Tag: gaming

I have some friends, but I’m not sure who is my best friend. Maybe Marith, maybe Ayse?

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant. Cut to the Temple of Sobek-in-Chains on the Demielemental Plane of Egyptology! Grim, having ended up in the trash compactor with the beautiful high priestess and her roguish love interest (but no wookie or droids), is fleeing the over-armored and under-trained Stormcroc Troopers down one corridor, and the rest of the Reshelving Squad is fleeing a quartet of literal giant crocodiles along the intersecting corridor. They’re reunited, but they have to make a stand! Fortunately Grim’s fey-granted power of animal control is extremely effective when the only significant threat is giant crocodiles, and the day is saved. The restored priesthood of Sobek will not be dismantling the giant sun-cannon on top of the temple, which surely will not be an issue. Decorations and rewards for all (including sweet crocodile tattoos of protection for Thaïs so people will stop teasing her about being unarmored), level UP! And now, back into Bibliospace to finish the journey to Renwick’s laboratory for advice.

We have to bring this campaign to a satisfying conclusion by the end of the summer, as two of our players are moving, and also figure out what to play next. Apparently people actually read this page? So maybe I should have something to playtest by then? And figure out how to explain all the D&Disms I want to get rid of in positive terms.

Read (novel): Like Cicadas (Fiori Manni, tr Emma Sayers): A girl goes to summer on the coast like her family always does, but this year all the girls her age are having puberty and making eyes at boys instead of wanting to do anything fun, and there’s a new girl who is completely amazing, and no one in 1990s Italy knows what lesbians are so great confusion and also great adolescent drama ensues.

Written (catgirl): 268.

Are you a hoopy frood who knows where your towel is at? Good, good.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant: The Reshelving Squad (minus Grim) and their new Adorable Crocodile Boy flee from the molasses flood burbling down the tunnel… right into the clutches of Glinda and her Emerald City Pikemen! A sticky battle ensues, with blinding sugar-dust, plummeting tiny houses, and toppling lollipop trees. Eventually, Thaïs manages to get her eyes clear long enough to teleport herself and the Adorable Crocodile Boy to the realm above the Lollipop Forest, where she finds herself running late for a final exam that she hasn’t studied for. It was all a dream! In fact they are safe(?) and sound(?) back in the university, and soon learn that Grim has been dragged into the river that was running down University Street by a saltwater crocodile. The only reasonable conclusion is that Sobek is mad about his temple being taken over by the body-hopper and the squad is on the hook to fix it. Shoggoth Bob is bribed into regurgitating the spellbook found earlier, with the body-hopping spell which is so evil that nobody thinks they could learn it without an alignment change (except Martin, and nobody believes him), but Renwick is already a lich and a demigod of magic, so what’s the worst that could happen? The squad sets out for his laboratory, and as Lilli’s divination magic indicates that Grim can be retrieved from the temple of the god who took him, they will look for a temple of Sobek on the banks of the Dessarin Valley.

After gaming, I went all the way to Dave’s place to check on the cats, who were still fine. Good job being cats, guys!

Written (catgirl): 208.

Also underrated.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94. Everett has a run-in with fake cops at his work, but defeats them with the power of stoicism and railroad tracks, Thessaly does tarot readings, Longfingers takes more notes on how to be a grown-up lesbian, Siddy gets supplies for more urban farmsteading stuff, and Theophania does approximately nothing. I should probably drop out.

Written (catgirl): 197, splitting the different between a whole page and going to bed on time and thus accomplishing neither.

A marvelous invention, to be sure!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94: Thessaly decides she needs to talk to Tom-Tom, so Longfingers uses her new Hedge-navigating power to get everyone to the Gilman Project, where indeed Tom-Tom is vibing in the middle of the mosh pit. After some moshing difficulty, they get Tom-Tom outside and Thessaly grills him about the four seasonal monarchs, of which he was one before Mark (now King of the Eternal Summer) betrayed the others and broke Tom-Tom’s heart. Thessaly also seems to believe that the grotto where she and Theophania almost had a moment belonged to the Queen of Winter. So that was pretty heavy, and also Theophania has many questions!

Read (nothing): Nothing.

Written (catgirl): 124.

It’s where I keep all my stuff!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 94:Despite Vivian’s hardware betraying her, the group eventually manages to get to Longfingers’s scheduled meeting at the coffee shop with Simple John, Mary, and Beth. (Theophania notices that Mary is excessively hot, which Thessaly doesn’t approve of, so maybe Longfingers will learn entirely the wrong lessons about how to be a grown-up sapphic.) They learn some more about being changelings, and take a trip into the hedge to learn how to make Contracts. Hurray for magic powers! Even if Thessaly is being all secretive about hers.

