THE IMPROVISED DUNGEON

common dungeon elements

mazes:
drawing a maze as they explore is actually fine. you can easily put things in the maze while you sketch the paths and make decisions about which way is the right way. trick is to make those decisions before the players decide which way to go if possible

riddles:
difficult to come up with a good riddle on the spot

monsters:
a good monster can just be something stereotypical with a twist

traps:
seriously easy to think up... again just think of it before the players encounter it. blades in the dark jab out at you... there's a magical energy field generating blades. and uh it's coming from a little magic machine running in the corner. great trap.

treasure:
can actually be negotiated with players as described or invented randomly

puzzles:
I would say that you can actually make this up as the players solve it, similar to a maze. you see a bunch of colored blocks that can be rotated. green yellow blue orange. they correspond to... some charts on the wall. the charts? well there's a series of checkerboard patterns that have those colors... no, it's too difficult for me to draw out... yes, let's just have someone roll an intelligence check... you can bail out

secret passageways:
as convenient (goes without saying) and you get to use fiat  whether they find any in a search. it's important to use fiat. because life is arbitrary

an overall sense of dungeon logic:
will emerge as you play.

advantages

• no prep
• don't need to reference prep
• dungeons are pretty random collections of elements anyways
• surmising quickly thought-up elements into larger overall themes is actually easy
• I might be better at improvisation than reference
• can elide easier, bring out the important bits easier
• can use fragmentary prep easily
• simple stuff is probably easier to play with
• good work flow: make or find fun fragments and improvise rest
• credible way to run a red & pleasant land

disadvantages

• some elements are hard to improvise such as riddles (solved via fragmentary prep -ed)
• a sense of prewritten secrets being divulged is perhaps lost
• requires the ability to improvise
• "fairness"???

what I want and do not want in rpgs

I read " I feel the compulsion to explicitly state the things I desire in play and assumptions in the material I write, " in scrap's post and have, honestly, been gushing over the pig pip stuff zak put out lately. 

what I want in rpgs:

1. a framework of power

in the game, the king's guards can protect the king from most threats, there's a military logic behind it. you can always refer to that logic. this is how you get cool stories in like plays. in "sexy beast" a retired mob employee is being pressured by his superior to come out of retirement. the retired mobster does not want to come out of retirement because he is afraid of death, but he is also afraid of angering his superior who has the freedom to beat him up and maybe even kill him. the superior doesn't want to kill the mobster, his former friend... thus a drama. in the end the mobster kills the superior and then has to go deal with the superior's superior... consequences for the actions along a framework of power, a basis of drama like they taught me in playwriting class. 

not just the drama but also clever circumnavigation thereof... fun shit.

2. fun potential power levers

this is what lotfp has with the "summon" spell, or all the little rules which can be cleverly used, like casting "bless" to aid a pickpocket attempt. fun because they're clever, fun because they're dangerous, fun because they feel fair... that's one of the great uses of magic in games. powerful artifact has bad downsides.

honestly #2 is optional because with #1 I can just come up with fun power levers in whatever setting it is. my "top secret" campaign was one of the best bc the players would just use their knowledge of 80's airport security to bypass challenges.

.do not want:

1. railroading- a loaded term but basically any understanding applies

2. complex world of warcraft style combat which will always always be difficulty and pixel-bitchy and take too long to run.

3. non-optional homework. I should be able to drop in, having like library content to pour through can be good but I shouldn't have to or we should be able to do it quickly at the table.

interesting note here is that both categories above reflect a player's desires. 

d20 wizards

Grindle.

