Joel Hines Owns a Landline Phone
At 50:09 of the following puff piece interview for the then-upcoming Tide World of Mani Kickstarter, a landline phone begins to ring.
It sounds decrepit and naïve - as all landline phones do - and is visibly distracting to both millennial men on screen. I believe this phone belongs to Joel Hines, and will present my case for that assumption via the following review of Joel’s 2024 module Tide World of Mani.
“It’s almost as good as Desert Moon of Karth” seems to be the critical consensus surrounding Joel’s follow up to his early Mothership darling. I think that consensus is a crime. Less of a crime than someone in their 30s owning a landline phone, but a crime nonetheless. I look upon my peers and see dorks bewitched by a space cowboy power fantasy, unappreciative of the more mature fantasy of being a disgusting boat person.
yeah baby there it is that’s the stuff
I speak of the marina folk. The chortling riverside retirees who swear as fast as they piss. There is a beauty in them, as there is in all people. They are one of many paths by which we learn to question the heavy yoke of societal expectations. Joel clearly loves these guys.
These people solve problems. It is all they do, because their lives are composed entirely of problems. In real life those problems tend to revolve around divorce and engine trouble, but on Mani that problem is intense, inescapable resource scarcity.
Anchoring a city of endlessly recycled space parts to a single square mile of land was inspired. Crucial infrastructure is impossible to replace, ensuring permanent consequences for players who make hasty, destructive decisions. And when they inevitably do break something important, there’s literally nowhere to run - every millimeter of land is owned by one of the competing factions detailed in this book. It’s all so deliciously unstable.
The conflict extends not just between factions but within them. The church is hamstrung by a failing marriage while the monarchy’s policy remains in limbo from an inheritance dispute. Racial prejudice and class warfare are given equal screen time with illicit affairs and cancer diagnoses.
These old bitches I swear to god
Our hobby has made great strides since the era of ‘peak setting’ (when ‘World Building’ implied more discussion of nations than neighborhoods) to zoom in on the limited human perspectives our players actually inhabit. Joel raises that bar further by creating worlds whose macro-states are traceable to the petty micro-desires of familiar human archetypes. The authorial voice describing Mani never ‘zooms out’, it only ‘builds up’ from a bedrock of relationships. I value this approach. A skyscraper looks taller from the street than it does in the air. Besides, history is always shaped by fraught relationships.1
Don’t get me wrong, this book is not a masterpiece. There are typos, mapping errors, and some dubious font sizes. The “strained too hard to only use d10s”2 random encounter system from Karth has been replaced by a new, conceptually cool social unrest procedure that’s just begging for a simpler editing pass. The key art from Astral Brews is hanging out on pg9 for no obvious reason.
There’s a reason it’s so viscous
But, editing turbulence aside, this woman has good bones! Tide World of Mani simply likes people in a way most OSR modules do not. There are meet cutes between NPCs in the random encounter tables. The only monster for your players to slay is a chillingly true-to-life serial killer. There’s no magic item table full of repacked OD&D spells and Code Geass references. When was the last time you picked up a module inspired by something as politically complicated and obscure to western hobbyists as the Cinema Rex fire?3
Joel is obviously a mature, well adjusted adult in a way few of us terminally online blog creatures can comparably claim. He touches grass professionally, reads history lovingly, and asks for help from Silverarm’s production contacts when he needs it. We stan a module built to accommodate pacifist playthroughs. Challenge your dumbass party to reckon with the moral complexities of the Iranian Revolution on game night.
Only a man this worldly would even consider owning a landline phone in 2023. Such a relic was made for someone who values the simplicity of the human voice and rigorously prunes attentional vampires. I support your completely insane decision Joel, and wish you happiness and peace.
$25 Physical with a lovely 10 track OST.
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What would the world look like today if Vivian Wilson was a cis woman?↩
For the record, I oppose this “d10s only” Mothership design trend. I appreciate its elegance in the base rules, but why are we pretending there’s a single person on earth who both plays Mothership and doesn’t own a d12?↩
The correct answer is “whatever Kenneth Hite last wrote”, of course.↩