General update on posting

This one's basically for Alan. Hi Alan!

I do have several proper blog posts in progress, not just podcast episodes. I'm just snowed under and haven't had time to get them into shape!

When I started this blog, I had a job with a lot of dead time where I could usefully composed blog thoughts in email to myself and just tidy them up later. I then moved into admin, which involved writing an impossible number of emails while opening 4,000 spreadsheets simultaneously and trying not to simply perish. Now I'm a teacher. There's a lot of good things about teaching, but I can say:

1. You cannot realistically write blogposts while teaching a class, unless you have some post-human capabilities that I sadly lack
2. Writing syllabi and writing lessons competes heavily for time, mental energy, and eyestrain with gaming writing, and I prioritise prep for the campaigns I'm doing and writing things I might get paid for (curse you, capitalism)

Anyway, I do plan to get back to this; I have ideas, and I'm really hoping one of these days I'll be asked to teach a course that actually exists so I don't need to spend 10+ hours a week writing it as I go along.

Not sure if you already read it, but I highly recommend Arthur's blog Refereeing and Reflection.

Beneath Dark Skies accumulator post

Roger kindly enquired about the "bizarre sci-fi hack of World of Darkness" I mentioned, so seeing as it's a loose collections of posts knocking around, this seemed the easiest thing to do.

The initial overall premise.

A summary of Visitant, the first concept for Beneath Dark Skies.

Mechanics for Cover identities, and how they're compromised or reinforced. Xenotypes, the alien splats of Beneath Dark Skies.

Mutable Ansad, the first Xenotype. Peerless infiltrators. Yes, their plural is Welsh, deal with it. Their gifts are mastery of form and disguise.

The ultimate survivors, Mosa, with conscious control of their own biochemistry. Their gifts are regulation of their own bodies, and secretion of chemicals that affect others.

Swarming Shekt, nigh-immortal hive minds with a talent for negotiation. Their gifts rely on the capabilities of swarms, and the application of controlled sound.

Symbiotic Ytaleh, riding in stolen human corpses to sustain their ephemeral selves. Their gifts are mental influence and bioelectrical control.

How visitants might interact with other inhuman creatures.

Technological gifts for any species - also useable beyond Visitant for other high-tech entities.

Mistaken Identity, the first Terrible Game Fic. Whoops. An easy mistake to make. But only once.

Inside Job, additional Terrible Game Fic. No loyalty to corporate masters!

Hostile Takeover, some crossover Terrible Game Fic.

Quick podcasting update

Apologies to anyone disappointed by the lack of podcast episodes. We've just come through the busiest time of year for me at work, and I've simultaneously been moving home. Things are starting to settle down, but I haven't had a great deal of time or energy for editing. Plenty of episodes are stored up though, it's just a matter of getting to them and releasing them.

Anyone craving my dulcet tones (why?) can perhaps get your fix at Whartson Hall, where I've recently finished running Dark Carnival, as well as The Price of Success, a chapter in our new episodic GURPS filler campaign.

Now on DriveThruRPG and the Open Gaming Store

It's been a while, sorry folks. Work and personal life in the Time of COVID have been fairly brutal (I've been signed off work) so writing for the blog hasn't been a top priority.

One thing I have finally achieved is getting my Pathfinder supplements onto RPG stores! My first two are now available from DriveThruRPG and from the Open Gaming Store. So if you fancy taking a look, please drift over there.

I should mention that the Open Gaming Store charges a much smaller commission, so all things being equal I'd prefer you to buy from there... regardless, they're all DRM-free (or supposed to be).

Inglenook's Bloodlines is being reviewed as I have added more material to it. I've also been putting together an antipaladins supplement which I hope you might enjoy.

Hopefully I will be able to do some more writing soon. I just haven't been in the right headspace for pondering general questions of gaming, rather than putting together rules ideas.

Work in progress... Gutterspites

I've been working on a few things over the last few months - although most of my gaming energy goes into my Pathfinder campaign, now in its third year. The characters are, uh... 8th level. I should feel more guilty.

Here's a little taster of one of those projects, or rather a taster of a little slice of the project: devising some very, very minor supernatural beasties to afflict the ordinary population of a fantasy realm, the kind to produce folk remedies and the intervention of a village witch rather than a full-blown adventuring party. These are partly for flavour, partly as an alternative to rats and diseased goblins as an introductory adversary for beginner adventurers.

Just wanted to share a bit of this with you! There's still a lot to do on this new supplement but I'm enjoying it (but being sidetracked by the research).

