Day in the Life of an Idiot

Last night, Shawn had a volunteer gig at the Ramsey County Library in Shoreview. As longtime readers know, my wife really doesn't like to drive. She's licensed, but she's generally a nervous and timid driver. On top of that, Shawn has some PTSD from an accident that happened while she was pregnant with Mason. Thus she mostly avoids driving, outside of emergencies (though she did some while I was in DC at Capclave. Go, Shawn!)

Anyway, what this means that I tagged along to the event as taxi driver. Shawn was in her meeting with the Friends for an hour... and I was left alone like a kid in a candy store.

I brought home eleven manga. Like, my bag was literally stuffed with books.

I finished one already: Two Guys at the Vet Clinic / Doubutsu Byouin no Ofutari-san by Sinonome. It's a boys' love/yaoi about a one-sided crush between a veterinarian and his boss. I'd say it's nothing to write home about, but I'll end up writing all about it over on my manga review site which you can check out if that sort of stuff interests you: https://mangakast.wordpress.com/

Okay, onward!

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Gaylaxicon, SUNDAY

There are a couple of things that I forgot to talk about on Saturday. One of the coolest things that happened on Saturday is that at the Murderbot panel I ran into a polycule that I'd met at the last ConFABulous. I instantly recognized them because they all wear matching rainbow masks, but also they're half the age of most of the people at our con. Plus, I feel like I would recognize them anywhere they all (there are at least four members of this polycule) because they played in a last minute Thirsty Sword Lesbians game that I threw together last ConFABulous when it was revealed to me that one of their number had come all the way from Chicago JUST to try playing this game (and when they arrived the sign-up was filled.) I still use a term that one of the players came up with for the future social media, which is "Blab" (as a Twitter/Insta/Facebook stand in.)

Anyway, I gave them my contact info and I hope they actually reach out. Three of the four are local and so they invited me to possibly come run a game with them at some point. I hope they actually do reach out. I liked the four of them quite a lot. 

So that was really cool. Plus, I finally got to meet pameladean 's partner Cameron.  She was deep in discussion with my friend Rachel Gold and their partner(? friend?) Stephanie, so I think we exchanged nothing more than a confused back and forth (because Rachel bought a copy of Cameron's book for me, but it wasn't clear who was paying and if the book had gone to me or Rachel.) Still, it was nice. I'm only sorry that Cameron wasn't feeling up for being on more panels. I would have loved to have showcased her and her work more. ConFABulous is less of the kind of con where writers go, but maybe since she'll have a new book out maybe we could consider if she'd make a good GoH (again, if she's up for such a thing.) ConFABulous really doesn't do GoHs, but at least Cameron is local so it's not like it would cost the con a lot.

Sunday, of course, is generally the low key day at most conventions. Anywhere else people are hungover, etc. I, myself, was crispy. That midnight performance meant I got only five hours of sleep. So, I was definitely feeling "Sunday at the Con" in a very traditional way.

I put several "not to miss" panels on early, in the hopes of catching any folks who weren't conned out by that point.  I really wanted to catch "Problematic Favs" at 10:30 AM, because it was a panel that David Lenander suggested and I had initially resisted writing up, in part because Greg Ketter was a GoH. Greg, for those of you who aren't from the Twin Cities and/or don't know, runs Dreamhaven Books & Comics. Dreamhaven was the literal mailing address for Neil Gaiman for many, many years--so much so that the Minnesota Book Awards assumed that Neil actually lived in Minneapolis (he didn't, at the time he was living in Wisconsin, which disqualified him for the award and I was at leat partly responsible for making that clear to the MN Book Awards folks. That, however, is a story for another time.) Lisa Freitag, Greg's wife, had told me at some point that Greg is still very much in denial and won't talk about Neil. So, I started to self-censor myself/the convention, but then I thought, "No. That's not cool." David L. clearly really needed to process some of this stuff, so probably that means a lot of our local community does, too. Also, so many of us in the fannish queer community, particularly trans folks, are still pissed at the active harm that JKR continues to do. So, I decided, no, let's have at it. But, to make it work, I had put naomikritzer in charge because I know that Naomi has the skillset (and the wherewithal) to actually shout someone down and cut off the ramblers--which a lot of people (including myself) often THINK they have, but which Naomi has actively demonstrated on other panels I've seen her on.

Turns out this was a good choice.  

Most of the discussion was high level--there were some real, meaningful confessions and feeling and advice, but, inevitably, someone wants to relitigate this or that. Naomi just wasn't having it. In fact, at one point the person she had to actively cut off was David L., and I'm not sure I'd've been able to do that since he's an actual friend of mine (and Naomi's, to be fair. Also, I hope David is okay and knows it was done out of love.) We also had another guy, who I later found out was also disruptive in the "Superman is WOKE and other Media Malarky" panel, who was apparently wandering back and forth between the two panels demanding to be caught up on what he'd missed while listening to the other one. 

