Tag: office

More honored in the breach, etc etc.

Went to the office, got blamed by customers for not knowing things they hadn’t told us, New Boss T sent LLM output to the customer but nobody except me noticed, ate a stroganoff of beef.

Read (manga): HoriMiya vol 1 (Hero, Daisuke Hagiwara): Apparently this has been sitting on my TBR shelf since the days I thought boys had any place in romance stories. Anyway, she is glamorous at school but practical to take care of her little brother the rest of the time, he is emo and boring at school but secretly pierced and tattooed, together they shop for groceries and entertain the little brother.

Read (novel): The Shattering Peace (John Scalzi): Seventh(?) in the “Old Man’s War” series. Not quite what it says on the tin, although side effects of Consu meddling come close. The main character is pretty awesome. Possibly excessively so, but I like her.

Written (game design): 252:

The name came later, but Harmony was one of the first mechanics I put in
to get rid of spell slots and ten thousand abilities each with their own
set of charges and recharge condition. Now I’m throwing it out? And even
before adding MP, I got rid of health-based HP and now I’m bringing them
back? What is wrong with me? Am I just not smart enough to break free of
the D&D paradigm, even when I have all these other games to steal from?
Am I failing by trying to keep some crunch and not going full
story-game? Have I really reached the point where living dungeons and
black powder masers aren’t enough of a distraction and I have to go back
to the beginning on the system?

And, how do I make any of this anticapitalist, anticolonialist, and
antifascist? Starting with the PCs being outcasts from society instead
of members of a community probably isn’t great. Arguably living dungeons
and meteor monsters are colonizing the world? And wicked people turning
into monsters is spot on as long as we define wickedness appropriately.
And the visitors from the higher realms are definitely colonialist,
showing up and paving over things without regard to the mortals living
there. Whoever recycles souls (I’m pretty sure it’s not the higher
realms nor the celestial bureaucracy that FTWs work with, but some third
group) is also not great in this respect.

But, does the mere existence of colonialist entities presented
unfavorably make the game anticolonialist?

It sure seems like all news is bad news, so I guess that would follow.

Went to the office, only Coworker K was there, did some work, ate some chicken nuggets.

Watched (animated TV): Helluva Boss 1.1: Not sure about the number, this is the redone pilot that is more like what happens before the first episode, but 73% less gonzo and funny. I’m not at all sure this is a better introduction

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.13: The one with the hurricane and Maria.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 4 (Sai Naekawa): Main character and her two monsters go to basketball camp, where of course there is more horror, and also the mermaid insisting she’s a monster and doesn’t like the MC at all.

Written (game design): 284.

Watch, by next year this will be National Charlie Kirk Martyrdom Day. Maybe we can stuff some Nazis into the LHC.

Went to the office, ate a sandwich, did some work, read some news. Poor Coworker D was stuck on a customer call until well past his quitting time. I only had a couple hours of customer call.

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 4 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): More monsters, so many more monsters. Some can be defeated with Hime’s encyclopedic knowledge of the supernatural, but a chainsaw is still always handy.

Read (manga): Throw Away the Suit Together vol 3 (Keyyang): I guess I see the appeal of billionaire romances, since any story that involves job-hunting in the 21st century is guaranteed to be a downer, but at least they still have each other, so it probably counts as HEA?

Written (game design): 317:

Actually, lots of terms, if we’re going to have multiple kinds of
magic (whether distinguished by what it’s like to cast them, what
kind of effects they get, or both), and each needs at least what
its own practitioners call it and what everybody else calls it.
Which brings us back to the unresolved question from weeks ago,
“how does magic even?”.

There’s at least invoking the powers that be, and channeling your chi.
Turning your blood into flaming spears to fling at your enemies? Begging
the god of snails and sunsets and palindromes to give you a protective
shell? Letting the conjured phoenix out of the little cage you keep it
in? Breathing fire like the dragon you’re descended from? Growing spikes
like the mutant porcupine you ate the heart of? Monstering out by
drinking a mysterious potion? Calling up the spirits of the dead to drag
their shameful descendants to the grave?

How does necromancy (either D&D-style armies of undead, or OG divination
by spirits of the dead) work if souls get reprocessed? Are the parts
that know stuff or animate bodies reprocessed, or discarded back into
the environment, or what? What even is a soul? Egyptians had multi-part
souls, it’s not that much of a stretch.

For that matter, what is a spirit of the dead? Is that the same as
an individual ghost, or a more generalized vat of soul (which, not
being a physical substance, can be accessible everywhere)? There’s more
exciting friction (ie, the PCs are more boned) if you have to go where
somebody died to ask their spirit questions, but the Greeks did okay
with random locations and vats of blood, right?

And what’s an undead? I prefer the dead rising from their graves
to cause trouble as an omen of worse things to come over necromancers
calling up stupid shambling comic-relief zombies, but neither has
to be very common before cremation or sky burial or woodchipper has
always been everyone’s mandatory funeral custom. I guess if it’s rare
and there’s a very strong preference for burying intact bodies, maybe it
could still happen? Nothing horrible a PC can do is going to stay rare,
though. Some number of bodies get lost, though, so those could still
come back. Of course the bodies of wandering weirdos are most likely to
not get recovered, so maybe that’s another reason normal people don’t
like the touched. That gets us both headless horsemen and ghost ships,
which are vitally (hah) necessary part of undead stories.

I suppose bodies don’t need to get woodchipped to be safe from returning
from the dead if they have proper funeral rites. They could still be
animated as objects, though.

Hi Sherilyn!

Had a dream about the main character of the project I haven’t been working on. It had name-brand superheroes and wasn’t anything like the situation she’s in, but still. Maybe I should work on that. I figured out the emotional arc of the main character, but it’s getting to the point where I should be starting over to include all the stuff I’ve figured out and that would be the 3596th time I’ve started over because I don’t actually know how to write.

Went to the office, ate some pork and veggies and rice but had to leave the rest to call a customer, learned about a new product, gave some advice to my coworkers.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage Redemption 1.9-10: The one with the librarian and the one covered in bees. Are Harry and Sophie going anywhere with this?

Read (manga): Princess Resurrection vol 1 (Yasunori Mitsunaga): I remembered liking this a lot when I read it in 2012, enough to hunt down pirated scans of the volumes that didn’t get published over here, but apparently I remember it too well now. Will probably finish rereading what I have, and then we’ll see.

Written (game design): 291:

The creation could be ongoing: surprise, there’s a new god! Or a
new school of magic! Or swinging back the other way, a new curse. Or
every month, in the dark of the moon where no one can see, the gods add
a new hex to the edge of the map.

Being able to explore new regions can come in many forms. Maybe the new
regions are actually newly created, but maybe the gods have provided a
gate to another world, or a bridge over the sea of corrosive mist to the
next island. Maybe someone has invented a new kind of transportation
(boats! riding moose! bigger boats! flying carpets!) or protective gear
to travel across the Vast Deadly Desert surrounding Oz (or maybe just
shoes).

