SEPTEMBER 1ST SUPERFIGHT

a superfight is an exercise where you run a fictional tournament between some fictional combatants. today's fighters are:

kirby
mahatma ghandi (2nd time participant)
mewtwo
morrissey
a lamp
me
president bill clinton circa 1994
horse (returning champion)

Mr. president.

ROUND ONE

kirby v me

I am able to grievously wound wound kirby. however the kinetic force of his "suck" power is able to carom me off a wall or piece of furniture, dislocating my spine. Match: kirby. 

president bill clinton v. horse

bill clinton: not in shape, however has been photographed riding a horse (see above). Tame a wild horse? Unlikely. Victor: HORSE

mahatma ghandi v. a lamp

ghandi cinches this? Dude can break a lamp.

mewtwo v. morrissey

mewtwo uses confusion and flips morrissey into the ocean. the battlefield for this superfight is on a beach. winner: m2

ROUND TWO

mahatma ghandi v. a horse

mahatma could swing this. however, he wisely chooses not to ride the horse, as it poses a health risk.

match: mahatma. he is able to calm the horse down or simply outwait it until it sleeps.

mewtwo v. kirby

the actual fight we've been waiting for. obviously kirby copies mewtwo off of the bat. from then on we have a classic shadow ball match. kirby however does not have a reflective ability and I think that means mewtwo has the upper hand. perhaps the wound sustained in kirby's fight with me earlier makes an unfortunate reprisal. 

match: mewtwo

FINALS

mewtwo v. mahatma ghandi

mewtwo is curious about philosophy enough to stay its psychic powers. Can the mahatma sway mewtwo to the the path of pacificism? my gut instinct says no. ghandi is obliterated via psystrike

**MEWTWO WINS**

Pros and Cons of Lamentations of the Flame Princess. Additionally: How to Prep, and the Game's Basic Tenets As I Know It, After 4 Year's Experience

THE PROS OF A GAME OF LAMENTATIONS OF THE FLAME PRINCESS:

1. The game simply enables quick, deadly, and meaningful combat. This was the retroclone that did it for me and keeps on doing it.
2. Character creation is brief.
3. The rulebook is lightweight, full of good art, and generally easy to reference.
4. The skill system is versatile and lightweight and simple. It also encourages "avoiding the roll": the player is encouraged to use inventive techniques to avoid the often difficult skill checks.
5. "Avoiding the roll" is innate to the tactics. The stats are imposing, and this encourages imagination over rote gameplay. 
6. The GM does not know how the PCs can win or even if they will win, so the story is that much more uncontrolled and up to the player's wits.
7. Diplomacy is not a roll, instead it's up to the referee's rulings. In my games the players have to offer good reasons for NPCs to do what they want.
8. Heavily balancing the odds against the players means there's no reason to flinch when the PCs acquire some kind of heavily overpowered item/spell/demon. 
9. The game's portrait of magic is "high risk, high price, high reward" which makes for good horror storytelling.
10. The rulebook has many hidden power levers, the Summon spell is the most standout.
11. A focus on horror is a focus on glorious and weird adult drama.

THE CONS:

1. Players should be warned/informed of a number of factors:
1. Player Characters can easily die.
2. Extreme content. You need to ask what everyone's comfortable with.
3. The skill system is radically different than D&D's. Ditto for magic, XP, leveling up, classes/race, and diplomacy.
4. Combat is super deadly, retreat is important to keep in mind.
5. There are special combat options (charge does double dmg, press, parry, etc.)
6. Alignments don't govern behavior.
2. Being able to improvise well requires having a proper prep workflow (see section below).
3. The encumbrance system works best if it's not thoroughly addressed.
4. Fleeing from combat is somewhat under-written.*
5. Rules for stealth, sneak attack, helplessness, and surprise are not collated.
6. The system of saves is a pain to copy down or check against and seems overcomplicated.
7. The skill system is often confusing for new players.
8. High player character death volume can be demoralizing and hard to explain in the fiction.

"Young Girl Eating a Bird" Rene Magritte,1927

How to prep for LOTFP well:

• Make a large map which has loosely sketched locations on it.
• Have a handful of modules or adventure locations which you bought, read, or wrote, and have (agonizingly) sat on for years. Put some of these on the map.
• If the PCs go beyond your prep, you need to be able to improvise until the end of the session, and then spend the interim week catching up. This is the core of the workflow-- bringing something to the table, and if necessary, catching up between weeks.
• Be able to, at a moment's whim, discard hours worth of prep. This is crucial! if the PCs leave your adventure zone, you need to be able to keep up! Don't dawdle!
• As a gm, your role is imagining and writing stuff which may not ever be played, and the more gleefully you can embrace that, the more efficiently you'll prep, and the more fun you'll have. Plus you can and should save unplayed prep for later campaigns, even for years later in your life.

