While I’ve not had as much time lately due to all the things I have to do in Final Fantasy 14 to help settle the community and situate some kind of new normal, I do really want to get back to playing Avowed. I’ve been having a great time as a Gun Mage and enjoying the sort of build/rebuild system of leveling up that allows me to effectively tweak how I do things every time I get to a new tier of power and should probably stop using weaker spells. I mean, I still have the drain life spell because that’s part of my “ultimately sustainability” maneuver, but really mostly because I have the bonus that locks down my target. It’s nice to have a panic button, you know? Freeze whatever moster or hulking man is charging me, looking to obliterate me in one hit because I’m a weak little noodle with only brainpower and determination to see me through the day. I’ve also gotten deep enough into the story that I think I know what’s going on (and have a suspicion that I might be shaping some amount of it? But maybe that’s just good writing to make me FEEL like I have more control than I do) and have only reloaded a save once because I had made a note to go do a thing, had to deal with my FF14 free company imploding, and promptly forgot in the hubbub that I’d made a note to go do a thing until after it was too late. Which I’ll give myself without any guilt. That was a wild, exhausting few days.
Continue readingStorytelling
Once More Waiting For Dorohedoro
Dorohedoro season 2 has concluded. At only eleven episodes long, it feels distinctly shorter than the first season, but also a little bit longer if only because it does not spend the first few episodes spinning its wheels. While it is clear that the information within those first episodes is important in retrospect, season 2 does not rely on the long view of the series to make its episodes relevant. Every seemingly disjointed moment, all of the action and reaction that weaves through its first episodes, comes together quickly, breaks apart, and then returns for the conclusion of the season. It is incredibly clear, from the pacing of the season and the final beats of the last few episodes, that there is more to come. Unlike the first season, which left on a a downbeat, a retreat from the action and a moment of setup for the long-haul, season 2 ends on the climb up to what feels like the story’s finale. I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that the next season (which has been formally announced even if no other information has been provided yet) is only going to be six episodes. There may be plenty more story to tell that I can’t anticipate, but it really feels like we’re heading toward the end of things at the pacing that Dorohedoro likes to take.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: Worldbuiling Play Has Concluded
My players and I, minus one who was not feeling well, have met for the last worldbuiling session. We played a quick game of Sentinel (the second half of Sanctuary and Sentinel), that I ended without showing the full conclusion because I wanted to save that for the right moment in the upcoming Dungeons and Dragons 5e portion of this non-traditional campaign. We had a good few rounds of play before the end, thanks to there being four of us, but we still ended earlier than most of us expected. We were still building up to something bigger when the end arrived in the form of one of the deck’s joker cards, but it was just one pull before the random number I’d produced anyway, so we didn’t lose out on much potential build anyway. It just means the then-status quo will have to be significantly escalated in order for things to happen the way I envision. Which is possible! The danger of escalation was the constant backdrop of our game, so even if it never quite got there while we played, the idea was never far from anyone’s mind, so there are all kinds of crumbs and kernels that can be built into something larger. Plenty of ammunition, so to speak. I just need to take the time to sit down, work through everything we’ve built, and figure out how it all plays out. And how many years have passed. I did my best to draw out the time, to create a significant separation between the outside world and the life inside the dome that they characters will know, but we wound up less than three centuries separated and with some degree of contact for much of that. I will probably need to run the clock a while longer to really get the effect I want, but I’m also planning to toss a “long-lived peoples are rare” element into this world just to keep things a little less historically grounded. I want things to pass into myth and legend faster than they would if some poeple lived to be five hundred or whatever.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: Sanctuary And Sentinel (Part 1: Sanctuary)
Once again, my little campaign in the making has met and Sifting Through The Ashes has taken one more step towards it’s first stage of broader tabletop play. As my friend and player–who was a bit more familiar with MeghanlynnFTW’s Sanctuary & Sentinel–predicted, Sanctuary didn’t last all that long. We spent most of our timing building out the “sanctuary” and all its features than we spent playing the game after that. I’m not sure we even got through two whole rounds of turns before the game ended, thanks to a bad roll on my part and then a few more similarly bad rolls. It looked like we wouldn’t even make it past the first round, but we did. The rule at play here is that whenever you take a turn, you draw a card from a prepared deck of cards, look up the situation related to that card, and then roll to determine if the guardians of your sanctuary are successful in handling the threat or if they fail to take appropriate action and their enemy, The Threat, gets what it wants. When the game starts, you have to roll above a two on a six-sided die to succeed. And on my very first turn, I rolled a failure and that started us on a downward plunge because, as is often reflected in reality, it was increasingly easy for things to go bad or fail the more that whent wrong for the sactuary’s guardians. Still, we got some interesting worldbuiling building out of the game and I’ve got even more ammo for setting this all up according to my initial vision of the campaign, so it wasn’t a wasted night. It actually lasted almost exactly as long as I wanted it to, so it all worked out in the end even if we spent most of the post-setup play feeling like the game was crashing down around our ears.
