What are y'all up to these days?

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I do like Death Burp.

And does it say "poop minions" there?
 
Before the kids karate class I coach, I usually ask the kids of they did anyrh I g good this week. O e of them pipes up that he played Dungeons and Dragons for the first time. Seems pretty cool to me.
 
Second game of red hand of doom via Mythras classic fantasy went well. My brain has moved into a creative space from a depressive space, so I built a foam Vraath Keep and painted it up and built popsicle stick buildings for the inside. Next project is skull gorge bridge, with guard towers. I put one together last night and it’s 12” tall :smile:

A good time was had by all, highlighted by one player telling Alexa to play Turned Down for What, and Alexa responding with a scripted response that had been put in months before telling him no, and no one wants to hear that. Paralyzed the game table for several minutes.

I got myself a new gaming related shirt that says “things are about to get dicey” with some polyhedrals on it. I got two comments on it from folks as I was on errands, saying how d&d was cool and how they had just gotten into playing and all. It’s like some kind of bizarro world where I am the coolest kid in school because this fall will be my 40th year playing. Notably, my wife is unimpressed with her now being with the top dog.
 
How did you achieve this?

i'm not 100% certain, to be honest, but I can give some things that I know gave a positive influence.
  • some exercise. not lots, but some. a walk or some time on the bag. walk was half an hour to an hour, bag was no more than 15 minutes, sometimes only 5 minutes. not even every day or anything but a couple of times a week is good. sometimes a hike is good, and for density of benefit, hiking works the best for me.
  • music, especially while wearing noise cancelling headphones. I think the headphones are important for me as I get distracted easily. distraction moves me off my focus towards happiness. if I am not hiking, this is really strong for me, especially if it is high energy (not necessarily angry) music.
  • consciously choose new experiences instead of old. A simple one for me is picking the local high school/vo-tec radio station instead of spotify/itunes/playlist or whatever manicured set of music makes me stay in a spot. one might call this mental movement.
  • sunlight. based on the last couple of years, i'm pretty sure my wife and I both have SAD. So, replacing light bulbs is a thing, but also going outside and staying off the computer. an hour here and there.
  • dedicating time to myself. this sometimes means taking an afternoon off or otherwise excluding everyone from my life for a bit. has to be combined with an above activity, can't just be doing nothing, as that leads to depression
  • lunch with some friends. I have a particular set at work that I enjoy a lot. they've been a good influence on me.
  • being open and honest about my emotions. I've had some coworkers check in on me, and I tell them it's a good day or a bad day. I don't necessarily get into details, but I do say things are pretty rough and I'm under a lot of stress or whatever.
  • and for fuck's sake, off of facebook. just stay off. if you are on it, stop following people who just post links to other shit that makes noise.
i don't think any one thing really does it. If I was to pick one that had the most noticeable impact, I would say sunlight. there was a very definite shift in early April, when the days really started kicking up in length. by the end of April, I was a lot more resilient.
 
i'm not 100% certain, to be honest, but I can give some things that I know gave a positive influence.
  • some exercise. not lots, but some. a walk or some time on the bag. walk was half an hour to an hour, bag was no more than 15 minutes, sometimes only 5 minutes. not even every day or anything but a couple of times a week is good. sometimes a hike is good, and for density of benefit, hiking works the best for me.
  • music, especially while wearing noise cancelling headphones. I think the headphones are important for me as I get distracted easily. distraction moves me off my focus towards happiness. if I am not hiking, this is really strong for me, especially if it is high energy (not necessarily angry) music.
  • consciously choose new experiences instead of old. A simple one for me is picking the local high school/vo-tec radio station instead of spotify/itunes/playlist or whatever manicured set of music makes me stay in a spot. one might call this mental movement.
  • sunlight. based on the last couple of years, i'm pretty sure my wife and I both have SAD. So, replacing light bulbs is a thing, but also going outside and staying off the computer. an hour here and there.
  • dedicating time to myself. this sometimes means taking an afternoon off or otherwise excluding everyone from my life for a bit. has to be combined with an above activity, can't just be doing nothing, as that leads to depression
  • lunch with some friends. I have a particular set at work that I enjoy a lot. they've been a good influence on me.
  • being open and honest about my emotions. I've had some coworkers check in on me, and I tell them it's a good day or a bad day. I don't necessarily get into details, but I do say things are pretty rough and I'm under a lot of stress or whatever.
  • and for fuck's sake, off of facebook. just stay off. if you are on it, stop following people who just post links to other shit that makes noise.
i don't think any one thing really does it. If I was to pick one that had the most noticeable impact, I would say sunlight. there was a very definite shift in early April, when the days really started kicking up in length. by the end of April, I was a lot more resilient.
I'd just add it to me thing to this list.

