Happy birthday!

The big thing I'm usually looking at is just "what am I legally allowed to do with this engine?", since that's the thing I don't want to trip over. But I want to shout out Titanomachy's Caltrop Core as a very cool, very readable SRD I was able to build from.

titanomachyrpg.itch.io/caltropcore

Shoutout to the continuing evolution of my art as forced by a $0 design budget.

Really, really interesting meditations on warfare and privilege and cycles of violence and discrimination and cruelty stuck in a game that is dense with subsystems and hidden information but absolutely pancake flat at the gamefeel level.

But I'd much rather play the game, not do whatever all of that is, so I'm calling my losses and chucking this one in the bin.

This is difficulty, but not in a way the other parts of the game really interact with. If you know this was coming and you load full heals onto your characters and take only tanks and run everyone into the center and stall the first phase to stack physical cards it's probably doable?

So like, it gets a turn after every couple characters and it teleports across the map to keep your dps chasing after it uselessly and it AoEs the whole squad for 70% bar every turn and it autodebuffs any dps near it for -50% damage and no one can res.

It kinda feels like this thing was either designed for a different game, or just kind of a handwave towards having an ending. I *like* Matsuno games, but a lot of them have this point where the budget ran out so the game ends even if the narrative wasn't ready for it.

"Do 24 hours of side content grind" as the pass to even attempt the boss is pretty bad. It not being remotely sufficient, you also need a completely idiosyncratic team comp and you need to sandbag the first phase while Denam collects physical cards, and you still might get rng screwned, is worse.