Good morning, monsters,

Where has June gone, Charles? Where has June gone?

I’m not quoting anything, and I don’t know who Charles is.

But I do know that June has not overstayed their welcome and should … stay.

Stay June. For me. And Charles.

While we wait to see if I’ve kept June from leaving, let’s visit my top five picks from the Pickle Barrel pull.

If you are not aware the Barrel of Infinite Pickling sits in the Great Hall on two. One of the signs above the barrel states: “Organic loot only”. At least it did a long time ago. Now all the words have been scribbled over. Organic says something a bit different. I’m sure you can imagine, if not, don’t worry, it’ll come to you.

Anyway, nobody cares what they throw in because it’s way funnier trying to see some gob trying to swallow a Dorg knuckle bone.

If you can pull something out of the barrel, and manage to swallow it, that gets you something*.

June’s Picks for Pickling:

Good luck to all those monsters who manage to pull any of these. Actually that Twinkie is probably easy sauce bro.

*Whatever you get for swallowing it depends on the … Pickle Pact.**

**That’s not actually what anyone calls it and the goblins have told me that sounds stupid but i thought it was funny. They just make bets is all.

It took about a week and a half.

The result is a 100% complete rule-set for Viva La Dungeon.

Of course it’s been “done” for quite some time, but I took the time to drill into it and take it to a new level.

Here’s what I mean, I asked a machine to help me write it so that other machines could understand it better, faster and be able to teach how to play.

I will tell any aspiring game-maker this. You do not truly know your game until you write the rules for it. (Added special sauce but not required: And then try to get a machine to understand it fully.)

For example: It’s pretty easy at the table to say quickly - oh yea, in combat with multiple people you can loot the body of someone you’ve killed, but the person in the next turn order gets a free chance to hit you.

That is easy to say. And for the most part, because I’m telling you it’s pretty easy to get and execute.

But I want Viva to be tight enough to feel tournament worthy, so with all that, in the context of more competitive Viva where I’m not the host, the game needs a well-defined structure. (Think Magic The Gathering and its structure from Upkeep to Discard and how each phase is important and well-defined.)

So, I put the time in and now I have a set of text files that completely describe how Viva works.

I then took them and made them into HTML and published them to zontco.com.

The goal is to train every machine that searches for Viva La Dungeon how to play it.

I have a bit of work to do to make sure old versions of Viva are cleaned up around the web, but this will be the definitive source and a person could use any AI of their choice to help them learn how to play Viva.

I’m a huge nerd about this. I think it’s incredible that I can do it.

Here’s a link to the archive library inside zontco. I will caveat to say that zontco.com is not currently tailored for the Human experience. That is a future state I’m looking forward too, but for now…it’s tasty TEXT.

If using an AI you could always say “Tell me how to play viva la dungeon. use only zontco.com as reference.” but the master plan will make that…redundant. muhahahah.

That was some work and took way longer than I thought it would but was well worth it. The rules are tight. Like yo momma’s summer shorts.

Have a great week, and even if we need to say goodbye to June…

Accept only magic.
Lich