If the PCs have better travel ability, but everyone they meet is better
at murdering, then they aren’t likely to be colonialists, but might have
to worry about being colonized. That would be a different game than
fantasy adventure, I think. More like fantasy Star Trek, which is not
bad, but are we digressing from the original goal? We could be
discarding it as unworthy, but I think we’re just digressing.

Back to bad things happening, what if instead of new gods, we lost the
old gods? Any pantheon can drift off into space, but should these ones
plummet to Earth, leaving mountain-range-sized bodies of divine flesh
and lakes of holy blood, none of which leaves things unaltered? Probably
not; I’m stealing that from a smutty webcomic. Also I already did a game
where the entire landscape was smushed beneath the fallen palaces of
Heaven.

Which brings us back to not knowing what to do or how much to do it, but
at least it was an interesting tangent.

Like takeout boxes full of brains!

Went to the office, tried to eat a braised pork bowl but it was too fatty, did some work.

Read (manga): How Do I Turn My Best Friend Into My Girlfriend? vol 4 (Syu Yasaka): Despite each still not realizing the other is gay, they spend Christmas and New Year’s and into the school ski trip getting closer and closer to either making out or dying of heart attacks.

Written (game design): 338:

We’re not making a time-travel game (I hope), so the present of whatever
our vague setting is does depend on its past. What are our options for
the general trajectory?

Post-apocalyptic and ancient world were already mentioned. They are
similar in that most good (valuable or interesting) stuff comes from the
past, but the aesthetics are different: in one, everything is “normal”
just busted up (nuked, dehydrated, zombie-infested), while in the other
the beaches sparkle dazzlingly because they’re a billion years of wear
from structural diamond girders, the landscape is covered with huge
circular lakes from the Age of Relativistic Bombardment, that mountain
range is a buried arcology, etc. Post-apoc is usually SF because the
previous world is supposed to be relatable, meaning usually our world,
but I don’t think that’s strictly necessary. A sufficiently
well-understood fictional setting (generic D&D) would probably work just
as well, and a novel setting that’s fallen apart is just part of the
current setting, which people are fine with being novel. Probably.

Ancient world/deep time settings tend more to be science-fantasy,
with the fantasy usually being psionics and other dubious
science/technology with Clarke’s Law (Numenera), but sometimes real
magic (Ultraviolet Grasslands). The science part is almost always there,
because pure fantasy deep time can be anything, and isn’t more engaging
that pure fantasy that was poofed into existence. Black powder masers
notwithstanding, I don’t think I want to go the science-fantasy route,
but maybe that’s wrong of me. Apparently it’s how D&D started.

If it’s post-apocalyptic but the good stuff is new, and the old bad
stuff has been rejected, I think that’s solarpunk. I feel like that
needs more a link to our world than regular post-apoc, so that we
understand how bad it was. We can tay the ancients’ magic was innately
cursed and that’s why they fell, but do the players care? I guess maybe
if there’s a point in the campaign where they discover what’s in the
basement of the ruins of *m*l*s.

Even though I’m an extremely basic sucker for the OSR Aesthetic, not all
settings have to have apocalypses. That doesn’t mean peace; I’m thinking
of like early China where it was a heap of little kingdoms constantly
conquering each other. It wasn’t much fun for people in the way, but not
everything everywhere was destroyed all at once, so civilization as a
whole carried on. Lower-intensity would be Celts/Sartarites and constant
cattle-raiding skirmishes. Or, everything could be a peaceful utopia,
which is why PCs have to go Anywhere Else. (But that may lead to
colonialism.)

The world could even be improving (see Frieren, where they actually
develop new spells), which again just means less atrocity, not none,
although the improved state does have to be enough better for the
players to appreciate it. Also, if things are already getting better,
what do PCs do? Obviously they help improve things, but this implies
(does not require?) them to be more a part of society than murderhobos
usually are. That might not be a bad thing, but it’s probably more
limiting than D&D.

And of course, on the other side, maybe there’s not an apocalypse yet, but
everything is deteriorating. Probably not what people want to play in
this year 2025, but on the other hand, if the PCs play their cards
right, they could be the apocalypse! Requires a height to fall from,
probably.

Going up one level and then going to the other side, what if something
good happened (euapocalypse? I think that means something different, and
has calamitous koalas)? That can be just as disruptive and exciting as
an apocalypse, although not always as murdery. The biggest one would of
course be the creation of people, by the gods or space bats or whatever.
Maybe the world was created at the same time, or maybe it existed
earlier and didn’t matter because no one was around to see it. This
lends itself to an exploration campaign, which could be light or dark
depending on what they find out there in the world or what people at
home do with it.

Less drastic, but still a pretty big deal would be a sketchy titan
offering mortals a light around the back of the temple, the goddess
Etain bringing the secrets of writing, the wheel, and the double-blind
experiment, or the Okay Sage discovering Zero so you don’t have to herd
pigs any more. People having existed before this and probably gotten used
to how things were, there seems likely to be some social strife, even if
it’s good overall. Also exploration-oriented, but maybe more
competitive, and again, dependent on what possibilities in the world
have opened up.

Speaking of opening up, maybe the new thing is a region or world to
explore. If it’s not inhabited, though, it might not be very
interesting, and if it is, that can lead to colonialism. Maybe that’s
interesting to navigate?

A popular arguably-good change is magic appearing or returning.
That’s almost always in a modern or future setting, but what if a
psuedo-historic setting suddenly becomes a fantasy setting? Nobody
knows what kinds of magic there are, or what the limits could be. I
think this would need a stronger magic system than a settign that had
always had magic, even if only the GM knows it to begin with. Either
that, or some meta-system for discovering the magic system in play, like
the emergent mystery systems from Brindlewood, Ex Tenebris, etc. This
wouldn’t be a general fantasy-adventure system, but it could be
interesting.

A twist on that would be, surprise, there’s gods now! Could be very
similar, could be more social upheaval depending on what people think of
these gods and whether they had preconceptions.

I wish I remembered my dreams better, some of them are pretty good.

Went to the office, ate some veggies and meat and rice and veggies, had too much meeting and didn’t like it, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.6: The one with the Martin Shkreli stand-in and Breanna’s speech about fandom. (Did she come out as queer there, or just allyship?)

Read (manga): Spy x Family vol 14 (Tatsuya Endo): Ski cabin mystery! Then Anya’s first school dance, and a lot of backstory on secondary characters and the horrible war.

Read (novel): Demon in Disguise (Deborah Wilde): Main character has come out to just about everybody she knows, is at least tentatively back together with her ex, time for everything to go bad and end on a cliffhanger.