Make a little forward progress on something every day. Sometimes the other stuff on the list covers this. Sometimes not. But for me the feeling of making progress does wonders for my happiness.
 
i'm not 100% certain, to be honest, but I can give some things that I know gave a positive influence.

i don't think any one thing really does it. If I was to pick one that had the most noticeable impact, I would say sunlight. there was a very definite shift in early April, when the days really started kicking up in length. by the end of April, I was a lot more resilient.


I've been told to get more sun, but honestly when I do it has no effect. I think people don't understand why I have blackout curtains on my huge glass sliding door/window in my room. The sun and I don't seem to work that way. Though your other things sound 100% positive to me.
 
Finished running the first part of a Supers! adventure set in the DCAU on Discord. Got off to a slow start as we were waiting on one player (he was having issues with his laptop, so never got to play.

It went really well. I still had a player who played it for the first time, and he had a good time. Looking forward to when I can run part 2
 
I've been told to get more sun, but honestly when I do it has no effect. I think people don't understand why I have blackout curtains on my huge glass sliding door/window in my room. The sun and I don't seem to work that way. Though your other things sound 100% positive to me.

yep, only my own observations, and only really relevant to me. For me, I have some suspicion as to the effect - I might be experiencing frmo vitamin D deficiency. YMMV
 
Finally ran RuneQuest Glorantha.
The player's still had to finish their characters before we started, but we managed to play 1 hour and 30 min. Which was enough for me to throw the introduction I had prepared. I really like this setting, so much that I will wait for the hype to go down before writing about it.
Anyways, it's the first time in a intro game that a player's character got married.
Had a great time.
 
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Back from my second of two back to back father son camping (cabin) weekends. Fun but I'm tired. Eight hours of sleep between two days mixed with a lot of hiking wears me out.
 
Not as painful, I assure you. Only acute pancreatitis and childbirth come close, or so we’re told in med school.
I always marvel at the stuff future medics learn. Until now, I was under the erroneous belief that you only classified pain as "normally debilitating", "normally very strong, patient will complain and make involuntary motions" and "normally not so strong, but some are going to complain and move around anyway" (or something to that effect:evil:).

Yes, the dragon's poop becomes minions.
The phrase "those shitty minions" just got an entirely new meaning:grin:!
 
Finally ran RuneQuest Glorantha.
The player's still had to finish their characters before we started, but we managed to play 1 hour and 30 min. Which was enough for me to throw the introduction I had prepared. I really like this setting, so much that I will wait for the hype to go down before writing about it.
Anyways, it's the first time in a intro game that a player's character got married.
Had a great time.
That's great to hear:smile:!

Back from my second of two back to back father son camping (cabin) weekends. Fun but I'm tired. Eight hours of sleep between two days mixed with a lot of hiking wears me out.
I know what you mean, though it wasn't hiking for me:wink:.

Me? I was on a seminar with the grandmasters Carlos Machado (9th dan/coral belt in Machado BJJ), Chuck Canete (Doce Pares Escrima/Eskrido, grandson of the system's founder, has black belts in other systems as well) and Lubomir Yordanov (JKD, student of Richard Bustillo and others). It was a total of 16 gours for the two days, not counting the rests.
I only got about 5 hours sleep between the two days. Make that 10 hours with the sleep the previous night.
Some people were worse off, though, because they were invited to a marriage the night after the first day, and probably grabbed no more than a couple hours of sleep...marriages tend to continue well into the night around here:tongue:!
But magnesium supplements were our friends, I'll tell you that:grin:! (Also, we exchanged massages).
Anyway, the number of colourful characters I met are going to feed my games' needs for NPCs for years to come. Or until the next seminar, at least, when I'd probably add new ones:devil:.
 