Read (game): Land of Cicadas: A sandbox setting for Cloud Empress. Some hexes are farmland, some are wasteland, some are perilous forest, some contain giant bugs, some contain the sky-city expedition in search of their missing Cloud Empress, several contain killer robots, etc. There is plenty of scope for hapless wandering PCs to get into trouble, and possibly even cause a tremendous uproar. Or get eaten by giant bugs, of course.

Written (catgirl): 159 of notes.

I have not watched any anime today, but I think in general I’m good on this one.

Played (Changeling): Ken’s 90s Berkeley game. Thessaly and Theophania escape from the grotto before the awkwardness grows too intense, at the cost of only one more level of damage for Theo (Thessaly is too cool to bleed everywhere, of course). On his way home from work, Everett is almost run over by somebody in Siddy’s parent’s old pickup who looks exactly like Siddy’s human seeming, but she drives away very quickly, so what’s up with that? Everyone meets back up at the Hello Kitty Warehouse to catch up on their various days, discuss fetches and moral vs faerie seemings and whether Siddy can reach high shelves now, and help Thessaly name the new security ravens.

Read (manga): Nightfall Travellers vol 1 (Tomohi): A middle-school newspapergirl and a new transfer student explore an extremely hilly and somewhat mysterious city to find the perfectly normal explanations for supernatural manifestations that people gossip about. The art is kind of smudgy and watercolory, although greyscale for most pages, which makes the city 37% more mysterious. I am not convinced that neither of the girls is a real ghost, though.

Written (game design): 232. Instead of having to roll damage, or always using the attack that does the most damage, what if any hit takes out the target, but they have resources they can expend to negate a hit. This is like the 1-hp dragon, or looked at another way, turns hit points from a boring single counter into a collection of distinct resources each with their own mechanical significance. (You want to block that arrow? Sure, spend a use of Shining Steel Plate Armor. A lightning bolt, though?)

Libraries are the best.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 1994. We had no Kelsey, but our (new?) rule is that we’ll play if only one person is missing and it’s not the GM. This session, Everett gets his old job at the railroad back (Brookes rolled like eight successes!), Theophania goes to The Other Change of Hobbit to research horror magazines she could submit and covers for Longfingers sneaking upstairs to find a Hedge door and then meeting the fabled Simple John, Beth, and Mary, then Theophania and Thessaly follow the currents of magic through a theater basement and an abandoned 70s department store and find a one-way(?) pool of water(?) which leads to an abandoned grotto full of magical power (which they suck up for +1 Wyrd and full Glamour recharge each). There we leave them, alone in an extradimensional hideout with only bed. What will happen next week?

Read (short): The Knight and the Butcherbird (Alix E Harrow): Post-apocalyptic monster-hunting knight meets immovable librarian, discoveries about the new world are made.

Read (manga): The Tree of Death: Yomotsuhegui vol 2 (Masasumi Kakizaki): Our Cthulhoid undying ex-cop (really, that character design cannot be an accident) has been helping the shinigami and her mysterious blob for a year, and the enemy is finally closing in and using his connections to mortal life against him.

Written (catgirl): 111.

I’m much more suited to that than to Goddess of Fertility Day.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s Berkeley game. Siddy figures out how to get glamour from crafting for people, and gets a recruitment(?) feeler from King Mark’s goon Jack Horner while everybody else finishes up pillaging the . Thessaly is off doing something so the rest of the group mostly kicks around discussing the philosophy of monarchy and deciding that going into the mysterious telecom(?) building with no windows or doors would be a bad plan.

Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 16 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): Conclusion of the cliffs and ghost giraffe and idiots.

Written (game design): 171. New Plan! No levels, no XP, only experience and suffering!

I presume US National, so imported pandas.

Jus went to Davis for a robotics competition, and her team got second place! YAAAAYYYY JUS!

VTA management has not gotten their act together since yesterday, so I walked to gaming. Fortunately, it was not raining. The app for that said it would take 1:34 to walk there, and I felt like I have been getting slower since I stopped leaving my apartment, and then since I got Covid, so I allowed two hours. It actually took me somewhere between 1:05 and 1:10 to get there, which was very surprising to everyone except Dave.

