Tag: perils and princesses

More importantly, it’s National Black Cat Day in the UK, but neither I nor Nightvale is there.

Between fan noise and two nights of games ending early, I was much more alive this morning than at this point last year, which is good because I had to pack up and then run a game in the first slot of the day.

Ran: Perils and Princesses. In a turn of events that was only surprising because I did not know he came to BBC, one of my players was the designer of Princess World, but fortunately I am not prone to fangirling. He played Clik-Clok the daughter of the Tin Woodsman, so that was cute. This time I got things moving along well enough, but somehow the antagonists were not creepy enough, and the princesses almost let them get away with it, but someone remembered they had a dodgy mushroom in their inventory and used it to contact their fairy godmother who only appears in dreams and visions and ask for better instructions. The day was saved! They used the same solution as the second test group, so that was reassuring in some way.

Played: A magical girl search of terrible things to fight in Wandering Crows. Along with a half-merperson deathly afraid of water and a necromancer who could only bear to raise animals, she wandered a world recovering from fifty years of war and deprivation. We were hired to escort a box of paprika to a partially-underwater city than had been deprived for two generations, which involved keeping loud-mouthed cops from starting a paprika riot and fighting through gangsters (our merperson Squid literally barfed a lizard gangster to death), but turned out to be only half the job. The priest of the temple we were delivering to needed the paprika for a specific ritual in a specific, dangerous place to save the city, and we had the choice of going through paprika thieves or necromancers to get there. We chose necromancers, which our necromancer defeated by laying their zombies to rest instead of having a massive undead battle. As a reward for maintaining the life-support system of the city, we got information about our personal quests, a huge favor from the important temple, etc, but most importantly, the ancient dinosaur priest threw off his robe and flexed for us. (No, really, rainbow feathers!) Wandering Crows is a card-based that’s intended to be simple and portable, but it’s also a little abstract for me. I would prefer what you write on your character sheet to be more than flavor text. I should send a comment to the designer.

And that was it for Big Bad Con 2024! I did not play all lesbians all the time this year, but close enough, and I only played games I’d never played before. The games I ran went much better than last time I ran two years ago, because I was ruthless about railroading. Will I run Perils and Princesses again next year? Maybe! But maybe something I like more will come along.

I managed to resist buying any dice in the dealer’s room, despite the many beautiful colors on offer, because I do not need more dice. I did buy a bunch of games in hardcopy (Ryuutama, which I might already own but couldn’t find at home; Follow, ditto; For the Queen; CBR+PNK; The Lost and the Jammed; Sapphic Space Pirates, Rebels of the Outlaw Waste because the PDF doesn’t have the stickers for character advancement; Cloud Empress and some adventures) and a small plush squid with eldritch sigils (their name is Devil Squid and they are Baby Lizard’s friend).

Criminal Cat Onion’s human was allegedly at the con, but I did not manage to meet her.

I just made the train home, and my cats were there and I fell over dead.

Written: VACATION

Played: A pseudo-Islamic knight with a giant chicken (actually a Southeast Asian jungle fowl) in Gubat Banwa. A rich king hired us to pillage and/or kill the idealist king who was stealing his excessive wealth to fund an artistic community, but when we found out from a captured minion that they used to be close until the falling out, we had to drag him back and force them to repair their relationship. Gubat Banwa is very board-game-grid in the manner of D&D4e, but the part between battles seems cooler, and also you don’t want to kill random spuds because it’s better to have them beholden to you. Hurray non-European fantasy!

Ran: Perils and Princesses. Somehow, despite forgetting character sheets, of all things. Fortunately, there was a printer in the hotel and I still had the files on a thumb drive. Once we got past that, it went okay. I failed to deliver all the important information in a timely manner, and the princesses were so entertaining that I forgot to move the plot along and we had to resolve it in a rush right before our time was up, but it did get resolved, and people appeared to have fun, so I’m willing to count it as a partial success. The laminated handouts were handy for character creation, although I think there may have been too many of them. If I did this again, I’d probably move some things from random generation to pregen or player choice, although I don’t know what.

Played: A horrible little wrecking ball of a goblin in Wicked Ones in Gaming on Demand. I did okay at biting legs off and overcharging generators, and the fire demon and kobold ninja were also good, but the mad scientist slime demon totally stole the show and also won by getting lasers for our dungeon to fend off the forces of light when they came to complain about the human blood we used to wash off our curses.

I had a burger that was more satisfying than any recent burger, although it was real cow meat, so I probably shouldn’t have.

Written: VACATION

Or National Feral Cat Day, and Sage and Nightvale are rescues, so they count! But they are sweeties now.

Went to the office which was excessively full of people, ate some tacos, did a customer call and some other work.

Marith has made some samples of laminated handouts for the con games, which look like they will do nicely. If I were actually competent, I would do graphics stuff to fit them on fewer pages and stuff, but I’m not.

Read: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End vol 9 (Kanehito Yamada, Tsukasa Abe): Characters from the mage test are already recurring, as are enemies from Frieren’s past. And doom.

