@BESW oh crap, i knew I forgot something. Turns out I have swimming on Mondays that i completely forgot about, so I am actually on my way home now, so I likely won't be able to make game stuff :(
@nitsua60 Yeah, I can't find a good source for it, but apparently it was due to questions about using shillelagh with quarterstaves and Polearm master.
I don't know? I was squarely on the "what the hell does that even mean" side of that conversation. But one of the participants had a few more sides than me....
In any case, having defiled William Goldman's work, broken the English language, started an intercontinental war, and rubbed-off my keyboard's apostrophe... I think I'll call it a day. To don't screw up the chat's my goal for tomorrow =)
yeah, I just cast my first close vote with the new bling... and it wasn't a 5e question =( What an anticlimax. That badge's been on my dashboard for *months* now.
According to the consensus over on Why are site comments being deleted?, comments that have been folded in to a question or answer are eligible to be deleted because they are Obsolete. This helps to keep the site clean and canonical.
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(Mesoamerican ocarinas could play over a dozen notes in up to three octaves, and were sometimes made to double as a mask for the player. They had spiritual properties, as the player's breath animated or ensouled the figure depicted by the instrument (often a ritually significant animal).)
I've been thinking of this 1850's Helsinki setting, with a mystery that starts out as a murder mystery but turns out that the murderer was actually trying to prevent something far more sinister. Have yet to figure out what that'd be ;)
I've run Horror of Fang Rock at least five times now, and it's been well received each time. The experience is quite different each time because of how the Investigators respond to the situations.
One idea I've been trying to refine is the Saturday night demon. By invoking a ritual to become Marked, a person can partake in the blessing of the demon and receive wealth and happiness, but in exchange, the demon requires sacrifice. Every Saturday night, the demon materializes as a hairy humanoid in many places - near each Marked person, and tries to kill them until successfully killing one.
The main antagonists, in addition to the demon, is a cult that protects its own hide from the demon by luring other people in the cult and trapping them into positions where they're easy prey to the beast. That way the victim is sure to be killed to appease the demon until next week.
If I wire this to the "murder mystery that turns out to be something more sinister", they're the people investigating the original murder I guess. Have to think about that.
> If you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: 'Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.' - Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, 'On the Art of Writing,' 1916
As a GM I find this advice especially useful in both its senses: that extravagant flourishes like Unexpected Twists, Strange Goings-On, or Unusual Folks, don't actually make for good games; and that even if an idea is a good one, it might not be right for that campaign.
RPGs are closer to improvisational theatre than to any kind of writing form. Using the styles, techniques, or strategies of novel- or screenplay-writing is usually counterproductive.
As a planning GM, I find that--like writing--often if I let myself write out my darlings (even if I know I'll be trashing them at the end), it gives me room to find other more interesting or relephant options.
I once wrote two pages of verse to get a usable six-line poem, and I've written countless over-complicated PCs and NPCs, tortuous plots, and elaborate death-traps, which all informed whatever finally hit the table.
The initial suspect being actually a reasonably good guy suppressing the evil might be a bit ambitious too.
And drawing barriers might make it easier to turn it into a story. If there's a murder in your house, it's not going to affect you that much - the gendarme comes and questions you but that's about it. But if one is visiting a friend or something, and there's a murder, they suddenly become a suspect who may not be entitled to leave until there's some outcome...
> You may wish to seed in red herrings, too—clues that seem important, but that don’t relate to the main case. Be sparing. Players may get frustrated by being sent down too many dead ends. Instead, it’s always possible to let a seeming clue lead to another character who is having difficulties: a B-plot or C-plot mystery. Or maybe that “red herring” becomes an A-plot case later on down the line. [...] This can’t be stressed enough. Things that seem obvious to you as you design the mystery or improvise on the fly may be utterly baffling to the players, particularly if your adventure spans mor…
@BESW The last part being way, WAY too common for me. I once did a game that had a mystery element - basically, a baron was a target for an attempted assassination. I had been playing a lot of Crusader Kings 2 and was pretty confident my players would first blame the baron's younger brother who was set to inherit in the event of the baron's death - but nay, it sort of wooshed.
It wasn't a major hurdle though, because the mystery was a rather minor element in the story.