On the way back, I walked with Dave, which was faster walking but we deviated from the app route to see other streets in Northwestern San Jose so it took a little longer.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant: After a night of crocodile dreams that are surely not important, the Reshelving Squad decide to backtrack the purple worm to see what else might pop out of that hole to annoy their kobold friends. After numerous ups and downs, and many dents shaped like bullywug helmets, they find a huge cavern with a literally Cyclopean ruined city. All the treasure has been taken, but whoever was there before kindly left the swarms of stirges and brains-with-legs in place. This is annoying, but the real problem is that the last brain-with-legs ran off toward the exit with a definite Timmy-fell-down-the-well vibe. (It’s a brain with legs, all it has is vibes.) When Lilli scries out the area with sketchy divine magic, she spots some mind flayers, which nobody likes. Since the brain-legger didn’t deliver its message, they don’t seem to be coming into the cyclopean ruins, and nobody wants to pester them. Unfortunately, while the Reshelving Squad is finding the dead end, the mind flayers do advance, and set up for an ambush at the tunnel entrance. Since sneaking past is obviously not going to work, even not counting Grumman and his Steam Colossus, they decide to have Grim teleport to flank them, carrying Thaïs to a position where she can freeze all three of them. Of course the mind flayers knew to the minute when Lilli’s scrying magic would give out, and changed position, so they and their attack brains are able to counterattack more effectively than planned, but it’s not enough to save them.

Read (novella): The Orb of Cairado (Katherine Addison): Also in the world of The Goblin Emperor, soon after the Big Airship Crash, but it’s a sketchy academic solving murders and looking for lost treasure.

Read (manga): Call the Name of the Night vol 3 (Tama Mitsuboshi): Cursed Girl has some more magical adventures and develops a little more self-confidence when it could involve a book signing.

Written (catgirl): 165.

Thanks, Jeremy and Ken!

Sleeping wrapped in velcro bands and wires and nose cannulas and finger clamps wasn’t as bad as I feared, but it definitely wasn’t good, and I did have to get up early to take the stuff back to the place, so it was not a vigorous day. I’m also not sure I even generated any data, since I had to put on the velcro straps myself, and society wants single people to die.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s Berkeley. Now our changelings hate this King Mark guy, because he sent a little punk to shake down their new friend Troll for hedge fruit (which he didn’t have, because he already gave it to Theophania & co).  They go into the hedge looking for fruit which they may give to Troll if he wants it, and find some stabapple (not edible, maybe useful for stabbing), something that causes the eater to try to eat more and more of it until they die, and grapes with eyes inside and vines that almost strangle Theophania before she can use one of her few contracts to disable the security. We close on them arguing (Theophania with gestures) over whether to steal the grapes.

Read (graphic novel): Codex Black: A Fire Among Clouds (Camilo Moncada Lozano): Mesoamerican fantasy! A girl with a god-inhabited shawl goes in search of her long-lost father, meets a boy (not like that) who has even more mysterious magic, they have some adventures, get mixed up in and robbed by yet more magic, etc. It is pretty cute and there’s not much on-screen human sacrifice.

Written (catgirl): 118.

But… only one per hand?!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s game. Our n00bs finally find a good squat, an abandoned Japanese import warehouse with a bunch of leftover Hello Kitty dolls and a room that Siddy can fill with cozy furniture and cats at only a small secret cost in blood. The next day, finally well-rested (except Thessaly, who has been bed-surfing all along), they go down to Telegraph to meet Troll (yes) and swap him some copper wire looted from the warehouse while Siddy set up her mending-while-u-wait business. Theophania has no useful skills and is still hung up on cash money, so I think we see where part of her personal journey has to go. (Outside the box, although she’d rather go– anyway.)

Read (manga): Pulse vol 1 (Ratana Satis): She’s a heart surgeon who sleeps around and scorns romance, she’s a romantic young heart patient who scorns a transplant, together they make an obvious bet.

Written (catgirl): 122 of fixing minor issues. Soon I will be able to start adding new stuff.

 

Thank you, internationals, for showing it’s possible to not be complete fascists, even if it will take the US another 250 years to figure it out.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s game. We got a new player, who seems pretty cool, even if her character unfairly knows more about what’s going on than my character does. We got distracted from finding a squat by SHOWER at the place Thessaly had been couch-surfing, but next time for sure!

Read (manga): Me and My Beast Boss vol 3 (Shiroinu): More corporate intrigue, more anti-human racism, but also more of the other characters shipping the female lead and her lion boss.

Written (game design): 105.

Sure, why not? Nature already abhors me, I’m sure!

Management wanted everyone in the area to go into the office for the two-hour all-hands, but I did not go. I am pretty sure I got the same +0 to morale over zoom.

Played (Changeling the Lost): 90s Berkeley. Our changelings make it to the flea market, meet fellow changelings Badger and Melanie and hear about how money is used by the fae to track runaways, immediately use all the cash they get from Nicole’s mending business to buy supplies instead of hoarding it– Cheese it! The fuzz!

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 1-2 (Sai Naekawa): A high-school girl with pronounced suicidal ideation ever since her tragic past gets accosted by a girl who claims to be a monster who wants to devour her when she’s spiritually ripe, but will keep her safe until then. Based on something that passes without comment in vol 1, I’m guessing every named character in this series is actually a monster, but we’ll see. No sign of yuri yet.

Written (game design): 138.

