When I start building out a world for a tabletop game, if there’s a particular feeling that I’m trying to achieve as part of that build, I will usually create a playlist to help me zero in on it. I’ll do the same thing for villains, sometimes, though I tend to avoid it since I generally want my villains to be a framework with some goals and ideals that will be given greater detail and a final shape through their interactions with my player characters (however remote or limited those interactions are). I make playlists a lot more as a player, usually one for every major step along the path of my character’s journey that go from being vague ideas to solid, smaller playlists as I hit those major beats and see what shape they’ll take, but the practice that started as a player in a D&D game has grown far beyond that point. I’ve relied on it as a part of my worldbuilding and NPC development more heavily in recent years, as I’ve moved away from standard fantasy worlds and instead built worlds to reflect past failures (from when my weekly Sunday game had a Total Party Kill and we decided to start a new game in the distant future of the world they failed to save) or to reflect specific themes (like the one I built and adapted to first a Heroic Tragedy D&D campaign and then to a game of Heart: The City Beneath). For these more thematically focused worlds, the playlists have been super helpful in reminding me of the tone I’m supposed to be setting as I flesh out bits of the world my players are about to encounter or create things out of whole cloth on the spot as I run the sessions.
Continue readingStorytelling
Finding The Right Game To Run
I’ve been working on putting together a modern fantasy setting for a new game I’m going to start in a couple weeks. We’re planning to play Dungeons and Dragons fifth edition since I’ve already got a ton of books for that and I’ve yet to find another system that feels as comfortable and malleable as D&D 5e does (most other things I’ve looked at feel a little too rules-light for the game my players and I want to play). Sure, there’s a lot of other much more open games where the only limitation is your imagination, but I’ve learned from trying to get people to play those games that a lot of people will freeze up if they’re presented with tasks or choices that seem too open-ended. Not everyone has the improvisational experience required to enjoy those kinds of games and a lot of people just want to play a game they already know so they can relax and enjoy themselves. Plus, I kind of miss it. D&D 5e, I mean. I’m still not planning to give Wizards anymore money, though I’ll admit that I’m running into a few problems with having all of my digital access to the 5e books I bought prior to last year’s debacle locked into one website since, unless I pay them money every year, I can’t share that access with anyone else. If I’d bought PDFs instead of digital access, I’d be able to share those with my players easily, but I honestly never thought I’d end my subscription to DnDBeyond and yet, here I am, subscription-less and trying to figure out how to make sure all my players have access to the same information I do.
Continue readingPreparing To Dive Back Into Heart: The City Beneath
Just in time to prepare for our upcoming session, I’ve finished running all of the smaller one-on-one sessions for all of my players from my every-other-week game of Heart: The City Beneath. I feel like I’ve managed to at least partially maintain the game’s tension and even add to it a little bit by giving each character some focused attention (to move their personal plot forward) and by keeping up a steady (if small) stream of information in the Discord server I built for my this group. I still (as of writing this) have a lot to do to finish preparing for the session since I actually know what the group is going to do ahead of time for once, but it’s work I’m genuinely excited to do since I’ve figured out how to tie the stories of all my players together in this moment. Maybe not permanently (the improvisational nature of our game makes that impossible to claim with any confidence), but enough to give us a major inflection point in the overal game as we walk up to and past what might actually be the halfway point of this campaign.
Continue readingWhen It All Falls Out In Heart: The City Beneath
In my most recent session of Heart: The City Beneath with my every-other-Sunday group (our campaign is called Descent Into The Rotting Heart, which is what I’m gonna use to refer to this game from here on out), things finally came to a head and then blew up. A bit literally. Turns out the “message” one of the players was supposed to deliver was a bit of a weird cursed energy bomb meant to disrupt the efforts of a capitalist extraction machine masquerading as a public benefits science corporation. They, unfortunately, went to deliver the message first and then went looking for other stuff, so they got a bit caught up in the blast as it went off. They survived, thankfully, one of them without even getting hurt in any way (my players roll their own stress and the result the delivery peron rolled was equal to the amount of protection they had, so they took no stress) and the other was only hurt in a way that made a great plot hook. This was, if you remember my last post, the Office crew, who were down their most capably violent member because the player couldn’t make it to the session and he had a beat that was going to take him out of the action anyway, so they’d just come out of a situation that should have gone very poorly for them but didn’t go TOO poorly. One of them picked up a bunch of fallouts, but they were all fairly minor things that should be fixable. I will definitely need to make sure they get more loot, though, since they did a lot less body-looting than I expected them to do.
Continue readingStill Having A Wild Time In Wildermyth
After most of a year away from the game, I’ve returned to playing Wildermyth. My return from this extended absence was prompted by the group of people that I used to play Dungeons and Dragons with on Fridays suggesting we play Wildermyth as a fun activity we could all do together. We even had one pleasant but incredibly late session of it, though we’ve since struggled to get together to continue playing. I suspect this will be a bit easier than scheduling a D&D session, on account of it taking less time to play in general and Wildermyth’s ability to be easily shortened or stretched to fit into whatever time we’ve got. I don’t expect us to play it weekly, by any means, but hopefully we’ll be able to return to the game we started before a full month has passed. Also, while waiting, I can continue to play by myself. It’s tons of fun to play in multiplayer mode, but still almost as fun to play in single player mode, so I’m beginning to slip it into my regular gaming rotation again. I’m also, once again, discovering that it is incredibly addicting to play and that it is incredibly easy for me to lose track of time while I’m playing it. I’ve already had a couple nights where I stayed up way too dang late to play it and I’ve only been back to playing it for a week as of writing this post.