If anyone's wondering about the supplements I already wrote - I'm now waiting to hear back from both Paizo and the Open Gaming Store about consignment, both having received my application form and gone radio silent. Did I put explosive runes on them by accident?

Gutterspite

Imps are often held to be the lowliest of fiends, but even lesser entities are responsible for much misery around the world. Gutterspites are barely-conscious bundles of malevolence that prey on whatever unfortunate mortals they can find. Too weak to inflict serious harm, they settle for inflicting unhappiness, pain and ill-luck, feeding greedily on the misery of their victims.

Gutterspites have the following traits unless otherwise noted:

Paltry Malevolence (Ex): Gutterspites are such pathetic fiends that even a hint of divine power is enough to annihilate them. Any devout follower can use a holy symbol to make a touch attack against a gutterspite. A successful attack with a symbol of a non-evil faith deals 1d6 damage, bypassing their damage reduction. An unholy symbol instead makes a gutterspite sickened and frightened for 1 minute. Unlike most other fiends, a gutterspite’s attacks do not count as evil for the purpose of overcoming damage reduction.

Shun Hallows (Ex): Gutterspites cannot enter an area protected by a consecrate or desecrate spell. If a holy symbol is displayed in a door or window, a gutterspite must succeed at a DC 15 Will saving throw to pass through the opening or any other opening within 20 feet of it.

Minor Telepathy (Su): A gutterspite has a limited form of telepathy, allowing it to convey simple concepts or emotions to other creatures that possess telepathy.

Baleful Gutterspite

The long, feathery tail of this creature could almost be beautiful, if it weren’t for its sickly colouration and the dull malice in its three bone-white eyes. Four crooked arms clasp greedily at a dropped coin.

Baleful Gutterspite

CR 1/8

XP 50

NE Diminutive outsider (evil, gutterspite)

Init +6; Senses darkvision 60 ft.; Perception –2

DEFENCE

AC 16, touch 16, flat-footed 14 (+2 Dexterity, +4 size)

hp 4 (1d10–1)

Fort +2, Ref +4, Will –2

DR 3/cold iron, silver or good; Resist acid 3, cold 3, electricity 3, fire 3

Weaknesses paltry malevolence, shun hallows

OFFENSE

Speed 20 feet

Melee tail +7 melee (1 nonlethal plus fatewrack)

Space 1 ft., Reach 0 ft. (5 ft. with tail)

Spell-like abilities (CL 1st; concentration +1)

1/hour–lightfingers (DC 10, drop item only)

STATISTICS

Str 3, Dex 14, Con 8, Int 2, Wis 6, Cha 10

Base Atk +1; CMB –7; CMD 2

Feats Improved Initiative, Weapon Finesse^B

Skills Perception +2, Sleight of Hand +6, Stealth +14

Languages minor telepathy 10 ft.

ECOLOGY

Environment any

Organization solitary

Treasure none

Description Resembling a four-armed squirrel with a third eye in place of a mouth, baleful gutterspites lurk amongst furniture, clothing and rafters, waiting for an opportunity to afflict a victim with bad luck. They relish the scent of failure and frustration, and are the bane of artisans and cooks, who find simple tasks suddenly eluding them.

Fatewrack (Su): A creature struck by a baleful gutterspite’s feathery tail is subject to misfortune. For the following 24 hours, the creature can’t take 10 on any skill checks, and a natural 1 on a skill check always fails as though it were a critical miss on an attack roll or saving throw. This also affects the result of taking 20.

Feather Touch (Ex): The incredible softness of a baleful gutterspite’s tail means a creature doesn’t automatically become aware when struck. The baleful gutterspite can attempt a Sleight of Hand check to conceal the attack, opposed by the victim’s Perception.

FYI: limited blogging

This has never been a very reliable blog, so I don't have a schedule to break. Just wanted to mention that posts and responses are likely to be patchy for a while, as I'm adjusting to new medication and it's a constant battle to stay awake. Writing about games is therefore taking a back seat to keeping my job and consuming organic matter. Oh, and actually playing games.

If you're missing my blog, first off thanks!, secondly please let me know what it was you liked and maybe I can write more of it in future. Thirdly, go and check out Refereeing and Reflection, Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice, Reviews from R'lyeh, and feel free to post further suggestions for gaming-relevant blogs and sites in the comments.

(I say that with some trepidation - will attempt to whack any spam-moles ASAP)

A fleeting insight

As I was deliberately not trying to write anything for the blog tonight, I glanced at my site, and then thought someone somewhere might appreciate a tiny glimpse behind the scenes (I know, I am terribly enigmatic)

For certain parsings of "terribly"...

