Words are inadequate

Small good things:

The bathroom is repainted (and Nic the assistant super cleaned it pretty well), the apartment windows are replaced. I've vacuumed and am no longer stepping on grit that someone else tracked in. Later today I shall take everything down out of the medicine cabinet and wipe down the shelves so I stop being annoyed by the white sawdust that drifted in through the doors.

I have figured out a meringue recipe I'm happy with. (Equal amounts egg-white and sugar, by weight; whip in the sugar a bit at a time so it doesn't just all sink to the bottom; when it's about done add a splash of vanilla and one of orange extract; spoon onto the baking sheet with small-eating-spoons; bake at 200F for two hours, then turn the oven off and leave them in there.) This is handy as it's Egg Season as of a couple of weeks ago.

I have three different RPGs that I'm actively excited about. Fate of Cthulhu, in which the characters travel back in time to stop a Great Old One from rising, is a version of Fate that I can comprehend. Spire has a straightforward mechanic and some genuinely interesting worldbuilding. And I recently picked up my old favourite Changeling and started reading through the 20th anniversary edition, and it still makes me happy.

I sent my tax stuff off to Chris the accountant, after spending half an hour last week trying and failing to find the last of my RRSP forms on various financial websites.

Two nights ago I slept for nine hours, with only a few brief interruptions.

Next week I begin working at 80% time, which will in theory result in me being 10% less annoyed at work. (I am taking a pay cut to do this, but it incorporates a long-overdue but still insufficient raise.)

And, perhaps most important: thanks to Erin being actually functional on Saturday morning and sitting on hold for awhile, I have an appointment for my first vaccine shot, for a week from Wednesday. I had thought the plan was for the vaccine to be rolled out by age group, but the powers that be seem to have decided that it's logistically better to just vaccinate everyone in small communities all at once.

I hope you're well.

Bah. Woken up sometime after three due to my apartment door swinging open and light from the hallway coming into my bedroom. Must have not latched it properly. Can't get back to sleep, but too tired to read.

Over the weekend, my mother posted to Facebook a copypasta of "i'm voting against joe biden and the democrats." It was probably one of those things where she said "oh yeah this sounds right" and didn't bother reading or analysing or engaging with the actual content. It's still taken up more room in my head than it deserves. I emailed her yesterday to ask about the bits that seemed to contradict things she'd said to me back in October. I don't really expect a response.

I'm afraid that between the plague and the move into the assisted-living facility, my parents have finally fully closed their epistemological loop. And this week I'm afraid, actually afraid, of another Trump victory. Like... even if he loses in November forty percent of the US is gone, lost to reason and to empathy, and that's horrific enough, but if he wins...

And now I'm thinking of Abby, my semiestranged friend who was arguably the first casualty of the Trump regime. She killed herself on election night 2016, on I think the assumption that the ACA would be repealed and she wouldn't be able to afford the MS drugs she needed. She is, somehow, the only person I've lost in the last four years. I don't expect that to hold true for another four.

I'm scared, and tired, and alone. It's Emily's birthday. It's the hour of the prickly pear, the year of the plague. I don't think I'm doing well but I'm hanging in. I just... continue to not be able to fully recharge, maybe.

I miss a sense of calm and routine and control over my life. I miss thinking further ahead than the next few days, I miss looking forward to things. Or having fixed points where I knew what was coming next. Or maybe having more or more varied spaces and activities where I can feel like /me/.

I'm roleplaying again, every other Monday afternoon (Monday evening East Coast time). The system is Savage Worlds, which I know only by reputation; the world is RIFTS, late-eighties teenage powergamer fantasy. So far it's confirmed that I dislike multi-person Zoom calls. It's also reminded me that I have an absolute limit on the number of people involved in a game that I'm playing in, which this is bumping up against (the limit's eight; I won't run a game for more than five and that's pushing it, but I'll play in slightly larger groups). And that RPG combat scenes are not what I game for. And despite all that it's good to get my hands back into role-playing, and next session promises to be less fighty. Vaguely stirring up ideas of running something myself, though I don't know what. Or for whom, or when. I just want more... more like that, somehow.

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day nine: Unknown Armies.



I picked up the Unknown Armies corebook on a lark, because the back copy looked interesting and because it was published by Atlas, who also did Over the Edge. UA had a bunch of neat mechanical ideas: skills cap at your related stat, only four stats and design-your-own skills, percentile dice but if it's your 'obsession' skill you can flip the ones and tens. Combat was pretty dangerous: to take one example, knives always do a little bit of damage, even on a miss. ("You're wearing your best suit and I have a magic marker. Take the marker away from me without getting your suit messed up.")