Basic Core Tenets of Lotfp (as I know it):

1. Success in adventure is not guaranteed.
2. Moral behavior is not especially rewarded.
3. If the players depart from the extent of the referee's prepared notes, the referee must improvise and follow their lead.
4. Humans and their power structures are usually predictable and genuinely powerful in their own rights. 
5. Monsters and magic are by nature horrifying, weird, and variously powerful.
6. If a participant in the game is not content with how the game is played they should address the group's agreements on how the game is played. 

The end result should be a game about planning and taking risks against desperate and weird circumstances, with unexpected results. It should spit out weird horror and invite unique contemplation. 

* It comes down to a fairly random roll off (1d20 + speed/10) with a few additions-- monsters have to pass a morale check if you drop food or treasure. Rules on how failed escapes work would be appreciated-- are the players are able to flee again after being caught?

border 2018 review

This movie at heart is about troll sex. The film is similar to the director's previous hit, "Let the Right One In". This guy is establishing his own cinematic universe-- modern day monsters in Sweden. 

The prosthetics glued to the actors do get in the way a little but they are pretty good. The sexual attraction between the trolls is the best. They are sniffing and it feels relatable and revealing. The actual sex is somewhat shocking. 

However the B plot which is about child pornography unfortunately feels folded in by coincidence with the A romance plot, and the movie's pacing struggles in the second half also. "Let The Right One In" had a more functional and compact story.

There's some amount of ironic gravitas surrounding trolls and baby-stealing which, like in "Let the Right One In", plays off the original emotions of the mythology. However as I said the conflict is a little less centered and therefore the protagonist's struggle at the climax fell flat for me.

Which do you exclusively choose: community with others of your kind or a sense of universal ethics? I don't think the film suggests a more interesting question.

"Prog rock" sexy.

Hereditary & Midsommar

The films are mirror images of each other. There's an obsession with sacrifices made by fire. Cults and manipulation in the face of grief. There's a formula:

1. Messy family trauma played realistically
2. Loud crying scene
3. Cult enters; first signs of cult
4. Cult influence and horrid intentions become more obvious
5. Total abandonment of reality as cult reigns supreme 

Like "Rosemary's Baby" or "The Wicker Man" pretty much but with family trauma and loud crying scene upfront. The contrast between grief and the supernatural is what "Hereditary" receives praise for. I think both films don't stick the ending.

"Hereditary" has a perceived resolution with the Mom hanging above her son (Peter) and cutting her own head off with piano wire.  Unlike my mom who would never do that. In "Midsommar" the main character watches her boyfriend burn alive in a bear suit.

I think it's about the cult in both cases-- in "Hereditary", the cult is mostly invisible, and therefore their web of power can be easily imagined. The supernatural flourishes in the dark. In "Midsommar", the cult is very visible.

"Midsommar"s visibility leads to a lot of beautiful and striking crowd scenes. It's all shot in a giant field which, by the end, feels claustrophobic. The utter presence of every building in every exterior shot is a notable accomplishment for the filmmakers.

However, the acts of violence that start piling up feel too extreme for the Swedes. By the end it's a horror movie bloodbath. What we deserved was a more nuanced and realistic tale.

It's a case where utter visibility defines, for me, stricter requirements for my suspension of disbelief.

Collected Silent Titans Play Reports

Collected Silent Titans Play Reports, Spring/Summer 2019

Session 1:

OK SILENT TITANS PLAY REPORT... DRUNK DRUNK DRUNK... THE "TIME TORNADO" NEAR-IMPOSSIBLE TO DESCRIBE... FRIEND BRINGS OUT KNIFE... IS THIS THE END OF OUR SOCIAL CIRCLE?

Session 2:

Play report of 2nd session of SILENT TITANS.... folks wander around wir-heal.

