Tag: changeling

Libraries are the best.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Berkeley 1994. We had no Kelsey, but our (new?) rule is that we’ll play if only one person is missing and it’s not the GM. This session, Everett gets his old job at the railroad back (Brookes rolled like eight successes!), Theophania goes to The Other Change of Hobbit to research horror magazines she could submit and covers for Longfingers sneaking upstairs to find a Hedge door and then meeting the fabled Simple John, Beth, and Mary, then Theophania and Thessaly follow the currents of magic through a theater basement and an abandoned 70s department store and find a one-way(?) pool of water(?) which leads to an abandoned grotto full of magical power (which they suck up for +1 Wyrd and full Glamour recharge each). There we leave them, alone in an extradimensional hideout with only bed. What will happen next week?

Read (short): The Knight and the Butcherbird (Alix E Harrow): Post-apocalyptic monster-hunting knight meets immovable librarian, discoveries about the new world are made.

Read (manga): The Tree of Death: Yomotsuhegui vol 2 (Masasumi Kakizaki): Our Cthulhoid undying ex-cop (really, that character design cannot be an accident) has been helping the shinigami and her mysterious blob for a year, and the enemy is finally closing in and using his connections to mortal life against him.

Written (catgirl): 111.

I’m much more suited to that than to Goddess of Fertility Day.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s Berkeley game. Siddy figures out how to get glamour from crafting for people, and gets a recruitment(?) feeler from King Mark’s goon Jack Horner while everybody else finishes up pillaging the . Thessaly is off doing something so the rest of the group mostly kicks around discussing the philosophy of monarchy and deciding that going into the mysterious telecom(?) building with no windows or doors would be a bad plan.

Read (manga): In/Spectre vol 16 (Kyo Shirodaira, Chashiba Katase): Conclusion of the cliffs and ghost giraffe and idiots.

Written (game design): 171. New Plan! No levels, no XP, only experience and suffering!

But… only one per hand?!

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s game. Our n00bs finally find a good squat, an abandoned Japanese import warehouse with a bunch of leftover Hello Kitty dolls and a room that Siddy can fill with cozy furniture and cats at only a small secret cost in blood. The next day, finally well-rested (except Thessaly, who has been bed-surfing all along), they go down to Telegraph to meet Troll (yes) and swap him some copper wire looted from the warehouse while Siddy set up her mending-while-u-wait business. Theophania has no useful skills and is still hung up on cash money, so I think we see where part of her personal journey has to go. (Outside the box, although she’d rather go– anyway.)

Read (manga): Pulse vol 1 (Ratana Satis): She’s a heart surgeon who sleeps around and scorns romance, she’s a romantic young heart patient who scorns a transplant, together they make an obvious bet.

Written (catgirl): 122 of fixing minor issues. Soon I will be able to start adding new stuff.

Thank you, internationals, for showing it’s possible to not be complete fascists, even if it will take the US another 250 years to figure it out.

Played (Changeling the Lost): Ken’s 90s game. We got a new player, who seems pretty cool, even if her character unfairly knows more about what’s going on than my character does. We got distracted from finding a squat by SHOWER at the place Thessaly had been couch-surfing, but next time for sure!

Read (manga): Me and My Beast Boss vol 3 (Shiroinu): More corporate intrigue, more anti-human racism, but also more of the other characters shipping the female lead and her lion boss.

Written (game design): 105.

Sure, why not? Nature already abhors me, I’m sure!

Management wanted everyone in the area to go into the office for the two-hour all-hands, but I did not go. I am pretty sure I got the same +0 to morale over zoom.

Played (Changeling the Lost): 90s Berkeley. Our changelings make it to the flea market, meet fellow changelings Badger and Melanie and hear about how money is used by the fae to track runaways, immediately use all the cash they get from Nicole’s mending business to buy supplies instead of hoarding it– Cheese it! The fuzz!

Read (manga): This Monster Wants to Eat Me vol 1-2 (Sai Naekawa): A high-school girl with pronounced suicidal ideation ever since her tragic past gets accosted by a girl who claims to be a monster who wants to devour her when she’s spiritually ripe, but will keep her safe until then. Based on something that passes without comment in vol 1, I’m guessing every named character in this series is actually a monster, but we’ll see. No sign of yuri yet.

