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The story quests should be pointing you in a couple of different directions by now. You should be equipped enough to follow either of those at this point.

The overland route specifically will net you plenty of shrines along the way to continue pumping up your hearts - there are a few caves too and those are always full of surprises.

Just be smart about what fights you take on along the way. Two things about fights in this game:

1. It's okay to run. If you encounter anything you aren't prepared to fight, just run. Typically you can get away on foot (or horse if you have one). If it comes down to it, warping away is also fine.
2. Especially in the early game, fights are trial and error. And you aren't going to find the loot you're looking for without taking on fights. You're probably going to die a few times, and that's okay.

The game doesn't punish you for dying, unless you're overly sensitive to loading screens. Try different strategies, get a feel for the advanced combat mechanics. You'll probably end up at a few different combat training shrines if you're following the early game quests and that'll help you out if you're unfamiliar with some of the more advanced techniques.

I'd recommend you play some games before you dive into designing. That way you can get a feel for themes and mechanics and what works and what you like.

The good news is that you don't need anyone to play with. There are plenty of TTRPG systems designed for solo, or you can always play more traditional systems solo using a GM emulator or similar.

Solo TTRPGs tend to come in a couple of general flavors - journaling games, and more "traditional" RPGs. And each of those come in various complexity levels.

Here are a few of various flavors that can help get you started. Check em out to get a feel for what's out there, what other folks are doing, and what works for you. Lots of folks with start with tweaks, extensions, or hacks of existing games.

• Alone Among the Stars
• Ironsworn: Starforged
• One Page Solo Engine
• Thousand Year Old Vampire
• The Wretched
• Colostle

Number 1 for me are the Duke Nukem Collections for Evercade coming in November.

I played tons of duke3d as a kid so I'm excited to revisit it. But even more, I never got a chance to play the original DOS side-scrollers, so I'm pumped to get the new remastered versions. Even cooler that they're the first Evercade exclusives.

The trouble is that, as always, leadership fucked around and now workers are finding out.

Leadership overextended while money was cheap, now money isn't so cheap and the bills are gonna start coming due so they need to cut some "dead weight" which is largely gonna mean cutting workers to save on salaries and other liabilities.

And as always this is gonna make them look profitable enough to stay above water for a couple years until interest rates come down and money is cheap again. And that's when the cycle starts over.

The worst part is there will be no accountability for that leadership because this isn't a sign of incompetence. It is a sign of a system working as intended.

This mystery deal that fell through is a convenient precipitating event to point to, but this was always the going to be the eventual outcome of the way these companies operate.

You can see it happening...well everywhere but especially in tech and adjacent companies over the past couple years. Maybe next time it'll be another industry, but at some point folks are gonna get addicted to free money again and get all shockedpikachu when it stops being so free and they need to pay it back.