My guess would be a cross you make next to a party during the election… or maybe it’s supposed to be a target? That said I find it baffling that no one during production pointed out how similar the logo is in it’s color scheme with the swastika, and yeah celtic cross is another one that has clear associations for fascists even in Germany.

I believe in German electioneering

I think there’s still a few but they are going to go full hog, don’t want to brutalize social security recipients you are out, want to tax the rich you are out, immigrants? You better believe your position has to be the same as the nazis.

Imo SPD will use the poor election result to purge anything even approaching social democraticness in their own ranks and go more right as that seems to have been the play of every party so far.

So I’ve been super sick with the flu since thursday which effectively kept me from sleeping during the night which gave me some time to check out what the germans been up to and really nothing really can do as good a job as the logo they used for one ‘politics debate’

Really liking the red white and black there…

Anyways that debate was bad but at least somewhat bearable but there was the Scholz vs Merz debate which basically went like this.

Merz (CDU): There’s too many foreigners you haven’t been doing enough to send them back!!!

Scholz (SPD): Ehrm, actually you’ll find that no other Bundeskanzler sent back more asylumseekers than me, no one turned them away at the border until I showed up and did it in a grand manner.

Merz: We are spending too much on social security! Our government expenses are out of control and Scholz is not able to cut the excesses because he isn’t brutal enough

Scholz: Actually I personally brutalized tons of social security recipients and so what Mr Merz is saying is completely wrong

This has animated a few people to move towards Die Linke so they are now polling around 5% and might make it into government but it won’t matter after this debate it becomes clear that a CDU-SPD coalition will probably be what is going to happen as SPD seems proud on being conservative and cruel shitheads.

Hey bud, why don’t you join the war effort and enlist in the ukrainian army? After all it’s super important to keep a senseless war going! Or are you unaffected by the consequences of the war and just can have this ‘We gotta oppose Putin at all cost’ affectation…

Depends on the Map I want to make and how much time I have.

Worldographer for hexmaps, I’ve tried other programs like Hex Kit but honestly I like Hexographer the most because it is the easiest to read and fastest to get something put together in.

Dungeondraft for Dungeons/Battlemaps, there’s some issues I have with it with how it handles several assets but overall it’s solid and just your assets straight out of the gate are solid.

Wonderdraft for ‘Useless Maps’, this one is for world maps but for the most part I use it to make a map that players might find on a goblin that details their plans to attack a village or a city map in an old style so it is used more to convey an atmosphere.

Honorable mention to dungeonscrawl which I use to just sketch out a dungeon real quick has enough functionality for me.

Tyranny is also a great mention I think I did like 4 playthroughs ranging from warrior to lawyer because it doesn’t take that long to get through it just once.

I actually disagree RPGs should be shorter, I remember playing Dragon Age Inquisition and it just being a slog, and even now replaying the old infinity engine games they are all very nice and tightly paced that I can finish a game in 2 weeks so roughly 20-30 hours while BG3 is more than 100 hours and it also becomes a slog after the first act which is roughly around 30 hours.

If anything a shorter play experience is vital for RPGs because they allow you to play different characters who perceive the world differently. One thing that Disco Elysium did really well is depending on what your character does well they perceive different things. There’s no ‘universal’ world and RPGs should lean more into the roleplaying and what you can do with it. Pathfinder:WotR does this but that also feels a tad too long and a bit shorter would’ve really made it so you can’t wait to play through all paths.

I just remembered Fallout:NV is also one of those games you can have a full experience in 20-30 hours.

I’ve just been playing through the infinity engine games (Currently on IWD2)

Just talking about Infinity Engine here from most accessible to least:

Baldurs Gate 1 - This one is very accessible you can just pick fighter and go. The Story is basically pointing you towards the next place and ironically good fighters are somewhat rare in BG1

Icewind Dale 1 - This one ranks lower because instead of 1 character to have to make a whole party and that can be quite a daunting task, however it’s very well paced and you aren’t going to get lost if it weren’t for character creation this would be above BG1

Baldurs Gate 2 - Higher level game means you need to figure out how to do buffs, how to deal with enemy mages by dismantling their protective spells requires quite a bit more understanding.

Planescape Torment - This isn’t a hard game from it’s gameplay it’s pretty easy but Planescape is a very dnd ‘meta’ setting so that’s why it is ranked here.

Icewind Dale 2 - Ok listen I love 3rd edition but compared to the others there’s a couple of big hurdles one is that you need to know how feats work, you also need to know how resistances work oh and there’s no official enhanced edition only a modded one since the source code was lost.

Outside of the Infinity Engine some honorable mentions in no particular order since I’m just writing them as they come to my head:

Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura - I generally hate magitech and this one feels the same, it’s set in the industrial revolution in a generic fantasy land. Very fallout very good.

Temple of Elemental Evil - Really solid implementation of 3e, awesome synth ost this one is much more approachable for a 3e game and has great combat which means it would probably rank below Baldurs Gate 2

Pillars of Eternity 1 & 2 - Solid modern polished games the most accessible out of any mentioned.