Read: Delicious in Dungeon vol 3 (Ryoko Kui): Deeper into the dungeon means more monsters to eat and more fellow adventurers to regard with caution and drama.

Written: 213. I didn’t finish any books like Kit and other pocket fronds, but I did make my MC suffer.

I checked, I am still registered! But I’m not in a state with a red government, so it wasn’t likely I would have been disenfranchised.

I thought I was being clever in getting two medical appointments on the same morning so that I would only have to take half a day off work, but then I biffed it. The second appointment needed me to not eat or drink anything for three hours previously, so I had early breakfast, but when I went to check in for the first appointment, I found out that I was supposed to have been fasting for that too. Had to reschedule for a month from now, on the first day of my Big Bad Con vacation. I did manage to get the infrasound(?) test taken successfully, and then since the clinic is right there in Mountain View, went to the office to eat Thai food and do a work. The office isn’t any different on Tuesdays than on Thursdays, it turns out.

Read: Galaxy: The Prettiest Star (Jadzia Axelrod, Jess Taylor): An alien princess in exile and her retainers are hiding out on Earth of the DC universe. The magic disguise avocado has turned her into a boy human, which is not what she wants at all, but her retainers insist on not breaking cover no matter how miserable she is. Then she meets a girl.

Played: Perils and Princesses: The end! The princesses successfully resolved the problem in a completely different way than the first group. After that, we talked about Ken’s proposed Changeling: the Lost game. I have no idea how to be a human in the East Bay in the 90s, or even a 90s human at all.

Written: 241.

 

Am an IT professional? Probably not? Maybe?

Played: Perils and Princesses. We only had a short time to game, because Ken has a 5am class tomorrow, but the princesses dealt with the people and reached the thing and are ready to make their escape. Next week for sure!

Read: Long Live Evil (Sarah Rees Brennan): Our terminally ill MC is put into the body of the doomed temptress from the famous series of epic tragic over-the-top fantasy, the night before she is scheduled to die. If she can get the maguffin of infinite healing, she can live in the real world, and it’s not like anybody cares what happens to characters in a book, so she decides to be completely evil and suborn other characters and betray as needed to get what she wants. This almost immediately goes off the rails, she goes more over-the-top, people catch feelings, people ponder the nature of evil, people die horribly, the plot changes or was never what she thought it was, and there is so, so much doom. Unresolved doom, because of course if the MC is stuck in a trilogy, this must be a trilogy too.

Written: 187.

In other words, Dystopian Future Day, but at least we get to choose a subgenre.

Played: Perils and Princesses. Our princesses (and their tagalong) explore the island some and finally meet the NPCs who are also on the island. I need to railroad more and have less exploration and more interaction, was the consensus.

Written: 109.

Not that there are even any skyscrapers in San Jose, at least according to Wikipedia. The minimum height is 100m or 150m depending on who you ask, and downtown San Jose is close enough to the airport that nothing is over 91m.

It was very clever of me to have taken today off to do weekend stuff. A bunch of the morning was unproductive because there was a cat on me and I couldn’t get out of bed, but then I vacuumed up a bunch of stray litter, went shopping, got a new screen door for the balcony installed, and did some laundry.

Sage was very loud today. I probably deserved the yelling for being so cruel as to abandon her.

Played: Perils and Princesses. A short session because Ken was feeling poorly, but they did get to the Cursed Isle and level up.

Written: 172.

Alastor’s Hell Birthday aka death day. (Don’t know if that’s a thing, but it should be.)

Successfully played a little Perils & Princesses, but I’ve forgotten how to push people forward. Also I’m pretty sure Ken still hates it all.

Read: Demon World Boba Shop vol 2 (RC Joshua): Not-OP isekai bubble tea maker leaves the city where his tea shop is, encounters many new things, breaks society with a trivial technological innovation from his old life, and sets out for the new frontier with all his friends.

Written: 135.

Hello, Snek Friends!

Played: Perils and Princesses. Kelsey does not have enough brains left after work and Renfaire prep and 2024 life to run D&D just now, so people took me up on my offer to test my BBC adventure on them. It did not go that well, since Ken hates my GMing and also adding a giant spider attack to show how painful combat is was the wrong move in every way, and also we only had about half of the necessary four hours, but I guess we’ll see what happens next week.

Read: Komi Can’t Communicate vol 30 (Tomohito Oda): I guess somebody wanting to marry both you and your boyfriend counts as a friend…? Also Manbagi and her new boy are doing well and may even be able to hold a serious conversation someday.

Written: 179.

Possibly every day is chocolate day.

Now that I am not full of Covid and despair, I was able to test my Perils & Princesses adventure on the Sunday gaming group. Some problems were revealed, but people seemed to mostly enjoy it, so I will move forward with making myself unable to escape.

Need to figure out how much extra prep is worth doing for something I’m only going to run twice. Like, of course it would be easier at game time to have cards to hand out and fight over than to have players roll dice and write down the table lookups, but enough easier to justify figuring out how to make cards?

Written: 126 of scribbled notes for improving my adventure and/or its presentation.