Author: Wren

Tabletop Highlight: Breaks, Hiatuses, and How to Fill the Time Between

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Like any Dungeons and Dragons group, or any tabletop gaming group for that matter, mine occasionally has a few weeks where we aren’t able to get enough people together for a gaming session. It happens more frequently with my group than with most given that my group is only three players so even one missing player breaks my “more than two-thirds of the players must be present to run a session” rule. At the same time, when I’m incredibly stressed like I have been for the past few weeks, I am not up to running the game even though I usually still want to. I learned not to push it on those days long ago, because they’re inevitably the days when the players get some idea stuck in their head and I’ve gotta re-do half the plot and story I had planned on the spot, even if we’re well past the point when I thought I’d have to change anything like that around. They always find a way.

It’s always a struggle to figure out how to handle gaps like this. If you’re at a plot-critical moment, it gets really difficult to keep the tension and anticipation going when you don’t meet for a month. If you’re between big moments or the players are at a point where they must decide what to do next, then it is relatively simple to skip time since all they’ll need is a refresher. If it is at all possible to time your gaps so they fall at moments like those, I recommend doing it. That being said, most gaps aren’t planned ones but one-week skips that wind up incidentally getting longer, so here are some ways to help fill time between sessions.

The easiest way is to find a way to have smaller one-off sessions so each of the players gets a chance to do something integral to the story that’s unfolding. This won’t work if they’re in the middle of a dungeon or if you didn’t end the session at a point where the various characters can temporarily go their separate ways. This is a great time for rogues to do stealth missions or for the diplomatically inclined to take the time to get to know the local gentry. Even the more mercenary characters can make connections, even if they’re just with the various mercantile forces in the area. If you’ve got a role-play heavy campaign, there’s no such thing as too many connections. If your players tend to be more interested in being murder-hobos than role-players, you can easily make up a small encounter or two that will give them a chance to cut loose while waiting for the plot to resume.

Another thing you can do is more or less assign them homework. Maybe they have some connections they should contact that will help them in this situation. Have them write out a dialogue that represents this interaction and make sure to give them something for it, maybe a bonus on a future skill check, a minor item that will come in handy, or just a smidgen of role-playing XP. This is especially useful if you’re doing a role-play heavy campaign because it lets the players get more into their character and also provides you with more information about their characters that you can then figure out how to work into the game later on.

If you’re looking for something that’s less work for the dungeon master, I suggest assigning them a text-based interaction. There’s probably a decision or two they need to role-play and they can do it via text instead of taking up time at the next session. If it’s a big decision or something that’s going to spark a lot of debate, then it’s even better to get it out of the way before the session so you all can get down to figuring out what happens next. This is useful to you because you don’t need to monitor the text conversation and can just check in on it from time-to-time or read it all whenever you feel up to it. Alternatively, and you should never reveal this to your players (so stop reading this London, David, and Daniel, and just start at the top of the next paragraph), you give them a text discussion to role-play and then you never read it. If it isn’t a super important discussion, you can just skim it for any important bits or let your players bring up the highlights in conversation. That last bit is particularly easy if you live with one or more of your players and they love talking about the game (I told you to stop reading this, David).

Another thing you can do if you’re willing to surrender a little control and need something that takes the burden off of you is have one of the players propose a little side-mission or adventure they can run. It keeps things in your world and will likely be at least tangential to the plot you’re running, but you should definitely work through what that player wants to run if you’re going to let them do it in your game world since you want to make sure they aren’t going to cut off something you’ve been saving. I don’t really recommend this option much because I’ve seen it go wrong more often than right, but it’s definitely an option. If you’re co-running a game with someone or if one of your players is a good DM, then it gets much less risky, but you definitely still need to sit down and talk to them about it before you give them the go-ahead.

As I said, it’s always better if you don’t need to find a way to fill a bunch of time without game sessions, but I guarantee that there will come a time when you will need to get through a gap at an inconvenient time. If you do something else to bridge gaps like this one, I’d love to hear what that is. Please share it in the comments or shoot me an email!

The Edge of Sleep

Wren 2 Comments

Half-dreamt thoughts on the edge of sleep. Little things seen out of the corner of your eyes. A double-take revealing nothing extraordinary. A memory of a moment in the future, forgotten until it happens.

“Anxiety” they said, “manifesting as insomnia and psychosis.” Sleep studies, sleeping pills, and sleep aids.

“You brain is just firing neurons. There’s nothing to worry about.” Pills, therapy, and even meditation, all to fix an imbalance that never budged.

“It’s a form of schizophrenia. We can figure it out.” More pills, more therapy, but also a treatment center this time.

Whispered conversations on the edge of hearing. Reports handed to parents with only the occasional word revealed to me. The knowledge they talked about me like I wasn’t there anymore and there was nothing I could do to convince them otherwise.

But it was all real. There were cracks in the world, slowly letting the magic and majesty of the old world back in. Atlantis had sunk, but not in water.

Now, after millenia, it was coming back, guided by creatures that looked like the worst nightmares of the woman in the cell next to mine whose wordless screams of pain and fear no words could have described better.

There was one other girl who knew. She showed up after I did but her family never visited. They kept us apart. “It just feeds your psychosis” they would say.

By the time they believed us, it was too late. The wards were sealed and they waited for the Atlanteans to get around to them before taking out the only people who could have stopped them.

It was easy. We were locked in cells and restrained in jackets. A flash of light and it was over.

I have that memory-dream every night, but no one believes me.

Saturday Morning Musing

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We’ve all been there. Someone you love, perhaps a friend, or maybe just someone who shares a social circle with you, posts something on Facebook. It’s some alarmist post about candy-flavored crystal meth or the dangers of dihydrogen-monoxide. Maybe it’s something political, accusing some public figure of operating a human trafficking ring out of the basement of a single-story, basement-less pizza parlor. Heck, maybe they bought into the “QAnon” bullshit and think “The Storm” is about to drop the hammer on every politician they’ve been told to hate. You don’t really believe it, or maybe you do because that candy-flavored crystal meth thing seems like just the sort of horrible shit a no-good drug dealer would get up to in order to start reeling in a bunch of child customers. The point is, the pictures are really sad and the idea sounds just plausible enough that you share it to, or maybe you just think about it for now but then decide to share it later after you’ve seen it come up a few more times.