More than the mechanics, though I loved UA for its atmosphere. Tynes and Stolze had as their explicit guiding principle "humans did it." No immortal vampires pulling strings, no shadowy cabal of mages: matter of fact, since magic in UA is a function of obsession, mages are more likely to be messed-up human beings incapable of controlling anything. John Constantine, not Stephen Strange.

In one of the later sourcebooks, they had what they called scenario seeds: a couple of pages describing the high points of a short campaign episode and how it might play out. I remember reading those and thinking "yes! Perfect! This is exactly the amount of detail I need to run a scenario."

I spent several years hanging out on the UA mailing list, which was pretty cool. People posted campaign stories ("one of my PCs is a fleshworker who got his hand cut off... but he retrieved it and did a major working, and now it's an artifact that responds to his commands") and weird things they encountered, and the designers got into the conversations as well. That was where I got into Warren Zevon (the first sourcebook was named "Lawyers, Guns & Money"), and where I met Gareth Hanranan, now a fantasy author and a game designer extraordinaire for Pelgrane.

Sadly UA, like OTE before it, fell victim to Emily's hatred of naming her own skills. I did get to run a couple of short scenarios, but never found a group who'd really get into the whole low-power street-magick vibe. One of these days, maybe.

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day seven: GURPS.



GURPS wants to simulate everything, and I mean everything. Break it all down to character points spent and 3d6. I believe all the GURPS games I ever came close to being involved in have been some variety of fantasy, but I know there was at least one ongoing Space game at Tech while I was there, and there are GURPS sourcebooks covering just about any genre and setting you can imagine.

It will not surprise you to hear that I don't get on well with GURPS. I've played in several campaigns, and my sense during each has been that I spend half my time fighting against the system to do what I want to do. I know there are people who love it to death, who tell amazing stories using it, who can wield the system like a scalpel to carve a pitch-perfect and appropriate simulation. They aren't me.

This doesn't stop me from owning a couple of the sourcebooks, though. When they're not descending into number-crunching, they tend to be wonderfully deep dives on their subject matter.

RPGs day 5: Millennium's End v2.0

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them. Day 5: Millennium's End v2.0



Well, they can't all be winners.

Giao was looking for players, and I was overcome by the sudden wealth of gaming opportunities, so I said "sure". Not the wisest choice I ever made.

Millennium's End was a game of corporate espionage, written in the early nineties and set in 1999-2000. It was mostly notable for its incredibly detailed firefight rules, including transparent silhouettes so you could work out exactly where you'd been hit by gunfire. One of its most significant supplements was titled "Ultramodern Firearms." You really got a sense of what the designer considered important in game design, which was "how easily can you headshot guys from this range with this weapon."

The campaign petered out after four or five sessions, from a combination of clunky rules and players who were really, really bad at being spies. ("The bad guys got here before us and are in this building! Let's... slash their tires! That'll teach them!") I learned some valuable lessons, though, such as "I really don't get on well with rules-heavy systems" and "maybe take a look at the rulebook before agreeing to join a game."

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them.



I got into On the Edge in high school, when I was looking for a multiplayer CCG and the store was sold out of Jyhad, the horribly-named Vampire: The Masquerade game. On the Edge is set on a Mediterranean island that's home to every conspiracy you can imagine and a half dozen more. It's fun, and frequently quite funny as well. When I found out there was an RPG's worth of background source material, of course I snapped it up.

Over the Edge is a weird, weird game, which I guess is fitting given its origin as "Jonathan Tweet's weird-stuff homebrew." It's the first game I'd ever seen with "design your own skills," or with an explicitly and deliberately fuzzy resolution mechanic, or that treated psychic etc powers as just some things you can do, though probably not very well. It had some excellent GM advice along the lines of "you're all here to have fun, which might look different to different people," and it included a meta-campaign in which the characters can meet their players. I loved it.

I've never actually played OTE. I didn't even get a chance to run it until the late 2000s, mostly due to Emily's intense hatred of design-your-own-skills systems. But the "here's a WHOLE BUNCH of awesome stuff" design philosophy and the freeform approach to skills and conflict resolution has had an enormous impact on my own GMing style.

Via James Nicoll, my first ten tabletop RPGs in ten days, in the order in which I encountered them.



I came across the bright-red Middle-Earth Roleplaying boxed set sometime in late elementary school. It said "Tolkien" so of course I was interested.

Even at that age the spellcasting classes seemed like a poor fit for Tolkien's world, and the bestiary had delved rather deeply into the obscure corners of the mythos. (Hummerhorns and Fastitycelyn [sing. Fastitocalon] as creatures you might encounter. Yeesh.) And the idea of randomly rolling to see what various NPCs would do felt deeply off, and honestly I ended up just being overwhelmed by the sheer number of numbers you were expected to track.