Tyranny - The less polished Pillars but really uplifted by great tight pacing that won’t make you spend 100 hours per playthrough.

Neverwinter Nights 2 - Oh boy another 3.5e game this one honestly is pretty good since it’s super scuffed so you can just go barbarian and not have as much of a headache.

I quite like Frostpunk 1 as a city builder and I found Frostpunk 2 to be not that good, the UI when I played was not that good and playing through the game itself it doesn’t get much better, at some point you will found different cities and dealing with them just doesn’t work since you need to micromanage three screens now.

Politics wise it goes all in on the ‘You wanted to do this good thing that’s actually bad.’ Like you can do something like ‘Communal Child Rearing’ and it basically develops into children taken from mothers right after birth and given a different name so… I don’t know why I guess for misery shit.

And like there’s very little gameplay wise like it’s incredibly anemic once you figure out how it works so all you can do is follow the story and it’s yeah not that good, it’s just this over and over.

So that’s not entirely true like even before women had many rights they already were working for pay in various industries, I could give one very specific example but this is true throughout industries. Waltham (US Watchmaker) really drove down prices of watches by a fixation of ‘interchangebility’ not just of the mechanical pieces but more importantly immigrant workers and way more importantly women workers. This basically made them 30% more money over a decade so from 1860s to 1870s and that huge gain was seen by other companies who rapidly took that same idea of ‘interchangebility’ and soon lots of women were working in factories all over the world. They were often kept separate from the other workers and given ‘simple’ work to obfuscate the fact that women were paid way less than their male counterparts. Early labor movements would often talk about women being forced into factories to help make money for the household.

Assemblé des Travailleurs de Sonvilier, Enquête ouvrière 24.02.1867 “But, they will say to us, what about the worker’s wife? Ah, yes, this being to whom nature assigns the care of the household, the early education of the children, and who is often already overburdened with tending to a large family, must still take up tools to help her husband provide bread for their children. Yes, it is a sad necessity! The father of the family can no longer provide the necessary bread for his children unless the wife helps him. And so, how many neglected households and sick children do we see because the mother is forced to devote her time and strength to the workshop.”

You are right in that it was the pressure to expand the market base but women certainly were working in factories, just not alongside men because there was often a deliberate separation to keep them as low wage workers.

And again this was happening in factories all over the world, this is just a specific subject I can quote from.

Yeah pretty much this to be honest, like SPD, Greens and FDP did all the nazi shit like the nazis who are rising now. They did austerity, they ‘shut down the border’, they helped israel in the whole genocide even go so far as so to say “Israel is justified in its war and killing civilians because Hamas uses civilian shields.” and this was Baerbock the foreign minister that said that. They even said “Well the ICC we of course support it but…”

Like the difference between the nazis that go and the nazis that are coming is I guess more corruption since Merz is hilariously corrupt but as far as foreign policy and treatment and migrants go there’s very little room to be worse. Like Police raiding church aslyums during the deepest night to grab a few men to send them ‘back to syria’ that has already happened under SPD. They’ve already been rounding up immigrants to appease the right. Absolutely no tears lost from me that these nazis are eating shit.

Scholz lost the vote so his government is now finally gone. Only 207 of 733 voted for him and 394 against. This doesn’t come as a shock or anything this just makes it official elections are in 60 days in feb. Based on the newest poll SPD is going to lose quite a bit and get between 15-17%. CDU/CSU is going to be the biggest party with 31-35% greens might actually also lose after mentions of a Green-Black (Greens and CDU) coalition are around. AfD looks to double their % from the elections up to 20% maybe even higher.

No idea if what the greens in Belgium did had any influence since there a city government was decidedly won by the left and greens formed a gov. coalition with right-wing freaks.

Probably, shy nazis are a thing but even then unless they outperform by a ton like say they get 35%+ it’ll probably have no different effect on policy because so far it goes like this already. AfD proposes nazi shit -> CDU dresses up the nazi shit a bit -> SPD passes it by dressing it up a bit again. Like it needs to be at a level where Union would have to include both SPD and Greens for it to be a factor imo.

I think it’s highly unlikely allying with the AfD would be long term disastrous for them since their current strategy is going ‘Why are you voting for AfD you are just throwing your vote away since no one will form a government with you. You should vote for us out of strategic interest.’

Plus SPD will throw themselves at the CDU and would allow everything you want anyways while the Nazis might make demands. Again Scholz the current leader was part of the previous cabinet under Merkel as the finance minister, and considering he is still the top guy it’ll happen I’m like 95% sure. The other 5% is you don’t have a working government (4%) and they will ally with the nazis (1%) and neither of those make the threshhold.

I could see the CDU reforming government kicking the SPD out and getting the AfD in at some later point but def not right now.

Karl Franz will summon the elector counts but I doubt anything will come of it.