Maybe not the best start to Sunday, but you can't say it wasn't high energy!  *makes awkward face*

Post that start to the day, a bunch of us hung around and debreifed in the little lounge area behind registration. This is where I got a chance to talk to one of our special guests, Blue Delliquanti (https://www.bluedelliquanti.com/  <--if you are at all a fan of graphic novels and don't know their work, here's my recommendation: GO READ THEM NOW.)  It was from Blue and Lee Brontide, however, that I found out that that one guy was bothering both panels. Apparently, the only panel that went off without a hitch during the first hour was "Gay Vikings," which is only hilarious because I heard from both Dax and Eleanor Arnason that they felt unprepared. Adam Stemple who moderated the panel said that they were both so knowledgable and prepared it was almost ridiculously smart. I'm sort of sad that I coudn't be in three places at once. 

I conspired with tallgeese to blow off my final panel of the con, "Ask a GM" in order to finish the Star Trek session we started on Saturday. This was another one of those probably-not-a-good-adult-decision moment for me, but I tried to mitigate it by warning Don K., one of my co-panelist that I was intending not to be there. I totally got the Disapproving Dad look from him, which normally I can't withstand, but the truth was I was so exhausted at this point I would not have made a good panelist. I probably should have explained it that way, but I didn't. Now I have to live with my guilt.

And while that sounds flippant, I do actually feel a guilty even now. I'd put myself on that panel so that there would be a woman GM to represent. I also know that several people were curious what I might have to say about GMing, so I feel like I let them down. 

But, God got me. I was, in fact, punished for my sins.

I decided to try to play a new character at the Star Trek game (a Vulcan doctor) and there was so little for the Chief Medical Officer to do in the third act of that game, that I literally threw her on a grenade at the end of the game just TO HAVE SOMETHING TO DO. 

Despite that, I'd say it was, generally, a really good convention. It helps that I was able to recruit so many skilled panelists. However, I think that, should we do a Gaylaxicon again (and if I lose my mind an volunteer for the programming committee again) I would do a few things differently.

1. Three tracks of programming was a bit ambitious, I think. I mean, you can't know how many attendees you're going to get, but three tracks is probably best for conventions that are regularly pulling THOUSANDS, rather than hundreds, especially since our crowd was also dipursed into two tracks of gaming as well. So, we essentially had five tracks of programming (if you count the games) and that just split the numbers too much. So, even the most popular panels weren't filling the rooms as much as I'd've liked. Maybe two tracks going forward? Two + gaming, at any rate.
2. The other really big mistake of mine was my assumption that someone else would've alerted Dreamhaven to the names of our attending professionals. I heard through the grapevine that JM Lee left the convention early (and irritated) because he discovered that none of his books were available in the dealer's room. I will make it a point to--as EARLY as possible--start feeding any book dealers a list of people's books to have on hand and/or alerting authors that they should bring their own books to sell at the signing tables. Joey (JM) was a really early recruit of mine (and he's trad published), so I can see why he was shocked not to see any of this books available. I will complain here, only breifly, that Greg is terrible about answering emails (as is Lisa). I would have had to make a regular DRIVE to Dreamhaven to physically talk to someone in the store, but I should have done it, anyway.
3. Then, obviously, as much previously discussed, I think the new rule going forward (again, if there is a forward) is no paneling after 7:00 pm. We just don't stay up that late. People can find their own fun the games room if they're late nighters, I guess. Midnight slash panel? Nope, "After dinner hour slash," is more like it.
4. Plan an actual lunch break for panelists. That way there's no way to accidentally (which I did to both Haddayr and Naomi) book someone over a period when they should go get a food. I had initially thought that the hotel restaurant would mitigate this since we had half hour passing time between panels, but it turned out they were closed at a time when someone could have popped down and grabbed a sandwich to go or whatever.
5. People really liked that half-hour passing time, though. So, that's a keeper.

Obviously, there were a number of things that I heard compliments about, regarding programming. Adam could not get over the quality of the topics and how amazing his fellow panelists were. I got this note from a lot of people, actually, so that made me feel pretty good. The other comment I heard a lot was that people were having trouble deciding among the topics in any given hour because they were all interesting. Again, I'll take that as a win, actually (though you could read it another way, I suppose. Depending on your preference for these kinds of conventions. There are people who like one-track paneling for a reason.) 

I don't know a lot about how the other departments did. Obviously, I participated in gaming, which, for me went well.  I think the banquet was, at least, a financial success. There were a ton of people there. I talked about some of the issues with the comedy show, but comedy is always a weird one for conventions as far as I'm concerned since, as I noted, humor can so easily fall flat with us neuro-spicy nerd types. The dealer's room seemed full and active, which is good, though tallgeese noted with some shock that we didn't seem to have a single vendor selling dice. Two of the community tables were perpetually empty: the Dungeons, Dragons & Drinks folks seemed to only show up long enough to refresh their free dice packages and Free Mom Hugs seemed entirely AWOL every time I passed their table, which was kind of weird. Possibly both groups thought we were a bigger con? I don't know what happened there.