I never actually played MERP. I mostly remember creating a bunch of characters, and laughing over the fumble tables ("Worst move seen in ages. -60 to activity due to a pulled groin. Foe is stunned two rounds laughing"). But I did appreciate that first-level characters had about as many hit points as tenth-level (the maximum). And it taught me useful vocabulary words like "melee."

In the course of writing about the Jacob's Ladder books I spent a few minutes poking around the internet for a brief summary of what makes Amber Diceless so great. I didn't find anything, partly because I got sidetracked into this in-depth review/response.

Reading that reminded me of two things.

One, that Amber (and Lords of Gossamer and Shadow, built on the same mechanics) has been the source of three memorable and excellent campaigns that I've run.

Two, that I really, really dislike a lot of the actual mechanics, to the extent that the only Amber game I've played in, I walked out after about three sessions because the GM was following the designer's advice and being an utter dick to my character.

The linked review goes into detail about all my complaints: the attribute auction, one of the fundamental aspects of the game, is kind of a mess; the secondary powers as written fit extremely poorly into the handwavey resolution system; the item creation rules are just plain terrible, as are the character advancement rules, etc etc etc.

So why do I like it so much?

Partly because the setting's so rich that it makes up for a lot of the shortcomings in the mechanics. Partly because it plays to my particular style: here's a bunch of weird stuff, figure it out. And partly because I took to heart some of the advice in the GM section of the book: throw out any parts of this that aren't working for you. Even as a baby GM, I could see the sense in that.

Rules are there to give some structure to the storytelling. Dice are there to give the players something to do with their hands. Conflict is there to make things interesting: not to beat up the players, but to point them in directions that keep their attention.

Dammit. Now I want to run a game again.

It turns out that writing a novel from scratch is hard. Who knew? I mean, other than everyone who's ever tried.

( process babble )

Because I feel better when I'm talking and writing about my life.

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Media. Currently halfway (4/10) through season 5 of The Wire. So far this season can be summed up as "Marlo kills everyone while Jimmy descends into farce." I have Thoughts on this series but they'll keep until we finish it off. It is, as expected, still Very Very Good.

Rereading Wolfe's Long Sun. I keep rolling my eyes at some of the excesses and improbable characterisations, and then reminding myself that, as someone else said, Long Sun is 'Patera Silk fanfic written by Horn and Nettle.' I think I will be less annoyed by the Big Reveal at the end of the series (the inhumi) than I was on first reading, because I think I can see bits of where he's building up to it.

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Gaming. Finished my Apocalypse World campaign last week. The ending came a bit more abruptly than I would have liked; another 3-4 sessions would have been good. Overall a success, though. I seem to have reined in my tendency to Keep Adding More Stuff.

One thing I love about Apocalypse World: the GM never rolls the dice. The players roll at times, when it's useful to have a bit of uncertainty or suspense, but the GM just reacts to the players' rolls. This is perfect for me. Randomness is for my players; I want control to shape the story they're living through.

As far as Stuff... for years I've said "I just make it all up as I go." I've been thinking about that in light of this campaign, and it's not entirely true. I started out with two separate ideas, but they were story ideas, not just setting elements. ('An alien invasion fractures the world's psyche' leads to a resolution involving the aliens; 'personified fragments of the collective unconscious battling in a god-game' leads to, well, all kinds of things, but paired with the alien invasion leads to 'the fragments fighting the aliens.') Everything I just made up (the specifics of the fragments, the character of the various regions, the weird things that turned up) was in service of one of those two elements. It worked well.

In my best games (this, the Amber game I ran for Vond's departure, the abortive Changeling game) I have a direction to channel all the stuff I'm making up and throwing in. Contrariwise, when I've just been flailing around (Technoir, or the first half of the Over the Edge game in McLean) the game suffers: the players flail around too, everything feels thin and disjointed, etc etc. Useful to have something to build towards. Will bear that in mind for my next game.

I am pretty sure this applies to writing as well. The stories I'm happiest with, I've written most of while knowing how they end. I think that's why I keep wanting to sit down and rough out a plot for the blood-mage thing, instead of just writing and seeing where it takes me. I'll try that when I sit down with it next.

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Next weekend we head for Montreal and Farthing Party. I am more surprised than I ought to be to discover that more than half of my VP teachers will be there. (Yay!)

By then I'm hoping to have Memory ready for beta-readers, if not on submission. That way I can at least feel like I've been doing something with my time.