Written (game design): 328:

So you have the fancy temple wizards, who draw circles to establish
holy domains and write the true names of gods around them and recite
genealogies back to Creation or cite the exact section, paragraph,
and clause of the Celestial Ordinances that applies, etc, etc. They can
make something happen right away, or bless your weapons, or whatever.
Wizards who aren’t so fancy take longer to make spells, but then they
can stash them in their rings or toads or whatever for later use. Some
don’t bother with storing spells and evoke spirits to follow them around
and do stuff for them. Alchemists don’t cast spells at all, they refine
philosopher’s phosphorus or whatever by actually refining it. Mystics
and martial artists also don’t cast spells, but gain special powers over
body and mind by rigorous training and self-discipline. (This is
completely different than the way people get special powers when they
turn into monsters, how dare you.)

Is this too explainy and mechanical? I don’t want to be as completely
vibes-based as some story games (cough DW Wizard’s primary move cough),
because players need to be able to plan in at least a slightly crunchy
way, but it is magic and shouldn’t be boring like D&D. Do I need to go
full post-apocalyptic “we can turn it on and replace the batteries if we
find new ones but no idea how to repair it”?

(D&D is advertised as medieval, but it’s really a combination of
Renaissance (cities, inns, cash economy) plus post-apocalyptic (perilous
ruins, incomprehensible artifacts) plus Wild West (murder-hobos, clear
the subhuman savages to expand civilization). Various editions have
emphasized different aspects: 1e was relatively heavier on the Wild West
since it was supposed to transition into domain play but the
colonialism aspect has faded over time; 4e was more post-apocalyptic
with the “scattered points of light”, etc. I’m also leaning toward the
post-apoc genre, since ancient magic going haywire is a great excuse for
monsters and other problems.)

What do you mean, “why”?

Went to the office, ate a pad thai, did some work.Train was late on the way back, probably because someone was an idiot on the tracks, but not so late that I couldn’t feed the cats on time.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 14 (Yukinobu Tatsu): More huge fight against aliens, some plotlines even got resolved. I’m sure there will be new ones any minute, though, since there’s not danger of running out of weirdos

Written (game design): 256:

Since we’re repudiating any distinction between arcane and divine magic,
drawing circles and burning incense and chanting is obviously prayer
stuff, invoking greater powers to do the thing. What the greater powers
think of this or how they implement it is obviously ineffable. Are these
the same entities from the higher realms that can appear as monsters? I
don’t think so, those are from the cosmic horror side. What humans pray
to are embedded in the same flow of the universe that Harmony harmonizes
with, ex-humans providing an interface that isn’t people any more, but
similar enough to translate between religious ceremony and fundamental
forces of the universe.

(The higher realms aren’t places, they’re states of being in a completely
different way. In theory you could translate someone from the world to
be something in the higher realms, but it wouldn’t be the same person,
probably not even a person at all. Why does it work the other way? You’d
understand after the translation process.)

When I say the gods or ancestors or saints or whatever aren’t people, I
mean you can’t have a conversation with them and get them to just answer
questions or give you that little bit more power for your really good
cause. You do the thing, the flow of the universe is altered (lose
Harmony) in accordance with the opaque rules. In a lot of cases the
thing may be saying what you want to have happen, but you can’t just say
whatever and hope to get anything.

They Frolic.

Went to the office, ate mild masamun meatball curry, did a work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 2.1: Amazon, what are you doing?! But that explains why some time seemed to have passed. The one with the dictator and his debutante daughter.

Read (novel): Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe (CB Lee): Interdimensional meet-cute, followed by more cuteness but also impending doom which ties into one girl’s family backstory and there are feelings and conspiracies but overall it’s really pretty cozy.

Read (manga): Yuri Espoir vol 3 (Mai Naoi): Yuri-fantasizing girl continues to be extremely traumatized by the existence of this man-thing she has to marry, although other people seem to be able to deal with him just fine and he’s drawn with a face when she’s not there an everything. Also, scenes from the very gay lives of the women she sketches. Best Friend is kind of sus, but I think we saw that before.

Written (game design): 221:

We can definitely come up with lists of potential consequences for
the specific Actions, since they’re more constrained than “Act Under
Pressure”. Another possibility is allowing partial success: “They’re
your friend now, but only as long as you keep the presents coming,”
or whatever. “Act Under Pressure” is by definition for things that
aren’t as interesting to play out in detail, so it can be pass/fail.

Now we’re back to having to construct the list of Actions, because the
one before wasn’t good enough. And we haven’t even gotten into actions
for fighting a guy.

Oh, another possibility for the results of Actions is that you could
give the GM some kind of metacurrency, which they can then spend to give
you a failure later, or some stroke of horrible luck. GM metacurrency is
tricky, since it has to be distinct from what the GM can do normally
according to the rules of the game, but on the other hand, how great is
it to have a stack of Quantifiable Doom to taunt the players with?

I think that’s one of those jobs that seems way more exciting on the screen than in real life. (Like most jobs.)

Went to the office, had the room to myself, ate some jerk pork, did some work, nicked some extra jerk pork to eat for dinner.

Read (manga): There’s No Freaking Way I’ll Be Your Lover! Unless… vol 7 (Musshu, Teren Mikami, Eku Takeshima): Rena and Ajisai finish their runaway episode with Mai’s “help”, Ajisai admits that she loves Rena (to herself, readers already knew), nobody is actually murdered by their family.

Written (game design): 278:

One of the problems with stealing PbtA moves is that they’re completely
player-facing, so we finally have to decide on how to resist social
skills, which may be the impetus need to make a rule for opposed
actions.

The quality of your action, which may only matter for opposed actions,
is the lowest value on any of your successful dice. If you didn’t roll
because you were at Difficulty 0, your quality is the same as your skill
rating. If you rolled and have no successful dice, your quality is 0.
Higher, or highest, quality wins.

Actual harm still goes through Readiness to get to your tender flesh or
soul, but mere blandishments can be resisted with an opposed roll using
“Be a Stubborn Ass” against whatever the other person is using. This is
like a save, but subtly different for reasons to be explained later.

Another question is, why would players choose these more specific
Actions that have to have their own ratings instead of always Acting
Under Pressure and spending all their XP on improving that one rating?
Of course the rule is that if there’s a specific move for what you’re
doing, you have to use it, but never underestimate a player’s
willingness to argue that they’re doing something slightly different and
therefore that rule doesn’t apply. We can make Act Under Pressure more
expensive to buy up, although probably not as expensive as everything
else put together. (But maybe.)

Using the carrot instead of the stick, we can make the outcomes for
using a specific move better (for the player) or more concrete (for the
GM). Or we could if we had any ideas how to do that.

Squamate! Squamate! OK!

