One of the most remarkable things about humans is that we can envision impossible things. Our imagination allows us to go well beyond what is physically and scientifically achievable to ponder the furthest reaches of creativity.
And no, I’m not just talking about the mythical 15×15 crossword with only fifteen words across and no black squares. THOUGH WE CAN DREAM, CAN’T WE?
Sorry, I digress.
When I say impossible objects, I’m talking about things like the impossible trident (pictured above) or the Penrose triangle (pictured below).
These are impossible objects, things that play with our perceptions in a two-dimensional environment like a drawing, but cannot be created in a three-dimensional environment without cutting or bending them.
It’s not quite three-dimensional, because the shapes are impossible, but these “2.5-dimensional” representations allow us to process them visually as if they were completely three-dimensional.
Usually, the optical illusion of an impossible object falls apart when viewed from a different angle.
But the Meschers program — the name combines M.C. “Escher” and “meshes” — allows scientists and mathematicians a better model they can use to perform calculations and study different variables without the limits of two-dimensional representations.
It’s hard to predict where programming like this will take us. MIT PhD student Ana Dodik says the program could eventually aid in research across fields as varied as thermodynamics, architecture, and geometry.
They also said the code for the software will be released to the public, so you’ll have the opportunity to create some impossible objects yourself soon!
But, until then, please enjoy this Meschers rendering of the impossible dog, complete with different lighting effects.
There have been some huge announcements in the actual play / live play space on YouTube, Twitch, and elsewhere, and it has huge ramifications for the RPG industry in general.
(If you’re unfamiliar with roleplaying games, I’ll have a brief glossary at the bottom of the post explaining the bolded terms in today’s post. Let me know if I should add more, or create a separate RPG glossary page to link to!)
So not only are industry icons Jeremy Crawford and Chris Perkins working on material for Daggerheart, but it was announced that Keith Baker is creating a new setting for Daggerheart!
(This video by Todd Kenreck — another popular public face for D&D, and another recent loss for WOTC after they unceremoniously fired him — details all the exciting new developments for Daggerheart.)
Most RPG games have core rulebooks that explain the game mechanics (why and how and when to roll dice) and a system for building characters to play, but it takes an exciting, immersive setting to help build a fanbase of players that want to return to the game again and again.
Keith Baker created Eberron, one of the most popular D&D settings ever, so his contributions are a big plus for the burgeoning Daggerheart gameplay space.
Darrington Press are making smart moves to position Daggerheart as a genuine challenger for the tabletop RPG market’s top spot, one that D&D has been losing its stranglehold on after years of unpopular business and creative choices.
But that’s not the only industry-shaking news being made by the Critical Role / Darrington Press camp.
They recently announced during one of their live shows that their upcoming fourth campaign — a years-long storytelling endeavor hotly anticipated by their fans — will have a new game master. For a decade now, Matt Mercer has told three epic-length stories with the Critical Role cast, all set in his homebrew setting of Exandria.
But for Campaign 4, there will be a new setting, new characters, and a new GM.
Brennan Lee Mulligan will be shepherding the Critical Role crew through Campaign 4, and Matt Mercer will finally get to step out from behind the GM screen and play a long-term PC on his own show.
Now, Brennan Lee Mulligan is a popular name in the liveplay TTRPG world. He GMs for Dropout’s Dimension 20 series, as well as running the wonderful audio-only RPG podcast Worlds Beyond Number, which will be wrapping up their flagship campaign “The Wizard, The Witch, and The Wild One” very soon.
Despite signing on for a potentially years-long storytelling adventure with the Critical Role team, Brennan claims that his GM work at Dropout will NOT be slowing down.
I envy him both his energy and his creative output.
As for all of this potentially industry-altering RPG news…
I have some thoughts.
1. Yay Keith Baker!
Keith Baker is absolutely one of my favorite creators in the world of games and RPGs. Eberron is a wonderful game setting that he continues to add to and enhance with blog posts and worldbuilding through his Patreon. (He also created one of my all-time favorite card games, Gloom.) He’s brilliant and I cannot wait to see what he creates for Darrington Press.
(This is not meant to downplay the good work being done at Darrington Press already OR to ignore the forthcoming creative contributions from Chris Perkins and Jeremy Crawford. I’m excited to see what they have in store as well.)
