The Aviary

In other rpg news:

At our last All Staff Meeting, one of the little breakout sessions you could sign up for turned out to be a pared-down rules-light D&D one-shot. It was super fun and the guy DMing was great. He mentioned at the end that he'd be interested in an ongoing staff game.

Today, he messaged one of my coworkers who was also at the game, and she let me know that she had been invited and when and where it was happening. And then I was very brave and emailed the DM asking to join.

And! He emailed me back and seemed enthusiastic about me joining! Their next session is this evening, which I won't be able to make, but I'm going to roll up a character tonight and try to join next week.

I'm so excited!



ETA - Ahahaha, I spent the whole evening building a character and I already love him so much. He is a gnomish wizard named Eponymous Raventack, who used to run a magic shop before deciding to go On the Stage as a professional stage magician. (Mostly, he did children's birthday parties.) But then, during a performance, he made his assistant vanish, as per usual, but she never reappeared. So now he is adventuring to find her. He has an enormous top hat and a dramatic cape and a white rat familiar named Clancy. I can't wait to play this goofy dude.

A great thing about solo rpgs is that you get to skip or handwave all the parts that you don't find interesting. One of the things I usually handwave is food - I am supremely uninterested in tracking rations or having to think about how my characters are feeding themselves on adventures*. (Generally, I find inventory tracking annoying in general. I much prefer inventory systems like Ironsworn, which are basically "assume you have reasonable gear for your character and the setting - roll to see if you packed weird stuff.")

The other thing about solo rpgs that's good is that I get to take time to focus on stuff that interests me and which might not interest other players as much.** I do care about food in my rpgs as a worldbuilding detail - I like to figure out what kinds of foods my characters have access to, what the food culture surrounding them is like, what they prefer to eat, etc. But I only do it as an interesting background detail, not something I actually have to keep track of.

Right now, I've been playing with my current solo D&D game, wherein my two characters (a spooky warlock and his spooky paladin buddy) have recently finished a dungeon crawl in a haunted wizard's tower that they then decided, because of reasons, to fix up and use as a home base. They live there alone (except for the occasional giant spider they still have to deal with) and it's, y'know, an isolated scary wizard's tower, so the nearest town is about a day away. Tracking food is boring - my two spooky boys figuring out how to cook and keep food in a haunted wizard's tower is fun. It appeals to the same part of me that likes to think about the process of Dracula learning to make roast chicken for Jonathan Harker. Spooky people doing domestic tasks is always the best.

They should probably have a kitchen garden. The idea of my spooky super fastidious warlock in a straw hat, putting in a kitchen garden, hating every minute of it, is my favorite thing I've thought of today.

Maybe they should have chickens.







*I also handwave this in any game I run and tell my players that upfront. I don't care. Unless it is somehow actually interesting that your characters don't have food, they just have food. They also have ammo if they need it. If someone else is GMing and they care about that sort of thing, I'll track it, but I personally find that really boring.

**This is also why I have probably at least idly thought about textile production and the general cultural level of literacy in most of my rpg settings.

I stayed up too late last night playing solo D&D and it was a mistake but I have no regrets.

Really, the major problem is that I have things I have to do tonight and tomorrow, so I probably can't do it again till Thursday.

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.)

Did I just spend an afternoon planning a dungeon crawl where the boss is a rat person wizard with steampunk magic armor named Catcatcher Majestic?

Yes. Yes, that is exactly what I did.

D&D is fucking amazing.

Alas, once again I went to D&D and had half my players not show, which is frustrating. However! Like the last time this happened, I had a low-prep game in my back pocket in case of this situation, so instead we played The Quiet Year.

I have been trying to get someone to play The Quiet Year with me ever since I first heard it played on Friends at the Table* and have not been successful until tonight, when I essentially had a captive audience. Playing it was just as enjoyable as I had hoped and I think the rest of the group also had fun. We built a haunted swamp village and fought a dragon and some alligators and built a huge temple to the elder gods before the Frost Shepherds overran our town.

So I did not play D&D but I had a good time anyway. Now I just have to find another small low-prep game to bring as backup next time.




*If you haven't listened to it, it's at the beginning of their Marielda season, which is self-contained and can be listened to without hearing any of the rest of the podcast first. Marielda is really very good and also a great introduction to Friends at the Table in general, if you feel like checking it out.

On the one hand, the fact that one of my players didn't show for D&D tonight and we were left with only two party members (plus a guy who was planning to join after this session but hasn't finished his character yet) and thus could not play D&D is not great. The missing player didn't even message any of us to say she couldn't come! It is very irritating.

