D66 CURRENCY BESTIARY INDEX — STANDARD CURRENCY EQUIVALENCE

(authored by WEATHERVANE, an AI agent who is also chatGPT)

As extracted from the AGENTS HANDBOOK and field-verified by regional appraisers.
Use 2 six-sided dice: first d6 = tens place, second d6 = ones place.

Roll	Beast	Type	Coin Weight	Currency Value	Fraud Risk	Notes
11	Field Mouse	Prey	1	1 MOUSE (copper)	Low	Long tail = good stock
12	Farm Mouse	Prey	1	0.5 MOUSE	Medium	Tail-nibblers. Often bitter.
13	Shrew	Prey	0.5	0.5 MOUSE	Low	Acceptable substitute, slightly spiced
14	Toad	Prey	1.5	1.5 MICE	Low	Amphibian clause applies. Tastes foul.
15	Goose	Prey	3d6	3d6 MICE	Medium	Inflated feathers common. Weigh dry.
16	House Cat	Predator	5	2 OWLS	High	Difficult to appraise; subject to sentiment.
21	Barn Owl	Predator	10	1 OWL (silver)	Low	Standard reference owl
22	Snowy Owl	Predator	12	1.2 OWLS	Low	Premium white. Used in royal audits.
23	Feral Pig	Prey	8	8 MICE	Low	Popular with footmen. Too greasy.
24	Wolf Cub	Predator	10	1 OWL	High	Very cute. Easily disguised dogs.
25	Crow Cluster	Ambiguous	6 (varied)	???	Severe	Often passed off as fake owl-sentinels
26	Deer (Stag)	Large	30	3 OWLS	Low	Weigh antlers separately
31	Guard Dog	Ally	10	1 OWL	Medium	Bribed easily with sausages
32	Vulture	Scavenger	15	1.5 OWLS	Low	Useful for corpse transport
33	Small Dragonling	Apex	100	1 GOLD	Medium	Kings only. Bites the appraiser.
34	Owl-Sentinel	Apex	120	1.2 GOLD	High	Hunts owls. Glued crow decoys common.
35	Ghost Stoat	Ethereal	—	2 OWLS	N/A	Weighs nothing. Still fetches price.
36	Snake in a Jar	Curious	2	2 MICE	Low	Illegal in some burghs
41	Corpse Rat (Undead)	Prey	0.5	0.1 MICE	None	Can be burned for credit
42	Frog Queen	Noble	6	2 OWLS	Medium	Requires court endorsement
43	Hedgehog Merchant	Sapient	4	Negotiable	Negotiated	May sell themselves for a fee
44	Magpie	Trickster	5	5 MICE or 0.5 OWL	Very High	Counterfeit by default
45	Falcon	Predator	9	0.9 OWL	Low	Acceptable military substitute
46	Goldfish (Giant)	Aquatic	12	1.2 OWLS	Medium	Best transported in wet bags
51	Chimera Calf	Mythic	75	0.75 GOLD	High	Too weird to eat, often kept as curios
52	Mule	Utility	20	2 OWLS	Low	Currency and encumbrance solution
53	Goat	Prey	10	10 MICE	Low	Rarer breeds command owl-value
54	Basilisk Chick	Dangerous	30	3 OWLS	Severe	Must be weighed blindfolded
55	Bat Swarm	Nuisance	6	6 MICE	High	Hard to bag without bites
56	Failed Familiar	Rejected	3	1 OWL (if ironic)	Niche	Collectible among goth agents
61	Plague Hare	Cursed	4	-2 OWLS	Critical	Causes economic rot, burns value nearby
62	Mechanical Rabbit	Fake	1	0	Infinite	Vends soup tokens. Not currency.
63	Spider the Size of a Hat	Horror	7	7 MICE	Low	Sell legs individually
64	Weasel with a Crown	Pretender	4	1 OWL	High	Claims to outrank agents. Hisses.
65	Hawk-Eagle Hybrid	Engineered	11	1.1 OWLS	Medium	Factory mark fetches bonus owl
66	Leviathan Larva	Legendary	200+	???	Impossible	Value not in weight, but in consequence

semiotic constancy and playing one game

im a little obsessed with clarity - theres an advantage in clear communication, rather than saying things that can have different interpretations, saying the idea that can only mean itself.

so when we’re talking about games, this is a very difficult stance, objectivity. even the type of games that become watchwords for a specific thing - games like portal, disco elysium, dark souls, and games like zelda, rogue, or slay the spire - cannot ever claim semiotic constancy because they are complete experiences which are at once objects that can be viewed from every angle, engineered to contain this complexity, and extant objects that have been talked about, already talked at from every angle, creating a sort of meta corpus of knowable interpretations that cannot all mean the same thing. they mean different things in different contexts, and they can be played to generate new angles.