Right now there are 72 draft posts in my profile. Some of these are not really drafts at all, just a few lines of something I wanted to remember. Some of them will never go anywhere. Quite a few are something I'd vaguely like to develop further but keep getting distracted.

Mostly what happens is one of the following:

• I read, listen to or discuss something that provokes thought, leading me to start writing a new post rather than finish an old one
• I begin working on a post, have a tangential thought and explore that instead
• I begin working on a post, go to do a little research, and end up writing a completely different post
• In extreme cases, I start writing a post, go to get the link for a post where I previously said something relevant, and either remember that I meant to write a follow-up post or have a new idea inspired by the thing I wrote before

And to be fair, several of the posts there are things like entire campaign settings that are not necessarily well-served by being a blogpost.

Alarmingly, I recently embarked on a concerted effort to cut back that pile, by either finishing posts or discarding them. That's where seven of the last ten posts came from. Unfortunately I have rather a butterfly brain, so my drafts folders tend to replenish themselves just as fast as my scenario seeds list and my reading pile.

On the elusiveness of upbeat actual play

I have a massive heap of downloaded podcasts, but somehow I wanted something different. Perhaps it's because nearly 300 of the nearly 1000 podcasts in my folder are by the RPPR crowd, whose games are often entertaining but also tend to be grim and downbeat (yes, in most cases the group are clearly enjoying themselves hugely, but the actual events are rarely cheerful). And a lot of the rest are non-fiction from the BBC, quite a lot of which is also not very cheerful.

I decided to head out and look again for podcasts that might suit me. The criteria this time:

• Not Call of Cthulhu. I have plenty of that, and it's rare to find a single episode that's not grim, however lightly it's presented. I enjoy it enough to both listen and play, but I'm depressive - I very much don't need a diet of all bad things happening all the time.
• Still going. I've no wish to get into the archives of a podcast that only hit nine episodes. Been there, done that.
• Not stuff that is as or even more depressing than Call of Cthulhu. I found some recommendation threads, and found myself staring at lists of sessions about Apocalypse World (no, never, under any circumstances*) or Monsterhearts (also no**), or You Are A Horrible Person And Bad Things Happen To You Which You Can't Control***.
• Lucid. There's quite a few podcasts that received praise, but which are also described as people getting increasingly drunk and silly. People getting drunk are boring. If I'm listening to a gaming podcast, it's because I want to hear the game. There's a few podcasts I listen to where people do sometimes drink, and whenever it's noticeable it always detracts from the experience of that episode.

* It's technically possible to do post-apocalyptic narratives that aren't about how horrible human beings are, but from everything I can tell this game is designed to do exactly the opposite. And given most proudly-labelled "Post-Apocalyptic!" stuff I've encountered is about selfishness, human failings, pointless violence, manly manhood and rape, I will give that a flying pass.

** So from what I can tell, this is a game about being horrible teenagers, except you're also actually monsters I think? You lost me at "being horrible". That does not seem an enjoyable premise for an, well, for anything at all actually.

*** I know this isn't a real game, but I've seen quite a few games described which seem like they could neatly be summed up in this basket. I do not understand the fascination of indie gamers with this premise.

I found a few leads. It's striking just how many of them are actually "3-6 improv comedians play some games" rather than "some people play some games". I am somewhat wary of these, because I'm suspicious that either a) the podcast is part of a marketing exercise rather than just a hobby; or b) people whose main hobby is theatricals will make the podcast about them and their performance rather than the game - but I'm willing to give it a shot.

I'm also trying to find podcasts that aren't American. I mean, nothing against Americans, but I have plenty of American gaming podcasts. It's hard though, because that's never an available search term.

I am struggling to come up with a useful way to explain "upbeat" versus "downbeat". Downer endings are obviously downbeat. But I also don't want traumatic and grim things happening to the PCs. I don't want choices with no option that isn't horrible. I don't really the backstory to be framed around lots of bad stuff that happened to people.

I appreciate this is relatively difficult, because RPGs are generally built around challenge, and because a lot of the types of challenge you can offer a group of 3-6 players are extrinsic and based on open conflict. And most RPGs are quite reactive, usually reacting to bad things that have happened. And of course, quite a lot of roleplayers (like quite a lot of people in general) genuinely like dark grittiness and murders and gratuitous violence and so on.

Stuff I noticed

So, some exasperations of this time!

