Sometimes when I feel down about my skills as a game writer or GM I go reread my look through of Slime Story and I feel the fire rekindle in me.

yeah, that'll do it

It’s just captivatingly bad.

A relatively simple concept fucked up on every possible level of execution.

Like I have tried to run games that fix it in some way and the conclusion I keep hitting is that you have to do so much to fix it it becomes something else entirely.

And yet!

It’s always an idea somewhere on the back burner, to fix it somehow in a game.

What’s the line?

“Makes no damn sense. Compels me though.”

i think there really is something compelling about the idea seed but its just so badly implemented in every respect

So like, if I were to try again, I think I would keep the “it’s a thing teenagers do and part of normal life” aspect but also it is only both of those things because we’re running on Super Earth levels of propaganda here.

If the planet is covered in massive monster spawning portals that also slowly export alien plantlife and releases radiation then we’re talking about every military force on the planet being dedicated to dealing with the worst of them considering an average spawn rate of 10 minutes.

(The book says the portals produce 100 mSv but doesn’t specify if that’s per annum or per monster spawn.)

(If the former, then everyone who lives near a portal has about a 250% higher than average chance of cancer. If the latter, 5000 mSv is the LD50 for gamma radiation and every portal produces an average of 1440 mSv per day so we can assume everyone who lived near a portal in that first ten year scramble died a horrible agonizing wasting death.)

(1000 mSv is enough to hospitalize someone for acute radiation poisoning, and give them a 5% fatal cancer risk.)

Doing some napkin math this means anywhere with more than about three active portals is essentially the Pripyat exclusion zone in terms of ambient radiation.

damn

So yeah. I assume the only logical way that humanity is dealing with a lowkey nuclear fallout and infinite monsters spawning is by having massive military coalitions and keeping its populations in much more tamped down areas.

Kids kill monsters because there’s almost certainly mandatory conscription now, it’s good to normalize fighting slimes and the little egg stealing assholes because there’s a real chance you’re going to spend two years outside of what used to be Albuquerque against the Infinite Rathalos Portal as soon as you turn 18.

The reason everything feels weirdly like a pastiche of multiple decades is that they’re making an international effort to make the world inside the safe zones feel well, safe.

You don’t want people to be focused on the new forever war against the monsters.

So if you feel like life in your small town or suburb is boring? Mission accomplished! You got to have as normal a childhood as anyone can anymore.