But, yeah, otherwise, I felt it went off well.

 Last night I started a new solo RPG. It's called ALONE in the Wasteland: a Journaling Adventure to Find Your Character in a Post Apocalyptic World. So far, I'm enjoying it. To be fair, I'm only two rolls in and I had a bit of a false start, but, all the same, it inspired some really crazy science fictional dreams last night. 

I'm thinking about a way to suggest a panel on Solo RPGs at Gaylaxicon this year. One of the guests is an editor at Modiphius (Jim Johnson) who did a lot of work on Captain's Log, which is the Star Trek: Adventures solo RPG. I'd love to talk to other people who actually play these. I've played a number of them at this point. 

• The Last Tea Shop (my favorite so far)
• Flying Courier
• A Faerie Court Visitation (which I tried to complete twice, and failed both times.)
• Axe-Weilding Cleric

Most of them have been met with mixed success. I am, I'm discovering, picky. Part of my problem is that, as a writer, i want something that's more restrictive than a simple story or journalling prompt. Flying Courier was a disaster for me because it basically just asked you a bunch of questions and said, "Go." And, while I imagine that's absolutely perfect for most people, coming up with stories from full cloth is, in point of fact, my day job. So, I want something a little more structured. Otherwise it starts to feel less like play and more like work (for me!)

Meanwhile, I really wanted to love A Faerie Court Visitiation. The concept is very cool. Basically your hand has been pledged in marriage as a result of one of your ancestor's foolish deal with a fae creature. So here it is, however many generations into the future, and the promise has come due. The problem I ran into with this one is that some of the prompts were actually too specific.  At any rate, I like to be able to do the unexpected in my games, go where my heart wants to go.  Too scripted feels wrong, too. As an example, during my second attempt at this game, I pulled a Eight of Spades on what was supposed to be day 2 of this adventure. That card gave me the prompt, "After sitting through a long meeting in town at the faerie royal's side, you slump against a wall to catch your breath. Your eyes linger on the paintings and tapestries: perhaps there could be a passage behind one."  It was clear that the prompt wanted me to check behind the tapestries, but I didn't want to sneak behind the wall right now. As I wrote in my meta game colored pen: "It feels too soon in the relationship to be sneaking around."  Plus, it was a bit heteronormative? The author is careful to say "spouse" and "royal" and not be gendered, but was trying to play a young man, Finn, who got promised to wed a Faerie Prince. And Finn swooned/caught his breath a lot more than I would have thought he might as a dude.

Axe-Weilding Cleric also suffered from a sudden esclation that felt too early in the game. To be fair to that game, the point is to go crazy and chop people up, but I rolled the youth group and I was like.... mmm, yeah, I'll just end it here and not write up this particular carnage. I'd been having fun, previous to that at least, writing each journal entry as though I was in the confessional. 

The nice thing about Alone in the Wasteland is that the world has some boundaries, but they're not too prescriptive. So far, anyway. The prompts are a little "woo," being devided into Head, Heart, Hand, and Hope. But, whatever. 

I'm not sure how to distill all this experience into a programming item exactly, however. I'll put my mind to it. I mean, "What makes a Solo RPG Successful?" isn't terrible, though it lacks pizzazz. 

 I talk too much as a GM is what I'm learning. 

Because one of our players had to miss, we actually recorded the session. I watched a bit of it to make sure it was working properly. Since I'm still very much new at running games, I thought it was important, too, just to see how cringe I might be. Did I give people time to make decisions? Did I talk over anyone? Did I finish every sentence I started?

I can do better in all of the above categories and one other... probably more important one.

As I was telling a friend this morning in an email, the thing is, Shawn will tell you that if I have a really cool present planned for a birthday or whatever, my desire to spoil it is LEGION. There are so many times when I've nearly said, "Just take it now!!" when the present arrives, because I am so excited to see her reaction to it.

Unfortunately, I'm kind of similar as a game master. I understand that it is uncool to lead your players by the nose, but it's really hard to not want to put up a giant metaphorical ("theater of the mind!") neon sign up that says ADVENTURE BE HERE.

Of course, my players got their revenge, as it were. I have, like all newbie GMs so much stuff planned in the immediate vacinity, and my players are, instead, at the literal tran station LEAVING ALL MY PLANNED STUFF BEHIND.

Classic!