Archives. People are going to come to your podcast and want to listen to your archives. Why do you make it so difficult? Quite a few sites just have, for example, a "podcast" tag which they put on all those episodes. But - what with half of them being improv groups - the same sites also often host two (or, in extreme cases, fifteen) other podcasts of no relevance whatsoever to me. Or the group plays six rotating campaigns, four of which I don't want to listen to. Or they play a hundred different mini-campaigns. It's really, really useful to tag and mark and group podcast episodes in useful ways, so that people can find the stuff they're actually looking for.

Fun fact: if it's a pain to trawl through your archive, people stop, like I did.

I would like to draw your attention to the massive tag cloud to my right to help people sort through my stuff.

Filenames, yet again

Also, I know I've talked about podcast file names a lot, but why stop now? Normally I don't call people out for this bullshit but hello Rusty Quill! You seemed so promising, being British and everything (although improv, so...) but your website is a pain and so is your naming convention. The webpage has an unnecessarily large banner and puts the "older posts" option in an unusual place, so I didn't spot it until late in the day. Now, you get kudos for having your entire podcast archive in the RSS feed - and extra kudos for having different feeds for each podcast! Good on yous.

But what sort of person looks at a file they're saving for public release and concludes that "207829424-rustyquill-1-rqg-0-metacast-character.mp3" is a good name?

Okay, first off, breathing room. If you're going to number things (and you should) do not start with single digits, because this means computers will sort things called 1 next to things called 10. This is basic, basic stuff, guys. I'm going to venture a guess that if you do improv you probably have arts degrees and didn't study much computing (nothing wrong with that!) but sort order isn't complicated so I feel you should have thought of this.

But secondly, what is this 207829424 about? What does that mean? Is it relevant to the audience, at all? No? Then don't include it! Because, and I appreciate this may not happen to everyone, when I scroll through files on my player, all I will see on the screen for several seconds is a string of numbers. I don't know what that is. If I listen to your podcast a lot I might realise it's yours, but it could also be a random podcast from somewhere else (the BBC inexplicably does this sometimes). Just begin the filename with something identifiable so I know what I'm looking at.

In fact, for particular exasperation, my phone will only show the first twenty-odd characters of a filename in music player, which means I won't be able to tell your episodes apart. They'll all be "STRINGOFNUMBERS-rustyqui". Does that seem helpful?

To be fair, I've checked again and they change their filenames partway through the archive. You know, you could go back and change the older ones too.

Here's a list of stuff I am currently planning to try out, and will try to comment on later:

• Rusty Quill
• She's a Super Geek
• Shark Bone
• In Sanity We Trust
• One Shot Podcast

Why so Cthulhu?

So here's something Dan said to me over the extended gaming weekend that was my New Year:

"I'm surprised just how into Call of Cthulhu you are."

And that got me thinking. Why am I so keen on Call of Cthulhu? Or, to take a step back, am I especially keen on Call of Cthulhu? And if so, why and in what way?

A suuuper quick precis of my gaming history. Fighting Fantasy gamebooks aside, I first encountered the concept around the age of 12 when I was on holiday in the states and bought a copy of Dragon magazine. Over ten years later I started running D&D 4th edition for some librarians, and a few months later was finally invited to try out a tabletop RPG. Since then I've played a few White Wolf one-shots, quite a bit of D&D, various random one-shots and playtests, some Warhammer 40K, and a moderate amount of Call of Cthulhu. I've also listened to podcasts of and read the rulebooks for a few other systems, like Traveller.

I've run one short campaign, which was D&D 4th edition and based around adapting existing scenarios. I've written a scenario for 40K that I haven't yet run, as well as a game about lizards. When I have ideas for future games, they are generally for Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is what I tend to default to, and I'm working this out as I go along. Broadly speaking, there are factors which tend to make me actively gravitate towards it, and there's also more passive reasons why I just find it a comfortable fit.

System

One of the things that I think Call of Cthulhu genuinely has going for it is the system. It is simple, reasonably robust, reasonably genre-appropriate, and broad. It takes almost no effort to understand the mechanics well enough to play ("this is a percentage, roll under it"), and not much more to memorise most of the rules. Character generation is quicker than most other games and choosing names frequently seems to be the bottleneck.

I enjoy games with much crunchier rules too - both Warhammer 40K and D&D are much more complex. But if I want to throw someone into a situation and just get on with it, or to start playing myself, Call of Cthulhu is the most straightforward option.