NOTES ON WIR-HEAL:

• it became obvious that is hard to leave wir-heal, due to the travelling mechanic. There's only two spots to get to the "southern border" which you have to roll randomly. In addition tracking your own location can be difficult.
• Court of wapentake happened, went pretty well, fairly disheartening for the convicted player who was sentenced to the gibbet for killing a pig child
• Near end of session: court of wassail overturned this conviction, freeing the player character (after the player had already made a new character)
• Players got separated within wir-heal, to avoid too much b.s. gonna start off new session "you all found your way back to legion's fort"
• They were on a quest from the Cathedral of the Duck to check on the other two churches, they will be rewarded 5 shillings on return to Legion's Fort

Session 3:

 SESSION SUMMARIZATION: They go into R8-BY in search of lost memories after speaking to NPCs about titan-lore. There they find the Wraeca, a scrambled ghost of one PC... after some trouble with the Court of Wapentake this Wraeca is sentenced to "crawl" on all fours for a year.

The Wraeca leads the party to R8-BY's Titan Mouth. Within the titan/dungeon they defeat a giant screaming owl and some associated ghosts... The environment: flooded libraries and stained-glass angel doors.

It takes them a while to understand, but they learn they can open the dungeon's doors with eyes stolen from cephalopod monsters. Wandering further in the Titan, they feed milky fluid to some ghosts and listen to lore-fragments from a giant damaged android. They climb to a central room full of damaged cephalopods. Striking battle there to claim more cephalopod eyes, they win, but are damaged. They choose to retreat from the dungeon.

On the way out they are harassed by ghosts and sadly a PC is lost. They head back to legion's fort, numbering one less...

PLAY/MECHANICAL NOTES:

• they are learning how to navigate Wir-Heal surprisingly fast, and I think the navigation system is reliably providing strange picaresque elements as well as a melancholy doom.
• the R8-BY titan went very well, considering the bizarre elements. I really thought the tone came across, and the descriptions went well! Christian Kessler's layout was generally helpful, I just read from the specific notes when they wanted more information. ((should take more time to analyze this later)). Flipping back forth to the monster stats was an issue although a minor one.
• players were appropriately confused by R8-BY's eternally flooding room, not by first encounter but by their second.
• I didn't realize until later, but I was misusing the table with the talking damaged android. I was summing all the d8+mods and reading one entry/turn instead of using each d8+mod to read one entry for a total of 3 entries per turn.
•  I used the R8By map, printed out full color, with unexplored segments of the map covered with scrap paper. It worked really well, particularly bc the more straightforward elements like the hallways and doors are very clear and simple. (there's a picture below)

(I used scraps of an extra copy of the ravens dungeon map to cover the unexplored parts of the R8-By map)

• I think I'm good at running npcs now as a dm. I should also commend the text. The Wraeca seemed like a challenge to run when I first read it, but I found that the loose and shallow amount of information provided encouraged me to rp the character as glitchy and confused, which is exactly how it should be.
• the combat; one player (who's pc died) complained that they don't know if they really like it. We had some ambiguity about Critical Damage. I'm generally very generous with initative. Lots of ghosts wrestling each other in this session.
• overall this game is going very well. The mechanical elements flow smoothly, nothing takes too long as far as I'm concerned. Both wir-heal and the Titan function well, and the Titan in particular is exploding with bizarre detail. I'm having much less trouble describing this detail than I initally feared.

xxxxxxxxAs for difficulty: Into the Odd combat seems to lead to escalating stakes as PCs start taking Critical Damage. IF the last PC is knocked out, everyone dies, but if they kill the monster first, everyone recovers quickly. There was at least one time where one die roll would decide whether everyone died or everyone was fine. I consider one PC death after a dungeon delve to be pretty good result in terms of player demoralization, not too bad.

Silent Titans Session 4:

ok we dropped silent titans gonna do a veins of the earth campaign instead

:/ basically we concluded that the wir-heal navigation system + random encounters was bullshit having to repeat dense adjective-laden prose on a random, frustratin basis, and then encounter one of two wandering Courts, was kinda bullshit like. it just got tiresome after they figured it out, and involved a lot of guessing and for me, stumbling though a lot of dense prose :/

how my silent titans game crashed and burned

"I stopped paying attention because every time I looked up you were struggling with a series of adjectives"- my friend

The overland exploration part of the Silent Titan is pretty busted. You get to choose between two random paths; the paths themselves are described via complex pieces of prose:

Some examples.

Some of these are a little hard for me to visualize, let alone describe. "Escher-maze of cracked concrete steps."

And the courts kept showing up-- Court of Wapentake, Court of Wassail. 2 primary entries on the random encounter table. Good the first time but stopped being weird and started being repetitive. Not much was happening between iterations of mock trials, parades, and Ouzel visits.