Went to the office, attended an all-hands where none of the (minor and completely surmountable) problems could be construed as the fault of my team, ate a rice pork burger-shaped thing that made me vaguely queasy, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage: Redemption 1.2: Still chasing the opiate billionaire, Hardison has to bail to the other side of the world but look! there’s a new hacker that he vouches for. (We knew this was coming, the actor wasn’t able to commit to the whole season.) She has good ideas, though, and an appropriate regard for Parker.

Read (manga): Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 8 (Hiromu Arakawa): The complicated city-wide murdering scene is over, now all the characters are regrouping. So many characters, who are all these people? But many of them are entertaining people, so it’s okay.

Read (novel): Primer for the Apocalypse vol 1 (Braided Sky): Alien magic and the system will come to Earth, but right now a time mage from after the point has escaped back and is trying to rebuild her power so she can protect her family, without giving away that she will be able to time travel. Bog-standard litRPG.

Read (short): “Trap Line” (Timothy Zahn): An SF story in the old style: a human gets into trouble among the stars and has to figure out the problem and work with some aliens and against other aliens to save the day. In this case, the problem involves astral projection.

Written (game design): 465:

We could do Harmony-based magic like XZQJY. (When you spend a while
in meditation, roll with Mysticism. On a 10+ hold 5 Harmony; on a
7-9 hold 3; on a 6- hold 1 in addition to whatever the GM tells
you.) But we don’t actually have to, there are plenty of other options
for non-battery magic. Like, enchanted or cursed places/objects/monsters
have a Weirdness rating, and you can do any feat of magic (ie, cast any
spell) equal to or less than that Weirdness, but if you roll a 7-9 on
using magic, you can’t use that aura of strangeness against for a while,
and if you roll a 6-, it definitely gets to turn your spell back on you
or possess you or curse you. Or, the gods inscribe spells on the inside
of your skull, but when you roll 7-9 to cast one, it gives you a
concussion and on a 6- maybe you suffer serious brain damage. The
possibilities are endless!

Is it 10+/7-9/6- based on 2d6? It could be 0d6 to 4d6, keep the highest,
6/4-5/1-3, and that’s still officially PbtA. There’s a recent big FitD
fantasy release, Grimwild, though. Let’s stick with 2d6 for now and just
say you can’t roll at more than +/-4.

Back to classes. Cleric and Wizard are the only spellcasters. Druid is
all shapeshifting all the time, which doesn’t need to change. Bards can
spont a few magical effects, but I’m not sure we need bards at all. Any
spellcaster can have singing as their special effect, and any character
can try to seduce all the things.

Actually, can anybody seduce anything? “Hot” isn’t exactly a personality
trait, so there’s not an ability for it. We could make being good at the
D&D stats into moves you can take, though. Brute Force (move and break
things, maybe roll with Aggression), Striking Looks (seduce people,
maybe roll with Focus since paying attention to someone is allegedly
seductive), Educated (you know all about something, like the Bard’s
move), Unkillable, etc.

Back to classes. Do we want thieves? Anybody can sneak up on someone and
murder them without a roll if the fictional positioning is right, but
thieves can have specific moves for it, that’s fine in DW. Not sure
about paladins. Probably not barbarians, they seem OP and/or not really
suited for a party. Having been around since AD&D notwithstanding,
they’re kind of in a different genre.

I keep talking about wizards instead of The Wizard and such, which shows
a lack of commitment to PbtA, but I’m waffling over whether to have
classes like that, or classes at all. Pick one of the major beginning
moves (spellcasting, signature weapon, animal companion, etc), another
from the general pool, and away you go as some unique weirdo?

My own handwriting is terrible, but I admire calligraphy!

Betrayed by one bus, went to the office, ate a weirdly small burrito, did some weirdly small work, raised a concern to my interim manager, attended a training about new mandatory self-criticism reports.

Read (manga): Daemons of the Shadow Realm vol 7 (Hiromu Arakawa): More reunions and murders and escapes and backstories. Basically every character is still more interesting than the MC, though.

Written (game design): 223:

Leaving that to ferment, earlier I mentioned taking D&D out of
Dungeon World, so let’s look at a different part of game space and see
if there’s anything to bring back.

D&D abilities still suck, but Dungeon World is not the kind of game that
should have a bunch of skills. Maybe replace the abilities with
personality traits, more like Apocalypse World? Aggression instead of
Strength (not my idea; Into the Odd, maybe?), Focus, Mysticism,
Jitters, Determination? Five is probably enough. Also there should be a
move to fall prey to the downside of each one, although that risks
creating a “roll minus” mechanic. Also no ability scores, just -1 to +3
like the Bakers intended.

Level is just the number of advances you’ve taken, we can swap one term
for the other without losing anything except a few characters. Check XP
on failure and when answering end-of-session questions, that’s all good.

PbtA games are big on playbooks, but allow pretty arbitrary
“multiclassing” for at least a few moves, so going classless wouldn’t be
impossible. Making new classes isn’t hard, though, so it might be better
to just have a whole bunch of classes, replacing the old ones that are
too D&Dish. Wizard and Cleric would go, since we no longer believe in
secular magic.

Wouldn’t it be great if everyone in the world agreed this was not a celebration?

Went to the office, ate some samosas and chicken biriyani, did some work.

Read (manga): Kiss & White Lily for My Dearest Girl vol 1 (Canno): Reread. The girl who is good at everything using raw stats x the girl who put time into developing skills and still comes in second at everything, grrr! With many interludes about other students at Yuri High.

Written (catgirl): 266.

Also other things that are relevant is this dystopia, such as National Support Public Education Day, National Whistleblowers Appreciation Day, and World Day Against Trafficking in Persons. And, as a treat, National Cheesecake Day.

Went to the office, ate some falafal and dolmas and stuff, did a little work, almost fell asleep.

Read (manga): Otherside Picnic vol 12 (Iori Miyazawa, Eita Mizuno, Shirakaba): The search for the missing person has reached a major plot twist! Also, a cult compound full of creepy interdimensional weirdness is definitely the ideal place for PCs to set up a secret base.

Written (catgirl): 236.

But what are you going to tell me?

Went to the office, it was full of coworkers, ate some beef stroganoff which was far from healthy but which I haven’t had in years, sat on a customer call for hours.

Read (manga): Bloom Into You vol 1 (Nakatani Nio): Two high-school girls who thought they would never find but also never really miss love, one suddenly declares her love for the other, they are in the student council together. I only read two volumes of this back in the day, but have like four more, so I put it in the TBR before sending them to the used book store.

Read (manga): Dra-Q vol 2 (Chiyo): Pako is definitely a werewolf now, which poses all sorts of problems (some of which may have been made up), Amelie is incredibly pure and innocent for a decapitated vampire, little brothers are obnoxious, everything is a mess.

Written (game design): 291:

Not all saves happen as a result of attacks; some are from environmental
hazards. I think those are handled as hits with +0 on the wound die: no
HP, because you avoid the hit by not going into the dangerous
environment.