@BESW The Finnish humor magazine Pahkasika (literally, Warthog) accepted reader submissions and joked that the typical hobbyist-drawn comic sent to them was about a guy drawing comics trying to figure what to draw a comic about. I recall one of the published comics actually being one.
My first time GMing (also my first time playing an RPG) I came in with a great stack of notes and references and sheets and tables, which I threw out half an hour in because the group was doing something totally different and more interesting.
@BESW When coming up with mysteries, do you start with the ending/truth and work your way back from there, or with the plot hooks and work up sensible conclusions from them until you reach some good ending?
I guess overall I may be a bit bad with the Lovecraftian madness thing. I keep injecting too much "X happens because of Y", "people do X because they want Y" sense into stuff. Doesn't really fit well with madmen or monsters with truly incomprehensible motives.
The closest I've ever come to sustaining that over a long campaign was in my interpretation of 4e's Points of Light setting:
> In my version of the Points of Light setting, all the multiverse that is the Points of Light reality is a tiny sliver of coherency in the vast indefinable body of the Far Realm. The Far Realm responds to it the way our bodies would a foreign object: automatic responses engage to simultaneously destroy, encapsulate, and expel it. That's what aberrations, and horrific fates handed down by malevolent stars, and Star Pact warlocks, and all of that stuff, are: various kinds of auto-immune effects that sometimes work together and sometimes at cross purposes in response to an unwelcome body. It …
But for Cthulhu Dark, the motives don't have to be unintelligible to mortals. CD is about the experience of not knowing, more than the experience of being unable to know.
Often in my games, figuring out what's really going on and what the creature really wants is what precipitates the party's descent into panicked madness.
When the creature's goal is "Methodically and destructively consume the experience and knowledge of every person in London," and they appear to be well on their way to doing so, panic is a quite reasonable response to understanding.
@kviiri This is one reason I use old Doctor Who stories. They were really good at giving just enough explanation to keep the story moving, and not a jot more.
Then I take out the Doctor, so there IS an explanation but nobody is around to explain it.
(This works for almost any story where the focus of the monster isn't the Doctor, and the monster will continue its plot without the Doctor's intervention.)
I've also experimented with taking Scooby-Doo stories and making the monster real.
@kviiri I recommend the two-season series Mystery, Inc. as perhaps the only modern Scooby-Doo material worth your time unless your goal is to make fun of the thing.
I'll make a note of that, but probably won't have the time to watch it anytime soon. Summertime is almost over and we'll probably be trying to squeeze in as many geocache hits as we can now that cycling is still an option :)
(to be honest many people cycle in the snow too, I'm just not badass enough)
Hello everyone. So how did the session zero of your DW game go? It was starting 4am my time, so couldn't even crash in and hover, but am very much curious.
I was just there for the first hour, so I don't know much about the other PCs, but I was there for the basic worldbuilding.
We decided that we want to play a game that's got a decent amount of "people and society are important and you can't just go around killing folks and doing whatever you like," but also opportunities to just go around killing stuff and doing whatever we like.
Exactly, we want to avoid that but still have "acceptable" targets.
Solution: a society that was devastated by unspeakable abominations from beyond the stars about a generation ago. The war's been won, barely, but the world is still putting itself back together.
Some people are trying to rebuild, by consolidation or expansion; some are taking advantage of the situation for their own benefit; and so forth.
So we'll have social intrigue and drama in the towns, but going from town to town plunges us into lawless wilderness.
(It's basically 4e's Points of Light setting, but replacing the sack of Nerath by an army of demon-led gnolls with an invasion of Far Realm aberrations.)
Post-near-apocalypse, perhaps. And really, it's very common: a great deal of fantasy is set in the remnants of a devastated empire.
One of us will be playing a paladin who is so overconfident he has a hard time seeing his own flaws; another will be playing a psion who I think is seeking to better understand the foibles of the mind; I'll be a shulassakar bard from a distant land, on a journey of discovery.
Well, true. But I guess I wouldn't categorize fantasy-Romes as post-apocalyptic, necessarily... it depends on the social implications of the empire's collapse. It might range from true scarcity and devastation to just power vacuum.