Finally ran RuneQuest Glorantha.
The player's still had to finish their characters before we started, but we managed to play 1 hour and 30 min. Which was enough for me to throw the introduction I had prepared. I really like this setting, so much that I will wait for the hype to go down before writing about it.
Anyways, it's the first time in a intro game that a player's character got married.
Had a great time.
BTW, I just liked you set-up quite a bit, here. Is it yours, or from the book:smile:?
I'll put it in a spoiler tag just in case.
The spirit reveals that Drekos Travassani recently married Indara Avanti, a Ernalda priestess making a sacred vow for a two year marriage. Seeing a opportunity here Vernus Mormundi, tricked Drekos into spending a night at Uleria temple, where he could enjoy pleasures not meant for a married man. Vernus, went and reported the adultery to Lemaria who in it’s fury scarred the land. The thing is, the feud between the two families happened because of the claim on the sacred orchard, and now Vernus used Lemaria fury to prove that the Travassani could not handle the land properly and the Mormundi family would put a claim on it again. What would be done with the information the vision provided was left for the adventurers to decide.
 
BTW, I just liked you set-up quite a bit, here. Is it yours, or from the book:smile:?
It's mine, I used the Apple Lane hamlet and some NPC's from the Gamemaster Adventures from the GM pack.
But the idea when I first wrote It was that I would be able to ran it anywhere in Sartar, I didn't knew at the time If I would be able to finish reading the booklet before the next session. It turns out Glorantha is way more interesting than anything I have to read related to computers on my everyday life. :hehe:
So I took the hamlet and inserted my adventure so that I could show my player's the more personal conflict that exists in the setting.
 
I got to spend a couple hours explaining to my wife and daughter how to play Marvel Super Heroes using a basic scenario similar to the movie Captain America: Civil War where Captain America fights against Spider-Man. I explained it using the basic rules and went from there. We used Marvel Heroclix on the boxed set map to make it easy to visualize. I think everyone had fun. I don’t get to game much and I really enjoyed it.
 
Adapted the set-up from G.I. Joe Special Missions #4 to make it suitable for a mercenary unit. Since I'm using a more "realistic" world, obviously there's no Cobra organization, but I just swapped out the Firebat black boxes with U.S.A.F. experimental surveillance equipment that went down over a neutral jungle island in the South China Sea. Instead of the Oktober Guard versus G.I. Joe, the Soviets and the U.S. both sent mercenaries to retrieve the equipment since neither wanted, for political reasons, to be seen deploying its military in a neutral state with important oil and mineral resources that both sides are interested in obtaining.
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The bad news is I only have a few more issues of G.I. Joe Special Missions to steal from, and at least one of them is a fighter jet scenario unusable for my purposes.
 
Picked up the Trail of Cthulhu campaign Eternal Lies for peanuts (slightly damaged, but nothing major) and am rather digging it. It is so similar to what i'd consider an evocative WFRP campaign, that i'm seriously considering re-skinning it. Someone's asked me to run WFRP for them, so i think i'm going to take this mighty tome for inspiration.
 
Free RPG Day was so-so this year. Guardian Games didn't really promote it like they have in previous years. Thankfully, a married couple who is part of the Supers! online community drove to Portland (4 1/2 hour trip each way for them) to hang out and meet me and the other GM. They were my only players for my FF one shot. I let them play two characters each. It was a lot of fun (given they know the game well, it helped). The other GM had 3 players, and some young girl got a free copy of the rules (gifted to us by the Publisher).

The other GM ran Tales from the Loop, so I decided to give it a shot, as did our out of town friends. We had a 4th player who knew the game, which helped. It wasn't bad, but the system didn't really impress me. I'd give it another shot though.

