Tag: gaming

I checked, I am still registered! But I’m not in a state with a red government, so it wasn’t likely I would have been disenfranchised.

I thought I was being clever in getting two medical appointments on the same morning so that I would only have to take half a day off work, but then I biffed it. The second appointment needed me to not eat or drink anything for three hours previously, so I had early breakfast, but when I went to check in for the first appointment, I found out that I was supposed to have been fasting for that too. Had to reschedule for a month from now, on the first day of my Big Bad Con vacation. I did manage to get the infrasound(?) test taken successfully, and then since the clinic is right there in Mountain View, went to the office to eat Thai food and do a work. The office isn’t any different on Tuesdays than on Thursdays, it turns out.

Read: Galaxy: The Prettiest Star (Jadzia Axelrod, Jess Taylor): An alien princess in exile and her retainers are hiding out on Earth of the DC universe. The magic disguise avocado has turned her into a boy human, which is not what she wants at all, but her retainers insist on not breaking cover no matter how miserable she is. Then she meets a girl.

Played: Perils and Princesses: The end! The princesses successfully resolved the problem in a completely different way than the first group. After that, we talked about Ken’s proposed Changeling: the Lost game. I have no idea how to be a human in the East Bay in the 90s, or even a 90s human at all.

Written: 241.

 

Am an IT professional? Probably not? Maybe?

Played: Perils and Princesses. We only had a short time to game, because Ken has a 5am class tomorrow, but the princesses dealt with the people and reached the thing and are ready to make their escape. Next week for sure!

Read: Long Live Evil (Sarah Rees Brennan): Our terminally ill MC is put into the body of the doomed temptress from the famous series of epic tragic over-the-top fantasy, the night before she is scheduled to die. If she can get the maguffin of infinite healing, she can live in the real world, and it’s not like anybody cares what happens to characters in a book, so she decides to be completely evil and suborn other characters and betray as needed to get what she wants. This almost immediately goes off the rails, she goes more over-the-top, people catch feelings, people ponder the nature of evil, people die horribly, the plot changes or was never what she thought it was, and there is so, so much doom. Unresolved doom, because of course if the MC is stuck in a trilogy, this must be a trilogy too.

Written: 187.

I guess the idea is to do all the things one has been promising to get around to “someday” but I didn’t do anything at all useful.

Played: Librarians Errant. After Shia was disintegrated into a pile of pages and then eaten by a shoggoth in the form of a book last session, the team wraps up their visit with Professor Demigod Wick and returns home without being further assaulted by bibliospace fauna. Martin gets the shoggoth to disgorge a person, but it’s not Shia, it’s somebody who claims that Grim Abyss is his real name, despite sounding like something Thaïs would called herself when she was fourteen. He offers to join the team to repay them from freeing from death or whatever it was that befell him on his last adventure, and after they learn (but do not tell him) that he is a fictional character from a series of adventures novels dating back more than two hundred years, they decide they need to keep an eye on him after all. Since their goal seems to require the text of The Magical Education of Beatrix Fogtower, but not the volumes themselves, tasty a magic item set as they are, the new plan is to try to get the third volume, copy it, and then trade it to Gladys for a copy of the first volume. Divination magic (4th-level spells, baby!) points to Tokda Snir, their kobold acquaintance and crime lord of the freshman class, but before they can track her down, things with the appearance of Grim’s fellow book characters show up and try to steal him, then blast everybody with extremely meta antibackstory powers before being reduced to ink and inscriptions. This will need to be investigated, but first they finish meeting up with Tokda Snir, who upon hearing that volume 3 may have once been given to a Masked Lord of Waterdeep, mentions that her grand-relative, the kindly kobold priest, is a Masked Lord. Talk about a cliffhanger!

Read: The Masquerades of Spring (Ben Aaronovitch): Another non-Peter story from the Folly, set in 1920s New York where a young gentleman who would be perfectly at home in the Drones Club is trying to live his fabulous life abroad in the land of jazz but his old school chum the Nightingale shows up asking for his help.

Written: 174.

In other words, Dystopian Future Day, but at least we get to choose a subgenre.

Played: Perils and Princesses. Our princesses (and their tagalong) explore the island some and finally meet the NPCs who are also on the island. I need to railroad more and have less exploration and more interaction, was the consensus.

Written: 109.

Not that there are even any skyscrapers in San Jose, at least according to Wikipedia. The minimum height is 100m or 150m depending on who you ask, and downtown San Jose is close enough to the airport that nothing is over 91m.