The other use of saves in (modern) D&D is to determine when an effect
ends, but that has to be part of the rules for poison/disease/curses,
which will be utterly brilliant as soon they get written.

Save vs Falling isn’t ignoring gravity, it’s holding onto something
(the cliff you were just pushed off, the train you’re riding on the
outside of, etc), which is almost like an action but too simple to be
worth having the full mechanics. Also it seems like it should be
affected by Strength and Size, which otherwise don’t affect d20 rolls.
Is it just a special case of Get Over There (which covers climbing)? It’s
probably not worth it’s own special mechanic, but it’s a reaction, not
an action.

Save vs Restraint is in the same boat. It could almost be an action of
its own, Wriggle Out, but it’s not really enough. Maybe it should be
part of Get Over There as well. I think that’s more justifiable than for
Save vs Falling, but that leaves Save vs Falling still orphaned.

I don’t know what to do with this, and I should. “I try to not die” is a
valid and even common adventurer action. Maybe it’s enough to have a
nonspecific save based on luck (which is not currently a mechanical
entity, so just a die roll)?

I haven’t had any today, but I hope to enjoy vanilla ice cream on many days this summer!

Went to the office, ate some tacos, did some work.

Read (novel): Firebreak (Craig Schaefer): Second volume of highly sus magic school in Schaefer’s multiseries universe, our heroic lesbians continue to be awesome but also have teenager problems to go with their magic problems. Very cliffhanger ending, since this is supposed to be I think five books.

Read (manga): Dandadan vol 13 (Yukinobu Tatsu): Now we understand Vamola’s backstory, so it’s time for the heroes to rally!

Written (game design): 520:

Wait, how could I forget about the stochastic variant of door #3? Save
vs Ambush or lose half your HP! Or possibly lose all of them, or the
attacker gets the bonus attack dice. Anyway, this is pretty much exactly
why I thought of Save vs Ambush in the first place.

How do saves even? They’re for situations where the player might
avoid a bad outcome, so dice are appropriate, but it’s not really
an action. They feel like they should be d20 rolls, but are they
like actions? Is there a Difficulty? How would it be set? What does
a failed die do? For saves, failure and consequences are the same,
so that part of the action mechanic doesn’t really apply. Are saves
always D1, so they’re simple pass/fail? Or higher difficulty, to
allow for more granular outcomes like 1d6 attack or one round of
paralysis for each bad die?

How does this interact with HP? Earlier I had a bunch of saves
besides Ambush/Traps (Poison/Sickness, Curses, Possession/Compulsion,
Restraint, Falls, Influence), but where do the saves come in as opposed
to hits at 0 HP? I said earlier that I want to have effects actually
take effect, not fizzle, so a save up front isn’t right. Still thinking
about spell attacks going against MP, but for now let’s say every attack
goes through HP until it gets a hit.

Save vs Ambush or Trap isn’t about taking a hit (in D&D it would be the
Perception check against the hidden pressure plate or the ninja sneaking
up behind you) so it’s fine as-is. Save vs Influence is for resisting
social skills from NPCs, which probably don’t go against HP, so that’s
okay too. The rest I’m not sure about. Would it be nice to have
characters with varying levels of resistance to different kinds of
trouble? I think it would, but are save ratings the way to do it? Maybe they
instead have varying amounts of “armor” to subtract from the wound die
when they finally take a hit?

No, I’m wrong, a save isn’t the correct mechanic for resisting NPC
social skills. This isn’t a game where only the players roll, so the NPC
makes their action, and if they succeed, the PC target gets a bribe of
experience points to play along, which they can turn down if they really
want to. This also works for Possession/Compulsion, but because it’s
less of a choice for the character, they get some negative effect (maybe
just a wound) if they decline the experience points for playing along.

The other saves aren’t about things that affect character behavior
directly, so I don’t think the bribe mechanic fits. Modifying the wound
die is better for those.

Save vs Ambush is not like any of those, so it should be a different
mechanic, probably integrated with however we roll initiative.

🙂 🙂 🙂 🙂

Went to the office, train was delayed, did some work, ate some Impossible sausage, along with improbable mashed potatoes and entirely plausible sauerkraut.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.8: The one where Parker is on her own and down a limb, but solves the problem anyway because she’s the best.

Read (manga): Ogami-San Can’t Keep It In vol 7 (Yu Yoshidamaru): They made it! Not without more worries, but they get all the way to an epilogue where Ogami says she wants more sex.

Read (manga): The Tiger Won’t Eat The Dragon Yet vol 3 (Hachi Inaba): Tiger and Dragon continue the quest for reduced mortality and encounter various beasts, including the ones they really didn’t want to meet again. Also a cut to Boy Tiger and the cheetah cub he adopted. This manga is kind of nerve-wracking, since I don’t care if humans get eaten by hyenas, but would be very upset if Baby Cheetah did, and they still might.

Read (short): “An Easy Mistake” (Glynn Stewart): Vignette to draw people to the newsletter, as is apparently the custom in our social-media-blighted dystopia of 2025.

Written (game design): 336:

I was thinking about how I want to have black powder guns and
grenades as non-magical counterparts to the big-damage limited-use
spells, but what even is “non-magical”? D&D has a fake-historical
setting with “magic” stapled on top, but it’s a distinct thing,
which leads to spells of detect magic and dispel magic, and even a
god of magic, when it’s the gods themselves that should be magic.
(We continue to reject the false dichotomy of divine vs arcane
magic!)

But is magic invoking the gods, or powers bestowed by the gods?
Maybe secret knowledge granted by the gods? Performed by servitors sent
by the gods? Are there even gods? Earlier I talked about MP being
attunement to the flow of the cosmos, and maybe that’s all there is; the
“gods” are just humans putting faces on different parts of it? Not that
means they aren’t real.

Not sure where I’m going with this. (I say that a lot, don’t I?)
We already knew all of D&D magic can be tossed out, but this isn’t
getting us closer to knowing what to replace it with. If we do have
guns and bombs, then magicians don’t have to be literal artillery
and can fill some other roles.

One thing I like from some OSR games is the “cleric” being the prophet
of some weird little god. There can be also be priests of big important
gods with temples and vestments and established rites, but the prophet
is directly connected to something that is highly specialized and not
even slightly good at dealing with human stuff. The quote I remember is,
“Whoops, you didn’t want to give birth to a thousand live snakes through
your mouth? Sorry, it was an honest mistake!” This is somewhere between
magic-by-invoking-the-gods and magic-powers-granted-by-the-gods, but
presumably part of being an early prophet is establishing the rites so
the later priests can have magic-spells-revealed-by-the-gods or
whatever.

Also, maybe I want black powder lasers. The equipment list is fair game
for worldbuilding!

Friend noodles!