Continue readingWatching FF14 FanFest From Home
Tomorrow (from the day this gets posted) is Final Fantasy 14’s first Fan Fest since I started playing. I tried to get tickets but was not lucky enough to get any. Three of my friends, though, coincidentally the ones I spend the most time with online, all got tickets. Which means that I’m going to be doing my best to catch the live streams of everything going on at fan fest (since that’s where FF14 makes its big announcements) AND that I’m going to be at a bit of a loss for who to spend time with this weekend. I’ve got other options, but it’s going to be a much quieter weekend than usual, I expect. Which means I should have plenty of time to wrap up whatever little chores and tasks I’ve got for myself to complete before the new patch drops next week, but I have to admit that I’ll be looking out at Fan Fest with a little bit of envy in my heart. It’s not often that I want to go someplace public with thousands of people, especially not since COVID entered the scene, but I’ve really enjoyed my time with Final Fantasy 14 enough that I wanted to go to the place where they’re celebrating it and the communities within it. I really wanted to get out of my comfort zone, try something new, and really experience what it’s like to be a part of some kind of community like that. But it was not in the cards. The live streams will help, of course, especially since I’ll still get all the news about what’s coming up in the future of Final Fantasy 14, but it just won’t be the same.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Micro Versus Macro Plotting
As I’ve been to busy to really do much active preparation for this tabletop campaign (which isn’t great considering that I’m writing this two days before our next session and I need to be ready to facilitate a game of Sanctuary), I’ve been trying to keep my momentum going by working through whatever plot I might put together for the two discrete chunks of the later campaign that I can foresee. I’ve got the outline of it locked in already, and I won’t be getting TOO specific since I need to leave room for adaptation, player input, and micro-plots, but I really need to start lining up some of the more important details. Especially for the first chunk of the campaign since that’s going to be a bit more locked-in than the second chunk by its very nature. I also need to produce a map for it as well, since that kind of location-based visual will be important for a while. It won’t be unimportant later, but it will be more important earlier to help ground everything we’ve got going on. After that, I need to generate a bunch of names, some proper nouns, work out how to incorporate a few fun little details from our games thus far, and then organize it all in some way that I can reliably use and won’t completely forget about. I’ve made plenty of GM reference documents in the past, but none in quite a while and I’ve never done anything of the sort while this burned out and tired, so I’ve got my work cut out for me.
Continue readingDorohedoro Season 2 Is Everything I Hoped For (So Far)
The first three episodes of Dorhedoro came out last week. Another two episodes are out by the time this post goes up and while the fourth was out when I was writing this, I hadn’t had the time to watch it yet. Which is a real disappointment because it has been everything I could have hoped for so far. Things are just as weird and zany as they were in season one, but with the threat of it all dialed up a notch. Everyone’s at risk this season, even the supposedly invincible characters, and it looks like they’re not holding back at all. Three episodes is about a quarter of the first season and sees to be par-to-the-course for a show developed by netflix to release a triplet of episodes when they’ve only got a twelve-episode season, so I do feel a bit sad that a quarter of the experience is already over, but maybe it’ll be different. Maybe there’ll be more than twelve episodes this season or maybe a third season won’t take another six years to come out. Who could say? I have no idea what might be in store for us since I’m trying to avoid looking anything up about the show while I’ve still got unwatched episodes ready to go. I wouldn’t want any spoilers, you know?