Given I worked the night before, I was on fumes when we went out to dinner. Ended up being up over 24 hours, and paid for it by sleeping almost 14 hours! Good thing this is once a year lol. Can't wait until I have more vacation time, so I can take a 4 day weekend to do this. Only 2 more years to go on that lol

Next year I might try the other game store near me. They seemed better organized this year, and ran no D&D/Pathfinder, etc. Lots of small press games, but they did have Delta Green. Guess I will see depending on what they choose for a theme next year.
 
Thinking about trying to convince folks to play Lucha Libre Hero, or else to use it as a sourcebook for a luchador game using another system.
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Failing that, once one of the other PBPs winds down I may press some Pub crawlers into service.
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I love the crazy variety of lucha libre characters (I've translated all the names into English, though most are obvious):
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Brother Death

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Limbo

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Exotic Party Girl (!)

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Guadelajaran Thunderbolt

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Juan the Rancher

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Aztec Warrior

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Hellcat

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Metallic Tiger

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Hands of Silk

and last but not least...
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Batman!
These are but a few! There are also some female luchadores, but unfortunately they aren't covered in this particular book. Did I mention I also love their blatant disregard for trademarks and copyrights? :hehe:
 
Thinking about trying to convince folks to play Lucha Libre Hero, or else to use it as a sourcebook for a luchador game using another system.
Failing that, once one of the other PBPs winds down I may press some Pub crawlers into service.

I own all those movies except for Santo vs. El Strangulador.
 
Some luchadoras (no, la Mujer Murcielago was not real, just a movie character played by an actress):
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Dark Angel (can you guess she's a Canadian import?)

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Queen Panther

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Princesa Sugehit

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Candy​
 
Today I learned why RuneQuest is called limbquest...
I ran the scenario Defending Apple Lane from the gm booklet.

Managed to roll not one but three times the value 99 for my Tusk Riders, one of my player's rolled a 1, doing double damage full value ignoring armor on the head of the leader of the Tusk Riders, so his Javelin was impaled on the guy's throat, and yes the tusk rider missed the parry.
Narrated one of my player's losing his leg, at least another 2 legs were lost/went flying in other directions... dealing with eight tusk riders is hardcore, but they used a sound battle plan. RuneQuest doesn't care at all about balance on encounters and I loved it.

Also my player's are extremely lucky, I mean extremely.
 
Recommended reading if you ever want to run a luchador game or just delve into the origins, culture, and cinematic history:
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Simply for game background and ideas, though, I'd go with Lucha Libre Hero and The Mexican Masked Wrestler and Monster Filmography. In the latter book I just found some old typed-up and handwritten luchador campaign notes serving as a bookmark:
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As you can see, I often "cast" NPCs in my notes so I can better picture them and their mannerisms. The Post-It Note is a list of movies to steal from!
 
Today I learned why RuneQuest is called limbquest...
I ran the scenario Defending Apple Lane from the gm booklet.

Managed to roll not one but three times the value 99 for my Tusk Riders, one of my player's rolled a 1, doing double damage full value ignoring armor on the head of the leader of the Tusk Riders, so his Javelin was impaled on the guy's throat, and yes the tusk rider missed the parry.
Narrated one of my player's losing his leg, at least another 2 legs were lost/went flying in other directions... dealing with eight tusk riders is hardcore, but they used a sound battle plan. RuneQuest doesn't care at all about balance on encounters and I loved it.

Also my player's are extremely lucky, I mean extremely.
My players have a thing for right legs in Mythras. It is a little less Limbquest due to luck points but not by much
 
So after working Friday night into Saturday morning, I ate breakfast, took a shower, and headed off to Guardian Games. My partner in crime Quinn was there. He drives 3 1/2 hours from Hermiston to run games and hang out. I also got to meet two others from the online Supers! community, who also run stuff for the Bamf! podcast. They drove 4 1/2 hours, and one of them has a lot of health issues (she suffered a asthma attack while we were playing Tales from the Loop, but recovered), and like me, spent most of Sunday recovering.