It's also flexible enough that you can use it as a rough approximation for a very wide range of settings. It doesn't handle all genres well (in particular, anything heroic tends to fall down on the combat, and it's not crunchy enough to be tactical) but you can use almost any setting. Modern day? Historical? Ancient world? Future? Traditional fantasy? Gothic? Cyberpunk? You just need to tweak the skill list to get something that's useable. I'm not saying it will be great - I'm saying it will do.

Puzzling

Call of Cthulhu is often used as an investigative game, and I find that tends to suit me. I am an inveterate prodder at game realities, and as a player I frequently find myself having to bite my tongue to avoid roleplaying a detective. I always want more information, to try out theories, to see what happens.

Call of Cthulhu has several advantages here. Firstly, it's often played explicitly as an investigative game where you are trying to puzzle out what happened, which makes it a great fit. Secondly, because it's usually quite an ambient experience rather than one where you're in constant peril, there is usually a lot of room for asking questions, testing out theories, and going to gather more information; while there are situations where "let's just try my idea" will get you killed, they're relatively few compared to a combat-focused game.

For what it's worth, my limited experience of White Wolf games was that they also offered a satisfying amount of room to play around with ideas and with in-game abilities in creative ways.

A third aspect is that the setting lends itself to quite thorough investigation, because the mysteries you're solving tend to be weird enough that eliminating the impossible isn't always a good idea... while fellow-gamers don't necessarily want to indulge quite as much as I often do, Call of Cthulhu tends to get them more onboard than many other games.

Source material

Obviously, Call of Cthulhu is broadly based on the work of HP Lovecraft and associated folks. I quite like these. I wouldn't go so far as to call myself an actual fan, honestly. There's plenty of problems with both Lovecraft's stories and those of other people. Lovecraft had a whole bunch of prejudices, and in a way his taste for short stories made it difficult to get into the work as deeply as novel authors allow. The related works are a very mixed bunch, divergent in genre (Clark Ashton Smith is a different beast from Howard, Derleth or Lumley, for example) and in focus. Some authors are keen to write genuine horror, which I flee from with alacrity.

Still, there's something in it which appeals to me. There are mysteries, and slow unfurling writing full of description (keen readers may have noticed my own verbose tendencies) and fantastical events. I like the old places, and the ancient tomes, and the peculiar people, which appeal to me far more than, say, reading about men with guns being manly.

Genre knowledge

Tying into the last point, I think one of the reasons Call of Cthulhu does genuinely appeal to me more than many other games is that I have a much better grasp of it. It's one of the few games where I actually know the source material, in many cases better than everyone else I'm playing with, and feel I have a good grasp of what I'm doing. This is because Call of Cthulhu is based on books.

To cut a long story uncharacteristically short, my family were never great TV watchers and we didn't even have a TV for most of my childhood. Between that and other factors, I just never got into TV. I could say that I was reading instead, or doing school clubs, both of which are true, but honestly I've just never developed the habit or skill of watching TV. In the pre-iPlayer days I was rarely organised enough to reliably watch a particular show. Nowadays I'm too skittish and sitting down to watch something for an hour feels like a huge investment of precious time - I prefer something that feels less passive.

The end result of all this is that I am, for a nerd as big as I am, spectacularly unversed in most of the mainstays of pop culture. I never watched Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files, Xena, Ally McBeal, Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, Frasier, Law and Order, Saved by the Bell, Beverly Hills, The Fresh Prince, Byker Grove, Dawson's Creek, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Shield, The West Wing, any police procedural whatsoever, any soap whatsoever - I can't even compile this list without reference to Google because I don't even know what the shows are that I didn't see. I saw a handful of Futurama episodes at university, caught up with Firefly on DVD years later, and somehow managed to watch a good proportion of the episodes of mid-run Buffy. I did see quite a bit of Dr Who on video, and found the resurrection of the show disappointing enough that I lost interest years ago.

Similarly, I never really watched that many films, and the ones I did see tended to be fairly light-hearted and family-friendly. I did, however, read ferociously, mostly in the areas of nonfiction, fantasy and sci-fi.

And all this means I am equally spectacularly at sea in terms of the tropes of most of these things, which is a real problem because most role-playing games seem to either be specifically based on film and TV, or at the very least to be heavily influenced by them.

The RPGs I find easiest to grasp are Dungeons and Dragons, Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer 40,000. I really don't think that's an accident. All three are primarily based on books (yes, even 40K - the game itself consists of books, which have fluff in them, and there's lots of tie-in books too). I am familiar with a lot of the stuff behind all three. Traveller I've still never played, but it feels like it could fit with the fairly dry and hard-but-not-annoyingly-philosophical tone of a lot of the books I read in my younger days.