Alright I said I would do a shortish thing about the upcoming german elections so here goes:

There’s been 3 4 (one new one came in just as I started writing this) polls during the last few days so I’ll just go by their numbers:

Alright we got numbers now how do they look…

In Germany you got a electoral threshold of 5% meaning if you get below 5% you can’t get into parliament, this means that it’s not unlikely that there would only be 4 parties represented in parliament after this election with around 20% of the votes being effectively thrown out. Voter participation is around 75% (Last election 76.4% but a few years before that 70.8%). So Parliament represents 60% of all Germans. Now with all of that out of the way we can talk about movements and malaise.

Shouldn’t be too hard to tell but SPD during the period where they were able to govern collapsed, this is a trend that is probably just going to continue but it is remarkable just how shitty this iteration of Center Right Soc Dems is because polling at 16-18% is a historic low, my guess is just glancing at past elections that they’ll not recover from this and become a 15% political party in the near future because of how colossal the shift to the right under Scholz was. Now to Union, they have recovered from the terrible result last time and are now sitting roughly where they’ve been the last few election cycles.

AfD looks to almost double their voter percentage from last time, they had their start in 2013 because of the syrian civil war as a ‘anti-Merkel’ party but they’ve gone away from that to try and be more chummy with the Union to get into power but kept all the other right wing outright nazi shit. I cannot state that enough they keep doing Nazi dog whistles and it’s pretty fucking obvious that they are cryptonazis.

Greens they are down a bit but have been able to grow from their usual 6-7% they used to be at probably because they have a ton of atlantacists and pro-US people in their party I mean Baerbock is literally a former member of the german marshall fund think tank that’s funded by the US. So Greens? Funded and supported by the US pass it on.

BSW, Sahra Wagenknecht used to be in Die Linke has made her own party that is the most likely to actually make it into the Bundestag of the small ones. Was able to grab votes by being anti war in ukraine. US scepticism and some literal Pat Soc stuff, media has been talking about her being funded by Putin and her being a Putin shill, unlikely that she’ll be able to do anything if her party makes it into parliament.

FDP are more than likely out. It was unlikely that they would’ve made it but a few days ago an internal memo was leaked that detailed their plans to blow up the coalition and the most opportune time to do it. Worst of all? It had the Title ‘D-Day Ablaufszenarien und Maßnahmen’ which everyone rightly mocked. They’ve been getting dragged by civility people for being backstabbers, my guess is they’ll not be a factor for a few cycles then go back to their 10% they can reliably grab with their deep pockets.

Die Linke, it’s fucking dead it’s not coming back it’s over.

Most of the movements done so onto the malaise:

‘Which party is best suited to deal with the problems of Germany?’

So 3 years ago 45% would’ve said no party we are now at 55% which has improved a bit compared to the 60% at the start of the year because for some reason thing Union is going to fix it oh well. This number will grow because well things are going to get a lot more shitty.

Because the two big topics for germans are the russian-ukranian war and the economy. Which is why you have Scholz doing photo-ops in ukraine and Merz (Union) saying stuff like ‘We are finally going to be strong again and spend money on our military’. For the normal german person how do they see the economy? Well 16% think the economy is going to get better, a number that has gone steadily down, while 60% of germans think it’s going to get worse, a number that keeps going up, and 22% think that the situation is shitty but it won’t change.

So why malaise? Well this is just going to be my prediction but we will see a repeat of the GroKo (Greater Coalition/Union-SPD) we saw under Merkel, but this time under Merz a incredibly and openly corrupt politician so get ready for this one, Union is going to be able to do whatever because of the looming threat of AfD so SPD ‘has to’ chose the lesser evil. The coalition will push a huge amount of austerity onto the people during a recession which as we all know from every other country this has been done to, is really good.

I’ll do a thing about german maybe tomorrow since it’s super fucked but all I say is that 50% of the germans have given up and basically said that no political party can fix things so.

A wet erase map probably. Though I don’t know if that’s an ‘accessory’ since it’d be like saying dice, or notebooks are accessories they are so central to the whole thing.

I think one thing I really like since about last year is ‘origami’ miniatures i.e. miniatures folded out of paper, there’s just something that speaks to me when I put down a bunch of paper frogs or a paper dragon as a miniature. They are ‘abstract’ but honestly it’s not like it needs to be super detailed. Plus I don’t have to worry about it getting damaged or lost, plus I can give it to people, which if you are running a game for kids, you’ll want to bring more than just one paper dragon miniature.

As for supplements I quite like the Book of Challenges from 3.5e and WallyDM’s Journal of Puzzle Encounters both help me with just coming up with challenges and puzzles since I can page through it a bit then make a new puzzle/challenge.

The racism and famine update did quite a few things in general getting off bad laws is easier but agricultural nations got hit hard. Migration is back in a big way so any nation in the Americas will have a much smoother experience.

As for russian american company you start out in a pretty shitty position but you can gobble on mexico a bit and then stall out USA with Russia before going independent, if you do that you get an event like all other colonial nations when they go free, but you can also become Athabaska which would allow you to go for a turtle island run.