Gaming

Day one is Tunnels & Trolls, in honor of my very first RPG. I’m using the Deluxe rules, no complications. Stats are 3d6 in order and all that jazz. So what do we get? Strength 12 Constitution 5 Dexterity 8 Speed 11 Luck 11 Intelligence 9 Wizardry 8 Charisma 18+10 = 28 Phew, that’s poor. Except Charisma, which is ridiculous. This particular version of the rules allows you to roll and add when you get triples, so when I rolled an 18 on Charisma, I rolled again and added. If I’d gotten triples on the second roll I would have kept on rolling and adding. It’s ludicrous and it means my yet unnamed character starts at level 2, since level is determined by the highest first digit of any stat. ...

I got a wild hair this year, plus I need something to keep me busy in the evenings while I’m traveling, so I’m going to take a shot at the 2025 Character Creation Challenge. Basically: one TTRPG character per day. Details here. Then I missed the first day because I got very distracted by Trenque Lauquen. No regrets. That’s okay, I can play a bit of catchup! Completed entries are tagged as character-creation-2025. ...

Pitchfork dug deep for this review of Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Vol. 1-3. Cool for the music but also cool for the esoterica. Anyone who claimed to be Crowley’s kid and had a passion for folk music is worth investigating in my book. Alejandro Galindo seems like a really interesting director. A fair amount of his movies are available on the commercial-based streaming services. I wonder if these weren’t an influence on Roma? ...

I launched a new online campaign this week and with the consent of the players, I recorded the session for later reference. (One of them wrote a great summary, but it’s still nice to have the recording.) My original plan was to use Whisper to get a transcription but it turns out the built in Google Meet captioning system is plenty good enough. I did give Whisper a shot anyhow, and Whisper’s quality was higher, but the thing about Google Meet is that it adds speaker information to the transcriptions which is a huge difference. ...

I’ve been meaning to write this down in one place instead of scattering it in comments throughout the Internet. Note that the following blithely ignores the question of copyrighting mechanics; I agree that mechanics can’t be copyrighted but am assuming there’s concrete value to having a license for them anyhow. I also am assuming that the ORC will have a viral component; if not, it’s almost certainly going to be strictly inferior to Creative Commons Attribution. ...

Edge-of-Town is a nautical, isolated little borough. Plenty of room for things to get weird. Also I really like lighthouses.

This is the first week’s borough from my Bastion23 project. Harshbiscuit turned out to be a fairly wealthy borough – I imagine Gilded Age mansions. Map

My rough plan for Dungeon23 is to write one borough of Bastion per week, as follows: Monday: Basic map of transit lines Tuesday: Points of Interest named and described Wednesday: Complications written Thursday: Three to five One to three factions outlined Friday: Three to five One to three NPCs outlined Saturday: Encounter table Sunday: A Treasure Update: three to five NPCs and factions was optimistic. One to three is better. I will capture the day’s work on Mastodon, hash tagged #Dungeon23 and #Bastion23. The completed borough makes a Sunday blog post, which are also tagged as #Bastion23. ...

I’ve been thinking about Delta Green in relation to copaganda for a long time. That is a different blog post, because it’s a long topic, but recently I started wondering about collective action in the Delta Green world. As a practical matter, I believe that mutual aid is a better environment for mental health than any police force. What would that mean in relationship to the Cthulhu Mythos? Let’s start with the existing rules for using Bonds. ...

New text AI! Let’s try it on some tabletop RPG work. Bold is my prompts; I’ve snipped the polite banter out of most of the AI’s answers. Spoiler: this is way better than the last one I tried. If I repeat the same prompt it gets a little repetitive, but still not bad.