Setting

In terms of actually playing in or running a game, Call of Cthulhu has another big advantage in that it's a real-world game. This it shares with World of Darkness, though that gameline massively dilutes its advantage with an incredibly complex layer of supernatural stuff.

When you're starting out as a player, you don't need to know very much specific. It helps if you have a rough idea how the period you're playing in works, but even that can be worked around. You do know how the real world works, and have a broad idea of how things like shopping, social interaction, law and order work - especially given some narrative wiggle-room. The weirdness of the setting is specifically an unexpected and alarming element which is disruptive to the PCs, so you're not actually required to know anything about that ahead of time.

For the GM, it's also a boon, because it's really easy to run. You can use real-world locations and history, and improvise rapidly based on actual facts you know about reality. It's easier and quicker to guess plausibly how a certain NPC might behave, or how a town might respond to some bizarre events, than it is to make a similar judgement about a fantasy world. You can use actual maps to decide where players can go, rather than having to invent new locations on the fly. Plus, the players can use their understanding of real history, science and so on to follow what's going on; they don't need to have read up on the metaphysics or magic laws of your setting, and have everything patiently explained to them "which your character would already know, of course".

GMing

I think this ties in to a more general point that I find Call of Cthulhu relatively easy to GM for.

I feel like I wouldn't even know where to start with a D&D campaign, and I'd have to invest a huge amount of effort to create a situation that might be playable in order to dangle it in front of potential players. And I'm sure any of the people I game with could run a better one. Maybe I just lack confidence. I certainly enjoy playing D&D, and I've actually got the broad strokes of a couple of worlds from my 4e campaign, but coming up with all the geographies and combat and faction motivations seems like a lot of hard work. And it must be said, so far everything I've suggested to the usual group has been met with absolute silence, so not a lot of encouragement over there.

Writing a single scenario for Call of Cthulhu is a relatively limited feat. Okay, okay, yes, I admit I personally end up putting preposterous amounts of work into writing really robust investigations over long periods. But the principle stands! You can come up with one idea, play around with it and see if it seems to have any meat on it. If so, you can flesh it out as a standalone scenario and then stop. There isn't the same expectation of presenting a long campaign that some other systems have. I think the absence of an XP system is one of the factors here; because doesn't offer the satisfaction of gradual increase in power and new exciting abilities, there's less expectation of long-term play.

Also, Call of Cthulhu is legendarily fond of prewritten adventures. I've only actually run a couple, but there's a widespread acceptance of them in the gaming community. You can GM by selecting, reading and running prewritten adventures, rather than writing all your own material.

If you do want to write scenarios, though, I think the "real world, but with weird elements" makes it really accessible. All you really need is one weird spin. I've got a huge list of ideas waiting to one day be scenariofied: they're inspired by things ranging from weird stories, to stories in a completely different genre, to purely mechanical challenges ("can you write a scenario where X?", to historical and political events, to slightly odd stuff that's happened to me in real life, to nursery rhymes, to advertising.

I've written an entire scenario based on a photo someone posted on Twitter. I think it's genuinely good.

I just don't have the extensive genre knowledge or game experience to comfortably write scenarios for most other systems. I'd want to play a hell of a lot more White Wolf, for example, before feeling I had even the slightest idea what to do with them.

Circumstantial

Finally, it's probably worth accepting that a fair bit of the reason is purely circumstantial.

My friends include several very experienced GMs who can easily run a long and satisfying D&D campaign. Since my own foray collapsed for timetabling reasons, there's been no reason for me to try. Those slots have enough D&D in them already and it's better than I'd do.

Besides the regular online gaming, most of my games consist of irregular weekends of board and roleplaying games. These are of uncertain duration, and it's unpredictable how many people are available - usually three, sometimes four, occasionally two (including me). Experience of trying to run D&D on a roughly similar model was very poor. However, these are good occasions to try a one-shot that lasts four to eight hours. Of the games available, everyone is reasonably keen on Call of Cthulhu so it makes sense to run that. We sometimes experiment with other one-shots, but there's not huge enthusiasm and of course it's a lot of upfront time investment learning a system.

Because I live a long way from my existing gaming groups, I have limited opportunities to play or run games, but plenty of opportunities to think and write about them. Call of Cthulhu lends itself well to this because it's focused on prewritten scenarios, and because most of the game content you need consists of NPCs and clue chains rather than combat. Writing up mysteries is, I think, more satisfying to do than writing up potential combat because you can put together a coherent whole situation, whereas with combat it's all hazy until the sword hits the goblin.