My friends were the only ones to play my FF one shot, so I let them play two characters each. It went pretty well, with maybe a bit more humor from some characters. They foiled a plot by the Kree to steal the plans for the Negative Zone Portal, along with coordinates for various inhabited worlds in the NZ (as they were looking to expand their empire in a way that would allow them to avoid their enemies The Skrulls, and the Shi'ar). The team also fought five low scale villains called The Frightful Force (or Feeble Force as Mr. Fantastic dubbed them; he also warned them The Wizard might consider their team name copyright infringement!)

Quinn had 3 players for his game, and afterward, they all rolled a d6 to see who was getting the free softcover copy of the rules the publisher of Supers! gave us to give away this year. There were 2 men and a young girl; one of the men got the book, but as the girl was his niece, he gave it to her. She looked pretty happy

After that, my two players and I, along with a fourth member played in Quinn's Tales from the Loop adventure. It was a weird adventure involving a restaurant serving "exotic" foods that turned out to be giant slugs and such that came through some weird portal from an alternate prehistoric era. We get hired by the guy who acquires the food for said restaurant, and we go to this island to forage. We ended up at some summer camp under construction, and find all the workers sitting at a table looking pale and out of it. We later learned it was some weird tree-like being that did that too them, as it drank some of their blood. We scared it back through the portal, and the other players (not me, I was like "no way!") went through the portal. They did kill some weird prehistoric aquatic thing. They came back through the portal, and using some dynamite we found at the summer camp, blew up the cave with the portal, sealing it off.

We finished foraging, made some money, but as we sealed off the portal, in a few weeks, the restaurant had to close (due to running out of exotic food).

After that we all went out to dinner before Quinn drove me home. I ended up being awake for around 27 hours, then slept for almost 14. Spent pretty much the rest of Sunday after I woke up watching stuff on Netflix and Prime Video. I'm still kind of tired today, so I'm doing more of the same.

I wasn't happy with how the store promoted things this year. I did learn another store does Free RPG Day as well locally, so we might split time between both, or just try the other store next year. I did get a Starfinder die and a Dice Bag, and Quinn let me have the Modern Age Quickstart he got. So while there was some disappointment, it wasn't all bad.
 
Planning to run a game of Exalted heroic mortals...
Using Cepheus:devil:.
 
I'll be interested to hear how you adapt that.
"Run it in a place where they don't get to meet Exalts, at least not yet", is my first point:smile:.

After that? Basically, anyone makes a fantasy-appropriate character, by using my system of "assign 15 dice to the six attributes, then roll (but you only take the highest two".
For the stages after that, I mixed liberally Cepheus Engine core (reskinning the career tables) with Worlds Apart, from whence the Events came, and even some supplements like High School and Graduate School. Those were necessary, because the only character so far is a high-Social unexalted scion of Kathak (which would have what amounts to higher education in the setting), currently stationed in the South.

And then taking the Essence rating of gods, elementals, demons, ghosts and fae, and assigning it as skill in their magic/psionic effects using "Easy Magic for Cepheus Engine" covers the rest. If necessary, it can be mixed with the ritual magic from Of Realms Unbounded/2d6 Magic to produce other necessary effects, and some artefacts or thaumaturgic items:wink:.

Also, I reduced the time of terms to 2 years (though university+graduate school still amounted to 6 years instead as a special exception), and had them start "university" at 14. IMO, that's enough time to learn the "narrower" skills used in Cepheus Engine (as opposed to the broader ones in CT). And many ancient societies expected people to become responsible adults far earlier than us, so it fits.

That's all the changes I'm making. I guess it's possible the characters might Exalt later.
If it becomes necessary, I'd consider giving them some access to magic, or even remaking them as Exalted characters. Sidereals 1e is looking shamelessly at me:grin:!

Though I might end up using some other system again, or retain Cepheus:devil:.I like the background, though!


Heh, I think anyone could quote me in the Opinions about Exalted thread, if you're curious what people would think about my hastily-hatched hack:tongue:!
 
damn, forgot that Quinn is a member here; so everything I wrote earlier also featured ORtrail ORtrail
 
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