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It turns out that business trips are poor places to work on posting challenges, especially if you’re horribly jet lagged and you have a lot of evening meetings. I’m gonna try and hit 31 of these anyhow, just not before the end of January. I found myself thinking about action a lot, so now that I’m back in the US I’m gonna do a quick Outgunned character. Outgunned is designed as a modern action RPG, very much in the spirit of John Wick. Since it’s been pretty successful as measured by Kickstarter success, the designers (Two Little Mice) have added a couple of genre books packed full of potential settings – Wild West, space opera, etc. – and a second corebook aimed at 30s pulp action. This time out I’m doing the “A Kind of Magic” mini-expansion, or Action Flick. I’m going to frame this as modern espionage with magic, which seems like a fun game idea.

OK, this time I really did cut back on movies. When I say “cut back” what I mean is I watched only 291 movies, which is only cutting back if you start at a baseline of 508 movies watched. Partially this is because we didn’t do Fantasia in 2024; really, though, I made myself be less obsessive, watched more TV, and so on. Also I had a nasty case of something at the beginning of the year which left me exhausted for most of the rest of the year; I want to say it was COVID but who knows? Either way my workday evenings were less useful than once they were. ...

Aw, that’s cute, I thought I wasn’t going to watch as many movies as I did in 2022. Instead I went from 423 watched to 508 watched. Remember when I said “I want to spend more time following my whims”? That worked out really well. In 2022, I did a weekly challenge plus a weekly movie watching club plus another weekly movie watching club – it got to be a grind. In 2023 I was more varied about my tastes and I had more fun. ...

Man, there were no dice last time. Also I’m just off a transatlantic flight and I’m tired. Thus, I’m going to let the dice do the thinking for me and go for something highly randomized: the Troika supplement Academies of the Arcane. It was a really fun read; I wound up wanting to run a mini-campaign in it. We start with stats: Skill: 6 (nice, that’s max) Stamina: 18 Luck: 9 ...

That’s a lot of OSR to start the challenge, so I figured I’d do something less trad for day three. If I’d been thinking ahead, which I may do later in the month, I’d have thrown the playbook history section open to my pals on social media to crowdsource answers, but in the interests of efficiency I just made up my own this time around. I decided I wanted to play a character who’s a little bit out of sync with the modern world but still effective. Playbook: the Initiate, who belongs to some kind of secret sect that thinks it’s the bulwark against evil. I’m going to call her Jeanne, as a reference to Joan of Arc. ...

Mothership gets to be my second character because a pal of mine wants to playtest a scenario sometime this year. I won’t use this character for the purpose – at the table, I’d rather make PCs with everyone else around – but it’ll familiarize me with the rules a bit. Stats come first. This is another one where you roll stats in order, using 6d10 this time. I get: Strength: 21 Speed: 32 Intellect: 41 (31 + 10 from my class) Combat: 30 ...

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. ...

January is kind of a traditional, vanilla month for the Criterion Channel — less experimental or unknown work, more stuff from the canon. Which is still not bad! So let’s see what we’ve got.

S. and I are up in Victoria for a brief pre-Christmas holiday vacation; mostly just lounging about. We’re sitting in Saint Cecilia as I write this, which I strongly recommend if you’re into coffee. They do great hand-brews. One of the non-lounge activities, though, was Craigdarroch Castle. Craigdarroch Castle from a slight distance — it’s a big Romanesque Revival stone building. ...