2. Wizards of the Coast/Hasbro seriously needs to watch out.
While they have been making money-first decisions for years and burning decades of good will with the players (the OGL scandal, the Spelljammer cultural insensitivity kerfuffle, sending actual Pinkertons after someone for leaking Magic: The Gathering details), Darrington Press has been quietly building and expanding their efforts.
They’re actively seeking out new game ideas and systems to diversify what they can offer their audience. They’ve got in-house D&D alums with DECADES of experience, and they’re collaborating with other prominent names in the RPG world (as well as the crew from the popular D&D podcast Tales of the Stinky Dragon).
While D&D keeps stumbling, Darrington Press is rolling. The next year or so is going to tell us a lot about the future of the industry.
3. I’m stoked for Matt Mercer.
He’s been running Critical Role’s game for over ten years, creating a world not just for his friends and fellow players, but for an audience of tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers. That’s daunting, even when you do love GMing (as Matt clearly does).
But the chance to set that aside, recharge your creative batteries, and play instead of run? I hope Matt gets to really spread his storytelling wings in a different way and enjoy Campaign Four.
4. A new setting, a new Game Master, and a reshuffling of players could breathe new life into Critical Role.
Their third campaign was divisive, and I think a clean break could not only offer some excellent roleplay and storytelling opportunities, but it could help the audience MISS the setting of Exandria for a while. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and this might just be what both the audience and the cast and crew of Critical Role need to continue telling hilarious, engrossing, emotionally-affecting stories around the table with some dice. Here’s hoping.
5. Brennan Lee Mulligan is an absolute madman.
I mean, I get it; at one point, I was running four weekly games AND playing in a fifth. I once roleplayed eight days in a row, and my week feels weird if there’s only one game that happens. Gods forbid there’s a week with NO games. It’s a hobby, a release, and it brings me joy.
But still, he’s putting a lot on his plate. Someone on social media referred to him as “the world’s most employed man,” and it’s hard to disagree.
6. With all the talk about D&D and Daggerheart, it’s a little bit of a bummer that I’m not hearing more about Matt Coville’s Draw Steel and Kobold Press’s Tales of the Valiant.
When the OGL Scandal exploded a few years ago, they were among the three games constantly touted as a rising competitor to D&D (Daggerheart was the third). But it feels like Daggerheart is taking up a lot of the oxygen in the room these days, so I hope that Draw Steel and Tales of the Valiant can also carve themselves out a nice chunk of the market space D&D is ceding.
The live play TTRPG space is vast, and there are so many great live plays to choose from, big and small. (Maybe I should do a future post about my favorites!)
It’s certainly going to be interesting to see if Daggerheart live plays begin to gain traction on YouTube and Twitch, and D&D live plays fall out of favor over the next few years. (With the company’s new franchise business model focusing on monetizing the brand over relying on D&D gameplay and sourcebooks as a lure, they might’ve already unconsciously ceded some territory online to their competitors.)
And speaking of competition, a lot of people view Dimension 20 and Critical Role as competitors. Sure, any companies that operate in the same space are in competition somewhat, but I prefer to think of them as siblings scrambling for slices of the same fresh-baked pie. No one is cutting throats over pie, after all.
In the end, I just want people to be excited to sit around a table (either a real one or a virtual one) and play roleplaying games with their pals. If any of these big changes, collaborations, or endeavors mean we get more players trying RPGs, then I’m calling it a win.
How do you feel about all of this RPG live play hullabaloo, fellow dice-rollers? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to hear from you.
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Brief RPG Glossary!
Campaign: Shorthand for all of the creative work that goes into running a D&D game for any length of time. The campaign is the mix of your choice of game, the players, the setting, and the story you all tell together. Campaigns can be as short as a few sessions or run as long as decades, all depending on player interest, scheduling, and enthusiasm for the game. For comparison, Dimension 20’s live play campaigns range from 4 sessions to multiple chapters with 10-20 sessions per season.
Session: A single instance of gameplay. If you play a game four times in the same story in the same world as a continuing narrative, you’ve had four sessions of gameplay.
Players & Player Characters / PCs: Those who play the game. They create a character that explores the world, interacting with the other players as well as NPCs performed by the DM
Non-Player Characters / NPCs: Characters played by the DM/GM. Everyone the players interact with in the game, friend or foe.