It was very clever of me to have taken today off to do weekend stuff. A bunch of the morning was unproductive because there was a cat on me and I couldn’t get out of bed, but then I vacuumed up a bunch of stray litter, went shopping, got a new screen door for the balcony installed, and did some laundry.

Sage was very loud today. I probably deserved the yelling for being so cruel as to abandon her.

Played: Perils and Princesses. A short session because Ken was feeling poorly, but they did get to the Cursed Isle and level up.

Written: 172.

Alastor’s Hell Birthday aka death day. (Don’t know if that’s a thing, but it should be.)

Successfully played a little Perils & Princesses, but I’ve forgotten how to push people forward. Also I’m pretty sure Ken still hates it all.

Read: Demon World Boba Shop vol 2 (RC Joshua): Not-OP isekai bubble tea maker leaves the city where his tea shop is, encounters many new things, breaks society with a trivial technological innovation from his old life, and sets out for the new frontier with all his friends.

Written: 135.

An excellent invention, and also slightly relevant to the scene I’m writing.

Played: Librarians Errant. Our librarians successfully travel through Bibliospace to visit the professor/popular author/lich/demigod they want to consult with, but must face his tests to prove their worthiness. Unfortunately, the quest to retrieve a specific book ends with Shia being disintegrated into their own life history by an undead beholder, and reassembled incorrectly, while the rest of the team discovers that the book in question is the cursed shoggoth book that Lili has been carrying around since like episode 3. If only emojis had been invented, this would be the perfect YAYSOB. At least they can be level 7 to deal with the fallout of this next session.

Written: 119.

Definitely a good day for ice cream, at least in the Northern hemisphere!

Played: Librarians Errant. After missing two sessions because I was first full of Covid and then full of hubris, we are back to Jeremy’s game. Tracking down books, fights with summoned cow monsters, kobold crime lords, the usual. Thaïs got uglified which was extremely mortifying, but not beyond the power of remove curse to fix, fortunately. Now the team has a case that looks like possession to stick their noses into, so they have to take presents to a lich who was involved in magic jar research and find out who might be responsible. Surely this will be a simple and safe trip with no complications.

Read: I Ran Away To Evil vol 1 (Mystic Neptune): A heroic princess (raised by quite abusive parents) goes to die trying to defeat the Dark Lord but she never gets around to fighting him because they’re too busy getting very wholesome crushes on each other and also administering his socialist paradise. Since they have heard of the birds and bees but never seen any, they are pretty awkward but adorable. Also there’s some plot stuff with her former kingdom trying to invade the Dark Enchanted Forest and recapture her. LitRPG, but the genre has reached the point where they don’t have to explain much, and blushing has no level requirements.

Written: 145. That’s not how to write either.

Hello, Snek Friends!

Played: Perils and Princesses. Kelsey does not have enough brains left after work and Renfaire prep and 2024 life to run D&D just now, so people took me up on my offer to test my BBC adventure on them. It did not go that well, since Ken hates my GMing and also adding a giant spider attack to show how painful combat is was the wrong move in every way, and also we only had about half of the necessary four hours, but I guess we’ll see what happens next week.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 30 (Tomohito Oda): I guess somebody wanting to marry both you and your boyfriend counts as a friend…? Also Manbagi and her new boy are doing well and may even be able to hold a serious conversation someday.

Written: 179.

Possibly every day is chocolate day.

Now that I am not full of Covid and despair, I was able to test my Perils & Princesses adventure on the Sunday gaming group. Some problems were revealed, but people seemed to mostly enjoy it, so I will move forward with making myself unable to escape.

Need to figure out how much extra prep is worth doing for something I’m only going to run twice. Like, of course it would be easier at game time to have cards to hand out and fight over than to have players roll dice and write down the table lookups, but enough easier to justify figuring out how to make cards?

Written: 126 of scribbled notes for improving my adventure and/or its presentation.

 

Just because you don’t know what it is doesn’t make an alien!

Did some work, had a Google meet with the team and the guy who is joining soon. He seems okay. Maybe too gung-ho, he might make me look bad, but I don’t need help with that.

Last day of work, I kept the rest of the week as vacation despite the lack of Roseville. Hopefully I will test negative soon so I can get some of the errands I’ve been putting off done. I did manage to throw out a couple of piles of stuff that I haven’t touched since I moved in, although there’s still so much to go.

