also host of the event, for which we are eternally thankful)

-Alan as The Necromancer

-Cass as The Hierophant (who very graciously agreed to play last minute, and who we are eternally thankful for)

-Simone as The Mariner

    Aside from Jay, everyone other than Natalie was coming to this game completely fresh (Natalie had previously played a game as a different flavor of Wizard). It was very nice to have Jay acting as our Facilitator for this because I think that we may have been quite lost with the intricacies of our individual boardgames. In terms of gaming backgrounds, I feel like we had a good spread between folks with more trad game backgrounds and those who focused more (or exclusively) on the LARP side of things, and I think everyone did an amazing job both in and out of character. This is very much a game that encourages people to jump in and play NPCs as they become relevant and to pass them around troupe-style which I think we did to great effect - me and Alan each got a time to be The Devil, and an NPC knight named Sir Gabriel showed up early on but ended up gaining more importance each time a new person played him. Because the in-game timeline was only about three months, we didn't get a whole lot of time to see the impact of what we were doing boardgame-wise, really with The Mariner and The Warlock's games being most visibly relevant to the narrative - but then, that's also kind of the point, because the more time each Wizard dedicates to solving issues in their own domains, the less visible any of those problems become to the rest of the Wizards.

    There were some really stand-out character moments: because misogyny and The Patriarchy are core themes that this game deals with, the scene where Natalie and Cass got to get together and be like "Hey yeah actually we're both women and we're both cool with that and also The Sage is going to try to use this to destroy us" got to be way more important and cool than I can render in words. Any time someone got to have a scene with Jay was moving - in the setup of the game, after Jay had told us that her character was still a teenager and suspected that one of us had killed her character's master, the previous Sage, we all just kind of collectively agreed that we all cosigned that and had picked this kid to serve as a patsy to make sure we had a full seven Wizards to maintain The Pact, and boy howdy let me tell you that would already be enough reason for some intense roleplaying if it wasn't also for the fact that Jay was trying to manipulate all of us to achieve our destinies which had an impact on the outcome of the stability of the world. 

    For my part in all this, I had two big scenes - once, where Simone and I agreed that it would be good for The Mariner to cast a spell to try to beautify the plants at a junkyard we had met at only to have the complications for that spell cause the fruits of that plant to become poisonous, which The Celestial Audience decided would mean that while not too many people immediately died from eating that fruit, it did end up getting bottled into wine which was then sent to the wedding of the princess which caused ALL KINDS of issues for The Warlock and The Hierophant for the rest of the game. Another time, speaking of The Hierophant, early on an NPC occultist appeared in Cass' realm which I needed to go deal with and decided that I would spend my monthly Big Time RP Scene to find this heretic, descend from the heavens and stab him to death to eliminate him as a problem in this realm - only to find out that there are actually combat mechanics in this game and suddenly and unexpectedly have to figure out how to strike this man down without killing a bunch of civilians with magic. (I did try turning him into a pillar of salt, for the bit, but sadly he resisted.) This in turn caused enough chaos that I would end up dealing with the RP consequences of that for the rest of the game - but lemme tell ya, it was cool as hell.

    Actually, I'm gonna take a second to expand out that fight because it has a lot to do with Dwiz's duel with Jay which he described in his blog post I linked up near the top, and which you should really go read. I was not expecting this game to have combat mechanics. I had seen The Shapeshifter's Duel spell and knew that that was an option for Wizardly Battling, but I figured mundane violence would be abstracted. Not so! Essentially, you end up establishing a number of Things That Are True about you and the person you are fighting, and then it just goes back and forth - either you attack them, and they parry with something they have (which could be as nebulous as "You cast a lightning bolt at me, and I command your bodyguard to jump in front of it), or else you try and destroy some of the Things That Are True about them so that they have nothing left to defend with. I quickly realized that this both incentivizes being very thorough about prepping for Doing Violence, but also that especially if a Wizard is involved and tried to bring magic into it that things will go out of hand extremely quickly. I was very lucky that my attempt to Petrify this occultist into a pillar of salt failed - had it not, the complications would have been such that the effect would have spread elsewhere in the temple, potentially affecting innocent people and going beyond the battlefield itself. Ultimately, I drove the Occultist away, but had we played for longer he may have come back to be a particular problem.