Went to the office, did some work, ate some dumplings, sat on the phone with a customer but contributed nothing. Also made a dumb mistake trying to help another customer, but did get it sorted.

Marith gave me some of her vegetable vegetable vegetable vegetable chicken so I wouldn’t die. Look, vitamins!

Read (manga): I Wanna Be Your Girl vol 1 (Umi Takase): She’s a trans girl who is publicly out for the first time now that she’s starting high school. She’s her childhood friend who is addicted to getting mad on behalf of others and also is in love with her. Together they fight crime gender norms and make friends. Is it just me, or is Yankee flirting with Anger Goblin?

Written (game design): 385:

I was thinking about doing things to enemies in combat besides scoring
hits to wound them, and wondering why you would bother to do that after
taking the trouble to chew through all their HP, except in very special
circumstances. I might be falling into the fine-grained D&D paradigm,
though. In D&D, if someone hits you with a special attack that knocks
you down, you remain motionless on the floor, with the Prone debuff, while
somewhere between 0 and N-2 other units activate, after which you can
spend some of the few footsteps allotted to you to stand up, move to
another square, swing your sword once, etc.

If I haven’t yet been talked out of having a round be a larger chunk
of combat and actions be simultaneous, though, then getting knocked
down is just a thing that happens during the round, and you can get
back up without having to account for every muscle contraction to
the Time and Motion Consultant. Knocking someone down, or throwing
pocket sand in their eyes, or whatever, is just Aid Another, if
it’s much of any action. I think.

Or maybe the key is that rolling your attack die against somebody you’re
engaged in combat with isn’t an action. You’re in weapon range, you get
to just roll your die (but so do they). Your action is something more
interesting like “keep them away from the wizard” or “push them off the
cliff”. I’m dubious about there being a “fight this guy harder” action
even if it’s not clear what else you would do in a one-on-one duel, but
“fight all these guys” so you can attack more than one of them is
probably valid.

Another list that we need: actual actions while fighting somebody.

    • Defend a person/place/thing
    • Push your opponent back or otherwise position them
    • Open your opponent up to attack by your ally
    • Also attack another opponent
    • Intimidate your opponent (force a morale check)
    • Seduce your opponent (got to draw in those Thirsty Sword Lesbians players…)
    • Play to the crowd
    • Knock something away from them
    • Strike at a weak spot

These are the things that you’d roll for if there end up being
combat action ratings; some obviously use another action like Issue
Commands to intimidate or Put On a Show to impress the crowd.

Every day is kitten day, for every nation! [gavel emoji]

Went to the office, had a chat with New Boss² A (he did most of the chatting), had a chat with Newish Boss³ M, ate a Beyond Meat wrap, finally made progress on the thing I’ve been putting off. The explanation for Former Boss² B’s dismissal was kind of sus, but I don’t know enough to refute it.

Beyond Meat sounds like it should be delivered by TARDIS from the far reaches of the continuum.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.10: Despite all the changes made for TV, it did end in the same place as the first book, so that was good. There may have been Feelings. Also, set design! I hear a second season has been approved, although no idea when it will come out or what it will cover.

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 3 (Sai Naekawa): Rival girl monster makes a strong showing with the dramatic gesture!

Read (short): “Hart-Struck” (Murphy Lawless): It’s an entire Virtue Shifter novella compressed into one scene!

Read (manga): Lonely Castle in the Mirror vol 5 (Mizuki Tsujimura, Tomo Taketomi): The dramatic conclusion, in which we find out what everybody’s personal deal was, and also what the deal with the castle was, and what happens when there’s a wish and everything. The End!

Read (short): “Rapport: Friendship, Solidarity, Communion, Empathy” (Martha Wells): A non-Murderbot (but ART) story, somewhere between Artificial Condition and Network Effect, where we see what kind of stuff ART’s crew gets up to and also maybe ART has a feeling.

Written (game design): 372:

Other magic I don’t like, even though it does something instead of
plusses, is remove curse/dispel magic. A proper curse should take more
than a single generic spell to get rid of. Likewise, unenchanting
something enchanted should take more than a single abracadabra. We spurn
the level-appropriate adventure, negative (or positive!) consequences
don’t have to be gone by the next morning to keep everything calibrated.

I also dislike detect magic, although that might be a matter of
presentation. We need more enemy mages appearing as hundred-handed
god-monsters in the astral realm and fewer color-coded arrows, but that
may be a lot of work for the GM.

Related to remove curse, I want to unify curses, diseases, and poisons
conceptually and mechanically, but I’m not sure how. It’s either a minor
issue that can be put off, or a key to the entire system.

For that matter, I don’t even know exactly what to do with the kind of
wounds PCs are expected to accumulate. When the enemy’s attack roll
exceeds your remaining Hit Protection, you take a hit, but what does
that mean? Are you out? Do you go through some degrees of woundedness
before being taken out? Should there be something like a roll modified
by how much attack exceeds HP, so that a better attack hurts more? I
like that because it offers the possibility of varying the results based
on whether you’re a huge dragon, or a slime zombie with no vital organs,
or whatever.

A lot of OSR systems have Dismemberment & Disfigurement tables, or
something named very similarly, to roll on when you take a serious
wound, but I may be too attached to my characters being cute to go for
that. We are assuming some kind of healing magic, though, so temporary
disabilities are fine.

I don’t think I want healing in combat, but that opens up the whole can
of worms about what magic is available and how fast it can be cast. It’s
not fantasy adventure without fireballs, but ritual magic is overall
more interesting.

Alas, I am old and useless and only have fictional horizons.

Went to the office after vacation, discovered that Boss² T was gone (which I had expected) but also Former Boss² B, which was not expected! He was my favorite! Bad company! I am not sure what happened there, but I do not approve! Nothing I could do, though, I have no power and am on a different continent. Ate a burger, did a small amount of work.

Read (light novel): I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level vol 2 (Kisetsu Morita, Benio): Our MC accumulates more cute and powerful girls in a way that is not explicitly gay but is suspiciously homoerotic and definitely ridiculous.

Read (novel): The Void Ascendant (Premee Mohamed): Despite the ending of the previous book, our main character is still stuck with existence, and fate isn’t done with him yet, as he will soon discover. Further interdimensional shenanigans ensue, until reaching an even more definitive conclusion than before. Probably.

Written (game design): 176:

Before I digressed, I was going to say that it’s lame for magic items,
or spells, or magic in general, to give plusses. Magic should give
narrative positioning, so you can do things you couldn’t otherwise
(which if we stick with the system from earlier, is expressed
mechanically as dice of Difficulty). As a
side effect, maybe they can give you a higher action rating for
something, but as previously mentioned, it should be a flat value. In
summary:

BAD: this item gives you +2 to Scrounge for doing the thing
MAYBE: this item raises your Scrounge score to 15 for doing the thing
BAD: this item removes 1 Difficulty when you do the thing
GOOD: this item serves as the tools needed for doing the thing
GOOD: this item lets you read any language needed for doing the thing

I guess that’s how languages work now, just +D on social tasks if you
don’t share a language.