@kviiri, in my impression, nearly every fantasy story ever is post-apocalyptic. It's inherent in the scholastic nature of magic and artifacts - "something ancient is universally better than anything we can produce now" is a definition of world decline.
The sword & sorcery genre (and for the purposes of this observation, Lord of the Rings counts) is firmly tied to rather distressingly colonial ideas about the rise and fall of civilisations as a natural, organic pattern of history.
One of the things I like about our setting is that it's about a society which refused to adopt that narrative and just lie down and die.
(I'm envisioning my bard with a kind of patronising attitude toward the dominant society we'll be adventuring in, perhaps with a bit of "I must learn these people's stories before they die out!")
Thinking of adventuring heroes, I wouldn't there's a dedicated support musician among them as an actual party member if I didn't know about DnD and all games that borrow from it.
The D&D-esque concept of the bard can trace its roots back to Romantic literature of the early 1800s.
(Which, in turn, was romanticised from earlier fictional depictions of bards and similar professions, more than from the reality of the professions themselves.)
As for where D&D itself found the bard, I suggest you check out the 1955 film The Court Jester.
Finnish folklore has sorcerers and deities who use music, poetry and song as the medium for their magic, too. But I think there's a difference of sorts... they're notable for being spellcasters, with music as their tool, while I feel the sword and sorcery bard is more fixed to the music itself.
@kviiri As someone with an amateur interest in the magic of different cultures, and a professional interest in the intersemiotics of words and images, I've found that cultures with a long history of alphabetic texts tend to ascribe magic to words while other cultures tend to ascribe magic to deeds or objects.
@UrhoKarila Our literature teacher said that kids today are wussies for being scared of the old-timey language it uses. "Tolkien read it using a dictionary, you are native speakers, you'll have no problems at all". She was right I guess :P
I actually used Seppo Ilmarinen as a figure in one of my aborted DW campaigns, with the MacGuffin being his ancient hammer - capable of not only earthly crafts, but also shaping pretty much anything. Even abstract concepts like time, love, life, humanity...
In the local culture here, strong emotions have great magical power. To indulge them rashly is to invite disaster, but to suppress them causes them to fester and cause problems later.
So the culture has rituals for expression strong emotions safely.
He also left behind lesser copies of the artifact for his followers, ones capable of any material works. Imagine hammering a broken shirt to fix it, or a single man building a sailing ship from scratch in a week.
There's a legend about a girl who frequently snuck off to go swimming instead of doing her chores. Her mother eventually got so mad that she shouted, "If she likes the ocean so much, I wish my daughter would turn into a fish!" And the girl began to turn into a fish.
I made a commitment ages ago to learn enough Italian to read Dante's Divine Comedy. There exists a reasonably good Finnish translation, but it doesn't preserve the uncommon poetic meter used by Dante.
But the girl's grandmother heard the mother's wish, and because she outranked her daughter, the grandmother was able to keep the girl from turning all the way: instead, she became a mermaid.
@BESW If volcanoes were formed that way, we'd have volcanoes in Finland too :)
We're watching this (very well-researched, as far as I know) drama series about Finnish history. There's a cool bit of syncretism showcased with the blacksmith's wife who recites Kalevala-esque poems about Virgin Mary to cure diseases and aid in childbirth.
Kirby: On she sent, one day, a second And at length, upon the third day, Came she to a lake's broad margin To the bank, o'ergrown with rushes And she reached it in the night-time And she halted in the darkness
Then her shift she cast on the willows And her dress upon the aspens On the open ground her stockings Threw her shoes upon the boulders On the sand her beads she scattered And her rings upon the shingle
Friberg: She walked one day, walked a second, On the third day she arrived Before her streched the open sea Bordered by a reedy marsh There the nightfall overtakes her And the darkness ends her wandering
Cast her dress upon an aspen Stockings on the marshy ground Shoes upon a laundrystone Necklace on the sandy shore And her rings among the pebbles
------- Getting some boundary between the verse & non-verse
@UrhoKarila: Eight syllables per verse, alliteration, and where appropriate repetition (saying the same thing or close twice, with different words) are the basic recipe for Kalevala-esque poetry. We had to learn that in school and even write some troche of our own :)
@DuckTapeAl Gold hammer, for when Maxwell wants to level up.