Also National Pork Rind Appreciation Day, which sadly has more relevance to my life. Where did I go wrong?

Played (D&D5E): Librarians Errant: The room that Grim and Thaïs disappeared into seems dark and quiet… too quiet. When the other reshelvers venture in, they find that the entire sanctuary has been covered by Mordenkainen’s nose exclusion zone to hide the extremely loud and obvious fight going on. Their teammates and Glady’s three henchmen are facing off against a horde of cymbal-banging clockwork crocomonkeys and a giant steam-powered robot crocodile, with the aid of a summoned water elemental! Things immediately get even worse as the Mechacroc blasts Mesoluna with a gout of steam and he loses control of the elemental, but somehow, despite steam and cymbal-banging and gigantic metal teeth and more steam, so much steam, the robots are put down and the contents of the secret temple library can be loaded into the extradimensional bookmobile and taken away for Martin and Gladys to haggle over. The wreckage of the nave and sanctuary are even cleaned up, so hopefully it will be some time before the hypothesized body-swapper figures out exactly what happened and who to come after.

Read (manga): Yakuza Reincarnation vol 9 (Hiroki Miyashita, Takeshi Natsuhara): Huh, looks like the isekai protagonist really is there to save the world!

Written (game design): 339, but mostly questions and not answers.

I like Lego, but I always feel like I should like it more.

Played (Changeling): 90s Berkeley. Nicole and Longfingers find a tiny door in the back of the auto body shop the crew is crashing in, which somehow lets changelings pass through into a secret realm of hostile tree-roots. Nicole befriends a mysterious squirrel-guy with sign language, and trades him left-over Chinese food for making a space in the Hedge (which is what this surely must be) where the crew can sleep safely. During the night, Longfingers hears strange noises, climbs around, and finds an exit into library somewhere, but does not make use of it. In the morning, the crew experiments with having Everett swear an oath to take Longfingers’s money from working at the club and use it to get supplies to make a sign for setting up Nicole with a While-U-Wait Mending business at the sketchy swap meet. He is successful in his quest and reaps the rewards of his vow. They also find a copy of the changeling zine by Simple John that they heard about before, which the players receive as an actual, semi-legible, amazing PDF.

Read (manga): Outbride vol 1 (Tohko Tsukinaga): A modern Japanese girl with no romantic experience meets Truck-kun and is awakened in a distant future by four gorgeous men who want her, as the only remaining human, to bear their hybrid super-children. She is not down for this for a variety of reasons, but she does have to make out with them to survive in the alien atmosphere of Earth’s cross-dimensional future and also they are obviously not going to take no for an answer. Not exactly my kink, alas.

Read (manga): Monster Cats vol 2 (Pandania): More of the same cats, some new monster types, still cute.

Written (game design): 105.

I absolutely do not understand quantum chromodynamics, but I hear it’s very important.

Despite confusion due to email failures, we did gather for food and gaming today.

Played (D&D5e): Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon now knows where they want to go, they just need a plan to get there. Several possibilities are discussed, but before implementing any of them, they decide to scout out the sewers for a way into the Temple of Sobek. Although no crocodiles have been seen in the temple for years, there is at least one large one in the sewers beneath, which chomps Grim and Thaïs good before being driven off; nevertheless, they persist in looking for more trouble. There is a manhole into the temple compound, all locks or traps long gone, so with their usual discipline and professionalism, the squad abandon the scouting mission in favor of rushing toward the book. The courtyard clears out while Grumman is being hex-wrenched out of his steam armor, so they make it all the way to the outer hall before running into anybody. There, a colorful bullywug in a revealing harness introduces himself at length as Inigo Frogtoya and declares his vendetta against Grumman for disrespecting the team’s recurring nemesis, Admiral Bigbugs. An extremely swashbuckling and fairly sticky battle ensues, during which Grim disappears to look for the third volume, but although it’s not easy, the rest of the squad manages to defeat Señor Frogtoya and he surrenders with honor. After getting frightened, Thaïs fled into the next room after Grim, but they haven’t come back with the book…

Read (manga): Witch Hat Atelier vol 13 (Kamome Shirahama): Continuing the arc with the city and the disaster and the Brimmed Caps and the ethics of magic that affects people.

Written: Not sure how to count when part of the changes are reorg because my script can’t separate that out, but I’ll call it 223.

Somebody once said something nice about a program I wrote, so I’ll take it.

Played: Changeling. Our dazed and confused escapees from Faerie make it back to Oakland and meet a nice gay satyr who trades them some lunch and some information for a promise from Nicole to fix something.

Read: The Butcher’s Masquerade (Matt Dinniman): In which a bunch of alien assholes get severely murdered, and serves them right. A lot of other people get murdered too, though. Also, Princess Donut’s dinosaur gets lucky.