This is why I’ve temporarily (with the option of taking it permanent) deactivated my Facebook account. There’s just so much absolute garbage getting chucked around the web by people who would rather just share whatever horrible, terrifying thing they read to be on the safe side. It’s not like it costs them anything to click that “Share” or “Retweet” button. They just pass it along in case it might be true like someone refusing to take a stance on whether or not they believe ghosts exist because it’s immaterial to trying to address why all the lights on that side of the theater keep burning out so quickly. Except it’s not really the same, is it? If you don’t state whether or not you believe in ghosts, you’re effectively ending a conversation. It’s not like you’re going to walk around yelling that you don’t want to say you don’t believe in ghosts just in case they’re real, you just believe it, share it with people who have some common experiences with you, and move on. When you share stuff on social media, it appears to be an endorsement of sorts and other people who value your opinion will believe something they otherwise would not.

Don’t worry, I’m not just going to complain about this today! I have a solution! The rest of this post is dedicated to giving you some tips to figure out if something is true or not. I will also make a few blanket statements that you can take as true just so we can get them out of the way. First, vaccines don’t cause autism, though I will say the debate still goes on about whether or not autism causes vaccines. Additionally, the world isn’t fucking flat. I’m not going to cite this one because I will reach across the internet and belt you one or, in less hyperbolic terms, just block you if you ever argue that the world is flat. Google or even Wikipedia will provide all the evidence you need for that one and it isn’t difficult to find unlike good sources for the vaccines thing now that the anti-vax movement has learned how to market itself on the internet.

The first thing you should look for on a Facebook post of dubious fact is the original poster. Almost every asinine thing that shows up on your timeline was posted by some random person and then shared repeatedly until it made its way to your wall. If you can find the original post, you will often discover some interesting information. The few times I’ve actually been unsure enough to look, the original poster has had a lot of “fake profile” flags. Usually their username is random (you can check that by looking at the URL of their page in your browser), they have some random assortment of jobs and such that make little sense. They also generally don’t have a lot of friends or old photos of themselves. Additionally, their profiles are usually pretty open to the public as well, so it makes it easy to realize there isn’t much information attached to that profile other than inflammatory comments about some kid getting his mouth blown up by grape-flavored crystal meth. If that doesn’t settle it one way or another, give the story itself the sniff test. No actual drug distributor is going to great crystal meth in fifteen different flavors and sell exclusively to children for so little money it’s laughable to event consider.

If all that fails, or if the post originates in a news site for one particularly hard-leaning side of the media or another, check out Snopes.com. Most of the time, for all the big controversies, anyway, Snopes will investigate the controversy, rate its truthfulness, and provide a ton of information available to the public that backs up their rating. I’ve yet to see Snopes actually get something wrong and searching their website doesn’t show any promising results. Searching on google provides me with a list of results that themselves could use a check on Snopes, so I’m comfortable saying the site is reliably accurate.

If the post is on Twitter and it’s making the rounds through your various friend groups, Snopes is still a good place to check, but actually following it back to the first tweet and discovering the context of the quoted tweet will shed a lot of light on the quote itself. Additionally, a good thing to check is the profile of the person sharing it on your time and the profile of the person who originally posted it. You can usually tell whether or not either person is a trustworthy source by the contexts of their profile blurb, the things they like, and what they tend to comment on or retweet. If you find any conspiracy theories are aren’t shared as an example of the moronic things people sometimes believe, then I suggest ignoring them and everything they share entirely.

Probably the biggest rule is to think critically about everything you read. If it feels suspicious, then it’s probably fake. Not everything will be fake, of course, but a lot of the shit that passes through five meme groups, a profile for long-term child-rearing advice, and some kind of group that has a name like “The blankity-blanks for the unification of blankness” is probably not trustworthy. So much of it is the political/social equivalent of the emails that claimed you’d die if you didn’t send the email on to twenty more people before the next time you went to the bathroom. Find yourself a few trusted news sources or news aggregates (I prefer direct sources, though most of the aggregators tend to be good at providing direct links) and stick with them rather than what Mr “Aree-al Mahn” posts to Facebook.

Fall

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Dawn in Fall is my favorite time of day.
The soft, warm colors paint the sky
As I clear the sleep stains from my mind
And my eyes gradually adjust
To take in the waking world.
The crisp chill air fills me as wind blows
The orange and pink splattered clouds
From one horizon to another.

Dusk in Fall is my favorite time of day.
The bright colors of late afternoon
Drain from the sky as my work worn eyes
Slowly adjust to the fading light
And my exhausted mind stirs anew.
The smoke scented air hangs heavy and cool
While heavy cold blues appear, descending
Until day has stilled and night reigns above.

The start of Fall is my favorite time of year.
The memory of heat and humidity lingers
Like a sheen of sweat on your forearms
And even the heavy frost of frozen mornings
Is a welcome reprieve from the cloying summer.
The quiet skitter of leaves on breeze
As the world begins to fall asleep
Lets me know that I can finally find peace.

The end of Fall is my favorite time of year.
The advent of snow and blistering cold
Wakes my mind like a dip in a frozen lake
Because there’s something in the failing fall
That tells me it is time to start moving.
The heavy weather gives me something
To push against as my mind roars a challenge
At the quietly dying world,
­­            As if to say “Not me.”
­­­                       “Never me.”