    

Final Wizardly Musings

    7PP is a game that is unabashedly and openly about confronting the expectations of masculinity and how that plays into global power structures. Through this, you can explore gender, famine, unjustness and how much it sucks that a small number of weird men rule over us all in ways that are sometimes hard to understand until it is too late. The thing is though, at one point Jay told us that her character could "either be a good person, or good at the game." And that really is what it boils down to - because let me tell you, if you want a power fantasy? You can absolutely indulge in a power fantasy. Do you want to create a world-ending beast? Do you want to summon long-dead wizard kings to do your bidding and reshape the world? Do you want to ascend beyond what the game is asking you to do and attempt Apotheosis? Do you just really, really want to summon 1001 imps? You can do all of these things and many, many more. Our playthrough didn't even touch on half the mechanics available in the game because we were on such a tight timer - there were things we could have researched, we could have gone beyond the Isles of Isha out to other parts of the world to bring back hidden knowledge, we could have had to fight Sick-Ass Undead Dudes Who Cause Problems On Purpose. This game is truly infinite in a way that a lot of RPGs are not but reigns that in by giving you a number of things on your individual boardgame that you HAVE to care about. You can't just explore everything and do everything - if you do, your realm will fall to chaos and hasten the end of the world. You have to care about your community - if you act selfishly or carelessly, you will doom the world so you can get what you want.

    If you, dear Wizard, have a chance to partake of the Seven Part Pact, I would offer you these warnings:

-If you come to this game with your own agenda, you will be foiled.

-If you come to this game to cause mischief, great ruin will be visited upon you.

-If you come to this game to do great deeds, know that everything has a cost - whether it is immediately visible to you or not.

And finally: if you find a problem that Summoning 1001 Imps cannot solve, I recommend you summon another 1001 imps.

Stay wizardly out there.

Don't Make A Journey Without Knowing Where The Road Leads: Ryuutama & Wanderhome

 tl;dr

    It seems somewhat counterintuitive to drop this at the beginning since it goes about trying to prove my point via blunt force trauma, but perhaps that's the best place to start: I don't think people read critically anymore. Whether due to lack of time, willingness to commit, or just atrophied critical thinking skills, by and large I think that the average TTRPG enjoyer does not take the time to read TTRPGs anymore and therefore will turn to community commentary on a game - which is inherently neither a good or a bad thing, but one that I do believe often leads to misconceptions about games as they must necessarily be filtered through other people's biases before they come to you. 

    The good news is, I think these are all things that can be counteracted. If you're willing to come take a journey with me, then I think I can lead you onto the path towards understanding games better. As luck would have it, there are two games about journeys that I often see conflated that we can thereupon practice our critical reading skills: Ryuutama by Atsuhiro Okada; and Wanderhome by Jay Dragon. This may be setting off alarm bells for some of you - specifically, because Wanderhome is so often recommended in the same context as Ryuutama, incorrectly. To be honest, I don't think anyone but Jay has ever pitched me one of Jay's games properly - that's a blog post for another time, but I think we have to do this one first.

Some Context

    While my current job doesn't quite afford me the privilege of unfettered access to the deluge of podcasts that I once had, I've spent the better part of the last three years mainlining TTRPG review podcasts, and the better part of the last decade consuming (and occasionally being a part of) TTRPG actual plays. Before that, the most common ways I heard about other games were from the experiences of my friends playing games. Since entering the world of games professionally, I've run a lot of games for people at cons who were not in my immediate friend group, often by having to rapidly onboard myself to a system I'd never read. I've also taken to working through my TTRPG backlog by way of forcing coercing cajoling curating and gently encouraging a very specific group of my friends to read through games with me as an act of play in and of itself, and perhaps most relevantly to this blog I also contributed to a Ryuutama zine this year! All of this is to say that I feel like I am a pretty reliable resource to make the kinds of claims I'm going to make in this post, but since part of the point of this post is learning to examine biases both of yourself and others, I feel like this is an important thing to include here! Ultimately, I am just some sicko on the Internet, just as you are. Suffice it to say that the advice I'm about to present is ALSO useful for evaluating this very article as you read it, so feel free to chug a Monster Zero and get that brain meat jiggling.