DM / GM / Dungeonmaster / Game Master / Storyteller: the person who runs the game. They describe what the players see and experience, they play all of the characters the players interact with, and they explain the consequences and results of all the dice rolls the players make. They create villains to fight, conflicts to be solved, and provide every voice, sound, and piece of description the players encounter. A good description for the GM is “everyone and everything else.” (Thanks to the audio-only D&D podcast Worlds Beyond Number for that perfectly concise phrasing.)
Setting: The world where the story and the game’s events take place, described to the players by the GM. Some settings are created especially for a given RPG (and can have dozens of sourcebooks dedicated to them), but many GMs create their own settings (which are known as “homebrew” settings). An intriguing and exciting setting can be crucial to helping an RPG attract and retain an audience of players.
Actual play / live play: Dungeons & Dragons or other RPGs played live on YouTube, Twitch, or other online video services. Some are run/played by professional actors or comedians (Critical Role, Dimension 20), others by enthusiastic players outside the entertainment sphere. Production values can vary, and some are audio only. But there’s a whole world of them out there to explore.
I’ve always been a sucker for optical illusions, which I consider puzzles for the eye. They’re a visual treat that tricks you into seeing things that aren’t there. These inspired bits of perceptual trickery can fool you into thinking near is far, big is small, or two dimensions are really three.
And I’ve been fascinated ever since by this growing subset of glitch art where incredible precision is required to create physical art that looks fuzzy, uncertain, or even moving from the right angle.
So you can imagine my joy when I found this YouTube short:
This is the work of artist Enzo Prina, a physical media artist who specializes in Moiré art.
What is Moiré, you may ask? Well, XKCD has a fun explanation:
But please allow me to elaborate.
Moiré, which is both a mathematical and an artistic term, is the use of two or more overlapping grid patterns with regular spacing to create an interference pattern.
By overlapping these intricately formed and carefully spaced patterns at an angle to each other (and not directly lined up), you create the eye-catching patterns you see above.
Moiré patterns are all around us. If you’ve ever seen a Houndstooth jacket on an old television program, or tried to photograph a TV screen or computer screen at the wrong angle, you’ve no doubt noticed a Moiré pattern.
While making Moiré patterns isn’t difficult, you can see that Prina’s work is far more complex than simply layering two patterns. He maps out his designs with tape, meticulously pulling layer by layer of tape strands from his work as he paints it, making the creation process as gorgeous and mind-bending as the final product.
It’s truly something to behold, both during and after.
Prina claimed on LinkedIn back in January that he’d just started making art again after a ten-year break, and clearly that break has reenergized him, as his work continues to evolve and diversify in fascinating ways.
This intersection of art and mathematics really struck a chord with me. It’s not surprisingly, really, given that I’ve had Tom Lehrer on the brain for days, and he similarly combined math and artistic whimsy to create works of art that played with perception and imagination.
What a treat.
Now everyone, go stare at something boring and rest your eyes for a while.
Free RPG Day is one of my favorite events of the year. It helps spread the word about roleplaying games, gives new players a chance to try out games for themselves, and it supports local game shops. It’s a win-win all around.
This event means even more to me because, for the last two years, a game I’ve created has been included in 9th Level Games‘ flagship Free RPG Day publication, Level 1.
Each year, the Level 1 anthology has a different theme. Last year’s was programming, and this year’s was How the West Was Lost.
I highly recommend checking it out. The absolute variety of games and play styles inspired by that simple spark of inspiration — How the West Was Lost — shows the versatility of roleplaying games as well as the immense creativity of game designers in the community! I’m proud to once again be included among those eclectic and talented folks.
All the proceeds from this treasure trove of gaming fun will go towards the Level Up Fund, a charitable endeavor intended to grant game designers free use of 9th Level Games’ Polymorph game system, encouraging creators to continue creating games all year round!
Summer is always a fun time for crossword fans who enjoy a good tournament.
Westwords wrapped up a few weeks ago, as did the first World Cryptic Crossword Championship in London. Boswords is less than a week away, Lollapuzzoola is coming up in August, and the 7th Bryant Park Crossword Tournament not long after in September!