This Game was the Very Best

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All hyperbole and theme song references aside, Pokemon Blue was my introduction to handheld gaming and set me up for a lifetime of fun. It holds a very special place in my heart and I will always remember standing in my backyard, on the deck my dad had recently built (with the assistance of my uncles) while I powered on my very own copy of the game. I remember seeing the large, turtle-monster with the cannons sticking out of its back and thinking that was the coolest thing ever. I, of course, picked Bulbasaur as my starter Pokemon because a frog-plant monster seemed even cooler. Also, one of my friends said it got this move called solarbeam and, at the time, that was the most badass thing I could think of. Fire blast was pretty standard and hydro pump sounded kinda dull because my dad was a civil engineer and hydro pumps were things that just moved water around, so Bulbasaur was clearly the best option. Thus began my deep and abiding love for the grass type starter. The only Pokemon game since then where I’ve ever picked one of the other options has been Gen II (Silver/Gold/Crystal/HeartGold/SoulSilver) when I picked Cyndaquil because I was watching the anime at the time and Cyndaquil was my favorite of Ash’s Pokemon.

To get the first part of this nostalgia trip under way, I honestly miss the old days. Back before the internet made it possible to nail down the exact appearance percentage of all the Pokemon in every clump of grass, all you had was your friends. You found everyone with a version of the game, red or blue, and compared notes about where you found each Pokemon. Eventually, someone splurged for a walk-through and then everyone passed it around, trying to figure out where to find the best Pokemon. Then someone got a link cable and you all clamored to trade with each other until someone finally captured all 150 Pokemon, earning them the neighborhood crown until someone else revealed the secret to getting Mew. I was never the first to catch them all, for any version or generation of the game, and I’d never gotten a Mew in my life until Pokemon Go came out, but I was one of the best at figuring out where to get all the pokemon or remembering how to use the glitches so you could use Master Balls on Safari Zone Pokemon.

Back in Gen I, and even in Gen II, the games seemed so much simpler and more appealing. There was no meta to care about, no one even knew IVs or EVs existed, and everyone who tried a link battle with their friends inevitably lost to the other person’s team of level 100 Pokemon or their level 100 Mewtwo, specifically in the battles where we agreed no one would us Pokemon trained up using the Rare Candy glitch since they’d always pretend they’d leveled him up honestly and nothing beat a level 100 Mewtwo even with Same Type Attack Bonus boosted moves (Parasect was your best bet, but even that couldn’t hack it with a forty level difference). Back then, the games told a story and we got to watch the world and the people inside it change from one game to the next and even battle our previous player once we beat all of Silver or Gold.

Even setting aside the “crotchety old man” stuff, I miss the wild rumors that would circulate about the games. The wild speculation we all engaged in about Lavender Town and the ghost Pokemon you fought. The first Pokemon games coincided with my friends and I starting to get our first opportunities to access the internet and one of us inevitably came across some of the original “creepypasta” rumors about the first Pokemon game and we’d delightfully terrorize each other with stories about the old man in Lavender town killing all your Pokemon or the horrors of Missingno if you actually capture it. We all learned glitches we could use to duplicate Pokemon and convinced gullible people to do them since they had a tendency to delete all your save data instead.

The thing was, there was a community around the games and it lasted for years. Even as my friends and I get the new games, the feeling just isn’t the same. I’m still the best when it comes to knowing where to find Pokemon and I tend to have the highest Pokedex completion percentage, but the way the games are set up now makes competition pointless because you either cheat, trade your rare Pokemon away, or go to events to get limited legendary Pokemon that aren’t available through normal gameplay. Right now, there’s a “year of legendaries” event going on and my initial plans of taking advantage of it every month quickly fell apart as life intervened. Now I have no way to get those Pokemon unless I trade away something far rarer since everyone who has one knows they can ask for anything they want because it’s easier to restart and replay the entire game than get a specific event Pokemon. Sure, Mew was an event Pokemon and Celebi was as well, so it’s been going on since the beginning, but it’s so incredibly difficult to get them all now that it would take years to get all the event Pokemon and I don’t even want to know how much many in travel expenses.

I definitely enjoy the new games, don’t get me wrong, but I feel like I enjoyed Pokemon as a whole more back when I didn’t know as much and when I had a little less information available to me. When things were simple and I played under the covers of my bed using the plug-in game light I told my parents was for car rides, Pokemon seemed like this amazing world that I would step into and explore. Now, because of the meta, because of Pokemon natures, and because of the ever pressing need to figure out where I need to go each month to get event Pokemon, it’s much less a world for me to explore and much more of a part-time job that doesn’t reimburse your travel expenses. I’ll still play each one as it comes out (though I might take a pass on the “Let’s Go” series coming out soon) because I still get hours and hours of entertainment out of it, not to mention assistance with my insomnia issues, but I miss the days when it felt more real to me.

To once again continue the theme of reflecting on old games, today’s post is about Pokemon! Listen to me wax nostalgic, play the part of a grumpy old main yelling about change, and consider the pitfalls of the more modern games.

If I Had to Pick a Webcomic as a Religion, I Would Pick Erfworld

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I’ve been putting off this review for months because this is my favorite story and I don’t want to sell it short. I want to be as charming and witty as this webcomic is and I just don’t have it in me since I’ve been constantly struggling just to keep up with the stuff I need to do, much less the stuff I want to do. I’ve written and deleted this post ten times over at this point because I can never come close to expressing how much I love this comic and how much Rob Balder, the writer and creator, inspires me. I feel like there’s some perfect version of this review inside me and I just keep failing to bring it out. Ultimately, though, a finished review that’s “alright” is better than the “perfect” review that never gets written. Anyway, as the protagonist of Erfworld–a man named Parson Gotti (just rearrange the letters a bit)–said, “We try things. Occasionally they even work.”

Erfworld is a comic about a man, the aforementioned Parson Gotti–aka Lord Hamster, who gets sucked into a different world by a spell created by people to be named later. The “side” of Gobwin Knob, ruled by Stanley the Tool (formerly Stanley the Plaid), paid a fortune for a spell to summon the perfect warlord, as defined by a handful of people who all had very different ideas of what that meant. Nevertheless, Parson arrives and sets to work with a will, slowly learning everything he doesn’t know he needs to know in order to take on what feels a lot like the whole world from the disadvantageous position of a long losing streak. Joining him is a memorable cast of detailed characters from a resigned necromancer, an illusionist with arguably too few marvels, a conjurer who hates violence, and a telepath whose moral ambiguity isn’t as much of an asset as she wants to think it is. Leading (debatably) them all is a man who just so happens to be incredibly short, incredibly short-tempered, and frustratingly short of common sense. Throw in some magic weapons with godly powers, a war for the very soul of Erfworld, a power dynamic that resists change, and you’re finally scratching the surface of this amazingly complex story.