Pattern Recognition & Data Synthesis

    I do not think it is a particularly hot take to say that we humans love us some good old fashioned pattern recognition. We love to associate things with things we already know - it makes the world more digestible, and being able to assign context to new situations allows us to function. A lot of the time, this kind of data serves us well enough to get by - so much of the time, in fact, that it becomes very easy to just rely on this with no further consideration to the conclusions we jump to. Not to belabor a very obvious point here, but like, just going off of this data is kind of exactly the situation we run into with both AI and hurtful stereotypes of all kinds - if you don't consider the data you have received and just take it at its face value, you've done at the very least yourself a disservice and depending on what position of authority you hold to other people, that disservice may become damage to many other folks.

    As much as I would love to make my English degree worth more than the paper it was printed on by way of explaining all the ins and outs of how to synthesize data and evaluate sources, that would make this blog as long, dry, and interesting to read as a CVS receipt so I'm going to skip around a bit: You have, almost certainly, heard of primary and secondary sources. In the context of what we're looking at here, a primary source would be an RPG text itself, whereas a secondary source would be a review of a game. Blog posts by the creator of the game about the game itself are kind of a nebulous area outside of these two classifications - they are technically primary sources, but can sometimes be secondary sources depending on the content - especially as it starts bleeding out into author interviews, etc. It's not really important right now that we categorize this thoroughly, but I need you to have at least this as a starting point for where we're going so that you're thinking about how tightly tied to the core concept of a game a source may be. It may be more helpful to you to consider things as a spectrum of direct and indirect sources - a direct source being the RPG text itself, an indirect source being someone with no relationship to the game voicing their opinions about it, and everything else somewhere in-between. 

    So. You, dear reader, likely have sources you like to go to for content about games. You might just talk to people on Discord about it, or you're reading horror stories on Reddit, or you're watching nerdy-ass voice actors play the game on Twitch, or you've assembled a group of friends to talk about games in person, or maybe you like to listen to a pair of disembodied hands flipping through a game and talking about the ways a game may or may not be compatible with the owner of those hands' own game system. Whatever floats your goat - but the point is, these are all functionally secondary sources to the actual text itself. These are extremely valuable resources, each in their own ways, but each with their own pitfalls as well. For a brief and noncomprehensive list, here's some hits:

Watching/Listening To People Play On A VOD/Podcast

• Pros: Getting to see the actual gameplay mechanics at work; being able to see a demonstration of how the game actually works; getting a good idea of pacing and timing for when to do certain things in the game; learning what parts do and don't chafe that group to potentially plan for those things in your own group
  
  
• Cons: Gameplay made As Content (TM) is often heavily edited not presenting an accurate depiction of how a game plays at the table; differing levels of skill as performers vs your home group; unclear what things are houserules that group has implemented vs what is in the text; otherwise unrealistic expectations of how easy or difficult the game is to pick up as a player/GM

Forum Posts

• Pros: extremely accessible; easily see multiple viewpoints on a topic; people motivated to speak on a subject in a forum are almost certainly passionate about that topic
  
  
• Cons: inevitable and extreme bias; unable to tell if people are voicing original thoughts or parroting things they've heard elsewhere without interacting with the game at all

Online Reviews

• Pros: someone has taken the time to thoughtfully lay out their reaction to a game; biases are often disclosed and repeated entries may allow savvy consumers to predict how a reviewer may interpret something; often presented in an easily digestible form to deliver information quickly
  