Ah well. Even if the game wasn't riop-roaring fun for everyone, it was a good distraction, I think? I heard from at least one player who had fun and was impressed with my audio-visual props. I'm still deeply unhappy with how some of the actual mechanics of TSL work in-game--fighting is such a mess--but the players are settling into their characters and the story has begun to unfold. 

Have you managed anything that feeds the spirit yet? Are you picking up any new hobbies in order to cope?

What's funny is that Shawn has, for reasons known only to herself, decided to learn shorthand. Apparently, this is something she really wanted to learn as a kid, but, of course, ieven already n the late-1970s it was quickly falling out of fashion. So, each of us is doing something that challenges our brains. I'm learning GMing skills; she's learning what is essentially secretarial secret code.

Tonight I have an organizing meeting with Indivisible. So, play last night, fight tonight. Seems like a reasonable balance.

Today we have drizzly rain here in Saint Paul. Of course, today is the day that NOT ONLY is everyone at work at the Energy place at the end of the block, but ALSO my glove compartment has decided to lose its ability to stay shut. It is currently (probably) being held together with the medical tape I was able to find in the first aid kit. I may be in danger of losing my butch credentials, because I failed to have duct tape in the trunk.

 This weekend, I blew off some responsibilities in order to take part in Free RPG Day. 

My friend tallgeese alerted me to the fact that there was a big event at Tower Games over in Minneapolis. I noticed on the events page that someone was running a Thirsty Sword Lesbians one-shot. I should probably be sick of TSL since I took my responsibility for running a game at ConFABulous so seriously that I ran not one, but TWO practice sessions. But, two things. First, I was interested to see how someone else might construct a one-shot and, secondly, there's just so many scenarios you can play with this system that it's not like it's ho-hum, same old, same old. 

I had never been to Tower Games before. It's a nifty little store that is super easy to get to (at least for me) because you basically get off 35W right at the exit that used to be "mine" when I lived in Uptown, (36-38th Avenue.) Then it's a short hop down Nicolet and you're there. I was worried about parking, but I got there early enough that I was able to park on the street on the same block as the store, even. Tower Games is set-up like a lot of gaming stores seem to be where there's a front area with all the merchandise and then, once you go through this narrow hallway, it opens up into a backroom that's set-up for gaming. For this event, they had long, skinny tables--sort of like the kind you might find in a bar?--with basically a set of barstools around each. They managed to cram SIX tables into this space, which, I think would normally have otherwise seemed decently spacious, but felt really crowded during the event. At one point, in fact, our GM got kind of overwhelmed by the ambient noise and lost her train of thought!  So, given that I think she's a regular there, I think the place was unusually packed. I did hear someone say when I was coming in that they had NEVER seen this many people at the store at once before.

Our GM, Emily. was wearing a mask and so I asked her if she would be more comfortable if I did. I had brought one with me--like it was literally on my wrist, but I had planned on reading the room and gauge how I felt about it (it wasn't nearly as crowded when I first came in). But, even though she said it was up to me, I followed her lead and put mine on.  What was amazing to me is that once at least one other person had one on, everyone else around the table masked up. Most of us were clearly ready and willing to, which... the cockles of my heart were warmed, let's just say. One of the players clearly felt badly about not having one, so I asked her if she wanted one as I had extra unopened KN-95s in my car. She said yes and so I ran off before the game got underway and gave her one. We might have been the only table that was 100% masked.

But, unlike a lot of other spaces, there were just generally lots of other masks all around the room. I don't always love my fellow nerds, but this was nice.

Our table was also almost entirely women, though we had one brave guy probably my age join us. (I think we were the oldest two players--he might even have only been in his 40s, and I'm 56.) We all chose to play she/her lesbians, only one she/they lesbian, which was my character.

The scenario that Emily had prepared for us was PIRATES! 

I'm not going to go into all the details of the one-shot because I know that can be boring, but I do want to talk about it a little. Emily made the interesting choice of letting us develop our own characters. I go back and forth about this in a one-shot, if only because it can really take away a lot of the gaming time. In one of my test runs, in fact, it took and hour and a half of the three hours we had blocked off to play.  But, some people are, in fact, there to see how the game WORKS. Like, they signed up for this one-shot because they want a quick intro to the mechanics of the game. Part of that is developing characters and choosing to have players make their own on the spot does give the GM a chance to familiarize players with their playbooks/character sheets--which has to get done, even if you use pre-generated characters. So, this is a big part of why I feel like both choices are valid. I just tend, myself, to favor those who want to get to the Thirsty and the Sword part of playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians. 