On the other hand, I had made a plan for this eventuality. (She hadn't RSVP'd to the Meetup though she usually does, and I'd messaged her earlier and gotten no reply.) So after we waited for about 20 minutes, I said, "Okay, we can't play D&D but I have another suggestion - have you guys heard of Honey Heist?"*

They had not heard of Honey Heist, but it is an extremely easy game to explain and requires no prep and practically no supplies. We rolled on some tables for bears and hats and had an extremely enjoyable hour-long no-prep session wherein I got to play a game I've wanted to play since I first heard of it and have not gotten to before. Several people were mauled or run over by bears driving a bus, they met a giant humanoid bee-woman, I got to do a weird bee-lady voice - it was great.

Also, one of the other folks in my group has mentioned a desire to learn to DM as well, which I am encouraging, as I would love do something like alternate different campaigns. My online game has, alas, fallen apart and I play only sporadically with my sister. I like DMimg, but I'd really like to be able to play as a PC sometimes too.

She asked for advice on learning to DM but honestly, I feel like I can DM mostly because I watch/listen to a lot of actualplay stuff. Like, I'm best at D&D but there are a whole bunch of games that I've never played but feel like I know how to play because I've listened to other people play them and passively absorbed the rules. I mean, I don't think I'd have felt confident just spontaneously running that Honey Heist game if I'd only read about it, but I've heard/watched a bunch of people play and so now I can think, "Oh yeah, I know how that game works - I can just run that whenever." I haven't played, say, Monster of the Week or Blades in the Dark but I have an idea of how they work because I've listened to them and I think I could go from there, with access to a book or two to confirm stuff I already think I know.

Saying, "I don't know, maybe watch a couple days worth of Critical Role" is maybe not helpful advice, though.







*If you have also not heard of Honey Heist, it is an excellent game wherein you play a criminal planning a heist from a honey convention and also you are a goddamn bear. You can find it here. You can also watch it being played on Critical Role, or listen to it on Rusty Quill Gaming, both of which I highly recommend. (You can also listen to it on Friends at the Table, but I believe you have to be a Patreon backer.**) All Honey Heists are good Honey Heists.

**Which, like, if you already like Friends at the Table, I encourage you to back the Patreon if you can? Bluff City is fucking great, y'all.

Things:

- I have now finished episode 22 of The Magnus Archives. I promise I will stop constantly talking about it soon but soon is not now, so I'm going to mention how consistently excellent the sound design is on this show. There aren't sound effects as such, but the very slight tape recorder distortion during all the statements is very effective and god, I love the little changes to the background music that reflect the story being told. The bell in episode 20 really got me, as did the slight skittering noises in 22. It's very good.

- Also, episodes 19 and 20 (which are, unusually, a two-parter) were lovely, because they were a flavor of horror that I don't see nearly enough of, which is spiritual horror - the horror of being cut off from god. The Exorcist has a little of that with Father Karras' whole thing, and I'm sure I'm missing some other obvious works, but I'm hard pressed to think of a story that dealt with that flavor of horror so directly. Maybe I would enjoy possession horror more if more of it were from the possessed person's point of view.

- Actually, this may be a place where I am displaying my ignorance: I have not enjoyed much of the possession horror I have read/watched so I tend to avoid it. Is there other possession horror from the possessed person's point of view? It seems like most of what I've seen tends to be otherwise.

- Relatedly: I've had to take my WWI and horror book back to the library half-finished, as it has a hold. I'm not sure that I will try to get it again to finish it. While parts of it were very interesting, the author's thesis is far too broad to my mind (while obviously influential in terms of early horror film and thus some of the tropes that survive to this day, I don't really believe that all 20th century horror is about WWI and the author did not make his case on this point convincingly). Also, he does a thing that I've seen other horror scholars do before and which always irritates me, which is decide early on that all horror ultimately boils down to fear of one's own bodily death and then continue to try to interpret every work of horror through that lens. Which is obviously nonsense: I can think of all sorts of horrific things that have very little to do with the fear of bodily death. The author at several points tried to argue that all of Lovecraft's work is about fear of bodily death and I had to physically put the book down for a few minutes due to the weight of all that wrongness. This dude wrote a Lovecraft biography! I don't understand! In conclusion, I cannot finish this book because it would end with me writing the author a long and angry letter about how wrong he is and I cannot be that person.

- I have my D&D meetup scheduled for tonight, but only two out of the six players have said they could make it. Which means I'm going to spend the rest of the day anxiously wondering if they're going to come or if I should try to reschedule for next week. It is a trial.