Also I guess having the emphasis on the first, third, fifth and seventh syllable of each stanza is important too.
In line with them being troches ;)
In the 45. poem of Kalevala (iirc) there's a poem about Väinämöinen going to sauna to heal and receive blessing. It was my favorite when I was a kid. My grandparents had a woodprint of that bit in their sauna's dressing room.
@nitsua60 How can I put this...anyone asking that question didn't leave out an edition because they disliked it, they left out an edition because of incomplete knowledge.
@nitsua60 [wave] I'm up waaay too late and need to go to bed now, but can you help see that somebody gets me up to date on who's playing what characters?
Also I posted a first pass at my bard in the Discord chat, for approval/revilement.
More precisely, I find it hard to come up with an evil agenda that's sensible enough to understand and yet clearly, obviously malevolent enough to warrant intervention.
Maybe it's that I don't really believe in evil, and I see "indifferent cosmic fiends" as pretty unlikely to actually go out of their way to terrorize humans.
One scenario I could lift from Mansions of Madness is a man working on a ritual that makes him immortal in exchange for the lives of his family line.
That's sensible - the guy wants to be immortal. That's vile, he'd slaughter his own family to get that.
@kviiri That's the main part I've had trouble with in trying to do Lovecraftian horror. I can't see a good reason that the creatures themselves would be too interested in dropping by, and I can't come up with good justification for why a cult would summon them
@kviiri Yeah, that seems like it'd be a fine justification for the character
Though it's another thing to get the PCs to care about it enough to do anything
The thing with cosmic horror creatures is, not all of them make a lot of sense to me. Some go out of their way to spook and interact with us humans that should supposedly be pathetically minor to them.
Why would they care?
Of course, often it's the followers who are worse. They assume the fiend would care, try to summon it, and find out the hard way how insignificant they are.
The main justifications I'm a fan of are (1) We just happen to be a tasty food source in a new and exciting environment (2) They're doing something else entirely, and we just happen to be caught underfoot
Might be fun to run a game in a setting kind of like Roadside Picnic, tho...
He's basically a faux voodoo doctor who receives his powers from evil spirits and promises souls in exchange. He dies at the end of the film by failing to deliver and losing himself instead.
Will go into radio silence now - quiz is starting and phones are not allowed out.
Well, it seems to be starting late as usual. Oh well!
I think human ghosts are a viable way to approach horror... They have history being human, so they are good at messing humans up, and they also can have easy motives.
I've stumbled upon an interesting conversation where it gets clear how AW is a game with asymmetric power distribution and has the same problems that D&D has when players try to convince the MC that the game should go how they think it should
I'm more worried about the guy writing the posts being very harsh
The sod is trapped between "stop saying that Ron Edwards is a guru just to mock him, he is not!" and "It turns out Ron Edwards already found out that 10 years earlier!"
The original thread was about the difference between objectives and stakes, I'm trying to identify when the real discussion about why a game with numeric results can't be a game with stakes/objectives starts
I can't recall if I'm around 69 or 79 kg. Anyway, it doesn't look that bad. It's just having a belly that's the opposite of flat that worries me. Not enough to have me exercise - then again, I have no idea what would make me.
@Skathix Anyway, I have no idea what an OK weight for a dragon is, nor I would risk asking one. Pass!
@doppelgreener Short version: A very proud chief was once left to cook dinner all by himself for the first time. He started with a very large fire (thinking that was how to make a meal worthy of someone of his status), burning himself in the process. Angry at having hurt himself and too proud to ask for assistance, he lost what little judgement he had and made the fire so big and hot (to appease his ego) that it became a volcano.
The longer versions vary depending on the teller, and generally involve comedic descriptions of his progressive failings and his increasing rage at being unable to make a simple meal.
I've seen one version which attributes our frequent earthquakes to the chief's continued rage.
Interestingly, often the person who loses their temper is losing it in response to someone who's disrupting the status quo, but the disruptor is portrayed more sympathetically.
i was about to say "i still remember fondly that story about the two chiefs who met each other" and then i realised i didn't actually remember ... the story
i think one of them thought he was much better than this other, and the other managed to help the first save face.
Yeah, Chamorro stories probably lend themselves well to any medium that's designed to focus on emotional reality as much as or more than physical reality.
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