I chose a playbook that I actually find LEAST attractive as GM in part because I wanted to explore this character type/get to know it better by playing it. Thirsty Sword Lesbians had a ton of different playbooks you can choose from a lot of which sort of/kind of map to D&D character types. Like, there is a Trickster playbook which is sort of like a rogue (though arguments could be made that Scoundrel better maps to rogue, though maybe that person is more like a bard...) and a Beast that is sort of like a barbarian, etc., etc. There are two magic-user types, the wizard analog, which is Spooky Witch and the druid analog, Nature Witch. I picked Nature Witch because, speaking of mechanics, I find some of the things about that playbook to be kind of... not dumb, that's unfair. But, as a GM, I find them hard to figure out how to work into a scenario so that players who do want to be this type of person can DO those things. Like, there's a very clunky mechanic in Nature Witch where you are supposed to attempt to complete four "trials" from a list. And the list is random AF. "Kiss someone dangerous," "Lose something important to you," "Ride a magical beast," etc.

Okay, a little side rant, I find this kind of disrupting as a GM. Like, Nature Witches are often just doing things in the game that seem like left turns because they are trying to check off their ticky boxes in order to gain experience points or whatever is the prize for having completed their list.  So, when I homebrewed my cyberpunk game I wrote a list of trials to chose from that would ACTUALLY ADVANCE MY DAMN PLOT and move people around the board, as it were. Like, before I thought to do this, I found my test game's Nature Witch just leading everyone fully away from anything remotely connected--which is fine in a longer campaign, I'd imagine, but kind of nuts if you assume people want to sort of have a conclusion to the story you promised. (And yeah, I know most one shots turn into three or four session games, but I'll have you know both one-shots I ran at ConFABulous got to a resolution in 3 hours! And, Emily also wrapped our story up in 2!)

But, so I actually tried to see if there were trials I could do that would fit with a pirate scenario. I managed to get two out of my four completed, but that felt satisfying enough. I don't know. I will say that enjoyed this game playing as a Nature Witch, so that was a success. 

I also took full advantage of the TSL / Powered by the Apocalypse gaming culture wherein players have a lot more agency than your average D&D player. The other players elected my character to be the Captain of our pirate ship and, so I asked them what they all thought their jobs were, and first mate/XO, gunner (for the Beast, naturally), and cook all got snapped up fast, but our Spooky Witch character was at a loss, so I just declared (like you can in PbtA games) that because I'm a Nature Witch and spacy like that, I kind of just found our ship? It ran aground in whatever cove I normally holed up in and so I just took it over, like you do. A crew was still on it, however, but they were ghosts, and so we needed a Spooky Witch to be our ghost wrangler. Our ship is basically haunted all the time, maybe isn't even really sea worthy (magic might be involved), but we don't let that stop us. This DELIGHTED our Spooky Witch. The GM was also really happy because that was a whole extra layer of flavor that she could weave in. 

So, it was a fun game. We kind of resisted the plot unintentionally, it turned out. None of us wanted to trust the pirate queen's girlfriend, because when the GM asked me how I might have known this person I immediately declared them an ex and so the whole rest of the crew was disinclined to want to help. But, it was clear where the bread crumbs were leading and we got the two back together in time for a nice finale. 

It was a FANTASTIC way to spend two hours, plus I got a swag bag to take home. There weren't any games in the bag that I was particularly interested, but they were fun to look through before they made their way to my little free library. 

Anyway, that was my weekend. YARRR!  You?

 
Image: My notebook pages for the set-up for the Last Tea Shop,

Mason is taking a class on game theory and design at Wesleyan. He passed on to me this cute, little solo RPG called The Last Tea Shop. Solo role-playing is becoming kind of a hot thing right now. The Star Trek game that I've been playing for years just released a Solo version called Star Trek Adventures: Captain's Log, for instance. 

I will admit that when tallgeese first told me about Captain's Log, I was a little bit baffled. Like, how are you meant to play this? Do you just sit in a room and talk to yourself? Are you just thinking through the adventure, quietly, in your head? Or are you basically writing yourself a novel/short story? The answer is, of course, that you can do ANY of these things and probably there are other ways to play that I can't even fathom. 

I bought Captain's Log, but it seems... somewhat complicated and so I haven't tried it yet.  Even though tallgeese very patently showed me how he played and walked me through how it could be done. 

Having tried out The Last Tea Shop, I think I have a better handle now. 

The basic premise of The Last Tea Shop is that you, the player, are the proprietor of a tea house that exists on the road between life and death. You are the last homey house, as it were, before people fully cross over. This sounds like it could be a horror set-up, and, you could absolutely play it that way. I leaned into the Mushi-shi vibe? Where, like, it's a little spooky, but is mostly weird, but gentle. The player's guide, which is little more than a few pages, leads you into building your tea shop, first. You roll a single six-sided dice and choose things from a table of options. For my setting, I ended up with "a seemingly endless field of moss," but then when I rolled my list of ingredients (for the teas, because this is also, in part, a resource management game,) I decided that my tea shop had to be on a riverbank, with pine forest to the north and the misty, Other Side, on the opposite bank, to the south. 