Sadly, all piloted by the Loch Ness monster. In further depressing news, it’s Second Half of the Year Day, which means we are now and forever more closer to 2050 than 2000.

Went to the office, ate some scallion pancakes rolled around meat and veggies and some sesame balls, did some work, got notes in everything that might become active before next Wednesday, set my email and Salesforce to OoO.

Watched (live-action TV): Slow Horses 1.5: There seem to be a lot of guns around for the UK, but I guess most of them are coming from the government thugs. I have definite hopes for who gets shot next.

Read (short): “Finer than Silk, Brighter than Snow” (Shveta Thakrar): The power of stories, and also snakes.

Read (novel): The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands (Sarah Brooks): Another in the recent subgenre where part of the world goes weird, in this case Siberia, although it has a Great Train running through it to have steampunk capitalism vs mystic landscape.

Read (manga): Failed Princesses vol 4-5 (Ajiichi): Love confessions all over! Apparently there’s only one more volume in which to get everything sorted.

Written (game design): 329:

D&D combat is very much putting all the pieces, whose rules are
public knowledge, onto the chessboard in plain view of everyone,
each in their own square, and then taking turns moving exactly one
piece at a time from square to square and applying one of its rules.
There are definite advantages to doing it this way: when the sorcerer
takes her turn, the barbarian is absolutely in this square and the
evil pharaoh is absolutely in that square, so there’s no question
about who’s in the nine squares of the thunderwave. Easy for newbs,
consistent results, no need for judgment calls. But there are board
games for that, some not even explicitly based on D&D.

I want something that’s slightly more like being in a haunted cave
while a giant worm monster and its pet sewer cannibals try to eat
your face. It’s still a tabletop game, it’s not going to be that
much more, but some would be nice.

Instead of having each unit activate, take its turn, and then freeze
again, we can separate declaration and resolution. From worst initiative
upward, each character declares what they’re doing, but they can declare
they’re getting involved (either for or against) in something that’s
already been declared. Then everything gets resolved more or less at
once, which may involve some judgment calls on the part of the GM as to
how far the human charging toward the wizard gets before they get
intercepted by the war bear, or what have you. This does want a new
initiative roll every round, so we might not want to have everyone
do double-digit addition ever time. My hope is to make a round a larger
chunk of the combat, though, so a heavier end/beginning of round
procedure might not be as bad.

Positioning should be looser, not down to the minimum space a
medium-size combatant occupies. I don’t know whether we want to be
as loose as 13th Age, which has zones of one standard move, and
then combatants can be engaged (adjacent) if they’re in the same
zone, or at a specific point like blocking a doorway, or just
somewhere in the zone. Maybe like 10′ zones, so anyone in a zone can
interact with anyone else if they want without having to take a move
action? That might still be too finicky, though.

Hopefully includes air conditioning for our friends on the East Coast!

Went to the office, the train worked out okay going but I need to change it up on the way back, ate some meat and veggies and rice and tea egg, did some work, told other people how to do work.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.8: Uh oh, Murderbot has a plan. And yeah, I thought we hadn’t had the name reveal until now!

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.5: The one with the cheerleaders and the federal government. It seems pretty obvious what Nate’s plan is, but we don’t know his motivation yet and there’s probably a twist.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 7 (Yoshimurakana): The unwholesomeness from last volume is still going on in the background, but now Kuroko has an entire terrorist organization to murder, so that should keep her occupied for a bit.

Read (manga): I Wanna Do Bad Things With You vol 3 (Yutaka): Oh no, someone else has noticed that our heroine is smoking hot and apparently also bi!

Written (game design): 320:

Leaving the primary spell-casting classes aside for the moment, what
other combined classes do we need, if we need classes? Fighter,
barbarian, and ranger are basically the same, they just have different
combat feats/fighting styles. (D&D rangers have spells, but I think
that’s just shoehorned in because as previously mentioned, everything is
spells. Two-weapon fighting and animal companion are more central to the
class.) Paladin and monk are more magical, but again, it doesn’t have to be
spells. Innate powers seem just as fitting, and possibly there’s not a
difference between those and advanced combat feats. Again, I’m okay with
nobody being able to claim punching through a brick wall isn’t magic.

There’s a school of thought that holds that D&D jumped the shark
when thieves were introduced. Suddenly, there’s a class that has
Climb Walls, Read Scrolls, and Backstab on its sheet, which means
all the other classes don’t. 3rd ed somewhat reversed that by
making most of those things skills that any character can have, but
the idea that you can do what’s on your character sheet and can’t
do things that aren’t was pretty firmly embedded.

The major thief ability that didn’t get turned into a skill is Backstab,
which has also gotten progressively genericized until now it has nothing
to do with stealth or surprise or distraction, and just gives a damage
bonus if the thief has a buddy nearby. This is as lame as calling them
“rogues”. It’s not that great to make only one class able to get an
advantage from ambushing people, though. Stabbing your enemies in the
back is a basic tactic, not a superpower. So, thieves are part of the
fighter superclass, differentiated only by the feats they take.

That’s another thing we need a list of, or several lists, or a tree or
something.

Not sure I have anything witty to say about vitiligo.

Finally went in to the office, ate a barbecue sandwich, did some work.

I have not been gastrointestinal since not shooting up on Sunday, so I need to contact my doctor. Ugh.

Trains are weird for at least the rest of this year. I should probably figure out how to take the bus up to the other train station, even though it will probably require me to get up even earlier on commute days. Ugh.

Read (novel): These Lifeless Things (Premee Mohamed): Decades after the stars were briefly right, a young academic reads the journal of someone who lived through those years and tries to find evidence to corroborate it. Humanities researchers get no respect.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 6 (Yoshimurakana): Yikes, that was very unwholesome and completely lacking in redeeming social value!

Read (anthology): Cooties Shot Required (ed Scott Gable, C Dombrowski): Anthology of stories about children in very unusual, often horrific, situations where adults are of no use. Mostly fantasy/horror, some SF. Not all end well.

Written (game design): 298:

Probably due to my exposure to Champions at an impressionable age,
I’m leaning strongly toward building characters (point-buy etc),
but I have an unreasonable fondness for the idea of discovering
characters (random generation). I also like the idea, don’t know where
it started, of using the same rolls that generate, eg, hit points (more
on those later) inversely to generate starting stuff. Like, if you roll
a 1 for HP, you get a giant clockwork dragon to eat your enemies, but if
you roll a 6, you get only an unsightly duelling scar. This needs a
table for every rolled attribute, for every class, so it would be
impractical here with a dozen or more skills times an unknown number of
classes, and it’s not even what I want here. Or rather, I can’t have
everything all at once. Probably.