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes Dev Log: The Not-So-Quiet Year
We’ve had our first session of the tenatively titled “Sifting Through The Ashes” campaign. We had a good starting session of The Quiet Year (By Avery Alder) and while it took most of our session to get through Spring, there was a bunch of slowly figuring things out as we played and periods of thoughtful silence, so I’m hoping this next session (the day I’m writing this, actually) will go a bit faster [it did! But more on that next week]. Not that I’m in any kind of hurry, I just want to keep things moving along and there’s plenty of ground left to cover. I want to keep us moving so that we aren’t still working up to the actual game we’ll be playing by the time next year rolls around. After all, we only have one regular session a month and up to two additional sessions scheduled as/if we find a day to hold them. That’s not nothing. Three sessions in a single month is pretty good even for a weekly campaign, in my experience, and we’ve definitely gotten that this month, so it looks like we’re moving at a pretty good pace. And yet I don’t want to risk us faltering or losing steam at a crucial moment. I also want to pace things so that my players have enough time to start thinking about whatever game we’re going to play next and getting through two seasons of The Quiet Year tonight (the day I wrote this, not the day it gets posted) would mean that they have two weeks before our next session and can spend that time reading the rules for the next game we’ll play. I’ve got it all planned out and being able to stick to that plan would be nice. Not essential, of course, just nice.
Continue readingThe Rapid Approach Of Dorohedoro Season 2
The trailer for Dorohedoro’s second season dropped a few days ago (as of writing this) and I’m getting pretty excited for it. It looks to have the same strange energy that the first season had, but with more going on? More order to find amidst the chaos? That or the trailer just took every bit of available “order” from the show and slapped it together in some kind of classic mislead that tends to crop up in trailers where they hint at something that doesn’t actually exist in the movie by showing you all of whatever it is in the trailer. I don’t think they’d do that with Dorohedoro Season 2, but anything can be made terribly, even things six years in the making (especially because it probably wasn’t being worked on for six years, but I don’t really know much about that), so I’m trying to avoid getting my hopes up too much. Which feels odd to say because, while I definitely enjoyed it while I was watching it, I thought I was much more neutral-trending-positive about it. Now, as I look back on it, I find that I feel more warmly about it and more actively engaged with it, maybe because my mind has had time to work through everything I saw, whereas I didn’t really give myself that when I first watched it? I mean, I binged the whole thing is a single go, more or less, so it stands to reason that I’d feel differently about it once I had time to let it settle, but this is maybe the first time I’ve liked something more as a result of that. Usually I either like it less or just appreciate some of the details more, which isn’t the same thing as liking it better.
Continue readingSifting Through The Ashes: Now It’s Official
The multi-game campaign I’m calling “Sifting Through The Ashes (Working Title)” has officially begun. We had our first meeting, the first conversations about what we’re doing have been started, we’ve observed our first lengthening silence in response to a question I asked, and I’ve even made a discord for the group. Heck, the day this posts, we’ll be getting together to start playing our very first game: The Quiet Year. I’m excited to introduce more people to that, and to get this whole campaign thing a-rolling. Of course, it would help if I wasn’t still struggling to get enough sleep and feel rested, but that’s just kind of life these days. Never enough sleep. But that’s okay. It’s only a three hour session playing a game I’m familiar with and need to just lead, not adjudicate. After all, it’s a GMless game and while I’ll still be wearing my GM hat, it will be just to facilitate the game and help get everyone’s creativity flowing rather than because rules need interpretation or a difficult situation needs arbitration. As long as work doesn’t kick my ass the whole week leading up to the session or give me extra hard on the day of the session itself, I should have enough juice in the tank to handle whatever that might bring [work has kicked my ass the whole week up to the session]. I still need to make sure my players are reading up on all the stuff I posted in the discord, continue reviewing the rules of Armour Astir: Advent, and make the roll20 game we’re going to use for maps and stuff, but most of that is pretty easily handled when I’ve got a bit more time and energy than I do right now.
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