Read: I’m In Love With The Villainess vol 1-3 (Aonoshimo, Inori, Hanagata): Modern person isekai’d into their favorite otome game scorns all the male love interests because she likes the snooty rival character much better (in a masochistic sort of way). I read the first two of this back when, but did not remember much of what happened when I got volumes 3-6. Now I remember!

Played: D&D5e. We finally started Kelsey’s adventure (I think it’s a module, but I have not looked so no spoilers), albeit without Vivian. Quin the half-elven bard/rogue Harper aspirant, Puck the fairy cleric/rogue trickster, and Opal the earth genasi rune knight successfully infiltrated the dungeon and beat the snot out of some horrible badger-hyena monsters, because you can do that when you’re 9th level.

Written: 213. Good thing I don’t have to get up tomorrow.

The site I use to find out what day it is has imploded, so for the moment, they’re all just days.

Played: The D&D character generation game. Usually I’m the one who has no ideas, but Kelsey asked the right questions or something. Opal Fossil, an earth genasi rune knight fighter seeking out the ancient wisdom of the giants who had a much closer connection to the primordial nature of the universe etc etc. She has a big fucken maul +1 and rune powers. 9th level, so there’s all kinds of 5E fiddly bits I have to fill in, but surely I can do that in the next two weeks. Then I hear we’re going into a dungeon!

Written: Finished up the script. It seems to work correctly despite being a complete bodge of diff and sed pipelines.

Hi Earl!

Also Writer’s Rights Day, but that sounds like it’s probably a thinly-veiled move for copyright maximalism.

Played: Librarians Errant. Another quick expedition into Bibliospace, another tussle with mad books and thesauri, the life of a junior librarian is always intense. Then an assortment of tasks that all collide with Club Fair Day, where Beasley Knees is once again performing a summoning that can be interrupted by Lily’s pet monster book, resulting in crocodiles and mad cows everywhere. (The book definitely has some beef with Beasley.) Filling a campus quad with crocodiles is more impressive than filling a vault with crocodiles, but the lack of novelty reduces it from “holy shit, crocodiles everywhere” to “ugh, crocodiles everywhere”. The one crocodile Lily gets to talk to is actually very nice, but the rest are just a big mess that have to be put down. Sadly, the Entrepreneurship major who scammed the team’s kobold friend Toctasnir out of a bunch of money by monopolizing textbooks is not eaten, because Thaïs is not a murderer.

Did some flattening of hills to make my Black Castle of Blackness stand out more and also have room for expansive carrot farms. Mining out one block at a time takes forever, though. Maybe I’m supposed to be making TNT?

Written: 116. This is the worst.

One out of two isn’t bad? (I’m no Meatloaf.)

Went into the office again, but this time all of us who are normally there were there to see our boss, except the one who’s out and the one who had to WFH so really it was just me and Coworker T. Found out that Coworker R is no longer with us, which is sad but honestly not surprising. Ate a rice bowl, sat on a customer call for hours.

Read: She Loves To Cook, and She Loves To Eat vol 4 (Sakaomi Yuzaki): More cooking, more eating, more love!

Played: Zoomwarts! Every magic castle is better with a troll in the basement, right?

Written: 177. I’m really not convinced this second draft is any better than the first draft.

Did I remember to text my mother? I did not.

I did tell Rachel Happy Mother’s Day when I went over to game, at least.

Played: Librarians Errant. Jeremy made us do a bunch of world building about historical Masked Lords of Waterdeep and their families/heirs/successors. We might have been slightly ridiculous. Then the team made it back to the University with the second magic item and we leveled up. Now Thaïs can send a howling monster of shadow to annoy her enemy. Also I have to choose between fly (generally handy for a ranged combatant, similar to the leaping and skydiving magic she already has) and thunder step (escape and attack as a single spell, similar to the thunderous magic she already has but most similar to the one she never uses). Or of course another spell, but those seem like the two best that fit her affinity.

Played: Minecraft. I finally built a nether portal and experienced the horror that is the Nether. I had a shiny hat so the piglins were whatever, but hoglins and ghasts crushed me like the insect I am. I did mine some polished blackstone bricks from a bastion remnant, and lots of quartz and netherwrack and a surprising amount of gold before I gave up for the day.

Written: 239. My head is almost 1/30th as magic as Kit’s!

Big props to all the teachers who did not murder me and/or leave the profession for good when I was younger.

Played: Lancer. Only in Lancer is this a problem we would solve by punching it with giant robots. I guess this is an important lesson about the trauma of war.

Read: The Ancient Magus’ Bride vol 5-6 (Kore Yamazaki): Death and Christmas!