Read: FAIL. I did not manage to make a dent in my oversupply of manga, because I suck.

Written: 127.

Librarians Errant, shrunk, amnesia volume 3, silverfish, mice, roomba banishment

Wait, are birds real after all? I wish the Internet would make up its mind!

Played: Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon find themselves in a mysterious, probably artificial landscape of cyclopean edifices. Why are they there? No time to figure out, exceptionally loathsome arthropods are attacking! From the way the squished bugs flutter down lightly, Thaïs deduces that the squad is very small, rather than the silverfish being very large, but trying to remember why and how results in visions of ink and origami, and San loss. Lili divines that they are there for the third volume of The Magical Education, and also that they have letters folded into(?) their heads. Rearranging themselves to spell out words does produce magical effects, but doesn’t get them any closer to the book, so they explore the regular way. They are in a library off a crocodile-themed temple, so probably in the temple of Sobek, where the possession issue is centered. At 1/60th scale, they can’t easily check the books on the shelves, but a magical tome wouldn’t be in the accessible library anyway. Checking around the baseboards, they find mice, but also a magically-warded secret door, and beyond it, a much smaller library guarded by an automatic dust-sucker that wouldn’t even come up to their ankles if they were full size, but now can swallow Grumman whole and carry him to another plane when banished, Fortunately its insides are not constructed to stand up to a determined engineer with a steam armor maintenance kit, and it returns inoperable. And, on an upper shelf, the third volume! The squad manages to knock it to the floor by spelling LEVER, but LARGE only breaks the spell and returns them to their bodies in the library. Still, now they know where the final volume is.

Read: The Summer You Were There vol 2 (Yuama): More feelings, and also popular girl knows depressed girl’s dark distressing history. Can she overcome it?

Read: The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook (Matt Dinniman): Turns out Carl isn’t the first to think, “fuck this entire system”, and they probably didn’t even have an evil subway system to figure out at the same time.

Written: 117. Writing a second draft was like pulling teeth, so I switched to writing in a summary mode, about one paragraph per scene. Not sure if this is better or worse, in either the long or short term.

Gaming munchies included chocolate brownies, so all is well.

Well, maybe not all, since it turns out Rachel was friends with the health care exec who was shot this week (if you’re reading this in the future, hopefully there’s enough of an Internet you can look it up), and some of her and Jeremy’s kids were near the earthquake and tsunami warning this week (ditto). Too much, 2024! Too much!

Played: Librarians Errant. Back from their dragon-robbing expedition, Reshelving Squad Upsilon picks up the trail of BODASHUS COW from where an actual cow belonging to the Ag Department was eaten. Plotting the incidents on a map indicates the main quad, so they search around there and find feathers leading to a window into the basement of the Student Center. The meeting room is not full of terror turkeys, but is reserved for “SHU” at 8, so the squad stakes it out. At 7:45, the TA who has been with Beasley Knees at all of the Interdimensional Cow incidents, Nick, and a couple of his fellow grad students show up for their meeting of the BOvine De-Apparition Society of Humanoids and Ungulates Standing Collectively in Opposition to Wizards. Lili barely waits for them to explain about Beasely being a menace and the anti-cow energy before joining. Their experimental manifestation of anti-cow energy is suspiciously feathery, and the Humanoids admit that some might have escaped, but surely they’re too small to have done any real harm, pshaw. With confirmation that feathered abominations are stalking the campus, the squad stakes out the Ag Department barn in case the growing monstrosities come back for another snack. They do, but then scarper cross-country to a sewer culvert and vanish beneath Waterdeep, maybe somewhere beneath the university. However, they didn’t get a cow this time, so the next night the squad stakes out the beef barn again, only to be interrupted by an unmissable summoning special effect from the direction of the main campus. The light show ends, leaving the Student Center apparently unharmed, until Lili (who had stayed behind with the SHU) bursts out the front riding a tyrannosaurus! Theropods of various sizes as well as a brontosaurus stampede out and begin attacking the students who have assembled to watch the excitement! Thaïs, realizing that this flood of dinosaurs isn’t going to stop as long as the portal is open, looks for a way into the basement while everyone else fends off the prehistoric onslaught. Beasley Knees shows up with his own summoning tarp to add with the chaos with gorgons and minotaurs as anti-anticow forces, which arguably helps the students, if not the landscaping, and another contingent of Medium-size raptors like the ones seen at the Ag Department starts setting up their own ritual in a corner of the quad. Anywhere else this would be a disaster, but at Waterdeep U… it’s still kind of disastrous. The first batch of smaller dinosaurs are wiped out pretty easily, but the tyrannosaurs and the next wave are more of a problem until Thaïs closes the gate (ending up with half a tyrannosaur all over her, the basement, and everything) and the mystery novoraptors suck the rest of the dinosaurs into their portal. Time for T-rex BBQ!