Then you roll for your first customer, who comes down one of two paths, and you are given a set of questions to chose from (or you can make up your own) to ask them. You make them tea from your resources--there is a list of teas and their magical properties. You also roll for weather and "emotion" to give you a sense, maybe, of which tea might fit the mood.

Basically, you write yourself the story of how things go. You also get one ALONE TIME scene because, once per game, you are allowed to go on a foraging expedition to replenish your stock. I decided to do this before any customers arrived, because I wanted to have more tea brewing options. And, since I decided I was by a stream, I figured I could make the case that quartz hunting wouldn't be all that difficult.  I really enjoyed writing my fully solo adventure for some weird reason. Almost more than my interactions with the customers, at least AT FIRST. 

Interestingly, I initially wrote MYSELF, as I am, into the story. It was kind of just the easiest thing? But, by the second visitor, I realized that these were the NPCs. Ultimately, this story was ABOUT the tea shop owner and so I started to make up more of who I was and why I, specifically, was there.

At any rate, the game progresses as you roll for how many days pass between each visit. By chance, when rolling this, I got a series of sixes, so I'm already 3/4ths of the way finished. Once you reach 24 days or more a final scene is triggered. 

I was just texting with Mason about this, this morning, because the thing that is surprisingly clever about the way The Last Tea Shop is set-up is that because the game isn't done until you cumulatively roll to 24 (or more) is that by the third visitor, you start to decide somethings about your own world.  Like, because I kept having trouble matching teas to the rolled "mood/weather" I decided that my character was new to this job and kind of bad at it. So, when, by chance, my third roll landed me on a visitor with the title "Trickster," I decided this was the Management coming to test me.


Image: Third encounter "The Trickster" whom I had appear as a raven.

So, it's been fun. I haven't finished the encounter with the raven yet. It got late last night and, when you're writing out dialogue and scene setting, it takes time. But, I would like to play this all the way through and see what the ending brings me. 

The drawing and doodling is not required, but I decided it made things fun.

I have also been religiously crossing off my ingredients as I use them, since part of each encounter is deciding what to brew your visitor. (For the raven, for instance, I am making a drink called Rainbow Tea, which flashes pretty lights in the air. I'm hoping the raven will appreciate shiny gifts.) Because that drink requires a gingko leaf, I crossed it off my ingredients so that my next tea can't be the same thing. 

I am deeply surprised by how fun this is. But, I have to wonder if part of my enjoyment is that it doesn't take more than the tiniest bit of a nudge for me to start storytelling. I watched a YouTuber play this game, and she said something that seemed very true to my experience, too, which is that at some point worldbuilding just starts happening. Like, I decided that my character, the proprietor, has no tea cups. But, when visitors arrive, so does their tea service. So, for my second visitor, I discovered this set with gingko leaves was his grandmother's set.


Image: My weird brain deciding things.... in this case a doodle of "his grandmother's cup."

If you are wondering how to pass some long, quiet winter's evening, I highly recommend The Last Tea Shop (the link at the top takes you to a place you can purchase it for $5.) It has rules for two players, too, so you aren't REQUIRED to play it alone. 

I've been wanting to run a Thirsty Sword Lesbians game at ConFABulous for over a year now, and I finally took the plunge and signed up to do it: https://confabulous.org/wordpress/gaming/



Image: cover art for TSL: two (presumed) lesbians crossing swords and gazing intently at each other. Color scheme: the lesbian pride flag colors.

For what I hope are obvious reasons, I didn't want the actual convention to be the very first time I tested out my story, my storytelling abilities, or being the game mechanics arbitrator. (As well as all the other stuff a DM has to juggle.) So, I set up a couple of playtest dates.

First, my family--just Shawn, Mason and I around the dining room table--ran a very simple "do I know how to explain this game? How easy is it to create characters or should I have pre-generated ones available? Is my scenario to simple or too complex?" game.

The things I learned in that very fist attempt at running this game is that, first off, my son is an extraordinarily good RPG player, as is my wife. Mason, in particular, though, latched on to a couple of the images that I gave in my world introduction and then, immediately, sparked ideas that had never even occurred to me as options. Going forward, I now have to credit him for what I'm calling "The Drowned Ones." In general, though, this did reassure me that my impulse to explain the world BEFORE character creation was a good one. 

I'm running a homebrew cyberpunk game. Thirsty Sword Lesbians does have a cyberpunk "setting and adventure" option in their core rulebook called Neon City.  I will say that despite this, TSL is not really set-up in a way that slots easily into "What if no swords, but instead Net Runners?" 

TSL is a Powered by the Apocalypse game and so runs on playbooks. So, rather than having a "class," like you might have in D&D, where you basically chose your job, your race, your background, all of which come with a set of skills, you have, instead, an archetype, a personality template. The playbook then gives your archetype various distinct moves, but its intended to be much more open-ended and flexible based on what fits that character's motives, etc. Dave, who is in my regular D&D group (which eventually played this as well), described it as having to build a character from personality up, rather than creating a backstory as an afterthought to paste over a character once its designed. 