While most of the world works according to some basic mechanics best compared to a miniatures game (units form “stacks”, move a certain number of terrain “hexes,” and have certain “specials” that modify their unit type such as “Flying” or “Archery”), the magic system is far more complex than most I’ve encountered and my descriptions of the various casters in the above paragraphs are vast over-simplifications for the sake of expediency. The necromancer is actually a “croakamancer,” which is a subset of the “naughtymancy” class of magic. I’d explain the others, but you’re honestly better off just reading the comic for yourself because the time it’d take to explain the magic system in a way I’d find satisfactory is greater than the time it’d take for you to read everything on the website. Not to mention that I’d have to revise it several times while writing it because we’re constantly learning more about magic in Erfworld and old assumptions and “facts” are constantly being set aside as we realized the fallacies of our assumptions. The one thing you do need to know is that the rules of the world are incredibly important, much more concrete than the rules of our world, and potentially exploitable. If you’re a gamer and you look at this story from the perspective of a power gamer looking for an exploit, you’ll find a lot of places for things to be used in a way the rule-writers likely didn’t intend. At the same time, Balder does an amazing job of breaking down what’s happening through text updates, character narration, and the detailed direction he gives the artists so that you don’t need to be a power gamer to understand or see what’s going on. All you really need is either a strong knowledge of pop-culture or strong Googling skills.

The plot itself is both pretty standard but also incredibly open-ended and unpredictable. Parson is summoned to serve his ruler and save the “side” of Gobwin Knob, but then what? The story carries on after plot wraps up and even the characters dealing with the fallout of how that concludes is only setting the stage for the appearance of even larger threats who all seem laser-focused on the fact that Parson is a player on the stage of Erfworld. Is Parson actually in a different universe, or did he have an aneurysm? Who are the bad guys in this story? What’s right and what’s wrong in a world where free will is a basically a special trait belonging only to a few units? What part does Fate play in the outcome of events and can it be circumvented or defeated? What does it mean to be the perfect warlord? All these questions and more are posed as the plot winds it way from one startling turn of events to another and, the further we go, the more we realize we’re not actually sure about the answers to those questions.

No one is the villain in their own story, but how do you tell a story about people who are trying to conquer the world through what seem like some pretty brutal means without making the readers dislike your protagonists? Is it enough to just give them someone worse to fight, and is that other someone actually worse or does it just seem like they are because we automatically sympathize with characters whose perspective we get to see? Only Balder has the answers to these questions, but it’s plain to see that he actually does have the answers to them. The way the story unfolds and the clever way he seeds foreshadowing into every major event is so detailed and complex that I can barely begin to comprehend the scope of his planning and work.

Behind the veneer of cutesy-sounding names and hilarious onomatopoeia is a harsh world full of difficult questions and the undeniable fact that only through death and war can any “side” survive. The often cute art of the comic hides an incredibly dark story of how far is “too far” and what’s justifiable in war, either as a defender or as an aggressor. Easily, the best part of this comic is the number of large and important questions it constantly raises and forces you to answer on your own. The characters in the comic find their own answers frequently, but that aren’t necessarily the answers we want since their answers are generally motivated by the desire for their side to win the war or come out on top. It can be difficult to keep track of what horrors each side has visited on each other because it feels like there’s a clear bad guy, but there are a few good guys who are only good because they’re willing to talk rather than fight. Peace isn’t really a permanent solution in Erfworld, but working for it seems like a better goal than just fighting all the time.

The art is amazing, even though it has changed rather frequently. The current artist team is by-far my favorite and I’m always excited for each new page because I can’t wait to pour over each page for all the hidden details they slip in. The often-changing artists are emblematic of the major struggle that has plagued Erfworld for a long time: an overabundance of tragedy. From the artist’s mother having cancer to the writer’s wife and one of the main employees of the website getting cancer, to stylistic differences with another artist, there’s a lot that has gone wrong for the comic as a whole and for Rob Balder in general. He’s been fairly open about everything since his fans are willing to stick by him throughout it all and have numerous times helped him come up with the money he needs to continue working on our favorite comic, but I still feel like most of those stories are his to tell, so I recommend checking out his news posts once you’ve read the whole thing. Regardless, his persistence and the way he’s always carried on with this story despite the hurdles he’s had to overcome has always inspired me to keep trying, even when I didn’t write for most of a year and considered giving up on it. I set the little statue of Parson I got from one of the Kickstarters next to my monitor and told myself “We try things. Occasionally they even work.” That is my all-time favorite quote from this comic (and that’s saying a lot because there are some real doozies here), and it has helped me not just get through the rough patches but stay focused when things were going well so I never took my good days for granted.

There aren’t a lot of stories I can say had a huge impact on my life and the number of writers I find truly inspiring is small enough that I can list them all on one hand, but Rob Balder and his wonderful story is at the top of both lists. If you want a story that will carry you along, with a cast of impeccable characters and a plot that will never leave you wanting, read Erfworld and bask in the glory that is one of the best stories I’ve ever read. Please, do us both a favor and start reading it now.

Coldheart and Iron: Part 31

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READ FROM THE BEGINNING

“Shit.”

“Tiffany?”

“I’m out of grenades and I’ve still got two doors to trap. You two got any?”

I let go of my rifle and rolled onto my back, unbuckling my belt as I moved to toss it to Tiffany who deftly caught it on the stump of her left arm. “Just make sure you bring the belt back. If we need to run, I’m going to need that to hold up my pants.”

“Marshall, you’re wearing a full-body snowsuit.”