  
• Cons: potential for unethical journalism; obvious bias may prevent accurate coverage of a game; people who do not like a game often do not give it the same kind of care and coverage of a game that they do enjoy whether they take pains to mitigate their bias or not

Reading and Playing a Game With Your Friends

• Pros: You are directly digesting the text as intended; you and your group will form your own decisions based on your own experiences
  
  
• Cons: Cognitive load for learning a new system; conscious and unconscious biases may prevent you from enjoying the game before giving it a fair shake; nerds are afraid of change and attempting to get them to learn a new game rather than just play the thing they already like may provoke nerd rage

    In a perfect world, you would do all of these things to fully understand a game. But the thing is, of course, that a lot of the time you're not going to be approaching games from an academic standpoint - sometimes your decade long D&D group has exploded and now you're on the hunt for a new game for that group of friends and have to try and sell them on something new, so you've gotta figure out what to play next with not a lot of time. How do you figure out what a game is actually like, and what do you do when you start playing something and realize it's not what you wanted? And what does all of this have to do with Ryuutama and Wanderhome, or that other thing at the beginning of this article about people not reading?

Natural Fantasy Roleplaying

    To completely jump away for a moment, let's talk about Fabula Ultima. Fabula Ultima is an homage to classic JRPG videogames, and as of March of this year has released three total setting guides to help you dial in the flavor of your story - beyond the content in the main guide, you have the Atlas: High Fantasy for games geared towards epic magical quests to attack and dethrone god, Atlas: Techno Fantasy which is more about the struggles between capitalism corrupting the environment and co-opting natural resources and the people who have to fight back against it (the whole Final Fantasy 7 situation, you know the deal), and most recently Atlas: Natural Fantasy which to quote directly from the DriveThruRPG page "...bring[s] you into worlds deeply permeated by the cycles of time and nature, where young heroes face the consequences of past mistakes and demonstrate that history does not have to repeat itself, creating a brave future of coexistence[.]" Ryuutama is likely the game that got the term "natural fantasy roleplaying" in the ears of gamers in the West, and given Fabula Ultima's definition thereof you could probably argue that Wanderhome fits into this category as well. There are, in fact, a staggering number of similarities between Wanderhome and Ryuutama, some of which are brought up more often than others. Superficially, they are both games with very cute art where you create a group of travelers that are not traditional RPG combatant types, they're both games intended to foster collaboration between the players and GM with a robust set of options for building out towns and festivals and which care heavily about the seasons and how those affect the characters, and most importantly the characters are learning about themselves as they help people along their journey. Less superficially, they're both written by people with backgrounds in teaching and specifically teaching games to newer players meaning that they feature language intended to be easily consumed and with broadly simple character mechanics, plus they're both doggedly committed to making sure that everyone at the tables knows that the journey is the point of playing.

    The issue is, that's where the comparisons basically stop. While both games take great pains to emphasize that they are about telling the story of a journey of people who are just regular folks, Ryuutama still includes combat, meaning that it expects players to interact with the world through violence despite trying to indicate otherwise. Wanderhome all but explicitly forbids violence - the one character able to commit an act of violence must be removed from play immediately after doing so - and predominantly expects players to affect the narrative directly. What this means, then, is that while both games are interested in telling a story of a journey, how each game defines what a journey is is wildly different. 

    The journey you take in Ryuutama is one where your Great Journey is one where you must Accomplish Something and you do so by way of your Skills And Might despite being just a regular person in the world. The story you tell in Ryuutama is quite literally in-game being recorded by a DMPC who will then feed that story to a great dragon, and so wants the characters to Do Great Deeds and push them beyond their normal humdrum life to make sure it's a good story. It's focused on DOING. And once the characters have finished DOING, then they are done, and the journey is over.