I’m not sure how many classes we have. D&D has to rigidly structure
classes to make sure every character of a given level can defeat the
same level-appropriate encounter by expending 25% of their resources or
whatever, but if we give up on that, we don’t have to care as much.
(Maybe not none, but definitely less.) Is everyone who learns spells
from some kind of patron the same class regardless of whether the patron
is an ancient tree (druid), a demon (warlock/wizard), or an ineffable divine
presence (cleric/bard)? I would tend to say yes. Then everybody who has
innate powers can be the same class, but are they even that different?
I don’t see why you can’t have a mix. Probably need some way to keep
everyone from becoming a useless generalist, but otherwise maybe we
don’t even need classes.

That’s every day, for humans!

Went to the office, did some work, ate a torta or at least picked out the insides.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 2 (Yoshimurakana): More horndoggery, more crazed killers, a murder mansion, still no redeeming social value.

Read (short): Fugitive Telemetry (Martha Wells): Murderbot solves a murder mystery and is still the best.

Watched (live-action TV): Murderbot 1.5: What’s up with this new character?! Marith and I suspect different things about them, which could both be true.

Written (catgirl): 270.

Insert mockery of the current regime here.

Missed my train stop but still made it in to the office, Coworker D is on vacation, ate some popcorn chicken, had my first 1:1 with Boss T.

Watched (live action TV): Leverage 5.3-4: The one where Nate doesn’t listen, and the one where Eliot helps Parker have an emotion.

Read (manga): Murciélago vol 1 (Yoshimurakana): A mass-murdering lesbian horndog kills criminals the police can’t handle in a city named R’lyeh. It’s over-the-top action-horror, not cosmic horror despite the Lovecraftian words scattered around, and all the monsters are nominally human, but it’s not surprising SAN is in generally short supply. Very unwholesome, zero redeeming social value.

Read (novel): Shroud (Adrian Tchaikovsky): It’s not a Hal Clement novel, but probably as close as we get in 2025. Two unfortunate explorers from a von Neumann corporate dystopia are stranded on a world that’s a cross between Venus and Titan and have to trek across the alien terrain full of alien creatures to get off. It’s more xenobiology and xenopsychology than chemistry and physics, though.

Written (catgirl): 198. Oh, that’s what was behind that door.

A pink flamingo is a well-fed flamingo full of brine shrimp!

Also End of the Middle Ages Day, which is apropos since I was thinking about how D&D is not medieval. (It’s mostly Renaissance, with some Wild West and Post-Apocalyptic thrown in.)

Went to the office, ate German food with vat-grown sausage, did some work.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 5.1: New lair, and Nate is up to something that’s probably self-destructive. The one with the airplane.

Read (novel): Advocate (Daniel M Ford): Frontier town necromancer-sheriff has to go back to civilization to help defend her mentor against trumped-up charges, which lets her use her noble background but also involves a lot of annoying politics.

Written (catgirl): 299.

They have built-in pockets for their favorite rocks, and trade rocks as part of courtship.

Went to the office, Coworker D is on vacation, Boss K is gone, ate a salmon sushirrito, did some work. Had a meeting with new Boss³ M (or maybe he’s only boss² since boss and boss² are currently collapsed into one) to tell him about everything that’s broken and ridiculous.

Read (manga): Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon vol 2-3 (Shio Usui): They definitely have feelings, although so far it’s still a mess. The little sister ships them, though.

Written (catgirl): 148.

Hi Ken!

Went to the office, some coworkers were there, ate samosas and saved my chicken biriyani for later, tried to straighten things up for vacation.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.15-16: the one where they help a rich guy, and the one where Hardison tries to be the mastermind. Only two episodes left in the season, so the guy who shows up at the end is probably going to be important for the finale.

Read (RPG): Under Hollow Hills (Meguey Baker, Vincent Baker): You are a fairy circus that travels around performing and getting involved in fairy shenanigans. Pretty much the opposite of Apocalypse World tonally, yet still very PbtA. Shifting toward Summer or Winter, planning shows, ensuring there’s always someone who doesn’t want you there, attending your own funeral, all the important fairy tropes are covered, in a way that’s generic enough to let players come up with their own ideas of fairy but evocative enough to always be Fairy.

Read (novel): The Devils (Joe Abercrombie): In an alternate Europe full of anthropophagous elves, murder, religious schisms, murder, various forms of holy and unholy sorcery, murder, etc, an extremely hapless monk is given command of a band of monstrous criminals and sent to deliver the lost princess of Troy to her throne. It’s Abercrombie, so it’s the darkest and murderiest of comedy, but surprisingly for alternate-historical grimness, I don’t think there’s any sexual violence. Stayed up way too late finishing it.

Written (catgirl): 171.

Not sure what that one’s about, poetry or body horror or both.

Went to the office, closed some more cases, got official notification that Boss K is leaving, ate a veggie burrito.

Read (novel): The Incandescent (Emily Tesh): Magical dark British academia, from the perspective of a teacher, written by somebody who knows what it is teachers actually do all day in the modern world. Also, did you know that teachers are supposed to protect their students and not use them as pawns? Yes, even the orphans! Plus, a real magic system with suitably alarming supernatural entities.

Written (catgirl): 127.

One of two, and that’s not counting Velociraptor Awareness Day.

Went to the office, spaced out during a long all-hands meeting, ate some rice and vegetables and meat, put up with Coworker R being a libertarian and also engaging in the British national sport of complaining (I have no moral high ground here), closed some cases.

I complained on slack about being ditched for the journey to and from Roseville, so now everybody there can hate me too. They’re right that I could at least look for a taxi if I hate both gig economy and people doing things for me, though.

Watched (live-action TV): Leverage 4.14: While the girls were out righting a wrong at a fancy party, the boys were getting into some kind of mobster trouble with an idiot.

Read (novel): Emberstone Farm vol 2 (L Meili): More OP-ness, world events that are alarming to people who think they live in reality, system usage that’s alarming to people who think they live in reality, extremely off-screen sex, nothing like an actual problem for the MC.

Read (manga): Assorted Entanglements vol 2 (Mikanuji): Apparently it’s been two years since I read volume 1, so I don’t remember if any of these are the same characters, but they’re all super gay and somewhat ridiculous anyway.

Written (catgirl): 202.

One for Jus.

Went to the office, metaboss T was there but only briefly, ate some meat and potatoes and kale, closed some cases.

Apparently nobody else is going up on the train to Roseville for Memorial Day after all, so I have to travel by myself if I even want to bother making people put up with me. I’m not sure I should.

Read (manga): Chainsaw Man vol 11 (Tatsuki Fujimoto): Well. That’s one way to make sure a defeat sticks. That’s the end of the arc, but looks like it’s only the first of two or more. Not sure what Denji is going to do for an encore, though.

Written (catgirl): 195