I looked over at Natalie who was still steadily firing at any of the monsters that moved away from the main body attacking the Enclave. I shrugged, more for Tiffany’s sake than Natalie’s because her face was still pressed to the scope of her rifle. “It’s the principle of the thing, you know?”

Tiffany rolled her eyes and walked away. “If I’m not back in ten minutes, you two had better move.”

“How dare she disrespect me like that.” I rolled back onto my stomach with a huff. “She’s still only a trainee Wayfinder. She’s too new to disrespect me like that.”

“Shush, Marshall, I’m trying to aim.” Natalie fired again, taking out the monster I was settling my sights on. Without missing a beat, I swapped to the one behind it and, after a quick exhale, fired.

“How is that supposed to impact your aim?” I fired and took out another monster, this time pausing to watch the shattered metal fall to the ground before moving on to the next one. “You ears aren’t involved in aiming at this distance and I feel I have a right to prattle on if I want since it looks like everything’s going to hell.”

Natalie sighed, pausing after the exhale to take out a monster, and then leaned back to reload her rifle. “I know, Marshall. Just try to keep it down. There’s no reason to lead everything to our location any faster than shooting at them will.”

“I mean, the rifles are kind of a dead giveaway to anything with half a brain or whatever the monsters have.” I shot another two monsters in quick succession for emphasis. “Everyone more or less knows we’re here. I just hope we can make the jump to that building over there when the time comes.” I jerked a thumb at the building next to us, separated by about ten feet of open air. “It’s a good fifteen feet lower than us, sure, but we might just go through the floor or miss entirely.”

“Stop being such a pessimist, dear.” Natalie chambered the first round and got back to shooting monsters. “No one likes a pessimist.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You love and accept me just the way I am.” I took my last shot and then reloaded my gun, hands taking me through the familiar motion almost before I could think of what to do next. “Are you watching the time?”

“Yes. Seven minutes.”

“Neat. I’m gonna see if I got eyes on anything around us.” I grabbed a set of binoculars from my pack and started looking up the side streets east of the main force of monsters. There were still monsters wandering away from where they’d been penned in by the Enclave defenders, but most of them seemed intent on the hole in the wall one of them had created when it blew itself up. The other Wayfinders and sharpshooters were doing a good job preventing the monsters from flanking around the Enclave defenses, but I saw two more groups of bandits creeping up on various sniper nests.

“I hope the spotters are keeping an eye out.”

“It’s standard procedure, Marshall. Either they remember their training or they don’t. We can’t help them now.”

I dropped back to my stomach, lined up my rifle with the first group I’d seen, and shot one of the bandits in the chest. I looked through my scope at the bandits as they ran for their lives and saw the mess I made of the bandit I shot. “Whoops. I should change back to regular ammunition if I’m just shooting bandits.”

“Or you could keep firing on the giant mass of monsters and help us save the city, trusting the lives of the Wayfinders to the people protecting them who can’t fire on the monsters, anyway.” Natalie fired again and then reloaded, shooting me a glare I mostly ignored as I swapped out the heavier ammunition we used for the monsters with the standard, pre-collapse ammunition we used for bandits.

“Just one clip. Enough to let them all know they’re not as clever as they think they are.”

Natalie ignored me and went back to her shooting while I found the second group right below one of the sniper nests. I popped the bandit at the door in the head and watched the rest of the bandits flee. I spent the next five minutes finding groups of bandits and scattering them. When I was debating whether or not to keep shooting bandits, Tiffany showed back up and crouched down behind us.

“Doors are trapped and the bandits have entered the first floor. We’ll get a few of them on the way up since I double-trapped every route, but we’ll likely still need to defend this point.” Tiffany shrugged so that her gun fell into her arms and smiled wickedly. “I haven’t gotten much practice with this yet and I’d love to finally get back to business.”

“Or we just jump to the next building, pick a different sniper nest, and keep doing our job.” Natalie looked back at Tiffany and over at me. “Maximize our efficiency and do our best to keep the Enclave from getting swarmed.”

Tiffany was about to respond but I held up a hand. After Tiffany closed her mouth, I turned back to Natalie. “Is this you telling me that you think we still have a chance to hold?”

“I don’t know, Marshall. It’s been fifteen minutes since they blew a hole in the wall and it’s too soon to know anything for sure.”

“If you watched for a few minutes, would you have a better idea?”

“I could maybe make a few educated guesses, but that’s all they’d be. We’re still better off continuing to focus on the mission we started until the Enclave is clearly lost, no matter what I see.”

I nodded, thinking for a moment. “Alright. Tiffany, keep your focus on the bandits and let us know what they’re doing. If they make it to the doors soon, we’ll move out and jump to the next building. If we’ve got more time, I’d rather wait since I don’t like the idea of jumping unless we absolutely need to.”

Natalie nodded and got back to shooting as I reloaded my gun with the heavier ammunition. Tiffany looked at me for a moment and then shrugged. “I’ll try to set up an ambush point.”

“Sounds good.” I gave her a thumbs up and then let myself fall back into the rhythm of firing and reloading. I lost track of time as we continued shooting and so it caught me by surprised when I heard a bang and felt the building shake. I realized one of Tiffany’s traps had gone off and halted shooting for a minute to wait for the next one. When it didn’t go off, I went back to shooting but kept my ears open for anyone approaching.

A few minutes later, Tiffany came back, chuckling under her breath. “Turns out that there’s a weakness in the staircases. If the door blows up, it takes the landing with it and then it takes out three of the landings beneath it as well. I moved the grenades to another door and I’m going to booby trap as many doors and staircases as I can. We’re good for now.”

I gave her another thumbs-up but kept my focus on shooting monsters. To my left, Natalie’s steady firing stopped and I felt her pull the binoculars away from my side. “Going to look now?”

“Yeah. I’m hoping the fact that the monsters are still trying to flank the walls indicates that the Enclave’s defenders are holding their ground at the hole. If they are, we still have a chance.”