Written: 218.

Yes, even student journalists who oppose genocide.

Got handed a case right at the end of the day so I had to work right up to the end, bah.

Played: Zoomwarts. Rosamund tried to do science, Bella got detention, Rosamund found a secret door that was there in her dream, Bella crawled into a hole by herself and went silent.

Read: The Dragon’s Soulmate is a Mushroom Princess! vol 2 (Hanami Nishine, poporucha): Romance therapy is going slowly, but the romance is progressing despite the female lead’s terrifyingly sheltered upbringing.

Read: I’d Rather Have a Cat Than a Harem! vol 2 (Kosuzu Kobato, Hinano Chano): Having befriended almost everyone who appeared in the game, including the probable heroine, the MC goes on to live a happy life with her loving prince and a zillion animals, the end!

Read: Tacticians of Ahm Early Access 0.8.3 (Christian Sorrell): I guess it’s Final Fantasy Tactics the RPG, but (unbeknownst to the characters) set in a digital world that is slowly degrading, introducing corrupt10n. All square grid all the time, most powers have an area of effect in grid squares (often one specific grid square), plentiful multiclassing, etc.

Written: 167.

So I should be writing!

Played: Librarians Errant. It turns out Gladys’s minions have wangled the Water Baron’s permission to be there under cover of being itinerant book shelvers or something, so the team has to offer to help them and try to find The Magical Education first. Which they do, but they stick around for a while to make sure all the books are correctly tagged in LoC, not Dewey Decimal and also to throw off suspicion. Alas, the Alexandrians figure it out, and as the team is taking in the Troll Experience before leaving town, the Dewey Decimal Trio busts in with a bunch more hobgoblins. Circus fight! Fortunately the trolls are not best pleased by this, and help fend off the invaders while Shia slips away with the book. Once it’s clear the book is no longer present, the fight is abandoned in favor of beer.

Written: 115.

Can the aliens come save us from the idea of IP?

Played: Zoomwarts. Food fight!

Read: Sandy Pug After Dark (Various): Varied spec-fic smut: aliens, AIs, monsters, gods, queer people. Needed more editing.

Read: The Exodus Gambit (Glynn Stewart): The start of a new missiles-in-space series, a sort-of princess on the run from the traitorous uncle who murdered the rest of their family, and her bodyguard, trying to outwit their pursuers who have a ship that’s much better in every way and get to help.

Written: 113.

Another one I’m in favor of!

Exciting news at work, possibly good, more likely neutral, definitely unexpected.

Played: Lancer. The horrible plan that could not be avoided is put into action, and goes okay, although not well enough to avoid the set-piece battles, and we are far too late to save the future of the colony. Finally, we reach the scene of the crime and gaze upon extremely distressing sights. Next session, the Final Boss!

Written: 123. We haven’t gotten to The Mushroom yet, but the MC finally made the terrible decision. Next: the consequences!

As long as you don’t try to measure it too precisely, anyway.

Played: Librarians Errant. The field trip continues, but while checking out a famous bridge for Grumman’s research paper, the team is accosted by talking goats and “rescued” by a dashing troll vigilante. All is revealed when Thaïs is knocked off the bridge but rescued by troll stagehands (and kissed by a troll, about which the less thought, the better) working for the troupe of troll actors who have been hired to play a prank on someone crossing the bridge that day, who is not the team. Everything is straightened out, but Thaïs will forever use this as an example of the terrible things that happen when you get up too early in the morning. After some additional travel, they arrive in Yartar, make contact with the Water Baron who is only too happy to show them her library, and help the Popesses of the Church of the Crystal Dragon (from the previous campaign) with their recurring Bane problem. Walking into a trap is a perfectly good way of dealing with it, right? (Thaïs used Flirt. It wasn’t very effective. But she did get a minor magic item of the goddess of Death and Rebirth, which is entirely fitting for her background.)

Written: 187.

I no longer use libraries that much, but will always defend and celebrate them, because libraries are awesome.

Boss B is back from vacation, so I had to get up early for 1:1, but all is well.

Played: Lancer. The PCs talked to the historical war crimes NHP in orbit and found out some about the other historical NHPs, but mostly spent a lot of time talking about what to do next and coming to the conclusion that they’ve only put off the thing they didn’t want to do, not found any way to avoid it.

Read: The Abandoned Heiress Gets Rich With Alchemy and Scores an Enemy General! vol 2 (Miyako Tsukuhara, Satsuki Sheena): Road trip to another kingdom that has dragons, but also has demon problems. Further tsundereness.