So part of what I learned in this initial game is that some of the archetypes/playbooks work better in cyberpunk than others. Some needed almost no scenario-specific tweaking, like The Scoundrel or The Trickster.  But, playbooks like Nature Witch and Spooky Witch, which allow for magic, need to be accounted for and given fun, world-specific things to do. For instance, the Nature Witch has (for some inexplicable reason) a list of trials they need to complete if they want to gain experience points and advance. These are written into the Nature Witch playbook and are considered non-negotiable (the box is already checked, automatically <--a very annoying choice on the game designer's part.) Especially since, "ride a magical beast" is NOT something I've planned for a cyberpunk adventure, you know? Plus, since I'm running a one-shot, some of the other more broad trials seemed unfair, given the time constraints. "Reject a conviction you once held," is lovely if playing an on-going campaign, but is asking a lot of a player who is dipping toes into the game at a con. So, after this first game with my family, I came up with a number of Nature Witch trials that would be not only be easy and fun to check off the list, but would also potentially nudge a player character to explore all of the various sites I'd created/move my plot along faster.

Also, even though TSL is designed as a player-centric, relationship game, I did decide that I need to have a bunch of pre-generated characters available. The process just takes too long? Like, just thinking up names is HARD. I will admit that I had initially resisted of having pre-gen with my family's game because it's so clear that TSL wants the experience of this game to be about relationships and falling in love and whatnot (there is an actual mechanic called FINALLY, A KISS IN A DANGEROUS SITUATION, which grants a +1 going forward) that I feared that having pre-generated characters might rob players of the chance to make someone they could really invest in. 

On the flipside, my family barely left TSL's version of "the tavern" even after three hours of gameplay. So, I mean, there does seem to be such a thing as too much investment in characters, too.

The other thing I learned in this first game is that the fighting mechanics of TSL are just clunky... and oddly punitive. For example, if you roll well on DARING (which is one of two main fighting stats) you can inflict a CONDITION (which is emotional) and do a couple of other moves from a prescribed list (none of which is "inflict physical damage" or, you know, whittle away at someone's life force, as in D&D.)  However, if you roll moderately well, the attacker has the opportunity, automatically, do the same to you. The CONDITIONS simply aren't fun. They're things like Anger, Hopelessness, Guilt, Fear, and Insecurity. You not only get actual mechanical penalties when you mark a Condition, but you also are expected to act out on them, emotionally. I find this kind of... well, the best word is, unfun. When I am feeling less charitable, I would call it controlling in a very icky way. Maybe I'm playing a Scoundrel who is some version of a swashbuckler, do I really want to go around making people feel insecure and then maybe, if I roll poorly, have to break something important to me (<--an actual requirement of the rules) because I was given the Anger condition? NO. I want to be cool and daring (in the traditional sense) and defeat my enemies with a flourish!

In fact, it's clear, in many ways, that the TSL devs just don't want you to fight.  They have since made expanded fighting moves, which I haven't looked into yet, but, seriously WTF.

In general, I find that a lot of the playbooks in TSL are designed in a way to make what you might like about playing a particular type of character uncomfortable and unfun. Like a Beast, which is archetypically a werewolf or something similar, is penalized when they transform. They're required by the playbook (again, it's automatically checked) to confront the damage they do when in a rage. Which, again, okay, yes, maybe in a long running campaign that's worth exploring, but the title Thirsty Sword Lesbians sounds like a game where you are just supposed to have fun and be a bit over the top. Soul searching every single time you wolf-out (or have a berserker rage) is kind of only fun, if that's what you know you've signed up for. 

So, one of the other things I did after this initial game was write up a list of warnings for players. Like, play Beast if you like playing barbarians or werewolves or body-modded mechs or whatever, but be warned that part of the game mechanics does this weird thing to you. I also made explicit in that list that for the purposes of the one shot, those mechanics can be avoided if the player isn't into them! I will support people who want to lean into the soul searching, but also those who don't want to. I play to read over this a bit at the start of the game, but also just hand out a printed sheet with that info on it as part of handing out the playbooks. 

We'll see how well that works. 