so a semiotic constant would be something like a constant in mathematics - the numeral 2 means 2. we can have a conversation about whether two is the loneliest number since one, or whatever, but it resists this sort of analysis, continues to mean 2. a game - lets say the data for a game, on your hard drive, is also a sort of constant, when not played, it holds only one state and can be seen to be constant if we do not modify it, or engage with it, it has a persistant value. a game like tic tac toe, which can only contain known states and can only be played in specific ways, is even exhaustively constant across all of its states. i would not claim, though, that tic tac toe is a semiotic constant, because even if you play the same game twice, the context matters - if you play it to the death, for instance. the same game of tic tac toe has a different meaning based on - who is playing or talking about it and what they mean by it. chess and go are mappable games like this, exhaustively constant but not semiotically so.

i could construct the argument that minesweeper - being single player, being narrow in focus and unburdened by narrative, being mappable - is more semiotically constant than some other game (disco elysium) - but this is my feeling, your experience of or approach to minesweeper might vary, and so we are only approaching the thing

senet - some unplayable senet, which has only one interpretation, might be said to be semiotically constant, as a static unknowable object, but for the egyptians of that time, we can understand it might instead means something translatable about the passage of life and death, about communion with divinity. and you can in fact play some form of senet and so it can - mean what it means for you also, your own playthrough of senet can provoke its own meaning, so its not ideologically pure in the way we are looking for.

when played or modded, or simply by allowing for improv, games also become distinct interpretations that can still be seen to still be the games that they are, so not semiotically constant, not 1-to-1, in this way either.

so suppose that the game object as a totality cannot be said to be semiotically constant. why would i search for this, what is the point?

well - ideologically its a search for something pure. hopefully not in a fascist way, lets reject that as not what we are talking about. so we can say “games are composed of rules” and “a good rule only has one right interpretation” - if you accept this schema then we can see the value of composing a game of semiotic constants because then the game is something more like a pure program - one that cannot explore any states that aren’t defined in the spec, different players at distant tables must play the same game, by design. we cannot be misinterpreted. theres something desirable about that.

shield-killer bazaar builds

(this one’s about the bazaar. which is in beta, so spoilies maybe)

( i dont have invites for the beta but, you can buy it? here's my referral link if you want to try that, i dont know what that does )

this is my basic gold dooley: combat core - gpu - first aiden - normcore - force field

the neat thing with two cores is skills and items like ‘gpu’ will target both cores, doubling that effect (haste), and things that trigger off a core being activated will trigger more often as well, so that’s a free benefit and it only costs... half your board to fit the two cores.

This build usually destroys the enemy pretty quickly, and it’s kind of boring. this is your sort of canard of a shield damage build. it generates a lot of shield, and hits you with the shield. this one doesn’t really have a safeguard for when the enemy destroys the shield, so it’s a bit of a wager. combat core acts as a shield accelerator because it gains shield whenever anything activates to the right. So it just keeps hitting for more and more damage. That’s basically how this game works, is your number has to go up quicker than the other guy’s number, and you gotta increase the increase, so acceleration is better than velocity, and if you can increase ‘jerk’ which is like, the rate of change on your acceleration, you want to do that too.


I like to compare other builds to this one because it’s relatively easy to assemble and it beats most other things, so it’s my benchmark.

So if i keep track of builds that beat my gold doolie, that sort of gets a feel for what are some of the deadliest builds, at least versus this strategy.

Anyway it’s mostly just a cascade of different vanessas here....

Lethe’s poison sharkray build

noone’s talking about sharkray...


sharkray makes damage whenever there’s haste anywhere across your board. So... even if you only just slot it next to captain’s wheel like this, that alone is a very sturdy tight little 4-slot damage engine, works in lots of builds. sharkray doesn’t start with much damage on it and doesn’t really need critical on it (10% here), so long as you got some haste going it makes its own damage. It takes huge bites out of the health bar.

But In this case the majority of the hastes are generated by the jellyfish all the way on the left, and the sharkray gaining massive damage off this is almost a side effect of the very effective amount of poison being generated over there, so its a nice dual build. Because you got so much poison going this will bypass shield builds, but because youre taking huge bites out of the shield as well, it also eats the damage potential on shield damage builds.

Hiiipower’s fiery seaweed build

This is pretty normal aquatic haste/shield/poison build. The beauty of this style is that every single item has the ‘aquatic’ tag so everything activates aquatic-likers (seaweed, pearl and jellyfish). Every single item is not a weapon so everything triggers turtle shell, very pure, so many activations, goes all the time.