Written: 120. Meh.

Played: Zoomwarts?! How did that happen? I blame Jus and her spring break. Anyway, I wrote off the entire game so far as a dream, which gave the players the opportunity to fix everything wrong with the setting, but they did nothing except move it forward to second year so they could feel superior to the new first-years. Marith had a great idea that I will have to implement if we manage to play again, and also I guess I should find a summary of book four (since that’s the year they’re in) since they want things to be the same-ish.

Written: 141.

Are you sure about that?

Played: Lancer, although we had no Kelsey. The spiderbots that were placed on the mantelpiece in the last session were definitely used against us, and it hurt a lot, although we were chewy enough that the station scuttled some of itself to try to get rid of us.

Read: From the Red Fog vol 1 (Mosae Nohara): Unrepentant tween serial killers in Victorian England, with the occasional spot of rape. Do not want.

Written: 122 terrible words. I’m not just saying that, they actually aren’t working. I think I need to back up a bit and approach this scene from a different angle.

Played: Librarians Errant. The team, which is now 5th level but still has no cool team name, goes through the Elemental Plane of Books to get to their next stop on the hunt for The Magical Education, instead of walking on muddy roads in the rain and cold like normal people, which saves like 3 days but does get them jumped when they cut through the bad (Dewey decimal) part of the stacks. Fortunately the rabid bat-books and book-lizards (yes, absolutely, you are correct about what they are, no question) are not that much of a problem, and soon the team arrives at the Kryptgarden Branch Campus. Somehow Thaïs is beaten at cute girls by Lily, of all people. Also they meet an absolutely terrifying dragon, find a suspect who is actually a victim, and stop a foolish professor from sacrificing his grad students to bring horrible monsters through a portal from the Feywild. Thaïs finally gets to use both of her new 3rd-level spells, but neither of them helps at all, because this is D&D and there’s no “play to find out what happens”. Bah!

After that I went with Dave back to his lair, to have Easter dinner with everybody. It was very nice because friends and ham and glazed shallots and friends!

Played: Uno Flex. It’s like regular Uno, but you can make the cards do extra stuff if your checkmark is right-side-up.

Written: Only 188, but I had lot of socializing today.

A good holiday to ignore, really. I don’t need beer, green or otherwise.

Played: Librarians Errant. The team had a brilliant plan to heist the manuscript full of old secrets that their boss wanted, but were thwarted when the people they wanted to offer their book-cataloging services to were out of town for the season. Fortunately(?), the house was in the process of being robbed by bullywugs and other such undesirables, so the team was able to look good by saving the surviving the guards, defeating a recurring bullywug villain, and then rushing down to prevent a hag and her lizardman flunkies from rifling the vault. The lizardman shamans had obnoxious spells like heat metal and roomful of crocodiles, but Thaïs managed to do 65 points of damage with a second-level spell slot (not even a second-level spell, it was upcast!) and also realized the hag had not actually phased through the wall but was lurking invisibly. It was painful and messy, but victory in combat and a victory in refraining from stealing anything except the one object thney were there to steal (unless somebody passed the GM a note and I didn’t notice). The manuscript told the team many salacious and useful things, so now they are packing for a trip to Yartar by way of the Kryptgarden Forest, in search of further volumes of The Magical Education. Level UP!

I tried to get ice cream on the way home, but I had actually eaten so much gaming food that I didn’t want any.

Written: 114

But in Canada, every day is poutine day. I hear.

Early meeting was cancelled, but I didn’t find out until I was already up, so bah.

Played: Lancer. We finished shooting down killsats with giant robot pistols and made it to the creepy abandoned space station, which naturally is full of rabid Second-Comm repair mechs. At least I can punch these ones.

Written: 166, mostly spent rewriting yesterday’s words. I think I might be reaching the point where there are so many notes about things to fix that I should just start over.

I like to think I’d still be okay, because my cats are sweetie pies, but probably it’s mostly because if they were able to open cans they would be too round to attack me.

Played: Librarians Errant. This session was pretty much one huge set-piece battle, with the players getting to also control their allies. The githyanki I played was clearly the best, but she did lose a few hit points to friendly fire (from my primary PC) and so did not make it through entirely unscathed. A lot of people got pretty beat up, but you’d think the area would be running pretty low on goblinoids by now.

Read: “On Venus, Have We Got a Rabbi!” (William Tenn): Future Jewish argument. I am not the target reader, but I hope those who are liked it.

Written: 150.