Alex Schroeder @kensanata@tabletop.social

#RPG related apps I host:
https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Apps

#LetsRead #BlackCompany Loved the cold. Icy manes, clouds of breath. One-Eye is at least 100 years old. Love it. Having to collaborate with evil sorcerers. Stealing the bounty like greedy D&D characters, for XP. And the dark lords squabbling. And Otto being wounded. I was a bit confused how Raker ended up being easy to kill at the end, physically. As if later in the books Cook changed his mind regarding the killing of the Taken.

Anyway, long blog post about Forged in the Dark games.
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2021-07-30_Forged_in_the_Dark

I was trying to find Chris McDowall's post about a simple 50:50 chance being all that's required in a RPG but instead I found this:
"These are the cheap little tricks down in the lower decks, the little things that can grease the wheels of your game if things start to stall. The salt of the RPG earth. They aren't going to win any awards as groundbreaking RPG theory, but I find it useful to keep some of them on-hand when running a game."
https://www.bastionland.com/2020/04/cheap-tricks.html

I feel old because I visited an old German RPG forum (Tanelorn) and skimmed some of the topics, and then I didn't read a single one of them. I was already tired when I read the titles and figured, either they get it, then they don't need me to tell them, or they don't get it, and then I feel like a reply guy. I wonder what would hold my interest. Table techniques. Personal issues and how to move forward. Perhaps there is only a limited number of years you can spend on all the other stuff?

“Kobold is legolassing this dude…” – Sean Nittner, Actual Play podcast 😂 English is a great language where you can not only noun the verbs and verb the nouns but can even verb the names! This speaker of Smashingwordstogetherlanguage has a lot of respect for this kind of flexibility.

In D&D, with all its monsters, intelligent monsters are still underused. Or maybe humans as monsters are underused. As soon as I'm in a world of intelligent beings, however, "evil" is harder for me to formulate. It's that banality of evil, where no individual is evil by responsibility is spread so thin in a system that in the end it's nobody's fault. And who do you fight, then?

«Every competent adventurer expects to encounter intelligent monsters like dragons, minotaurs and vampires, but in other cases brainpower and the ability to communicate lurk where they might not be expected. … These were … compiled, along with more additions, in the AD&D Monster Manual, with each monster now having a formal Intelligence stat. Many of the "secretly intelligent" monsters remain under-appreciated and/or underused, at least with respect to their intellect.»
https://zenopusarchives.blogspot.com/2021/07/d20-unexpectedly-intelligent-monsters.html

“a very effective technique for representing space iconically on the virtual tabletop is collage, pulling images from different places and placing them together in the context of play. A map of a planet that presents noteworthy locations with some science fiction art cribbed from the Internet provides a pretty strong sense of place for players, and any locations of which they are as yet unaware can be hidden from view to be brought to light at the right time.”
https://www.indiegamereadingclub.com/indie-game-reading-club/traveller-on-roll20/

As we're playing Blades in the Dark tonight, and as I consider @eli_oat's musings about ghosts and gravity, I'm thinking that if ghosts have no mass, wouldn't they simply continue moving in a straight line when the body dies, so the earth would be projecting a plane of ghosts along the ecliptic… My guess is we are already haunting the entire milky way.
https://dog.estate/@eli_oat/106596062080597277

I started listening to the Actual Play podcast episodes where they play Band of Blades. Then I bought the game even though we are starting a Blades in the Dark game. And now I am reading the Black Company books again. Something is telling me military fantasy might lie in my future.

Bookmark of bookmarks:
“I have, as one might expect, a considerable number of bookmarked pages. Here are some of the most useful / interesting / novel / enjoyable of those.”
https://throneofsalt.blogspot.com/2021/07/slushpile-85-bookmark-special.html

Reading a few pages of Blades in the Dark, then my wife reading a few pages, then talking about it. Learning a new game, reading it in a foreign language, if you’re not super into it.

Session report to go along with it, if people want to read session reports: https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Tau_Subsector/Episode_14 – usually players will occasionally add thoughts and vignettes of their own to this bare bones summary, e.g. last session report: https://campaignwiki.org/wiki/Tau_Subsector/Episode_13

Today in Traveller: learning about the Ludlow massacre. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre
Thanks, @phf & @wandererbill – not sure what emoji to use. It was a good game, but the Ludlow story is terrible.

I’m reading Band of Blades instead of doing what needs to be done.

Ohhh! "We're in the process of changing the guard. … My Name is Todd and I'll be picking up the torch to organize this year's event."
https://www.dungeoncontest.com/

The contest is on!

You have until July 31 to submit
your one page dungeon.

https://www.dungeoncontest.com/

#1pdc

«As for myself, I stopped doing reviews when I realized that they were always hopelessly out of date as I wanted to run all the adventures before reviewing them. And people convinced me that talking about the things we don’t like is a waste of time. Life is short. Talk about the things you love. Do we need “a review culture to guide consumers”? Maybe not. But then again, I’m on the record with claiming that we also don’t need much of a market…»
https://alexschroeder.ch/wiki/2021-03-27_Blogosphere