If I write a one-shot for Call of Cthulhu, I'm reasonably confident that at some point I'll be able to find players for it. That isn't the case for campaign pitches, as that requires a lot more investment from everyone and is competing for a very limited amount of weekly gaming space.

I have a suspicion that if I'd come into gaming via a different group of people, I'd be happily running around with White Wolf and a fistful of storygames.* I do like mechanics; I like crunchy games and simulationism and worlds I can poke. At the same time, I like satisfying narrative and tropes and acting and silly voices. I'm a big reader, I've done some acting, that could be me.

And if storygames didn't all seem to be so freaking miserable.

---

Now it could well be that if I decided to sit down and write up a load of D&D campaign notes, I'd be able to come up with something worthwhile. It's a tough first step though, and one I've never really felt the encouragement to try, because given my current gaming setup I'm not especially optimistic I'd ever get to use it. I mean, I like the idea of running another D&D campaign, but I also like the idea of being toned and muscular or writing a novel. So far, none of these seems likely.

Generic update

So blogging is slow at the moment for a variety of reasons, which are mostly that I'm doing other writing instead. At the moment I'm trying to devote my energies to a new Call of Cthulhu scenario that fits together with some previous games.

I've been trying to get back into creative writing, with mixed results; I dashed off a whole short story draft on Sunday afternoon, but have been struggling more with the next one. Of course, not having a whole day to write makes it trickier during the week. Still, it's something I always enjoyed so I do want to get back to it. Also I have a huge list of ideas looking at me sadly from my Ideas List so culling that slightly would be good.

In general though I'm just quite busy so I don't have a ton of time to devote to thinking about gaming, let alone writing about it. It requires a certain leisure of the brain to do the sort of musings I normally spout, even the unsuccessful ones. Instead I'm ploughing through emails and expenses and processing documents like some kind of hopped-up beaver. And this is supposedly the quiet season at work. The heart quails, frankly.

To be fair, I also haven't been doing a huge amount of RPGing lately, so less to talk about there and not as much inspiration for posting. I did play some board games but I don't really feel the urge to blog about them.

And technically I'm trying to get an appropriate amount of sleep instead of the 6 hours I typically manage, so there's that.

Anyway, if you read this blog you probably know most of this already, but that's how it is. There's no point me declaring any kind of official hiatus because we all know that will immediately mean I spend all of Monday night obsessively turning out some harrowing piece of bloggery on some insanely specific topic, like a system for generating random tapestries or a game about office pen-theft. I'll just get back to it when I do, really.

Intermission

Wow, it is so much harder to do post series building up systems from scratch when you actually have enough work to keep you busy at your day job.

I'm still working on the Travelogues (although discussion with my mate suggests I've aimed too small-scale for what he had in mind) but my brain is pretty frazzled from concentrating and task-switching all the time. Although I'm not going to complain about a job that actually keeps me busy, an advantage of my previous job was not having to concentrate a lot of the time, so I could design game stuff in my head while moving books around or whatever. Here my workflow looks more like this (looks like an exaggeration, actually a simplified summary):

Quiet summer

It feels super quiet on the blogging front right now. For my part that's for a mix of reasons. Most of it is Real Life Stuff that's both soaking up my energy, and limiting my gaming options. I've not done much gaming for months now due to being a long way from my group, and right now I'm in the middle of moving cities and have just started a new job. Once things settle down I hope to have more spark for writing.

It also depends what's going on, gameswise. We're playing a certain amount over VOIP at the moment, but mostly D&D. I love D&D, but being quite familiar, I have a limited amount to say about it, and I already voiced a lot of thoughts about the 5e rules. Generally it's running into new things that inspires me to write. Most of it is improvised as well, and I generally feel far more comfortable analysing the experience of playing prewritten modules (with a touch of the review) than whatever my friends were able to come up with on the fly.

I do have quite a few half-written games and settings lying around, but I just haven't been able to devote time to fleshing them out to my satisfaction. Plus, it's harder to do that when I don't have my group around to bounce ideas off.

Also Shannon is lying low at the moment, so who am I supposed to steal ideas off?

When I get some time to myself, I'll see about introducing you to my new D&D campaign slash Saturday morning TV show: The Seven Crystal Spheres.

Current projects

Wow, this blog got quiet.

So at the moment I'm juggling a ton of things, which has the unfortunate tendency to translate into not actually finishing anything. For self-flagellation purposes* I'm going to remind myself of some of the major ones.