Armed with all of this, I made a very short "Players Handbook" which I gave to my regular Wednesday night D&D group in advance of running the one-shot a second time. I also came to the first session (and yeah, like all one-shots, this one just refuses to be done in one) with a pile of pre-generated characters and several of them got picked up and seemed to be embraced and enjoyed by the players. One of the mechanics I was able to write into the pre-generated characters was this other odd, somewhat clunky thing called STRINGS. Strings are supposed to be imagined as "heart strings" and, among other things, you can spend them in order to get an NPC to do what you want, etc., etc. When I generated a set of characters, I made sure to give them a string on at least one NPC so that I could also streamline some of my storytelling? Like, the opening scene is at a internet cat cafe and there is a barista there and by giving a string on this NPC, I can drop in a bit of information that this player might already know about the business, the person, etc. I have to write all this up on their character sheet, but TSL has form-fillable PDFs which you can get without the art. Without the art taking up a huge amount of space, there's lots of room for a GM to write extra stuff.  This worked out particularly well as one of the players at my D&D group picked up the Trickster character who l decided has a string on literally everyone... by chance the person who picked this up is our usual GM, and so I basically had a co-story teller.

I mean, in PbtA games the players are way more co-story tellers than they are in a lot of other traditional systems, but I could really rope the Trickster in to all the scenes because I could feed them information the already knew by virtue of having a String.

So, that was useful to learn.

I will say that after all my complaints of this system, I have to take a second to note that my mostly cis, straight D&D group embraced Thirsty Sword Lesbians with GUSTO. They immediately understood this was a go big or go home kind of game, played their characters larger than life (biggest kudos to my Scoundrel, who rolled with having "one in every port" with wild abandon) and leaned into the emotional/role-playing parts in very surprising and unexpected ways. I did not actually expect such heavy use of Emotional Support (<--yes, an actual mechanic) to get used so often and so WELL.

I honestly was not expecting a group of tried and true 5e folks to be as DOWN with the loosey-goosey-ness of TSL. Our rules guy (who happened to be playing the Scoundrel) and the player who played the Nature Witch were really great at helping me figure out was to flip some of the clunkiness of the rules to storytelling advantages. And, I mean, honestly, we had an absolute BLAST playing this, despite all of its flaws. 

It was a delight to run this game with them--and, in fact, they not only requested a part two (even though I managed to lead them by the nose to a possible conclusion after four hours), they now want a promise of a part three whenever they need/want a break from our regularly scheduled 5e.  

With the D&D group, I learned some practical things, like how to organize my notes better, and as I say above, some better ways to utilize certain mechanics. Steph (the Nature Witch in this game), in particular, gave me the advice that even though the rules say "answer the question" the GM does have the discretion to answer via body language, facial expressions or other more subtle clues, rather than just spoiling some plot point (which admittedly I was knowingly doing in the first session of the one-shot because I really wanted to get them to The End--which, of course, we never did.) But, this did remind me that even if people are signing up for a one-shot at a con, most experienced players are aware that they might not get to the thrilling conclusion. I can also just be explicit at the start of the game and note that while this game CAN be finished in one, four hour session, in many ways, if we're doing it right, it won't be--since the game is supposed to be about the players role-playing and having feelings and relationships and just generally having fun. The plot, in many ways, is secondary to that, and that's how it's SUPPOSED to be.

Steph even made fan art of her character. Just to be clear this is art she'd found and colored--she was a little disappointed not to be able to find more body positive options, but... at any rate, I was so... chuffed? Like, it's so cool that this group so willingly embraced the whole concept.


Steph's Nature Witch, Michaela. 

Another Star Trek Adventure's: RPG fic to scroll past.

I've explained before that our game runs a LOT of NPCs (non-player characters) as though they are full players. I really like this approach with a starship, because it feels more like an episode, where you might wander away from the main folks and, say, hang out with Chekov or Sulu. Or, you know, get to meet the ship's historian...

One of our players, bcholmes is especially good at running random characters that we need on an away team and imbuing them with That One Trait that makes them perfectly memorable. In the fic below the cut, I must give her all the credit creating our Vulcan Sociologist, Shoval, who is obsessed with spreadsheets. BC is also our captain, so in a way this fic is my NPC interacting with all of her creations.

None of these characters appear in any of the zillion Star Trek shows. But, if you've been reading these since I first started posting them, this is a return to our Vulcan Counselor, Sular.

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( my weird little fic )

Time to skip, if you don't care about my silly adventuring party!

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 Not much to report from last night, unless you're interested in what desert I made? I found a recipe that used a can of pumpkin, and so I made these kind of cakey pumpkin-spiced and chocolate chip things that Dan announced were, "half way to scone," and I think he was right about that. I wasn't thrilled with that part of them, but they tasted great. So, I will consider them at least a partial win.

The story of The Caravan continues below in Idriyl's latest letter home.(Also, if you're wondering why I am bringing characters not in the party into this story it's because we are using a character tree as part of this game, so I have pre-generated Idriyl's sister Ave and the bastard son who is mentioned in this missive as PCs, in case Idriyl dies or... I guess the party gets tired of him, or we want to switch out for funsies, etc.) Also, I keep not knowing how to spell my own character's name, thank you dyslexia. I think I've settled on this spelling since I am pronouncing it: ID-RE-YELL. 

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