    The journey in Wanderhome is just that - a journey. Characters may come and go during the journey. They do still have goals to achieve and can affect the world in material ways, but since violence is not an answer, all the actions your characters can take focus around being present in the moment and practicing compassion. When a character accomplishes a goal, or when it feels appropriate, that character may leave and another may take their place, and the journey continues. Wanderhome is a story of BEING. Wanderhome asks you to BE with the characters for a while - for you to BE the town, to BE the landscape, to BE the NPCs. Wanderhome wants the players simply to BE the journey until they are satisfied and move on, just like the characters they play.

But What Does It All Mean, Basil?

    If you were pressed for time and listened to someone tell you about the basic premise of Wanderhome and Ryuutama and you drew the assumption that they were similar games because they're both nature-focused, travel-focused games with easy-to-learn mechanics, you would be correct - they are both that. However, you would also be completely wrong, because without an understanding of how each of those games want players to interact with the narrative, you cannot understand what each of those games will be. This, I think, is the major issue people have with trying to interact with any new RPG, and why I brought up how frustrating the lack of critical media consumption is - it seems as though people lack anything but the most baseline curiosity, and so when they find out about something new they try and immediately sort that game into a box with things they already know rather than making any kind of attempt to meet the game where it is and see what it actually wants you to do. In some ways, this lack of curiosity also leads to people trying to shoehorn their favorite games into being things that they are not because the intent of the existing mechanics encourages a specific kind of play which usually does not jive with whatever the new intent is which leads to either bad play experiences for everyone or the birth of new game designers, but I feel like that's a drum I beat in every article here  and I don't really need to go into that right now. The point is, people will do literally everything in their power to make assumptions about a game rather than try to figure out what the game actually is, and then are often upset or confused when they find the game is not what they assumed it would be.

    Frankly, I think that sucks. So.

    Let's imagine that spectrum of sources I mentioned earlier for a moment. Let's say someone told you about a game that for whatever reason piqued your interest. You're not sold on it enough to just go out and buy the book and read it, so what do you do? Here's my quick and easy tips:

• If "the book itself" is one side of the spectrum and "random person sharing thoughts about a game" is the other side of the spectrum, start near the middle: try to find an interview with the designer of the game and see what they say the intent of the game is.
  
  
• If you're still interested, go one step to either side of center - moving closer to the text itself would be something like looking up development blogs or other posts by the creator about the game, whereas moving farther away would be something like watching or listening to a one-shot of the game being played.
  
  
• If you've gotten this far and you're still hooked, you can now move to the farthest sides of the spectrum - listen to some people review the game itself, and then go read it.

    AND BEFORE YOU START WITH ME, because I can hear you begin to type furiously across the gulf of space and time, what I did not just say was "you should go spend money on something you don't know if you and your friend group will like." There are so, so many legal ways to get games for free if you cannot or don't feel comfortable purchasing a game. You should check with your local library - if it's a more mainstream release, one that has received at least a paperback or hardback printing, most library systems will have at least a copy or two floating around that you can grab via Interlibrary Loans. If it's an indie game and it has an Itch.io page, I would all but guarantee you that the page for the game either 1. has community copies available or 2. the creator of the game would be willing to send you a PDF for you to read - many creators are just happy people are interested in their work. Speaking of Itch, if you are someone who often purchases the charity bundles that pop up, there's a strong chance you might already have the game you're curious about! And perhaps the most critical thing - you should ask your friends if they have a copy of the game they could let you borrow - or, gasp, since they already own it, ask them what they think! Have them run a game for you, or get them to let you run a game for them!

    This blog post got a little more negative than I would have preferred, but at the end of the day I really just want people to feel comfortable critically evaluating things because it is not materially harder to do than what people are already doing - the only difference is actually thinking about the information you take in and how you feel about it to have your own thoughts. Simply absorbing information is not enough - you do sometimes have to use that piece of soggy bacon between your ears.

    Also, you should go play both Ryuutama and Wanderhome. Ryuutama is a great game to bridge the gap between people used to playing turn-based JRPGs into the world of tabletop RPGs. Wanderhome is a great game to bridge the gap from passive players to active storytellers. Both are great tools for your toolkit - you just have to know when to use them.

Stay weird out there.