The Aviary

I started my new Ironsworn-but-also-a-Universal-Horror-film game on Wednesday and have been playing it a whole bunch this weekend. Thoughts: ( under the cut, because other people's rpgs are not thrilling to read about )

I have been playing a lot of the Arkham Horror card game lately, and my mom expressed some interest in the game, so I've also been playing with her. It is fun! But also, it is yet another example of something that frequently frustrates me but that seems shitty to complain about out loud to the people who do it, so I'm complaining here. ( Cut for complaining about how people play games. )

So, as previously mentioned, I'm planning a Honey Heist game for my library's Staff Day this year. I will have 7 players, so I want to expand the character creation tables a little so there's less chance of overlap. Adding new Descriptors is relatively easy, and I have bears or bear-like animals to add to the Bear Type* list, but I am having trouble with the Criminal Role table.

The original table contains: Muscle, Brains, Driver, Hacker, Thief, Face. I'm adding Demolitions (because that's funny), but can't think of another role to add.

What is a fun role for a bear in a criminal gang?





*One of them is going to be a raccoon, because there's only so much obscure bear species knowledge you can expect your coworkers to have.

Normally, my library system has a yearly All Staff Day, where the whole staff gets together for a day of...well, a lot of nonsense, really, but there's the awards ceremony and some "professional development" stuff that never turns out to be actually relevant, and there's speakers and things. It's not great, but we get lunch, at least.

This year, obviously, that is a Bad Idea. So instead, the plan is to do the first four hours with the whole staff via Zoom and then break up into branches for the other four hours in the afternoon. Those four hours can be used either for "professional development" or "team building". My manager was jokingly despairing about planning stuff to fill those four hours.

I may have suggested that I could eat up at least two of them by giving the rest of the staff a crash course in rpgs and then running a Honey Heist game. Tabletop roleplaying games teach collaborative problem solving, right? That's a legit teambuilding exercise, probably. (Plus, much easier than trying to run a D&D game for newbies and lets them know that there's more to ttrpgs than D&D.)

It almost certainly won't actually happen, but my manager liked the idea a lot, so who knows?

I keep doing this stupid thing where I get linked to what claims to be a module for D&D (or a similar game) that's designed for solo play and I get excited and decide to try it out and then discover that it's just another Choose Your Own Adventure style gamebook with dice.

And I get it - the idea is to create a module that has a level of detail comparable to a GM-ed game without spoiling the solo player for what's going to happen next. I can't easily think of a way to accomplish both of those goals without making something that's CYOA style. And clearly CYOA style play works for a lot of people, or people on the solo roleplaying subreddit wouldn't keep recommending Tunnels and Trolls' solo stuff. But it doesn't work for me at all and I always end up disappointed to find it's the only option out there for pre-written stuff.

Things:

- I'm currently working on this shawl, which I'm enjoying very much. It is complicated in a different way than a lot of the complicated things I knit, in that it's all stockinette instead of being lace or cables, so the complexity is in the actual shaping and construction of the shawl. But the way it works does mean that I occasionally have to pick up and knit something like 179 stitches along the edge of something which is...tedious.

- Sunday morning is cooking time, so I have spent the morning cooking. I was trying a new recipe and it turned out to be awful (especially since the cabbage I bought turned out to be off, which I only discovered too late in the process to remedy), so I had to switch to a backup tried-and-trusted recipe that I already had most of the ingredients for. Ah, well. This is also loaf cake weekend, so I made a coconut and lime cake and that, at least, turned out fine.

- Last night, I finished the first adventure in my newest solo D&D game, so I'm figuring out what's going to happen next. I have an Adventure Crafter sheet for the next adventure, so I have some ideas, but a fun thing about playing solo is that if I want to spend a session or two having my character explore a new city via random oracle rolls rather than jumping straight to Danger and Excitement, I can do that. I also get to do exactly the amount and kind of worldbuilding I want, which means that I have no idea how the government of this city functions at all but I do know about the city's textile industry and the different kinds of street food you can buy.

Okay, I still hate summer and bright/hot weather but I will admit that being able to play Ironsworn outside at the table on our back porch under a tree is pretty nice.

Today I:

- made a rose cake with a sweet cream glaze. It is a loaf cake - I make a loaf cake every other week and then have enough cake for each of my work lunches, plus one slice for the in-between weekend and one to split with mom and dad immediately after the slicing process. (I make bread on the alternate weeks and thus always have either half a loaf of bread or cake in the freezer, waiting.) This one came out quite nicely.

- got to sit outside in the sun and knit. Yesterday was very gloomy but today was very sunny and not too hot. I am not very much a sunshine person, but being able to knit and watch the swallows at the same time is very nice. I am nearly done with my current shawl - I have to finish one last beaded row (beading makes for very slow knitting) and the bindoff, and then block it. I maybe already have plans for the next shawl.

- played my first session of Starforged. (Well, my first rp session. The book has a nice note about how prep for an rpg - especially a solo game - is itself a kind of gameplay, which I very much agree with.) It was super fun and the preview version of the game is definitely entirely playable on its own. There's some stuff that I'd like more clarification on and a few things I was confused about but sort of kludged together from my knowledge of Ironsworn but those are the kinds of things that will be dealt with more in depth in the completed game. I like the way the game mechanically rewards forming and maintaining relationships with NPCs by making the Forge a Bond move a progress move rather than an action move now; I like the way some stuff from Delve has been incorporated into the main game; and all of the worldbuilding setup oracles are rad. I'm still feeling out who my character is and how exactly the setting works but I had a fun adventure that led to some cool unexpected directions that the story could go in the future and I'm very excited about it.

I started playing Journey last night, which is a really lovely solo journaling rpg. (So a game where you have a premise and some basic restraints, and a way to generate random prompts - usually dice or a deck of cards - and then you write something.) I've been intrigued by journaling games for a while - someday, I will actually play Thousand Year Old Vampire - but this is the first one I've actually played.

It's a game built for people who really like worldbuilding or who want to imagine themselves wandering around in a fictional setting without a huge amount of story. You pick a setting and a form to travel through it (this is your PC, who as defined or undefined as you like), then roll dice to determine places or beings that exist in the setting, then draw cards to generate aspects of that place or being that you can explore. The prompts are necessarily very general, so you can build any kind of setting that you're interested in.

I had originally thought about playing the game to better define certain bits of the settings of one my other non-journaling solo rpgs, but I decided instead to create a new setting because I've had a tiring crabby week and thinking about actually having to make the new stuff fit into the stuff I've already built felt exhausting. Therefore, I've decided that this (and possibly other subsequent games of Journey) are going to be set in a fantasy world designed specifically to be soothing and appealing to me. You could certainly play Journey in such a way as to generate a world where scary or exciting things happen but I am choosing to use this as a gentle and relaxing exercise.

So far, I have spent some time wandering around a city where it's always twilight and everything is lit by paper lanterns and possibly there are moth people. It's been very pleasant.

Me: Okay, my tiny rpg game/Story is vaguely Weird West in terms of aesthetics and non-magical technology, but it's set in an explicitly secondary fantasy world so I don't have to worry about conflicts with real-world history or geography.

Also me: And now, for this goofy story that I am only telling to myself, I will falll down wikipedia/google rabbit holes on a) the historical availability of refined sugar in various parts of the US, b) the native range of wild ginger, and c) the early history of the Mormon church.

There are no Mormons in this story. The Christian Church doesn't exist in this world. And yet!

One of the best things about Ironsworn is that the enemies don't have stats at all beyond a threat rating. So you can definitely use the example monsters/enemies listed in the book or, instead, you can do what I did this afternoon and decide that the creature at the center of my current quest who has been stealing people from a nearby village is some kind of giant spectral ghost bear that can't be killed by normal weapons because it hid its heart in a cursed tree. As you do.

As previously discussed, I love playing solo rpgs. Up till now, I have mostly recorded my games on google drive via my computer, which is less than satisfying. The laptop takes up too much space, I have to move things around whenever I need to roll, if I want to draw maps I have to store them somewhere else, it's all a problem. Also, weirdly, the freedom that typing on a blank unending document gives me always ends up with me feeling like I have to record my games in a readable narrative style which I'm not good at (there is a reason that I don't write as a hobby), and that leads to me getting frustrated with my writing instead of enjoying my game. Also, less portable - I don't take my laptop places with me, and recording my games on my phone is a nightmare, but the games themselves are generally easy to move around and I'd like the option to play wherever I happen to be.

So I've been thinking through various pen-and-paper notebook solutions instead: ideally something like a refillable journal that could hold multiple notebooks (I often have more than one game running and would like to keep them all in one place) with storage options so I could easily hold onto character sheets or Ironsworn asset cards or whatever. I settled on a Traveler's Notebook because a) refillable and can hold at least 3 and up to 6 notebooks, b) lots of different kinds of notebooks available, c) fountain pen friendly, and d) aesthetics. So today I have spent some of my Christmas present money to order one with the specific refills I want. I am starting with a lined notebook for writing, a blank notebook for maps and other drawings (I would have preferred a dot-grid for that but it comes with a blank one so why waste it?), and a kraft pocket folder for holding things.

The trouble is that I have therefore spent a lot of this morning thinking about exactly how I want to play using this notebook, which makes me want to start a new Ironsworn game but I do not yet have the notebook, so starting now would be silly.

Maybe I will spend the intervening time in world-building. That would probably be useful, right?

Good Things:

- I took a mental health day on Thursday and spent much of the day at the Point No Point beach, aka my favorite place in the world. It was misting but not raining and I brought a waterproof blanket, tea, a sandwich, and some knitting and just sat in the grey outdoors listening to the rain for a few hours. It was incredibly soothing.

- Yesterday, I started a new solo D&D game, wherein I am playing through Waterdeep: Dungeon of the Mad Mage. This book is, basically, one big huge dungeoncrawl, where each level of the dungeon is designed for a successively higher character level, taking you from level 5 all the way to level 20. I'm playing a level higher than the book recommends and making a few other tweaks so that I can run it for myself with just two characters: I have an aarakocra figher and a kenku alchemist because if you can be birds, why would you not be birds? It's pretty great.

- In other rp news, today my sister, sibling-in-law, and I had session 0 for our Beam Saber campaign! It is not set in the setting we designed with Microscope because our Microscope game turned out too nice and heartwarming to contain a Forever War, so Sean has designed a new setting full of monsters and weird space magic that I'm super excited about. It's going to be very cool.

- Also today, I put flannel sheets and extra blankets on my bed because it is Autumn and it's chilly and I'm so very happy.

- If buying specialist equipment turns an activity into a hobby, I am now a hobbyist breadmaker because I bought myself a pain de mie pan. (I make a lot of bread for sandwiches and am constantly annoyed the the sandwiches in the middle of the loaf are bigger than the ones at the ends. Square bread is the solution!) It should arrive before next baking day, which is great, because I have a new-to-me recipe for Icelandic rye bread that I'm excited to make using it.

- I have convinced my parents to watch One Cut of the Dead with me this evening, which is an entirely delightful Japanese movie I watched last week and immediately fell in love with. If you, like me, have a love for charmingly inept horror movies, you should definitely watch it. Try not to read anything about it first, though - it's more fun if you don't know much about it going in. (For folks who are sensitive about horror: this movie does have zombies but is not scary and all the gore is extremely fake-looking and very goofy.)