Sraëka Lillian's one-a-week RPG "sketches" are a lovely series of experiments with hoary old conventions from Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest

Sraëka Lillian's one-a-week RPG "sketches" are a lovely series of experiments with hoary old conventions from Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest 31 and counting There's a running joke in the world of THEA-TAH that Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play made up entirely of quotations. I often get the same feeling when I play a fantasy RPG, and especially a fantasy RPG created with toolkits such as EasyRPG or RPG Maker that come with their own freely reusable assets, resulting in a slew of homebrew RPGs that can seem interchangeable, on the surface. A lot of RPGs are rearrangements of certain conventions and stereotypes popularised by behemoths like Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy: geographical clichés, such as the starting village, the forest labyrinth, the bustling hub city, or the endgame airship. And then, smaller recurring devices such as rat-killing tutorials, or the fact that villages always have just the one item shop, just the one armory, just the one inn.