Continue readingThe End Of National Novel Writing Month 2023
Well, National Novel Writing Month is basically over at this point. Sure, there’s still a bit over a day and a half left before it ends and I’m certain there are plenty of people working their butts off to wrap their goal up in whatever time they’ve got left (I used to be a regular member of this club), but I’m pretty much done. I’ve got all the time I need to finish and, depending on when you’re reading this, I might have already finished. I was just over three thousand words away from being doing when I started writing this blog post and that’s an achievable amount of writing for a day where I’ve suddenly got more time than I expected because, say, a Dungeons and Dragons game I was planning to play in got canceled just two hours before it was supposed to happen. So now I’ve got all kinds of time and while I might use some of it to run an errand, make myself a nice dinner, or finish a normal day’s writing early so I can enjoy some time to myself, I might also just push through the end of this month’s goal so I can stop writing it down as something to do on my to-do list.
Continue readingRiding The Coattails Of One Very Productive Day As NaNoWriMo Wraps Its Third Week
Well, it’s almost midnight the day before this post is due to go up and I’m only now writing it because I forgot, until this very moment, that I still needed to actually write something for tomorrow/today. Good thing I decided to do a little writing to end my very long, very busy, very social, and very fun day. I am exhausted and really considered just going to bed. I was certainly tired enough an hour an a half ago to consider doing it right then. Now, my kitchen is clean, my apartment is mostly clean, and I’m sitting tucked away in my closet-turned-office to do my daily writing because my siblings are bedding down for the night and I don’t want to keep them up with my light or my noise. Which, thanks to a really over-the-top day last Friday, I only have to do just over a thousand words to make my count. I’d really love to double down and insist that I only include words on my actual NaNoWriMo project, to keep the “Infrared Isolation Chapters” train rolling along, but I’m now twenty-two days into the month and I think maybe a fifth of my total word count for this month is for writing that isn’t going up on my blog. Which, on one hand, really just goes to show me how much writing I do most months. On the other hand, though, it really isn’t in the spirit of National Novel Writing Month.
Continue readingLife, Survival, and A Strange New World In Scavengers Reign
Every so often, I find some new bit of media that feels so unlike everything else I’ve seen that it fills me with wonder. When I was a kid, it was Lord of the Rings and Narnia. The Legend of Zelda. Halo. Nowadays, now that I’ve read more and seen more, it happens less frequently. Since I studied literature and storytelling, it is very easy to draw lines between things, to find the parallels and the threads that bind it all together since even the most original works still draw their ideas from a well of experiences and past media exposure. Once you know how to look, it gets easy to see echoes of the past in the stories of the present. Which isn’t a bad thing, mind you. All storytellers take the things they’ve seen, heard, or experienced and use them as fuel to power their creativity, taking it all and turning it into something new that still reverberates with their past influences. That is true of all stories, no matter what. Sometimes, though, the story being told brings in new things that inspire wonder if only because they’re just so different. Reading the first novel in The Stormlight Archive was one such experience like this. It was a fantasy world filled with creatures and basic worldbuilding conceits that were entirely unlike anything I’d seen before. An entire world that seemed to have developed from crustaceans’ and shelled creatures. Reading my first Discworld book had a similar effect, but for the method of storytelling rather than the worldbuilding. And now I’ve experienced it again, with the show Scavengers Reign.
Continue readingThe First Descent Into The Rotting Heart
One of the things that got me through this past week of exhaustingly busy days at work was thinking about my game of Heart: The City Beneath. I admittedly did not have much time to let my mind sit idle or even concern itself with anything other than the project I’ve spent thirty-six of the last sixty hours working on, but what time I did have that included free conscious thought was directed toward that game and the fun place we left it after our last session. True to form, we spent a lot of time roleplaying and only a little time on an adventure. We did get some major fallout, though, since the one player who’d managed to avoid any kind of fallout the first time around wound up getting a wee bit stressed the instant the party started their adventure. It worked out pretty well, though, because I got to do something super fun for me AND the character who got the major fallout had an ability that allowed them to make progress in their delve despite the horrible failure that resulted in said fallout. Everybody won!
Continue readingNational Novel Writing Month Update: One Week Later
Well, it’s been rough. I was INCREDIBLY optimistic about the course this month would take and I think I hit my primary daily writing target only once so far, let alone my daily secondary target of getting enough words to exclude my blog posts from my daily writing totals. I’ve been so busy with work and then so burned out from how busy I was that I when I finally go home and eat dinner, I’ve only got enough time and energy to spend an hour listlessly trying to write before shuffling off to bed. Even the weekend wasn’t much better since all the exhaustion I’d been putting off since I couldn’t afford to feel tired during my incredibly busy work days came crashing back down on me. I did almost nothing but play Spider-Man (the PS4 one, since I never finished the DLC) the entire time. I did eventually finish a blog post and do my laundry, but I was so wiped out that writing the post took three times longer than it should have and I didn’t even fold my clean laundry. What little energy I had for stuff beyond all that was spent on doing my dishes, a little bit of cooking, and taking care of things like paying my bills and other such unfortunate necessities. It has been rough mentally, emotionally, and physically these past few days, and even now that it seems like the worst has passed (though it remains to be seen if this will stay true since it’s not like I anticipated the horrible, frantic, and exhausting week I’ve had since the month began) I am barely staying on my feet as I struggle to remain functional despite the exhaustion.
Continue reading