“Cool. Just let me know if we should move, otherwise I’ll keep shooting.” I returned my attention to my scope and kept firing, trying to keep my mind focused on my task as the seemingly endless stream of monsters made their way east of the main body, looking for a path over the wall. I lost myself in the motions again and I was once again brought back to reality by the rumble and shake of explosives going off somewhere in the building. My arms were stiff and the pile of magazines beside me had shrunk considerably. I looked around me and noticed that Natalie had gone back to firing a while ago, judging by the diminished size of her own ammunition stock. Behind me, Tiffany sat with her back to a wall.

“That’s one of the stairwells collapsing.” Tiffany gestured toward the interior of the building we were occupying. “Even if any of them survive, they’ll find another trap in every stairwell and once behind each door leading to this floor. I wouldn’t worry about them until we feel the blast wave of a trap on this floor going off.”

I nodded and stretched my arms out, moving them from side to side before pushing myself back from the ledge. Once I was safely out of sight from the battlefield stretching below me, I hauled myself into a sitting position and took a few sips of water from my canteen. “How long have we been at this?”

Natalie replied from her position. “Two hours and about fifteen minutes.”

“It’s been about an hour and a half since the first bandit group showed up here.” Tiffany tossed me a granola bar that I pensively chewed as I started calculating how many monsters we must have killed.

After a few seconds of getting nowhere, I abandoned it and turned to Tiffany. “How many bandit groups have attacked us? Is this only the second?”

“Yeah. We’re higher up than most of the other sniper nests and pretty far east of the main body. The bandits have to sneak past a ton of blind alleys, most of which could have a monster wandering through them at any given time. The other nests are much easier targets.”

“Shoot.” I filled my mouth with water and swished it around to get as much of the granola out of my teeth as possible while I thought. A few moments later, I had an idea. “How easy will it be to completely collapse the stairs so no one can get up or down?”

“Pretty easy.” Tiffany shrugged. “The only thing left entirely intact at this point is a fire escape and that cuts off a floor above the ground.”

“Neat.” I started digging through my backpack for my lantern. “Is everyone alright if I turn my attention on the bandits trying to attack the sniper nests and make us a target for every single one of them?”

“Sounds like a blast.” Tiffany smirked and stood up. “I’ll go trap the fire escape if you’ll give me your grenades, lieutenant.”

Natalie rolled over, slipped off her grenade belt, and slid it back to Tiffany. I looked over at her and offered her a sheepish smile that she returned. “‘Better us than them’, right?”

I nodded and started filling my snowsuit pockets with ammo. “I love that you get me.”

“I know.” Natalie winked at me and rolled back over to continue firing, accompanied by gagging noises from Tiffany.

Once I’d grabbed everything I could fit in my pockets, I snatched my rifle from the ground and retreated into the dim interior of the building, following Tiffany to another vantage point that was better suited to my task. After leaving me to get set up, Tiffany disappeared further into the building. Getting settled took a while longer than I would have liked, especially because I had to finish the magazine of heavy ammo first, but I was soon set up and shooting.

Any group of bandits I saw lost at least one person. They moved less predictably than the monsters did, so I missed a few shots, but the way they started creeping forward and using cover made it clear that they’d figured out someone in my area was targeting them. After setting aside my gun for a moment, I took the reflector out of my lantern and set it in the remaining window to my right. Satisfied, I went back to shooting bandits until I noticed every crew I saw was heading in our direction.

Soon, I couldn’t look through my scope without seeing a group of bandits approaching. As I counted them, my heart fluttered with the realization that at least half the group of bandits that we’d expected to attack the Enclave were now on their way to our location. Whoever had united them was pretty clever. Get the monsters to attack the Enclave, take out the snipers so more monsters make it into the Enclave, and then rush in once everyone was exhausted or most of the monsters had been destroyed. Simple and effective.

It was clear, though, that they hadn’t dealt with many Wayfinders, though. Or at least not big groups of them. As far as I could tell, most of the sniper nests were still operating and the ones that weren’t had likely stopped due to a lack of ammo rather than anything else. The bandits would have needed to send in more than six to ten people at once if they wanted to overwhelm our defensive positions and the groups clearly lacked much in terms of specific plans. They had communication between groups and a plan to take out sniper nests, but they just wandered around, looking into buildings, and approaching each nest they found with only their one small group since they never discovered that another group had already failed to take out the sniper nest.

Only after I got their attention did they all start to move like they had a plan. They all slowly started to converge on the building, moving from bit of cover to bit of cover. I took shots where I could, but I didn’t get many hits. I could still hear Natalie firing away several rooms down, so I started the second part of my plan. I pulled my gun and the reflector from my lantern away, packed up all my stuff, and turned on one of the walkie talkies I had in my pocket. I tied the communicate button down and dropped the little signal bomb at the edge of the room.

I sprinted back to Natalie’s side and started packing up all of our gear. As I clattered empty rifle magazines into my bags, Natalie looked over at me, a question in her eyes.

“Keep shooting, but let me know as soon as they start coming this way and how many of them do.”

“Marshall.” I turned away to grab the pile of magazines and loose ammo Tiffany had been combining during her down time. When I didn’t answer, Natalie spoke again. “What did you do, Marshall?”

“I turned on one of the walkie talkies we were given and tied the ‘talk’ button so it’d stay on.”

“What?”

“I am doing to the bandits converging on our position what they tried to do to us. They’ll surround the building, start trying to make their way up here, find the traps, try even harder, and then they’ll be surrounded by monsters.”

“So will we!” Natalie turned all the way around to face me. “Jumping to the next building won’t work when the monsters are here. They’ll just follow us! We won’t be able to sneak through the crowd of them even if they don’t spot us jumping to the next building.”

“Which is why we leave as soon as the bandits set off the first trap. I’m going to grab Tiffany, so just keep shooting. Keep track of how many of the monsters start coming our way.” I shoved the last of the magazines into a pack and then ran off down the hallway, almost bowling Tiffany over as she rounded a corner.

“Captain!”

“C’mon, Tiffany. We’re making the jump as soon as the first trap goes off.”

