Can you expand your question, please? I'm not entirely sure what you're asking. Titles, while useful summaries for questions, do not actually serve as the question itself. — Brian Ballsun-Stanton8 mins ago
Do you have tricks or techniques to remember all the rules to the games you're playing? I would like to run my first game as a gamemaster, but I'm struggling with remembering all the feats and competency rules.
Generally a GM is expected to know the rules best and be the arbiter of them.
[pulls d20 Star Wars off the shelf and flips through GM section]
> You need to know how to play the game. As long as you know the rules, the game can move along, and the players can simply focus on their characters and how they react to what happens in the game. Have players tell you what they want their characters to do and translate those decisions into game terms for them. (SWd20 Revised Core Rulebook, p240, emphasis not mine)
So... yeah, gm-techniques and new-gm are quite reasonable for this question.
(I've never played d20 Star Wars; I picked up a couple of manuals from a friend who was leaving island.)
In games that focus on logic and practical efficiency so much (like D&D tends to), it's easy to forget that people often do really stupid things because they like other people.
@AlexP But yeah, the idea apparently is that the locals are on peaceful terms with some stone giants, but need to do a little bit of mild hostage taking to keep everyone peaceful. So youth exchange.
I don't have the source t hand, but before he found a book about Vlad's life and lineage Stoker was going to call his villain something like "Lord Wampyr." Because subtle.
My focus is mostly on English-language vampire pop culture dating from Polidori on, but that means I'm at least passingly familiar with the major folk lore and history, too.
He was kind to his people unless they opposed him, which was stupid to do anyway because he was the only thing standing in the way of the oncoming heathen armies which were flooding over their neighboring kingdoms.
Opposition to his nation's safety, from within or without, was met with swift violence and cruel irony.
And he hated evil in his country so much that, if anyone committed some harm, theft or robbery or a lie or an injustice, none of those remained alive. Even if he was a great boyar or a priest or a monk or an ordinary man, or even if he had a great fortune, he couldn't pay himself from death.
When muslim ambassadorial party refused to remove their turbans in his presence because it was against their faith, he said that he understood and wished to help them honor their religious laws.
I ran a brief game in the time period. One of the rival NPCs had been revealed to have a ring from the order. It took PCs some time to research what it meant. Then they very carefully chose not to piss off that NPC.
My favorite moment from that game, though, was when the PCs had walked into a town, only to find it closed down under suspicions of plague in the morning. There was a lot of bravado: "We'll blast those guardsmen." Then people started saying a holy man was coming to cleanse the plague, with a regiment of soldiers to protect him. "We'll blast those soldiers." Finally, it was revealed the holy man's name is Tomas. Tomas Torquemada. "Lets see if we can bribe someone with a boat."
@BESW that could be the case, and i might not push it further, except the information was there until I came along
and I really, really do not like the idea of it not at least having d20 for context, since that's what all the answers are responding in the context of anyway.
Our Ars Magica game is slowly inching towards the 1400's, actually. Though if we get there, we might consider winding back the clock for the next campaign, since it's getting a little out of scope for the game.
The campaign is starting its fifth iteration, with jumps of between 10 and 50 years between iterations. We started in the early 13th century, and the new one is starting in 1350.
2013 is totally the year I've given up secondary-world fantasy settings in favor of weird-historical fantasy. You get a lot of interesting stuff and detail "for free," and the setting tends to challenge your prejudices much more powerfully than a purely fictional world does.
A fictional world has to allegorize before it deconstructs.
In order for your real-world prejudices to be challenged by a fantasy setting you have to translate the setting's prejudices into their real-world parallels.
This is a powerful tool because it lets us discuss sensitive topics that would be too uncomfortable to talk about openly, but it can also dull the impact.
@Metamaterialgirl So, I think when we construct settings from scratch, it's easy to load them with our own expectations. Not purposefully, necessarily. But, for example, it's easy to build a setting where slavery is a problem to be solved.
Which is not how slavery works in ancient and medieval cultures.
In a historic setting it's easier to convey the scope of a cultural phenomenon to the players, and the difficulty they would face in trying to change it for real. True.
> Beginning in early April of 1986 the people in and around the little known Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant began to experience a series of strange events revolving around sightings of a mysterious creature described as a large, dark, and headless man with gigantic wings and piercing red eyes. People affected by this phenomena experienced horrific nightmares, threatening phone calls and first hand encounters with the winged beast which became known as the Black Bird of Chernobyl.
Of course, there was also one of my favorite Call of Cthulhu games, where the the characters spent quite some time looking for 'the guys who stopped the thing at Tunguska'.
Then the Chernobyl disaster happened. The appearance of the Black Bird of Chernobyl began in the days leading up to the disaster. The reactor melted down, and the factory exploded from the steam pressure.
Workers then arrived to put out the fires, not understanding there was a nuclear meltdown happening.