Written (game design): 138.

I like Lego, but I always feel like I should like it more.

Played (Changeling): 90s Berkeley. Nicole and Longfingers find a tiny door in the back of the auto body shop the crew is crashing in, which somehow lets changelings pass through into a secret realm of hostile tree-roots. Nicole befriends a mysterious squirrel-guy with sign language, and trades him left-over Chinese food for making a space in the Hedge (which is what this surely must be) where the crew can sleep safely. During the night, Longfingers hears strange noises, climbs around, and finds an exit into library somewhere, but does not make use of it. In the morning, the crew experiments with having Everett swear an oath to take Longfingers’s money from working at the club and use it to get supplies to make a sign for setting up Nicole with a While-U-Wait Mending business at the sketchy swap meet. He is successful in his quest and reaps the rewards of his vow. They also find a copy of the changeling zine by Simple John that they heard about before, which the players receive as an actual, semi-legible, amazing PDF.

Read (manga): Outbride vol 1 (Tohko Tsukinaga): A modern Japanese girl with no romantic experience meets Truck-kun and is awakened in a distant future by four gorgeous men who want her, as the only remaining human, to bear their hybrid super-children. She is not down for this for a variety of reasons, but she does have to make out with them to survive in the alien atmosphere of Earth’s cross-dimensional future and also they are obviously not going to take no for an answer. Not exactly my kink, alas.

Read (manga): Monster Cats vol 2 (Pandania): More of the same cats, some new monster types, still cute.

Written (game design): 105.

Somebody once said something nice about a program I wrote, so I’ll take it.

Played: Changeling. Our dazed and confused escapees from Faerie make it back to Oakland and meet a nice gay satyr who trades them some lunch and some information for a promise from Nicole to fix something.

Read: The Butcher’s Masquerade (Matt Dinniman): In which a bunch of alien assholes get severely murdered, and serves them right. A lot of other people get murdered too, though. Also, Princess Donut’s dinosaur gets lucky.

Read: FAIL. I did not manage to make a dent in my oversupply of manga, because I suck.

Written: 127.

Haven’t seen it in years, no idea if it would hold up.

Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 10 (Ryoko Kui): I couldn’t hold out for commuting tomorrow, I had to read it today. Did those come from Monty Python, or was it independent invention? Also, sus guy is sus.

Read: The Brain Leeches and Other Eldritch Phenomena (Tim Curran): Mythos or mythos-adjacent horror stories. As is only proper, they end with the protagonist going mad and getting eaten/transformed/fertilized by the monster, or the protagonist being revealed to be a cultist. They tend toward similar structure and long passages of hallucinatory experience on the way to the implantation pits, so they don’t show to best advantage all together like this. The ones I have previously read in multi-author anthologies were satisfying.

Played: Changeling, kind of. We did not have Kelsey, so we just talked about vices and virtues and one unique things (which are not actually a thing in this system but will let Ken know what kind of changeling things to give us.

Written: 159.

If only they had managed to take the vote away from men as well…

Read: Demon World Boba Shop vol 4 (RC Joshua): It’s the tower defense episode! Can they make it through the wave? And what about smooching? Or breakfast delivery?

Played: Changeling: the Lost. Nobody needs any more descriptions of horror this month, so we skipped straight to the jailbreak and our hapless changelings are now in a cemetery in the East Bay, being lectured by a creepy guy who doesn’t want them to go back for the friend they had to leave behind for the moment. Also apparently everything is terrible but being in Berkeley will be less terrible. Or something.

Written: 137. No guillotines in this story so far, but then I set it in 2014 specifically so I could avoid engaging with the bullshit of 2016 and onward.

Other people can have cats too, sure.

Back to work. I don’t like getting up for surveillance capitalism nearly as much as I like getting up to play RPGs.

I did get to play an RPG today, though. I decided not to change my character to be less like me because it would be horrible cultural appropriation and also Sage was sleeping on my arms for all the time I could have used to rewrite the sheet, so it was my horrible isolated tech geek who went to Renfaire, did not get anywhere with the cute girl, and then got lured into the Faeriemobile by an offer of a better job. Surely this will be fine. (It will not be fine, that’s the entire point of Changeling.)

Written: 157.