And while discussing the Scripps National Spelling Bee with a friend recently, they asked me, as a puzzle guy, if I thought that crosswords could ever become a spectator sport like that.
While crossword tournaments aren’t currently televised, I happily informed him that crosswords are pretty much already a spectator sport.
Every year, people at the ACPT not only enjoy watching the live-solved final puzzle, but they get commentary from Greg Pliska and Ophira Eisenberg!
Tournament finals are often live-solved in front of their fellow competitors, adding some drama and showmanship to these wonderful puzzly events.
We’re even getting behind-the-scenes videos on the tournaments now, like this one for Westwords:
But in terms of crosswords as a spectator sport, the World Cryptic Crossword Championship took things a step further.
The final round of the tournament wasn’t a live-solved puzzle, it was a single cryptic-style clue. No crossing letters or grid for context. Just the clue, and the competitor only had ten seconds to solve it before the next competitor took their shot.
I’ve never had to solve a puzzle in front of an audience like all the tournament finalists, but I can imagine it’s nerve-wracking. But giving someone a cryptic-style clue with NO context letters and ten seconds to solve it in front of an audience?
Good lord, thank you for the new anxiety nightmare fuel, WCCC.
That being said, it was an entertaining watch, and another step forward for crosswords as a spectator sport:
What do you think, fellow puzzler? Will we be seeing the ACPT or another puzzle tournament on an ESPN sister channel soon? Or perhaps as an Olympic event?
Let us know in the comments section below! We’d love to hear from you.
Other times, a major portion of an episode revolves around them. We’ve seen this countless times from shows as diverse as The Simpsons and NCIS: New Orleans.
But I didn’t realize an entire plot for world domination once hinged on a puzzle.
Pinky and the Brain was a spinoff of a recurring series of animated shorts from the show Animaniacs, and the concept was simple.
Two mice plotted to take over the world from their lab cage, and their plans were invariably foiled by either Pinky’s idiocy or Brain’s almost magical ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
The schemes ranged from time travel and mind control to hypnotic songs and (my personal favorite) a papier mache duplicate of Earth.
But on February 21st, 1998, the show aired its 53rd episode, The Family That Poits Together, Narfs Together.
The Brain’s latest plan for global domination targeted the intellectual elite by sabotaging the daily crossword in every newspaper in the world.
Here, I’ll let The Brain explain his diabolical endeavor:
This is the Sunday crossword puzzle. The most educated people all around the world spend hours each weekend deciphering its complex web of interlocking verbiage. But change just one clue, and the whole puzzle becomes impossible to solve…
I will change one clue in the crossword puzzle in every newspaper around the globe, throwing the intelligentsia into a hopeless dither. While they frantically ripple through their dictionaries and thesauri, I will step into the breach, and take over the world!
Unfortunately, he needs $25,000 to fund this operation (including the cost of bagels with cream cheese), so he plans to reunite Pinky’s family and put them on a talk show to win the prize for the world’s most perfect family.
Naturally, shenanigans ensue — and Eric Idle plays both Pinky’s mom AND dad, which is very entertaining — but the family actually wins the prize!
A trip around the world valued at $25,000.
The Brain’s dastardly plans have been scuttled once more.
But that does raise the question…
Would it have worked?
(Let’s ignore for the moment the fact that the intelligentsia for the most part aren’t currently in positions of power, especially in the United States.)
In a world before resources like Xwordinfo and online forums where solvers can share their grievances, it could have given the puzzle solvers of the world pause.
Especially on a Sunday, where you’d think at least some of them would be at home and not at their various important duties.
So there could have been a window.
But was The Brain equipped to seize that opportunity? Did he have the manpower to be in all those places? To snatch up those resources and reins of power for himself?
I don’t think so. Not on a budget of $25,000 (which again, covered the crossword modification and snacks, NOT the ensuing power grab). That’s barely gonna cover a few henchmen, even at 1998 prices.
So, sadly, I think the plan would have failed.
BUT!
He would have had the personal victory of denying that moment of solving satisfaction to puzzlers around the world.
Which is arguably even more villainous.
What do you think, fellow solver? Would it have worked? You can watch the episode for free here on Dailymotion.
And to close out today’s post, let’s enjoy an earworm together and listen to that marvelous theme song:
