Ursula

I posted a journaling game called Monster in the Wilderness in honor of radiantfracture's birthday!

radiantfracture designed an excellent prompt, and I had a lot of fun inventing a mechanic that uses destruction in an evocative but not overcomplicated way.

We wrapped up the arc today with a combat scene that involved a stumpy stone alligator dedicated to Xiuhtecuhtli, wrecking a phone with a well-thrown agate, and a whole lot of fire.

Quotes

• "FOXOTOTL. I misspelled it! FOXOLOTL."
  "I pronounce this the death of the pizza guy joke."
  "That has far more integrated laughs over time."
  
• "We are now the campaign of bad salamander puns."
  
• "Foxolotl Inquirer!"
  
• "Will people now look at Foxolotl News as a legitimate news source?"
  "We're legitimizing the next story they run about Jade Skirt showing up in my morning tamales!"
  
• "Who's checking their social media during a ritual?--Well, OK, probably like half of them."
  
• "It's pronounced Fosholotl News, right?"
  "We have linguistic standards for our jokes!"
  
• [The character couldn't attract interest from legitimate news sources because...]
  "It's the Aztec Public Radio fund drive! 888-258-98 Cheetah Cheetah. Aztec Public Radio tote bag? Basket?"
  
• "It looks like the kind of vehicle an exec would have."
  "I flip it off."
  "But what would your character do?"
  
• [Five dice are purple and three dice are blue--but you roll four Fate dice at a time.]
  "Maybe the dice know you don't love them for who they are."
  
• "I'll ready my blaster arm, because God damn it, we just rescued her!"
  
• "I pull out my pocket knife and cut his tongue off my phone."
  
• "Mocel's dad and his alligator."
  "Sounds like a terrible indie band."
  "I would buy their child's lullaby album."
  
• "You gave a priest a temple blow."
  "Gotta hit 'em where it hurts."
  
• "By Tlaloc's tadpole!"
  
• "I was kind of looking forward to roleplaying my arm exploding."
  
• "I was looking at the quotes from last time, and 'We found the linchpin, let's hit it with a hammer' is now our formal plan."
  "We hit it with an agate!"
  

Quotes from two sessions!

Last time

• "Not only is everyone going to die, but it's going to be used for nefarious evil."
  
• "We went from minorly annoying semi-incompetent death cult to... mustache-twirling levels of supervillainy here, so... we need a better plan."
  
• "We have to come up with a different term for smugglers that's less accusatory."
  "Noble blockade runners."
  "Entrepreneurs."
  "Aquatic entrepreneurs."
  
• "Is the seagull drone strong enough to carry the snake?"
  
• "My actual theological resources are not great, but I'm really good at waving crystals in the air."
  "So you had to banish the negative ions."
  
• "How is it all the other ones were fine, but 'brooch' is where you're like, ew, ew?"
  
• "I recommend showing up to the ritual and saying you're not the pizza guy!"
  

This time

• "Now we have motive--which we were kind of missing before--they had no reason to be a cult except to be all culty."
  
• "You talk to your friend who's a reference librarian."
  "Yeah, 'cause that's a roleplaying leap we all have to make?"
  
• "Why does anyone not notice vampires? We all carry around cell phones."
  
• "How 'bout the fact that they spelled 'crypton' with a 'c'?"
  "Like... dead people?"
  
• "We had a forty-five minute--not argument, debate--about the difference between a breakfast burrito and having a burrito for breakfast."
  
• "We should do something that won't make us wanted criminals."
  "We don't get wanted if we don't get caught."
  
• "If that butler is worth his salt as a butler, we're going to have to kill him to get to his master, that's how loyal butlers work."
  "That's [player]. I feel sorry for her first--"
  "My first butler?"
  

Quotes from this afternoon's game:

"By the power of Internet!"

"You have an angry machine spirit."
"Probably some snake I pissed off."

[Players try to remember whether the game has entailed combat of any sort prior to this session.]
"I killed a snake!"
"That actually required a combat roll."
"I think I used Arts and Sciences."
[...]
"Art and Science of sneaking! Camouflage and makeup and... interpretive dance."

"The spider-mech equivalent of an Escalade--Escaladl."

[Character prepares to drive a burning car into a canal.]
"This reminds me of--did you all watch Good Omens?"
"Is all of your music turning to Queen?"

"You know what they do at hospitals?"
"Treat my gunshot wound?"
"Call the cops?"

"This is a party of a cleric and three rogues. OK, a cleric, two rogues, and a bard."

Declarations of "You're not the pizza guy!" in an egret squawk: At least five.

yhlee asked for a dice post.

My own collection of gaming dice is utilitarian: I have some black dice with white numerals from an old D&D boxed set, a bunch of extra D&D dice handed down from a former neighbor's older brother, some extra d8s because I used to have a character with a longsword, lots of d10s from White Wolf, and extra d6s that were probably scrounged out of a Monopoly set. Oh, and a giant, heavy metal d20 that was a bridal party gift from anniebellet--I wouldn't use it in an actual game unless I wanted to make a point of shaking the table. My Fate dice are black, red, and a translucent golden yellow; these are the only dice that I purchased as a set while an adult with an income and access to the Internet, which explains why they are the closest to my usual livery colors.

I have bought fancy dice as gifts for other people. I like Made by Wombat on Shapeways; they will print gold-plated dice, if you want a particularly lavish and impractical gift for someone. The Dice Lab makes dice that are mathematically interesting!

A piece of worldbuilding solidified for me, while doing this session's planning. One of the setting aspects we developed when we were first planning the Aztec Cyberpunk campaign was The Broken Pyramid. We agreed it was in some way technological, in some way related to climate or the ocean, and that cults tended to spring up around it. I realized, while thinking about the activities of a particular cult, that there's a natural way for magic and technology to interact. Everything I've read about Aztec religion has insisted that the dichotomy between representation and reality is a Western one, that a represented thing has its own reality. In this setting, that means a sufficiently detailed simulation will be not only descriptive, but prescriptive. And the pyramid is running code...

Anyway, on to the quotes!

• "I mean, who really knows what humans do?"
  "Certainly not humans!"
  
• "You haven't heard anything about this cult."
  "They're super obscure. That's so cool."
  "You had this god on vinyl."
  
• "You could just knock on his door and say, 'I want to join your cult.'"
  "You're not the pizza guy!" [bird squawking]
  "I am not making another sexy bird decoy."
  
• "I'm trying to data-science this!"
  
• "Gambler's fallacy! Gambler's fallacy!" [bangs table]
  "You made my d10 light up!"
  
• "You're going to break me!"
  "Between the cake and the pseudoscience..."
  
• "They could be using the natural power to disrupt the artificial power."
  "I hate to say this, but that sounds... right."
  
• "He wasn't able to find the ecoterrorist equivalent of a recruiting poster."
  
• "I'm listening to everything you're saying. A man turned himself blue and carved a key out of a block of silver."
  
• "You just need to study the ways of the desert snake."
  "To live in the ocean?"
  
• "Where did you get this die?"
  "It came with my husband."
  
• "It's like turning your liver into a laser."
  
• "We'll need to disrupt the power of the ritual, and we'll be like, OK, I hit this guy with a rock--"
  "An agate, so it calms him down."
  
• "I think we just need to tail the guy. Maybe not me, 'cause I sort of stand out. Having, literally, a tail."
  
• "Don't get this guy started on Carthage!"
  
• "This is--office drone kind of cult participation?"
  
• "Either that, or you're a lizard person."
  [flicks tongue, then squawks]
  "Or a snowy egret person!"
  
• "Fate brought us together."
  
• "By our powers combined, we are OSHA recordable!"
  
• [describes podcast]
  [enthusiastically] "It's like having fake friends!"
  

Here is a D&D story for schneefink, who was wishing for some.

I learned about D&D from the acknowledgments to a Katherine Kerr novel when I was in fourth grade, but I didn't find people willing to play RPGs with me until high school. We mostly played White Wolf, since that was then the fashion; in particular, I GMed a lot of Mage.

My first serious D&D campaign was in college. Third edition was new and shiny! My character was named Angharad. She began the campaign as a very naive Lawful Good rogue; I reasoned that she came from a Thieves' Guild family, and had conformed to the expectation that she'd join the family business. She was moderately smart at the start of the campaign (INT 13 or 14, maybe), and we all started at seventh level. We encountered a strange temple that "balanced" our stats, though, so her intelligence went down and another stat went up, and because Angharad was exceedingly Lawful Good, I picked up a level in paladin. Then, through some rather awful failures in coordination, the entire party was killed by a mindflayer; upon resurrection, Angharad found herself with even less intelligence and missing one of those levels of rogue.

Finally, after maybe a semester of play (we spent a lot of time talking to people, and not very much killing monsters), Angharad earned a second paladin level, and became able to sense evil... at which point she learned that sildra's eponymous character had been lawful evil the entire time. "Sildra! You're evil?" is one of my favorite moments in excessive commitment to lawful goodness.

Smiting evil with a holy sword while simultaneously doing sneak-attack damage due to flanking is also pretty great, though.