> The workers who survived the initial blast and fire, but would later die of radiation poisoning, claimed to have witnessed what has been described as a large black, bird like creature, with a 20 foot wingspan, gliding through the swirling plumes of irradiated smoke pouring from the reactor.
> No further sightings of the Black Bird of Chernobyl were reported after the Chernobyl Disaster, leaving researchers to speculate just what haunted the workers of the plant during the days leading up to the disaster.
User cards (not sure what official SE name is) seem to be too small for fitting the info for users with many badges.
2 examples in 1 image:
This seems invariant as far as zooming in/out with Ctrl-wheelscroll
Firefox 26, didn't try other browsers.
@Metamaterialgirl Christian allegory I'm fine with. Islamophobia and the use of allegory to replace story so that the later books make no sense without the allegory...
@JonathanHobbs It's a thing that shows up heralding disaster but does nothing by itself. Shaped similar to the bird thing. I think it's mostly an East-Coast US urban legend. There was a movie about it recently-ish?
@BESW As a kid, the later books registered to me as more pure fairy tale, notably the wish-fulfillment of the second half of The Last Battle. Since the way it was told was very much in the line of other fairy tales I'd read.
'And then things got more and more wonderful, forever and ever.'
It had been disconcerting, to read Narnia books again after learning a bit more about the Bible and the rest, and to see just how much of a reskinned story it really is.
Also interpretations of the Black Bird of Chernobyl's presence vary from simply being a herald of disaster, to having been the very cause of the Chernobyl reactor melting down.
Since I was already reasonably aware of the Biblical elements it was allegorizing, I didn't get the "ignorant first read" that most people seem to have.
I was aware of Bible on my first readthrough, I think. But it was at such an early age I had no capacity to critically analyze it and see the similarities.
Utsuho Reiuji has a cape that has a vision into the night sky on the inside (and often resembles wings), has a core in her chest, has a control rod for a weapon, and uses nuclear power for her attacks.
Utsuho Reiuji is the Black Bird of Chernobyl. :) (Probably.)
Though I will note this about weird-historical: the virtues I mention only work if you're, well, interested in cultural history. You don't necessarily have to be super-well-read or try for "authentic" representation.
But, like, it's easy to erase women from historical-setting stories if you're just relying on dated gender assumptions and not really aware of some of the finer points of how real societies operated.
@Metamaterialgirl I have Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein to thank for introducing to me the term "macroherpetophile", i.e. someone sexually attracted to giant lizards. Namely, Godzilla. And that's not the weirdest thing in the book...
Agreed. Was just looking at an example from the quick reading on the Order of the Dragon I was doing--Barbara of Celje, cofounder of the order, gets a minimal blurb.
Also kinda amusing/head-bashing: trash cut-and-paste porn ebook covers actually have the same problem as high-budget fantasy novels. Namely, the chicks on the cover are way whiter and blonder than the chicks in the books.
If I get to the point of wanting a cover on it, I'd probably be willing to go with less realism and commission a webcomic artist, or someone of that kidney, and then have a good chance of getting a character portrayal that is a). slightly more accurate and b). I like.
@Metamaterialgirl There's a pretty nifty site that collects illustrators who don't have the "male gaze"/"erase people of color" problem. I'm trying to find a link for you but I can't...
My dream job would be designing and illustrating novel covers for a small press that gives me time to make sure the cover is accurate to the contents (but not too spoilery).
Theatre posters are challenging because I have exactly two weeks to do the project from start to finish, the costumes/sets/props are usually still in the concept stage, and the director has strong ideas about the content.
Hrm. @BESW, may I ask you for a favor? I really need icons (preferably vector) for my board game. I've been using ones I've found on the Internets, which was fine for private playtesting, but I want to do a public one as well. All of my artist friends are useless...
There's 12 icons currently in use, for cards and whatnot. All about 8mm x 8mm in size. Basically, I need icons I can use without worrying about attribution, etc (which is to say, that I can attribute to one person). This will be a public playtest that, realistically, not many people will see. But if all goes well, they'll also be used for demonstration to publishers (eveeeentually).
If you give me your gmail, I'll share the current rules doc that has all the icons listed, with current ones shown.
The timeframe is... eh. I'm trying to get back into working on the project. It's not urgent, but I'm going to be redesigning the board, and it'd make a lot of sense to use the new icons.
The one icon I want to change is the defense one. Rather than a shield, it should be a torch. The rest are fairly representative of their meaning, I think.
It's basically mashed-together wheat, rice, corn, oat, and soy stuffs.
Make brown rice in a rice cooker with Tabasco, Worcestershire, pepper, onion, garlic, and anything else handy that looks good.
Dice and sauté more onion and garlic in a bit of olive oil, then add the diced Tender Bits.
Microwave a bag of frozen mixed veggies and mix everything together in a bowl.
If you have fresh veggies like carrots, dice them and add them too (consider adding them to the sauté at the very end, but not for long: fresh veggies should keep their crunch).
Instead of Tender Bits, certain kinds of vegetarian hot dogs or sausages, or well-prepared tofu, can be used instead.