My survival mechanism for the moment is writing about an elderly veterinarian couple in #Hammondal.
Technically, he's a much-admired Marshal and she's "his wife," but she's doing most of the work these days. Not in a "Penny and Inspector Gadget" way, just in a "he's super elderly and can barely see ... past his pride" way, and they've both always been the type to do a night pro-bono to help a poor widow's sick dormouse.
Once that is done, I will step gingerly to the next survival mechanism. 😮
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Some are rich with land or cash or fame.
I'm not rich in any of those ways.
But I am rich beyond measure in USB cables.
🙏
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One of the reasons I vibe with Mastodon is: this is pretty much the only place where I don't get the dirty looks when I talk about the importance of scarecrows, to me, in #TTRPGDesign ...
Even on my beloved G+ in days of yore, the whiners whined at me about it.
Here, folks tend to get it, or, alternately, my Filters keep those who don't out of my feed. Same thing to me. 😅
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The Judges Guild town guides all oscillate between the lucid and the inscrutable fever-dream, and sometimes I feel like I'm flattering myself to think I can tell the difference.
Like the barmaid who'll sleep with anyone who wins a staring contest with the bar's brass toad. 2% chance, it says.
I like to assume that's the chance that the barmaid decides she wants to sleep with you, but hell, it's JG. Maybe it literally means the brass toad flinches and the barmaid's like "whatevs."
[#]TTRPG
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When working on #Hammondal - or ANY setting for an RPG - I have a constant awareness of the tactical economy of facts. I'm always, consciously, weighing everything in tactical terms alongside theme, alongside temperature, axiom, etc.
And then I take a break, and read some settings by others, and it's clear they didn't bother, and it's beautiful. It's so attractive to me and I'm so envious.
And then I return to work and I'm still me, so, may as well accept that I'm me. 😅
[#]TTRPG #TTRPGDesign
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We probably won't get to see the finale of #SkeletonCrew until tomorrow evening, so I should probably set up a temporary set of Filters for the spoiler tsunami. 😅
[#]StarWars
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Another thing I don't have great terms for is the range of "medium-trust" designs.
Some are what I call "broad umbrella medium" in that they average near the middle but they stretch to the extremes. Many of David Pulver's works, frex.
Others are more "narrow medium" where they seem to have no interest in the extremes.
But MTT isn't really my focus so I guess I don't need anything more precise. Still gnaws at me, though.
[#]AdventureDesign
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While I really seriously actually am mostly focused on putting the early CoC #HTTRPG adventures on a timeline, I do keep wandering around when I remember a thing or read a review in an old mag.
Today I've added The Vanished, an old FASATREK module by Guy McLimore, to the timeline.
I'm unironically never tired of "shit gets weird on a space station" type adventures. 🖖😁
Which is good because that's a lot of 80s sci-fi #TTRPGDesign ...
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I feel like somewhere between "charged" and "volatile" there's a missing English word that would cast a fair umbrella over this entire design style.
Sometimes I shorthand to "a three feathers," in reference to the well-known @GraemeDavis scenario for WFRP.
I've been encountering it frequently in early Call of Cthulhu (and Traveller!) designs and my brain hates me for not having a suitably generic term. 😅
Anyway, tonight, "charged situation" feels closest to fair.
Tomorrow will differ. 😵
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There's a medium-trust style of #TTRPG #AdventureDesign that's a cousin to high-trust design. Nothing so loosey-goosey as a sandbox, it's a designed situation but deliberately without a PC objective presumed. Basically, a stew of high potentiality for the PCs to surf or exploit or drown in. Clashing NPC motives, etc.
I oscillate madly on my "generic" term for it. I sometimes call it "fraught [situation]" or "fruitful" or "volatile," etc.
Tonight it's a "charged" situation.
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Okay, going to take a break from slamming All of the 80s CoC Adventures into my eyeballs and read a Traveller adventure instead.
Unlike with CoC, I've never found a single #HTTRPG adventure for Trav, which kind of surprises me; it feels like it would be such a natural fit (and since Space Master is pretty flush with them, it's clearly not a genre thing).
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Tying my #CallOfCthulhu revisit to #Hammondal ... I'm spending a lot of thought lately on the exact style I'll be using for the hand-drawn interiors I'll be doing for the book, and my gold-standards for those are 80s Chaosium, 80s Games Workshop, and 80s Flying Buffalo.
On the Chaosium side, I'm sufficiently humble to recognize that I am no Yurek Chodak, and I never can be. But I might manage a passable Charlie Krank. 😅
(I'll probably end up somewhere near these earlier plans o' mine)
[#]TTRPG
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Re-reading Underground Menace tonight, Petersen's #CallOfCthulhu adventure from Different Worlds in '82. Like most early CoC adventures, it offers a core problem layered under some mystery, though it's not very #HTTRPG, as there are 3 clearly-outlined buckets of outcome, all based on who or what the PCs kill.
But: it does have the spine-tingling description of the sound of a Dark Young moving: "like a giant wearing wet tennis shoes."
And it has a cow that starts screaming.
So: ❤️
[#]TTRPG
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Midway through my 4th mug of Denny's coffee* and my stomach is considering filing for divorce.
[#]Dennys
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For the last few days I've been going through the early #CallOfCthulhu adventures semi-chronologically, and that's meant re-reading some old T.O.M.E. modules, which I haven't revisited in years.
I mean, yeah they're less interesed in being "Lovecraftian" (not necessarily a bad thing) and they have that rough garage-production vibe, but I'm enjoying them. They're strongly, wholly trad in a way that warms the ol' heart-cockles.
[#]TTRPG
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Time for some night-time kitchen errands: going to make a pot of chicken noodle soup, portion some fresh meats into zipper bags for the freezer, and then if I'm still feeling kitcheny, make a red sauce for using on pasta this weekend.
That latter one will depend mainly on how willing I am to chop the bell peppers. I swear they bring out the lazy in me, but my house sauce depends on a bunch of them. 😅
[#]Cooking
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While working on my current articles about #AdventureDesign I have to keep slapping my own hand when I'm tempted to drift into adventure #Writing.
I might give in and include a single sidebar of rapid-fire writing reminders, but that would be poor discipline on my part. So, more likely, I'll write a sidebar of reminders to burn them out of my system, then shelve them for a later article. 😊
And if I were giving myself writing advice I'd be like: "stop being that way." 😂
[#]TTRPG
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Man, I love that little show.
[#]StarWars #SkeletonCrew
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Almost time for the countdown!
(Not that one)
(This one)
Fwanna!
Duba!
Dopa!
Bo!
HAPPY NEW-EPISODE!
[#]StarWars #SkeletonCrew
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I don't think this will reveal an "inventor" of the form. As with trad itself, I don't think that's a thing. It was just an approach that made a kind of contextual sense, and for certain types of gamer it had some degree of appeal ... so it just happened, at a lot of tables, and it made its way into a few books along the way, inevitably.
Commerce killed it for more concrete, measurable reasons. But I don't think anything so definite brought it into the world.
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