“What? What happened to making a glorious last stand here?”

I pulled her along with me, back to where Natalie was. “I’d rather take a chance at surviving since, if my plan works, it should buy the Enclave enough time to fix the hole in their wall.”

“What plan?”

Natalie appeared in the doorway to the blown out room we’d been using, lugging the packs behind here. “He set up a radio and every single monster not a part of the main press on the walls is heading our way. I estimate at least five hundred of them, and those are the ones directly west of us. I’m sure there are more to the north and south.”

“Cool.” I grabbed my pack, slung it on my back, and tightened all the straps until it was almost painfully gripping my chest. “Now let’s get ready to jump since the bandits won’t be far behi-”

The first explosion rocked the building, carrying with it the sound of shrieking metal. Tiffany shook her head and started toward what used to be a conference room with floor to ceiling windows. “Of course they went for the fire escape first.”

I helped Natalie get her pack on and then helped Tiffany tighten down her straps while we all jogged toward the spot we’d picked as our jump point. By the time we got there, another explosion had gone off and Tiffany was muttering a commentary on the bandit’s location as I sprinted toward the empty window pane and leapt.

I had a moment of open air and grey, cloudy sky as time stood still. I fought the urge to wave my arms and kept my body compact as I hung, exposed, in the air. Before my heart had a chance to sneak even one beat in, time came rushing back. The wind whistled in my ears, the light-grey blur of the mid-morning sky became the dark grey blur of an approaching ruined building, and I landed in the best roll that I could. I felt something give way as I made impact and then the grey faded to black as the world fell silent.

Tabletop Highlight: Subverting Expectations to Comedic Effect

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One of my favorite things to do in more limber storytelling formats is to find a way to set and then subvert expectations. If you read my flash fiction, you’ve seen me do it tons of times. What you don’t know is that subverting expectations is my favorite way to create comedic situations in my Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. It is difficult to create humor without some about of subverted expectation because most humor is derived from an unexpected outcome to a pose situation. For example, the joke “Three men are walking down the street. Two of them walk into a bar but the third one ducks.” takes the format of a “walks into a bar” joke and spins it on its head, subverting the expectation that the punchline was going to involve a situation inside a drinking establishment. Of course, explaining a joke removes the humor, so the above joke is no longer the bit of supreme wit it was before I started this post, but it illustrates the quick payoff most jokes depend on. If you wait too long for the punchline, it is a lot more difficult to make the joke stick the landing.

In Dungeons and Dragons, though, the Dungeon Master has a little more leeway. For instance, in a comedic game I read a couple of weeks ago, the players were selected to participate in some kind of game by forces beyond their ken. As a result, they were pushed through a portal into a different world where they were given a problem to solve. In this case, they stepped out of a preparation room and into a Dr. Seuss world and were immediately approached by the Lorax who requested their aid in defending a grove of trees. Since all of the players knew the Dr. Seuss story, they immediately leapt to the yellow-mustachioed creature’s aid. They charged right up to the giant machine ripping up trees and woodland creatures as it belched smoke into the sky and accosted the man operating it.

As it turns out, he was just some guy doing his job. When the found out that the manager was in his operations booth off at the edge of what turned out to be a surprisingly rectangular forest, they went to discuss the problem with him, all the while animals continued to run into the now-idling machine. There, they found out that the company the manager represented owned the land and had specifically grown these trees to be harvested along with helping environmental groups restore the natural forests they had previously destroyed following the Lorax’s successful campaign to raise public awareness of the environmental impact of the loss of all those natural habitats. Unfortunately, this was the point when the party decided that the smoke was still a probably and started attacking the machine and its poor operator. If they’d continued seeking a peaceful solution, they’d have discovered that the smoke was actually beneficial to the environment given that the atmosphere of this strange planet in an alternate universe had a different chemical makeup than the atmosphere of earth. Instead, they attacked the poor operator, nearly killing him, and then actually killed the Earth Elemental cop who came to arrest them. After stealing a stun baton from one of the security officers and grabbing the badge the Earth Elemental dropped, they declared victory and then assisted the Lorax and his guerrilla army chase the rest of the company off the property before stepping through a door to their next waiting room.

Not only was this story itself a subversion of expectation (you should have seen their faces when I described the Lorax and his guerrilla fighters appearing from amongst the trees right after the Earth Elemental crumbled into rubble and a copper badge), but it’s part of a broader effort on my part to set the stage for future encounters in this “shiggles” campaign. I take something fairly simple and clear-cut, flip it on its head, and let them find out how far astray their assumptions have led them. After this, they’re generally a little more on-guard and I can actually break out the big guns. In a previous shiggles campaign, I had their characters wind up in a room that looked strikingly like the one they were in and, after the first remarks about how dumb it was that I was going that meta subsided, revealed that they’d actually stepped onto the elemental plane of Generic Suburban Houses that all contractors of pre-developed neighborhoods summon their houses fun. After that, they visited Carpenter’s Hell, and wound up accidentally stepping into a Harry Potter book before visiting a Faerie’s Demesne which was actually from a book none of them had read so no one got the reference.

The whole point of subverting their expectations constantly was to get them to abandon them completely so they would live entirely in the moment. If you can get your players to exist in that mental space, it is easier to keep them involved in the story you’re telling and the jokes you’re setting up. They stop worrying about what they should do or how they should behave and simply act, littering the campaign with easy places for you to insert humor or for it to arise naturally out of the group dynamic as they go about whatever little tasks you’ve given them. You need to keep subverting their expectations in order to maintain that mood, constantly flipping the script on them so they never feel like they’ve figured you out. If you stop or let things go too long, or maintain a joke for too long, then you step away from the comedy and back toward the drama of Dungeons and Dragons. For instance, my last “shiggles” campaign had a character all of the players loved, called Blornth the Tuba Player. Because they literally abandoned everything they were doing to follow him around, my ability to subvert expectations was pretty much limited to having Blornth do ridiculous stuff and that started to get stale quickly. I’m certain that, if the campaign had continued for much longer, they’d have all gotten sick of him and we wouldn’t be sharing memes about tuba players and musician gods while lamenting the end of the last campaign.