Rachel was definitely MVP with her extensive collection of dinosaur figurines, Lego and otherwise.

Read: Dandadan vol 9 (Yukinobu Tatsu): That’s an unexpectedly Ranma-esque plot twist! I wonder if it will turn out to be a translation error.

Read: Library System Reset: Rebound (KT Hanna): Librarian is leaning into her fundamentally OP nature, and only going a little mad with power. The conspiracy against the Library keeps being exposed as of greater and greater extent, though.

Written: 200.

Nice for those people who have talents, I guess.

Played: Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon is notified that a forbidden tome, On Putting Things Back the Way They Never Were, has been stolen from where it was misfiled. The only clue is the mysterious phrase BODASHUS COW in red paint behind the now-empty bookshelf (apparently unrelated to Beasley Knees and his Cow of Ill Repute). Although not assigned specifically to look for the missing book, the squad does check with their underworld contact Tokda Snir, who is aware of two other BODASHUS COW thefts, involving all the food from a dorm kitchen, and all the feathers from a turkey. When questioned, the turkey claims to know nothing, but there were huge saurian footprints all around the scene of plucking. With not many clues and no mandate, the squad decides to go back down into undercity and look for the halfling who was spying on their friends the kobolds, which so far has been intermittently painful but extremely lucrative. This time, they find a trapdoor that drops them into a wave-battered sea cave where a black dragon lairs with her mud mephit retainers and a black ooze garbage disposal. Daisy rejects the squad’s sincere apologies, so there is nothing to do but fight. It is the way of the world. As it turns out, since both Thaïs and Grim know banishing magic, the major threat is not from the dragon, the slow-moving ooze, or the splattery mephits, but from the huge waves that fill the cave every quarter-minute or so. Despite the environmental hazards, and possible future complications due to the idiosyncracies of Thaïs’s whirlwind of banishment, the squad prevails and makes off with Daisy’s treasure of a handful of potions and several statues of herself.

Read: Versus vol 1 (ONE, Kyoutarou Azuma, bose): Humanity is being overwhelmed by the demons, so the wizards hatch a plan to use a planet-size summoning circle to connect with another world and get help. Too bad the people they contact are not in a position to help…

Read: After God vol 1 (Sumi Eno): Japan is invaded by beautiful monsters that kill humans by their mere presence. Thirty years later, a girl with a mysterious power falls in with a team of crazed researchers bent on defeating the monsters without regard for IRBs. Looks like there’s going to be plenty of body horror.

Read: The War of Greedy Witches vol 1 (Homura Kawamoto, Makoto Shiozuka): Thirty-two women from history, redrawn as cheesecake with deliberately one-dimensional personalities, in a fight to the gratuitously gory death for the amusement of the half-dressed demon queen.

Written: 116.

Haven’t seen it in years, no idea if it would hold up.

Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 10 (Ryoko Kui): I couldn’t hold out for commuting tomorrow, I had to read it today. Did those come from Monty Python, or was it independent invention? Also, sus guy is sus.

Read: The Brain Leeches and Other Eldritch Phenomena (Tim Curran): Mythos or mythos-adjacent horror stories. As is only proper, they end with the protagonist going mad and getting eaten/transformed/fertilized by the monster, or the protagonist being revealed to be a cultist. They tend toward similar structure and long passages of hallucinatory experience on the way to the implantation pits, so they don’t show to best advantage all together like this. The ones I have previously read in multi-author anthologies were satisfying.

Played: Changeling, kind of. We did not have Kelsey, so we just talked about vices and virtues and one unique things (which are not actually a thing in this system but will let Ken know what kind of changeling things to give us.

Written: 159.

If only they had managed to take the vote away from men as well…

Read: Demon World Boba Shop vol 4 (RC Joshua): It’s the tower defense episode! Can they make it through the wave? And what about smooching? Or breakfast delivery?

Played: Changeling: the Lost. Nobody needs any more descriptions of horror this month, so we skipped straight to the jailbreak and our hapless changelings are now in a cemetery in the East Bay, being lectured by a creepy guy who doesn’t want them to go back for the friend they had to leave behind for the moment. Also apparently everything is terrible but being in Berkeley will be less terrible. Or something.

Written: 137. No guillotines in this story so far, but then I set it in 2014 specifically so I could avoid engaging with the bullshit of 2016 and onward.

Fortunately, Waterdhavian frogs do not get the bonus today.