1. wizard has a successful funerary company and uses bones but he has to eat glass so suffers digestive issues etc. spouse knows about the studies but just lumps it under "blasphemy"
2. in a major city: a person in rags that lives under a bridge, is not bothered by local authorities or travelers, emits a not quite unpleasant radial stench, occasionally has social events, carries out all the local assassinations although only from people who can pay, does not apparently carry out assassinations in person. this person will not be moved is not assailable and seems to always be there
3.  in the palace of papers there they is, completely cut off from the rest of the world, has traps among the papers, distilleries to produce edible glue. seeking a lost record of some rarity means tripping relatively near the wizard, who is audible. to be in the palace is to be among their things, they is the only resident allowed
4. wizard has a rolling horizontal towertube in the desert
5. wizard has invented skateboarding and has a modified mountain
6. imprisoned wizard on fiendish toilet commands mirror-holding golems from an undisclosed location
7. wizard is only local who's managed to figure out library has spellbooks and is retired
8. mangled sibling wizard in pocket dimension uses famous saucier for edicts
9. gordon ramsey wizard stumbles drunk into royal courts kills the monarch impregnates the spouses loudly criticizes everyone kills some eats some dahmer-style wakes up mortified leaves protected whole time by confusing veil of ego illusion. witnesses assume shakespearian drama responsible
10. wizard's whole face looks like a village which throws stuff (milk, eggs, butchered pigs in quantity) down well mouth. casts the spells from sleeping place of feathered swine and infrequently uses summon 
11. wizard has airship which floats by dimensional conflation only, thus airship is permanently travelling through parallel dimensions which collapse in shunting electrical shunts seconds after airship breaches them
12. wizard is currently living as panda in imperial zoo, has a habit of getting too personal with courtesans and eunuchs and has to make big ol excuses which typically resemble morality lessons involving a wise panda
13. christina's world wizard has muscular dystrophy and protects zone
14. wizard is either an eagle eating a mouse or a mouse being eaten by an eagle, physically manifest as well as a throbbing psychic image in those it communicates with
15. large diamond wizard zooms around and communicates in the booming psychic voice. not a diamond shaped like a wizard, a wizard shaped like a cut diamond
16. wizard goes to public places cries and gets drunk a lot. otherwise stereotypical
17. grassroots wizard is big into political organization wildly unsuccessful has caused disasters
18. wizard tower larger on the outside than on the inside on a huge scale
19. alan alda but he kills 
20. reroll

haneke's "la pianeste" = the piano teacher

I want to talk about the face Huppert makes at the end, which I once said I wanted to get tattooed on my thigh. The self-harm and anger as defiant, extreme emotional contraction, I think acknowledging that there is nothing there beneath the face. Like you get the autist's rage and you think, "woah, they're angry", and it's about some bullshit but then you're like there's that sliver of a person underneath there like an angry nerve inflamed and pumped up. And it's only a sliver of person.

I genuinely think part of a person is the lack of a person, the frustrating sense that there is nothing there. I imagine touching like a hollow of skin and feeling nothing but scar tissue and the person knows you're there but it means being apart of someone's trauma and NOT helping.

Having sex with traumatized people and depositing your experience in a apart of them that's just scar tissue and the other people's deposits and the few remaining cells working on breaking it down. Putting work on someone's shoulder's, burning through one layer of scar tissue. You're contributing and you're painful and want they want is not what you want. Knowing this and repressing it.

I have sympathy for the STATE OF MIND, I have sympathy for the KINK. Which is the formation in your brain, which you play around with, you digest like it's a pile in your asshole. You don't mind that it spurts blood, but when it does, when you're fucked, it's painful, and it's EXHILARATING. But it's still something fundamentally dead.

Or is it? Ultimately? Toi Derricote says she bloomed as a person in her fifties after finally processing that trauma. The danse macabre.

The dead dance, the dance of death. I love this dance, I love it's cold claw embrace and the puppeting and pirating. The feeling of something uncontrollably unconscious descending and picking up and rippin at the deeper brain, the inevitable pill thru the grey matter.

troika! ghost powers

1. possession
1. ghosts may attempt to possess the living. 
2. ectoplasm
1. ghosts may exert ectoplasm which may remain as goo or take the form of small living creatures or other hallucenogenic f/x as appropriate
3. communication
1. ghosts may appear, recognizably ghosts, to and/or speak to the living
4. flying
1. ghosts may fly and pass through walls. they may not pass through lead, ivy, or more than three feet of stone (or salt rings… -ed)
5. vulnerability to fire
1. ghosts touching fire take damage as appropriate
6. vulnerability to light
1. ghosts may not manifest any powers (#1-#3, #8) in the presence of any stronger than candle light and will lose possession in strong light
7. affecting other ghosts
1. all ghosts treat each other and all possessions (both their inventories and possessed people -ed) (and only each other and all possessions, this means spells and so on -ed, although you may cast spells if you possess somebody ) as if they were fully corporeal. 
8. ghost objects
1. ghosts may pick up “ghost objects” of recently destroyed objects