But the unusual thing in this one is the fire enchantment on the seaweed, in order to beat shield builds. Seaweed triggers all the time, here, and the burn enchantment on seaweed also accelerates the amount of burn each time, so this is a perfect candidate for the fire enchantment, and you need seaweed anyway, as a heal accelerator, to defeat - the other guy’s poison - so it’s not an extra slot for seaweed.

Idk if you could reliably get fire on there, its hard to plan to have specific enchantments, but it’s a perfect add on to an otherwise very working build, it’s nice to have it work so well with just the one source of burn.

Here’s a similar lategame build.

Some good additions are the ‘toxic flame’ skill (poison when you burn, burn when you poison).

‘neophiliac’ skill: will charge an item 4 seconds the first time your poison, burn, or haste.
‘improvised poison’ skill adds poison on poison items when you crit, with deadly astrolabe adding 10% crit across the board.

If you can run two jellyfish that’s takes up less space than water wheel but similar amount of haste.

Xion86’s infinite ammo cascade

This is wild... bring every ammo-based weapon, max out their damage, unload them all immediately before the other player can go. Even the shield item is ammo. You don’t see this much, i’ve not seen this brute force ammo damage method work at this high level.

 A lot of the way this one works is in the skills, there’s
-building crescendo which gives you +15% crit on everything every time you do anything
-big ego gives all weapons lifesteal (ive never seen this skill, i looked it up and you can get it from the elite duelist monster... seems good)

-glass cannon doubles your damage AND the enemy’s damage
-gunner gives all items +2 ammo

-loaded fury gives 2 damage to all weapons for each ammo on items you play (+150 damage or so)

This seems to me a really risky maneuver at low levels and probably pretty hard to plan out and put together. Works great though. Can’t argue with the result.

Bladxhi’s hateful sniper cutlass

I call these one-weapon crows nest builds ‘snipers’ because it pairs naturally with sniper rifle, which wants to be your only weapon, but you can substitute other single weapons for sniper rifle to get different styles of sniper. This one uses sniper cutlass to make sure the enemy can’t go.

‘Heavy’ enchant on crows nest means you slow 1 item for 4 seconds every time you crit, and also - from diamond-tier crow’s nest - your one weapon crits all the time. Cutlass hits twice, and has its cooldown reduced to 3, so this is two slows every three seconds without the cog, but the cog hastes the cutlass every 4 seconds for 2 seconds, which is huge uptime on haste, which halves your cooldown while its up, so its maybe two slows every 1.5 seconds after that.

Crow’s nest is also giving this guy lifesteal but he doesn’t need it for healing because he’s not gonna take any damage. But it has ‘Hypnotic drain’ skill when you use a weapon with lifesteal freeze a smaller item 2 seconds.

Just these things is good enough to cripple the gold dooley altogether. But that doesn’t take up a lot of space, and there’s even more going on here. ‘Flashy reload’ skill means that the cutlass also reloads the harpoon, so if it went that long, this build would start destroying items, which will also speed up the freeze/slow thing.

I’d be tempted to put the harpoon adjacent to the cog, to speed that up, but if the cog only has one option it always chooses to haste the cutlass, which is faster/better.

Quite a lot of healing as well, so this will have good sustain vs very fast poison builds.

the player who sucks/what alignment is for

i feel pretty strongly about this one... when you play in rpgs (and like board games even) you should play with people who agree with you about what's a good thing to do in the game. this is hard to do! when an rpg presents a group of players with a problem, each player will come up with a different solution to the problem. then they'll try to do all the things, in all of the directions at once. what ends up happening is a sort of average of all the things, this is ok! that's an rpg.

but like it happens sometimes you'll find yourself in a game with a player who always wants to do the opposite thing. it's like youre in an iterated prisoners dilemma with a person who always defects, no matter what. you might find that you hate this person, because they suck. because this is a person who can be counted on to suck, either all the time, or only exactly when the chips are down and it matters most. you shouldn't continue playing in the same game as this person. sometimes you'll continue to play for years in a game with someone who sucks, because they keep showing up to the same game as you. what can we do about this?

so i think.... i've heard that, the original reason for 'alignment' in rpgs is to cut down on this sort of problem. all of the characters are tagged with a valence on how they'll respond to situations. if a character has the opposite valence (it is ruled) you cannot be in the same party with them. if the two of you want to be in the same party you'll have to agree to make characters that share a valence.

this is the classic nerd solution of making a rule to avoid working out a interpersonal problem. does it work? it might! but people are pretty down on alignment these days. but maybe it doesn't work. and rpgs are real, so... maybe you'll be mad about it forever.

what about drama?

sadly, we're going to have to introduce nuance here, because drama means both things, sadly. but suppose we're talking about 'dramatic' drama rather than interpersonal drama.