It feels like a failure of with the system. Wir-Heal can be weird to navigate but it shouldn't be onerous and repetitive.

It would also be better if the paths you could take were more succinctly described as paths and not just landscapes. "Do you head over towards the gogmagogic buildings or the dense maquis?" Along with the vocabulary and diction it's a clear case of style over function.

The paths they took would often lead right back to where they started, which grew frustrating. It felt like a slot machine where most results were boring, creating boring gameplay.

Things I should have done to save the game:

• Not just read the prose describing the paths, but rather use the prose to inspire some simpler options. (In retrospect, I did this: "Tarmac paths or concrete steps"- but it was too late?)
• Fudge the results on the random encounter table to achieve more interesting results.
• Completely substitute the navigation system as soon as it stopped working. 
• The players were trying to ask locals for directions, which I resisted giving. 

 I also think the players could have been more inspired to find the titan's mouths. That might have ameliorated the aimless frustration. 

How it crashed and burned: the end of the 4th session I realized all the business with the tables and rolling options and being marble-mouthed at the prose wasn't working out, and we the gaming group decided to play something else... another Veins of the Earth campaign.

Ironically I'm having similar overworld journey struggles with the exploration rules in Veins, the setting thereof being a giant series of underground caverns.

My new overworld map for Veins.

Navigation in strange environments probably a continuing difficulty for roleplaying game's mechanics... blogosphere dead, unable to sort it out... Nonetheless I'm applying best principles and dropping a massive amount of preparation which has shown itself as unworkable.

I used to get heartbreak over this kind of thing, reading a big beautiful rpg book, preparing for weeks, and then not getting to use most of it... Difficulties in the rpgtext forbidding an ultimate experience. Well I've been through enough to not be too troubled. Maybe it will work out next time.

SILENT TITANS PRELIMINARY REVIEW

"Silent Titans" is kind of like if Joyce's "Ulyssess" was a rpg, same islander's speculative take, a lot of wandering through shitty beaches. Have not covered an actual Titan proper in my game, outside of the first one, Chronos, where the book has you start.

Properly speaking, it's worth your $50, because the book is a3, (a4?), and has good art in it, and has good writing. That's all it takes being worth as much.

The game itself: I haven't gotten to the dungeons/titans yet. I wrote Chris Kessler, the layout designer, a bunch of questions as I read it for the first time. The room labelled #1 is where the PC's start off in. The tubes in Hilb are hallways. Sometimes a bullet point is in the wrong place. I got all mad about the overmap but it's working great as a play-aid.

I printed out all the maps using my work printer, in color, the players loves them. Character creation is lovely. The gang is wandering around Wir-Heal and one got captured by the Court of Wapentake.

Big weird-o's are the combat, which is quick, area weapons are crazy good. Does the keyword "fast" mean they get to act twice? What about "slow"? This is not a book which, as a design choice, makes sure to define every little thing. The navigation system inside Wir-Heal is quite strange and provokes some dictionary lookups.

The navigation system essentially has you experience what I imagine, quaintly enough, Patrick experiences wandering around the post-industrial landscape of his homeworld, kicking trash and occasionally encountering bombastic threats. A lot of loneliness, and then you stumble into another animal-man village, while you're slowly turning into a Woodwose. It's surprisingly somber experience...

...As the rest of the book is, when you get into it, it tells a story which is quite fatalistic, the implicit tale of the Knight of the Pentangle. I originally wrote Dirk Detweiler Leichty that I hoped the game would be kinda board-game-like, considering his art looking like Jumanji/Chutes and Ladders. I definitely do have a board game experience when I print out the maps and slide around my friend's 3d-printed miniatures on them.

There is the added benefit that Dirk's escherian/arcane linework can be displayed to the players without giving away too much; and once explained it becomes clear.

AN EXAMPLE:

Guess what the below map-segment illustrates...

.... it's a library filling up up water... "Ink-black water sheets down the shelves and falls from the sky in an eternal pounding rain." Obviously the verbal description is needed to make this clear, but once done so the image becomes a shorthand. No visual spoilers by displaying the whole map.

The above is hypothetical as I haven't run most of the game yet, although a few illustrations like:

have already served me at the table basically as I've described.

-----

I am worried, or rather, more aware that within my group there will be a lot of character-chucking into the abyss, horribly random occurrences may prevent any dungeons from being explored, or maybe they'll visit just one. What is the larger narrative to be had here; PIGPIP, the players will fall and be consumed by the raging time-lords.