#RPGADAY2020 27. Favour

#Favour

I love mystery and exploration. It appears in all of my games, no matter the genre. It probably goes back to being a kid and raiding my parent's LP collection. 

I would pour over records and try to guess if it was Mom's or Dad's. If it was show tunes or sound tracks or classic, it was my Dad's. If it was Iron Butterfly or Jefferson Airplane, it was Mom's. 

But one record threw me for a loop. "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" by the Moody Blues. Was it Mom's or Dad's? Why did with have two copies?

It didn't trouble me too much as my parents let me listen to it over and over again. They had a lot of great music which rubbed off on me. 

The song, Procession was a clue, but one I could not decipher until 2001, 30 years after it was released. In August, 2001, my wife and I got married and finally moved into together. Anyway, we moved into a tiny apartment and didn't really didn't step foot outside until January of 2002. 

9-11 happened. I was working non-stop at Mattel, Kitty worked nights at the hospital. A December snow storm shut us up for weeks.  

Dec 2001. This picture was taken from our upstairs apartment. It doesn't look too bad
but the weight of the snow collapsed the porch roof and metal awings trapping us inside. 

My wife and I really got to know each other on a couple of different levels. One of those was through music. 

We both love music and our combined CD collection was over 1,000 discs. There was only one duplicate: Pink Floyd's "The Division Bell". 

This answered the question of who owned "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour". Both Mom and Dad. That was their duplicate CD, in vinyl form. 

While this is supposed to a post about games, I find there is an incredible parallel between "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour" and "The Division Bell". A lot of the same ideas run through both of them. Communication, destruction, feedback, discourse, discovery, creation, sharing. 

I've never played both albums back to back, but each favours these ideals. And they mirror my main themes and goals of game play. 

#RPGADAY2020 26. Strange

#Strange

I love the unexpected, so strange is hard coded into to my game play. 

I like to introduce mini-games and new concepts into my campaigns. I have missile fire procedures which are stolen right from Car Wars. I have a system of rules to set up weaponless chases, a la Indiana Jones. And silver is always magical. 

Do you have any strange things going on in your games? Let me know in the comments. 

#RPGADAY2020 25. Lever

#Lever

Not sure where to go with lever, except to give a session update. My kids are playing B2 = Keep on the Borderlands with me. All three of my kids are of the age where they make adult choices for themselves.

This tendency is playing out in the game. They took down the ogre in area E, moved into his cave and started playing house. Other than fix up the cave and spy on the other residents, they didn't want to do anything else.  

The characters are aware of the orcs and kobolds, but haven't discovered that there are two orc lairs. They know about the goblins, but don't know where they are coming from. They can hear their voices from the east and sometimes see them out and about but don't know their cave is connected to the goblin's home. 

Time for a lever. 

I had the orcs from area B attack the goblins. The goblins were overwhelmed and ran to the secret door yelling: " BREE-YARK!" The party was surprised when the door opened and bag of gold was thrown at them. After a moment or two, the party found how to open the secret door and unloaded a bunch of arrows into the orc's backs. The orcs charged them, but the party hid using the secret door and water barrel. When the orcs ran down the long hall, the party hit them again. 

The party retreated back through the secret door, leaving the goblins mystified. They have no idea the party is there and believe the ogre got his hands on a bow. 

The orcs lost 8 of 12 attackers and are thinking of pack it in and joining the second orc group. The characters were able to track them back to Area B and are thinking of attacking them. However, they are a little nervous with the goblins so close at hand. 

That was a nice lever for inaction. 

The Simple Things - Printing

I love books, but the oldest and the newest stuff is hard to get in print. Invariably, I wander DriveThruRPG ordering stuff left and right. It never ends. Once I read through something, it goes in one two places: into a hard copy or stays in my "Library of (Digital) RPG Titles" on my Kindle. 

Qualitatively, they are different places. One I expect to read again, while the other is something I might want to read by candlelight after the Nuclear Apocalypse. 

Anyway, reading preferences aside, printing books yourself is really dependent on your printer. I have an HP all in one inkjet printer. It's good for most things, most of the time.

In the picture on the left, look how sharp the text is. It's really nice. Perfectly acceptable for reading by nuclear candlelight. Inkjet are very good on plain paper for text. You can see a little blow through because I printed two sided, but it's still very legible. 

What inkjets are not good at are large, color images on plain paper. Things could not be worse. And since I print a lot of my own stuff on plain paper, the result is less than satisfactory. 

Here is a photo of Cult of Diana: The Amazon Witch for Basic Era Games by Timothy S. Brannan. I just love the covers of his books and this one is my favorite. 

And with inkjet on plain paper, it just sucks. Can you say mud? How did it go so wrong? 

It's the paper. 

Check out this next image. It's the same printer and settings, except I used photo paper.  

I'm very happy with this one, the colors are much brighter in real life, but I didn't want to alter the image with different settings to accentuate the colors. Where I went wrong is selecting my favorite cover rather than one that would highlight how good good can be. 

Take a look at this next image from Mr. Brannan's The Basic Witch: The Pumpkin Spice Witch Tradition. 

That 100 times better. We have blues and reds, and stuff in between. I can totally see the how this is different than how it appears on screen, but even using my cheap inkjet printer, the photo paper gives it far more color than plain paper. It's far more satisfying. 

Ah, the simple things. 

#RPGADAY2020 24. Humour

Or #Humor

I love laughing at the game table. However, I try not to force levity on the players. Often, I set up scenarios that are very funny, but almost always require the players to do something to cause it. 

For example, I am a big fan of the antagonist party. Done right, it creates drama and intrigue. Done wrong, it's just like high school.

In one campaign, I had two parties hostile to the party and the players manipulated them into a brawl in a bathhouse. It was hysterical. 

Sometimes, the players themselves are just comedians. As a DM, I gave a druid a magic charm to communicate with animals. The party's thief stole it and started talking to every animal they encountered. That was pretty funny, but then I gave him a talking donkey, so everyone could both sides of the conversation. The thief decided to play it as if he was oblivious to the fact that everyone could understand it. While this seems like a copy of Shrek, years before Shrek was a thing, the thief player behaved more Starlord in Guardians of the Galaxy, with the donkey providing lots of bad ideas which would be warped into something more zany. 

Good times.