d50 troika! macguffins

1. single testicle of god
2. a pokédex
3. the tape from “escape from new york”
4. beautiful and sexy jewel thieves chase after the world’s rarest diamond so you’ll become really popular with sexy beautiful jewel thieves if you get it
5. baby with extremely huge head can be crawled into and if you do you get an automatically good idea
6. the six magic puppet strings to run the World Marrionette
7. angel wings + surgery (you can take people into or out of heaven)
8. the subtle knife
9. the smartest man on earth almost knows everything so you have to either prevent him or help him learn the last thing
10. workable portal to trove
11. working film projector / the know how
12. dictionary of all words, you can cross out words. also grammar nazis
13. other low hanging fruit??? someone’s trying to steal silk from the orient
14. the orient is trying to steal silk back heh heh
15. grocery store’s just trying to stay open versus an oppressive developer
16. sword in the stone but it’s still in the stage where everyone’s trying to politcally manuever around it
17. dick-stealing cat
18. rival adventure group doing an important thing and you’re continuously in the way by incriminating coincidence
19. death is trying to play chess with you
20. conflicting apocalyptic warnings and mutual demonization from two intelligent items
21. letting your players know the sun is going to burn out soon and then you’re going to end the campaign
22. aggressive suitors
23. fortune-teller warns of a dangerous sea voyage. quest-givers all try to get PCs to go on a voyage after this
24. bank holding all of their wealth fails
25. god begins sending you burning bushes, etc.
26. pursued by the apparently sentient idea of taxes
27. debt collectors making life difficult
28. divorce if at all applicable
29. kings hanging out with you
30. national feast in your honor goes hairy
31. inform a player that their coming-of-age ceremony is almost due
32. the draft
33. macular irregularity needs treatment or go blind
34. someone’s drone bombing your country
35. everyone seems to be adopting a prohibitive religious cult about an ear
36. prison 
37. jesus of nazareth doin stuff
38. bastardettes
39. seduced and organ stolen, keeps happening
40. grifters invade land
41. battle baby fights are becoming popular
42. roll again and work in trepanning
43. they look like they’re
1. meth addicts
2. cannibals
3. a secret psychic cult
4. but they’re actually:
1. evolved dinosaurs like in the super mario bros movie
2. rebellious women
3. communists
44. communism is being badly implemented
45. sherlock holmes trying to figure out that crime the pcs did
46. the connection between local street toughs and hidden goverment psychic kids program has grown too strong
47. the people have found a portal to (fake) heaven 
48. aliens land
49. incredibly violent ghost
50. serial killer sending in letters to the newspaper

"Seul Contre Tous"= I Stand Alone, a Review

Watched this movie because my friend Rachael recommended I watch it. Ok, I've talked a lot recently about my switch over to a more "violence friendly" style personhood, meaning, I'm not totally opposed to violence like I used to be.

I had a friend who talked about beating up someone's abusive boyfriend. This friend was a person of ethics. Obv I'm not sure if beating up someone is even a good way to guarantee that they stop abusing anyone, fiction would say no, but as punishment I think there's a sort of lawlessness or frontier-justice style appeal which is ofc dangerous and likely to target the wrong ppl etc.

As with 'Irreversible' :Seul Contre Tous: opens with the mistaken case of violence ruining someone's life, a buncha ppls, albeit to the film's credit it posits the life of this man The Butcher in a way such that the act of mistaken violence he has committed was in his past and was something he learned from and took into his self. There's a sort of "committal of violence" which I appreciate; the process of picking up trauma in your life years after the fact (and the wounds) in any way, pride or not-pride.

I'm not proud of the butcher but something in my heart really loves him and I think its the film's portrayal of him, which is of credit, he is a man of character in the classic sense in that it's not fucking around, it's a person, o.k. You take a film which has no bones and lightly mocks the offended viewer about the presence of evil, I said to my uber driver later that I think humanity includes evil in a really special way, I would not pick the human world without violence I would not consider with the rage in my heart the evil of ppl etc. There's nothing to gasp out but a cloying service to the statute, "I stand alone", to be a person in destructive motion, is basically admirable, pathetic.