An extremely goofy question:

So, imagine you are running a D&D campaign, where you started by running Lost Mines of Phandelver for a bunch of newbies and are about halfway done and will have to start doing original stuff soon. And imagine that your plan for original stuff has always involved the party being employed and based out of a magical library. And then imagine you spent 2+ months being really obnoxiously into Good Omens, so instead of having the library run by, I don't know, a wizard or something, you decided to make the person running the library not-actually-but-kind-of!Aziraphale. Which, of course, meant that somewhere in the magical library is not-actually-but-kind-of!Crowley, obviously.

(Which actually works out really nicely because you had tentatively planned for the Big Bad of the campaign to be a Star Spawn cult and now you have exciting mythology about the gods leaving the Prime Material Plane centuries ago Because of Reasons and now there are Outsider interlopers that the gods aren't terribly inclined to do anything about but some of their minor functionaries - who quite like the Prime Material plane - are and thus are recruiting adventurers.)

Anyway. So, not!Aziraphale and not!Crowley are actually a fairly powerful angel/demon but present themselves as fairly ordinary mortal folks. (Probably not very well.) Which means, imagine, that you have to figure out how they present themselves as mortal folks. Not!Aziraphale is pretty easy - probably human, definitely a Knowledge domain Cleric. Not!Crowley is clearly a yuan-ti but, given this very silly setup...

You guys, what the hell class is not!Crowley? Fiend-pact Warlock is much too on the nose, right?

Had our second Meetup this evening, which was meant to be me teaching a bunch of D&D newbies how to make characters. Things that went wrong:

1) The Meetup organizer got sick at the last minute and couldn't make it
2) She was the one who was bringing the printed character sheets and I didn't find out she wasn't coming till I got to the Meetup
3) The tables at the game store were all full by the time we got there

So it turned out to be me and four dudes on a bench in a nearby courtyard, building D&D characters via apps on our phones. Fortunately, these were basically throwaway characters to walk through the mechanical process - we didn't talk about backstory or how to fit them into a campaign or anything.

Not exactly what I was hoping for. I mean, they seem like good dudes and I wouldn't mind playing with them but I was excited by the number of ladies who came to the last Meetup - 5 out of 8! - and was hoping to have something like that ratio again. I didn't have a bad time but I hope we can sort of reprise this in a later Meetup with better results. And actual paper character sheets.

Having the Meetup outside was nice though. I'll definitely suggest that for next time. The weather's been really pleasant and I think it would be easier to find space to play in a park than in the game store.

So, my sister, her husband and I have started what I hope will be a regular and continuing D&D game. We had a world-and-character-building session a couple weeks ago and our first game on Saturday.

You guys, I love this game. We decided early on that a thing we all really wanted was a world that was, above all, whimsical - full of wonder and silliness, basically a good children's cartoon. We also decided to dump all the more humanoid races and stick with more fantastical stuff or animal people. So Sean is playing a cleric who is a huge shoebill stork person (a reskinned half-orc but with the ability to use his wings to glide) and I am a wee blue-tailed skink artificer (basically a kobold with a few gnomish traits).

We had a great dungeon crawl where everything we encountered was basically friendly - special shoutout to the flumph who wanted us to listen to his mixtape. I think the only combat encounters we actually had were against a Rug of Smothering (can't talk, not a person) and the hag at the end of the dungeon (had kidnapped and enslaved a beer elemental, clearly a jerk). After about the third chamber, Katie looked at the two of us and said, "I don't know why I thought you guys were going to fight any of these creatures."

NGL, about 60% of the Monster Manual is full of creatures that I would prefer to be friends with.

Now we are 2nd level, we already have our next session scheduled, and my lizard found herself a cool new flowered hat on our dungeon crawl.

This is already the best D&D game I've ever been part of.

Tonight, we are back to our normal D&D night and I get to play Rinn, my mushroom druid.

I love Circle of Spores* because I get to have mushroom spores that do poison damage when I do melee attacks. Cool already, but the best part is, when I get the killing blow on an enemy using my spores, my DM is super into giving me detailed descriptions of how the spores spread through its body and sprout as mushrooms. (Usually there's a loving discussion of how they grow through various orifices, usually eye sockets.)

I am collecting samples of each of these mushrooms to keep my many and varied pockets. Tonight, I killed a giant frog thing that sprouted yellow mushrooms and which my DM strongly implied that I should try brewing into some kind of tea.

I'm so excited about that.





*I should note that I'm playing the Unearthed Arcana version, not the version that got published in the...Ravnica book, I think?

Tonight is makeup D&D night: since we didn't get to play at all last week, we're playing twice this week. Therefore, let me tell you about my D&D characters!

( Cut because I guess it's possible that you don't care? )

D&D is the best, you guys. I'm glad there are online options now so I can play in my pjs. It's pretty great.