After way too long, we played Librarians Errant again. Although in fact both Reshelving Squad Upsilon and Gladys’s musketeers are playing the exchange completely straight, as soon as they meet at the ice cream shop, everything goes off the rails. Poison-skinned bullywug acrobats launch themselves through the store window from mangonels and immediately trampoline back out with the books in their sticky fingers. Fortunately, Thaïs is also stuck to the books, so the bullywug escape doesn’t make it as far as planned. The bullywug Grand Admiral Bigbugs and his henchfrogs appear, and moments later, Celsian mercenary librarians rappel down from their airship to join the battle. The books change hands a few times, mostly remaining also in the appendages of the Celsians’ invisible stalker, various bullywugs are defeated, the airship is set aflame and has to be evacuated, a froghemoth crawls up from the sewers to provide an additional obstacle (not necessarily to anybody specific, just in general), until after three rounds of this, one of the musketeers gets hold of the books and makes his escape with skedaddling magic. With the objects of contention gone, the combatants disperse and/or get arrested, but later the musketeers do return the promised original of vol 2 to the reshelving squad. Level UP!

Written: 297.

 

Other people can have cats too, sure.

Back to work. I don’t like getting up for surveillance capitalism nearly as much as I like getting up to play RPGs.

I did get to play an RPG today, though. I decided not to change my character to be less like me because it would be horrible cultural appropriation and also Sage was sleeping on my arms for all the time I could have used to rewrite the sheet, so it was my horrible isolated tech geek who went to Renfaire, did not get anywhere with the cute girl, and then got lured into the Faeriemobile by an offer of a better job. Surely this will be fine. (It will not be fine, that’s the entire point of Changeling.)

Written: 157.

More importantly, it’s National Black Cat Day in the UK, but neither I nor Nightvale is there.

Between fan noise and two nights of games ending early, I was much more alive this morning than at this point last year, which is good because I had to pack up and then run a game in the first slot of the day.

Ran: Perils and Princesses. In a turn of events that was only surprising because I did not know he came to BBC, one of my players was the designer of Princess World, but fortunately I am not prone to fangirling. He played Clik-Clok the daughter of the Tin Woodsman, so that was cute. This time I got things moving along well enough, but somehow the antagonists were not creepy enough, and the princesses almost let them get away with it, but someone remembered they had a dodgy mushroom in their inventory and used it to contact their fairy godmother who only appears in dreams and visions and ask for better instructions. The day was saved! They used the same solution as the second test group, so that was reassuring in some way.

Played: A magical girl search of terrible things to fight in Wandering Crows. Along with a half-merperson deathly afraid of water and a necromancer who could only bear to raise animals, she wandered a world recovering from fifty years of war and deprivation. We were hired to escort a box of paprika to a partially-underwater city than had been deprived for two generations, which involved keeping loud-mouthed cops from starting a paprika riot and fighting through gangsters (our merperson Squid literally barfed a lizard gangster to death), but turned out to be only half the job. The priest of the temple we were delivering to needed the paprika for a specific ritual in a specific, dangerous place to save the city, and we had the choice of going through paprika thieves or necromancers to get there. We chose necromancers, which our necromancer defeated by laying their zombies to rest instead of having a massive undead battle. As a reward for maintaining the life-support system of the city, we got information about our personal quests, a huge favor from the important temple, etc, but most importantly, the ancient dinosaur priest threw off his robe and flexed for us. (No, really, rainbow feathers!) Wandering Crows is a card-based that’s intended to be simple and portable, but it’s also a little abstract for me. I would prefer what you write on your character sheet to be more than flavor text. I should send a comment to the designer.

And that was it for Big Bad Con 2024! I did not play all lesbians all the time this year, but close enough, and I only played games I’d never played before. The games I ran went much better than last time I ran two years ago, because I was ruthless about railroading. Will I run Perils and Princesses again next year? Maybe! But maybe something I like more will come along.

I managed to resist buying any dice in the dealer’s room, despite the many beautiful colors on offer, because I do not need more dice. I did buy a bunch of games in hardcopy (Ryuutama, which I might already own but couldn’t find at home; Follow, ditto; For the Queen; CBR+PNK; The Lost and the Jammed; Sapphic Space Pirates, Rebels of the Outlaw Waste because the PDF doesn’t have the stickers for character advancement; Cloud Empress and some adventures) and a small plush squid with eldritch sigils (their name is Devil Squid and they are Baby Lizard’s friend).

Criminal Cat Onion’s human was allegedly at the con, but I did not manage to meet her.

I just made the train home, and my cats were there and I fell over dead.

Written: VACATION

Played: A pseudo-Islamic knight with a giant chicken (actually a Southeast Asian jungle fowl) in Gubat Banwa. A rich king hired us to pillage and/or kill the idealist king who was stealing his excessive wealth to fund an artistic community, but when we found out from a captured minion that they used to be close until the falling out, we had to drag him back and force them to repair their relationship. Gubat Banwa is very board-game-grid in the manner of D&D4e, but the part between battles seems cooler, and also you don’t want to kill random spuds because it’s better to have them beholden to you. Hurray non-European fantasy!