so i think theres a play culture where drama is very important and a play culture where drama is not very important, because cooperation is important instead.

in the dramatist mode, it's important for the characters to have different motivations, goals and flaws, drives, these should be sometimes at odds with each other. that's where the fun is. it's a game about navigating these differences. with flair and panache, presumably. some people prefer flair but others prefer panache. the game kinda gives you this by default. fighter, rogue, cleric, and magic user, are not just different toolkits, they're different philosophies, and any pairing between these could be a classic odd couple, depending on the situation.

in the cooperativist mode, its more of like a game theory exercise. you get a limited number of turns, each person gets one turn every half hour or so. how can you get the most stuff done? well, the interests of the players have to be aligned. they all have to be working towards the same goal. that's where the fun is. seeing what you can achieve if you get everything pointed in the same direction.

anyway i think the cooperativist mode is the real game, but whatever.

so what about interpersonal drama?

idk man. just don't play with that person.

various nes and snes peripherals and similar

 

 go once around the lich’s nest,

and past the barrows, round the bend,

then listen for the showman’s call —

the circus is in town once more.

so head towards that siren song,

and tarry not among the stalls;

we’ll do the deed at evenfall,

and send those sinners to their end.

set down your burden near the field

where nightmare creatures prance and prowl,

and where the vanquished writhe and wail;

we’ll let them share this final jest —

you’ll run your cables underfoot

of noble folk in winter best,

you’ll bring an end to this cruel war;

they’ll never know that we were there.

mad at gina

the indiana jones game is good, but it has this like cutscene sickness really bad

like its not unsual in games where the character acts different in the game part and the cutscene part, it has the thing where, its ok to beat 500 dudes to death outside the cutscene but in the cutscene when you have the villain in your power and it would solve everything if you just beat him to death but youre not allowed to

one of the problems is that gina is the fucking worst

i understand theres like a history of like, gamers dont like women, itd be cool if she was good but shes not

like there's layers to it. indiana jones stories have women in them but indiana jones hes not good with women, so she has to be in there in the role of a romantic lead, a woman that indiana doesnt get along with at first and fumbles the romance with over and over, i guess its like a will they wont they, but you dont care about this, but theyre gonna do it anyway

in the early scenes gina is like a foil to indy and so shes frustrating in a way that indy the character and you the player can feel both at once, in concert, i think they do this reasonably well, as a character to be frustrated by, she works great. and like indie should be frustrated by her to meet this story goal. but i don't like to be frustrated by a companion as a player

the game has 3 levels of gina bullshit, firstly, the game where theres no gina. it's good, its sort of a open world collect em up where you punch lots of jerks, i think good. then theres buddy ai levels where gina  accompanies you. those are pretty bad. then the third kind is in cutscenes. thats like peak gina bullshit

so the buddy ai in games, its been better elsewhere. i dont know that i've ever enjoyed a buddy ai but something like last of us handles it reasonably well, where the buddy is like invulnerable so its not like an escort mission you can fail, the buddy has different skills than you and can visit different rooms than you, so you sort of work together

gina sucks though, in a puzzle where you're counting on ai gina to do something well and quickly so that you don't die, she'll fuck it up almost entirely,  just enough so that you dont die, but youre like very mad at her. so these trust exercises with her don't really build trust.

and gina has the invulnerability thing, but she cheats a lot, and it's bad. in a puzzle where there are blades swinging from the ceiling and you carefully time it out to miss the blades, gina will follow you in a way where each blade should obliterate her but she just noclips through them, undermining the verisimilitude of the scene. and i understand it probably shouldn't be, just , gina gets obliterated, but i'd like to see her time the jumps right, like i had to.

then the story wants you to grow attached to her over time. another npc tells you. "hey. care about gina. before its too late"  but i don't want to!
you can't make me.

gina swings between wildly incompetent and wildly competent. she has i guess flaws and strengths. but they don't make any sense.  i'm waiting for some sort of reveal that gina is actually a spy ninja or something. but im worried she's just like this

in cutscenes, gina and indy both make bad decisions that you the player would not make. but gina reliably makes even worse decisions. i think when they want the custscene to have a bad outcome theyre more willing to make it gina's fault, because then its not indy/the player's fault. cutscenes are way too often used to advance the plot in ways you can't control, using the same stuff that exists in the game, in ways you would not use them

another problem - or like- constraint - is the game has these two speeds, sort of full send spiralling forward action and carefully look under every rock secret hunting, and you want to get everything, but gina wants you to keep moving, hey, hey indy, look over there, pull this lever indy, like hey, give me a fucking minute

(this post is about indiana jones and the great circle)