Obviously, the big one is Monitors. This is fundamentally more-or-less drafted, and I'm weirdly reluctant to take the last few steps that would let me run a playtest. It's less weird when you realise that one of these is writing a playtest scenario. Also, playtesting risks revealing that it's a big fat mess.

I've also been on a bit of a Cthulhu binge recently. I have one Gaslight scenario ready for playtesting, entitled The Perishing of Sir Ashby Phipps. I have a modern-day scenario that feels like a solid core, but really needs some sensible hooks and more working out of concrete manifestations of narrative weirdness. I have another modern idea in mind, but very hazy. I'm midway through three (count 'em) rather niche scenarios built around specific premises that I... don't really want to talk about here, because the only people who read this blog are also my vict- players. Sadly, those are also the people I want to talk to to thrash out the missing details. D'oh. And there are about four other ideaas floating around in skeletal form, including bonsai versions of major campaigns that might conceivably be playable with our butterfly-like group. And I'd really like to take the epic scenario I started writing a few years ago, and rebuild it as a setting with a couple of possible scenarios, so that it resembles something playable by mere mortals.

Oh, and I have an Adeptus Arbites system and scenario basically done, just wanting a couple of kinks working out of the plot. So I need to run that.

There are also three actual settings I started working on, once of which (Aftergreen) I've talked about before.

And then recently I mentioned that Jacobeans versus Aliens idea, and now some people are very keen for me to finish it so they can play it. Do you realise how little I know about being a Jacobean?

I wrote that darkness game. I'd quite like to try it. And someone mentioned playing Feckless Wastrels.

I'm also in the middle of several bits of writing, a substantial coding project related to Traveller, and oh, trying to find a job.

Right, well, 頑張ろう I suppose...

*which reminds me that I really want to play Deathwatch again.

Temporary hiatus has begun

For the handful of people who read this blog and don't already know: I'm currently moving house continent, and as such there is a bit of a hiatus in posts. I've been preoccupied with packing the last couple of weeks; I'm currently stowing boxes around my parents' house and spending time with family, which means very little time or energy for thinking about games or editing podcasts. I'll be flying out in a few days, and then starting school in a week's time. Both of these are likely to keep me busy.

I've still got a small buffer of podcasts to go up, but as I like to write accompanying thoughts they probably won't be up that soon. There are also about fifty part-written posts on various subjects, all of which I'd like to get back to, so there's no shortage of material there. Fingers crossed I will be back on the air in mid-July once I've settled down.

A secondary effect of the move is that I'll be essentially gameless on account of being on the opposite side of the planet from my gaming group, which even puts the kibosh on Skype games for the most part. This is likely to cut down on inspiration, although it should be an opportunity to work through that buffer, of course.

The shape of things to come in 2014

It's looking likely that things will get quiet around here over the next few months. This is for the simple reason that I'll be on a different continent from the rest of the L&L crew, and just as importantly, in a completely different timezone.

I'm hoping to maintain some sporadic contact in a couple of ways. One is play-by-email, which I'm thinking of trying out - some of my players seem like they'd fit quite well with less boisterous games, and I'm thinking of running some Cthulhu or general investigative stuff, but leaving out the gunfights and car chases. A more investigation-based, roleplay-heavy (in the sense of "talk about your character") game that doesn't require too many dice rolls that'll break up play by potentially several days apiece. Any tips welcome!

The other thing is that I worked out I can actually run short sessions over Skype, providing I start at 7am and everyone else is willing to play 10-11pm. We'll see! It'd do wonders for my efficiency, I'm sure.

Anyway! I do have a bit of a post backlog to work through, including some draft posts that'll never see the light of day, rather too many game ideas to play with, and several podcasts that need editing up. But you can probably expect things to dry up a lot here. The site will also drift yet further from its origins, as I will no longer be a librarian.

Delayed Deathwatch

How annoying.

I've spent the last couple of weeks hammering away at more Deathwatch in an attempt to cut down my backlog - not least because there's some recent content I'd like to get up in more-or-less timely fashion to discuss while it's fresh, but don't want to leave older recordings hanging around any longer. Anyway, hot rough Fisting action is all ready to go, but Archive.org is being a pain and I haven't been able to upload the files. As I'll be away this weekend, it's likely to be at least next week before I can change that. A shame, I was really hoping to start posting the game.

Meta: Christmas rush?

I got a faint shock today when I opened Blogger.

Got to say, I'm mildly curious about the sudden rush of visitors (hey, in my world 30+ pageviews is a rush). I'm guessing some are Yoggies lured here by my tome-based posts, but then those don't seem especially inundated with pageviews. I'm be interested to know, if anyone cares to comment.