Ran: Perils and Princesses. Somehow, despite forgetting character sheets, of all things. Fortunately, there was a printer in the hotel and I still had the files on a thumb drive. Once we got past that, it went okay. I failed to deliver all the important information in a timely manner, and the princesses were so entertaining that I forgot to move the plot along and we had to resolve it in a rush right before our time was up, but it did get resolved, and people appeared to have fun, so I’m willing to count it as a partial success. The laminated handouts were handy for character creation, although I think there may have been too many of them. If I did this again, I’d probably move some things from random generation to pregen or player choice, although I don’t know what.

Played: A horrible little wrecking ball of a goblin in Wicked Ones in Gaming on Demand. I did okay at biting legs off and overcharging generators, and the fire demon and kobold ninja were also good, but the mad scientist slime demon totally stole the show and also won by getting lasers for our dungeon to fend off the forces of light when they came to complain about the human blood we used to wash off our curses.

I had a burger that was more satisfying than any recent burger, although it was real cow meat, so I probably shouldn’t have.

Written: VACATION

Funny how getting up early to do things I like is more appealing than getting up early to make rich fuckwads richer.

Played: A blue devil sorceress composed of 47% noodles by volume in Broken Worlds. The other 53% was unsupported assertions, but her plan to deal with the giant rolling sphere of hate and gold coming to destroy her neighborhood was in fact perfect, or at least very successful. Also implicated: a mendicant monk, a gang boss, an insufficiently-renegade angel, and an acupuncturist abandoned by her divine mother.

Played: A merchant hurrying out of town after an embarrassing mishap in Ryuutama. There could have been fighting, but instead we were very reasonable and helped the homesick witch with her cafe on the sky island of dragons. It was very Kiki’s Delivery Service. The GM provided tea and cookies, which I had not expected at an all-masking con but was very nice.

Played: Follow is more of a story game than a role-playing game, but I was responsible for the grizzled cybered-up old space dog and the AU space pirate captain. We didn’t make a very good SF story, but we did somehow make it onto the treasure asteroid and not get eaten or enslaved by the slime princess who formed from the slime tribbles, despite the loss of the captain and other characters. There were only three people out of four slots, so we ended early and that was okay. Sleep is good.

I tried eating chicken tenders and fries, because that sounded warm and filling and also celebrated Greasy Food Day, but no, I really don’t like regular chicken tenders any more.

Written: VACATION

Use your knees to avoid goose-stepping!

I am on vacation so it’s okay that I’m mostly useless. I did get my flu and COVID shots, though, and pretend to do some prep for the con.

We finally managed to have some Tuesday gaming. Now we’re making characters for Ken’s 90s East Bay Nostalgia Changeling game. I think I have failed. My character, despite having a good name (Tiffany “Theophania” Whitney) is not enough unlike me, so will be terrible. On the other hand, it’s Changeling, so maybe the characters are supposed to be terrible.

Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 6 (Ryoko Kui): More old friends! More intrigue! More ninjas! More trouble! New quest!

Written: 326.

Originally for teenage ninja turtles, but I’m sure anybody with a genome can get in on the action.

Since the bus I take to gaming is always late, I tried taking the one before that, which of course was right on time, but being early gave me a chance to get a sandwich before going to eat 95849 servings of gaming munchies.

Played: Librarians Errant. Reshelving Squad Upsilon goes to find Kars Hevel and ask him about Volume 3 (and maybe very cautiously allude to the possibility that he is a Masked Lord), but the kobold village has migrated to the depths, leaving only a few guards to pretend to build defenses. They’ll send word to the depths, but in the meantime, the squad decides to poke around the sewers like adventurers even though they have day jobs. They do find the lair of someone (probably a hobbit halfling based on the gourmet trail rations) who has obviously been keeping an eye on the kobolds, but he legitimately outwits them and escapes, so they continue on and find a soggy fungus-filled cave. Some of the fungi scream, some are infested with giant centipedes, the corridor has a trapper that falls on Grim, and the stagnant pool is full of froghemoth, so it’s an exciting few rounds, but although Thaïs can’t banish the froghemoth, she can electrocute the Flint out of it, and blast the trapper off of Lili before it crawls away to digest her, and then everyone can gather up a surprising amount of loot. Now they understand why people become adventurers! However, they still have a day job, so they go back up to finish tracking down Gladys’s Musketeers and offer them the deal of Volume 2 in exchange for a copy of Volume 1. This isn’t hard, as musketeers are known for frequenting pawnshops, of which there are a finite number, but before the Reshelving Squad can offer the deal, the Musketeers offer the real Volume 1 in exchange for a copy of Volume 2. Huh.

Written: I forgot to count up, but apparently today and tomorrow are 212 total, so call it 106.