Comedy, like wisdom, needs to change and grow in order to stay fresh. If you stick with one thing for too long, it grows stale. So throw a curveball at them and, as soon as they think they’ve got you figured out, throw in a fastball just to watch them doubt themselves while trying to figure out were the trick is. It’ll be funny for everyone, especially you.

Spiritual Hard Hat

Wren 1 Comment

“‘It’s a dangerous business, Frodo.’”

“Shut up, John.”

“‘You never know wh-’”

“Goddammit!” I spun to face my friend and slapped the hard hat from his hands. “You think I’m joking? You think this is funny?”

John picked up his hard hat. “I mean, you said this was a spiritual hard hat, Mel, and went on about heeding your every word.” John spun the hat in his hands. “What else am I supposed to think?”

“You’re supposed to take me seriously!” I grabbed the hat out of his hands and stuck it on his head. “This is your first day. I didn’t get you this job so you could get yourself killed.”

“Sure, but this is the part where you tell me to get thirty feet of shoreline or the left-handed screwdriver. There’s always hazing and I’m not falling for it. What kind of desk job requires you to wear a hard hat?”

“This one!” I sighed. “I’m not hazing you, John.”

“Then why is my spiritual hard hat also a physical hard hat that looks like every other hard hat I’ve ever seen?”

“Because it’s been imbued with spiritual protection. Did you not pay attention to the briefing you sat through this morning?”

“Yeah, but the dude was in it, clearly.”

“If you don’t take this seriously, your spirit is going to be crushed.”

“Mel, your attempt at joking is crushing my spirit.”

“Fine.” I gave him a push. “Have it your way. You signed the waivers.”

John took off his hard hat, smirked, and stepped into the office floor. I watched his smirk fade as he noticed every employee was wearing a hard hat. A moment later, he slipped it on and turned back toward me. “Really?”

“Really.” I walked up to him. “I’ll show you your desk.”

Saturday Morning Musing

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It took a while, but I think I finally figured out the complex feelings I had about where I grew up when I helped my parents out last month (mentioned in this post). Since I left after my first winter break during college, I haven’t gone back to visit for more than a week or so at a time. I stayed at my college for almost every break after that, working and living in the dorms aside from the few holidays I went back, like Christmas or Thanksgiving. I lived in the dorms and got used to staying quietly by myself when the campus was almost completely deserted aside from the foreign exchange students during the holidays. My little college town became my home, even though I moved at least once a year, from one dorm to another. The campus became the place I belonged and I stopped calling my parents’ house “home.”

I realized during one of my recent meditations that I no longer even think of their house as home. My old neighborhood is no longer my home. It’s the place I grew up and haven’t done more than visit in several years. I don’t really recognize it anymore. I know where it is and I’ll always know how to get there, but it’s just as foreign as the neighborhoods I used to park in when I drove myself to high school. I can navigate through it and I’ve got a basic idea of what it looks like, but I don’t really feel any connection to the place. I’ve still got that for the actual house I grew up in, but it fades a little bit as my parents make changes or slowly replace parts of the house. When I was spending time with my sister, I realized I didn’t know where anything was kept anymore and that I was essentially a stranger in the kitchen where I’d learned to cook.

I’m sure that’s a feeling many adults have to cope with from time to time, and I’m sure there are people who have similar (but different) feelings about visiting their parents because their parents no longer live in the home they grew up in. I even sort of expected it as I grew in college and started to see what it meant to me to have a place I’d chosen to belong. I wasn’t surprised when I finally felt it, just uncertain as to what it meant and why I felt it.

I’ve spent most of my adult life with a lot of difficult emotions tied to the place I grew up. I even spent a lot of time seeing it as the same place with the same people I’d left behind. It was static in my eyes, unchanging and always representing what I’d endured. Since my last non-holiday visit, I’ve been working on letting go of the emotions and memories connected to all those past painful moments, so I can finally start to see my family as they’ve become since then. I think finally seeing the places I grew up, the streets I had walked down and the yards I had cut through, as someplace foreign to me is a sign that I’ve finally started to achieve that. Those places are no longer static, no longer a time capsule to a past I want to leave behind. I feel like I’m seeing them for the first time since I essentially am, now that I’m not seeing them as they were a decade ago.

I still have a long way to go, though. I’ve gotten better about letting my family be whoever they are now, but it can be difficult to avoid the old habits and to not see them as the same people when some of the old problems still crop up. For instance, I didn’t find out my parents had gotten rid of their landline until I called it and was told the number was no longer in service. Panicking, I called every member of my immediate family with a cell phone and no one answered. Eventually, one of my sisters called back and explained what had happened. This was the summer I’d officially moved out for good, so it created feelings of disconnection from my family. It was startling to realize I hadn’t called the landline in months and that we hadn’t even talked in that time. The same sort of thing happened with the trip my parents went this summer, which was the whole reason I was in Chicago to spend time with my sister. I hadn’t gotten the group text or emails they’d sent out to the rest of my siblings about their trip and the need for us to lend a hand with our youngest sister, so I had made plans during most of the time they were gone. It was rather frustrating to learn about it only a couple of weeks before they needed help, and a bit late too since I’d fallen asleep that afternoon and missed the conference call they’d set up the week before.

That being said, I’m the only one who hasn’t lived near or with them for at least part of the year. Two of my siblings permanently live in the same general area and one of my siblings stays with them between employment engagements. The youngest is still in high school. I’ve lived in a different state for several years and only visit on the major holidays for the most part. I’m not much of a phone caller and I’ve always been pretty independent, so we don’t talk. It’s pretty easy for me to miss out on a lot of big news as a result. It can be frustrating at times, but I could also make a point to call my mom or dad once a week and I do not. I’m sure they’d love to hear from me, so it’s not like it’s all their fault or anything. It’s just difficult to remind myself to view my family as they are now rather than as I remember them when we’re having the same problems I remember us having.