The Aviary

A cool thing about solo rpgs is that you can accidentally create mysteries for yourself that you have no way of solving beyond continuing to play the game.

( Not everyone wants to know the details of my solo games, I guess )

Things:

- I have had the stupidest cold for nearly a week now. I call it the stupidest cold because I'm sick enough to feel off and to have mild but irritating symptoms, but not sick enough to actually feel like I shouldn't do things. Also because it spent about three days in the "sniffles and sore throat" stage without progressing. Fortunately, it feels like I've reached end-stage cold symptoms now, so hopefully it will be gone soon.

- I finished my handsewn shirt - it came out pretty okay! - and now I'm excited to make more clothing. Much like when I learned to knit, I find that now that I have some initial knowledge and experience, there is a part of my brain that has immediately decided that I am obviously capable of sewing anything. Textile crafts are the only area of my life in which I have this kind of boundless confidence in my abilities, regardless of whether or not that confidence has a basis in reality.

- Anyway, I have a growing list of patterns saved to make later. And also several articles of clothing I already own that I want to alter, mostly to add more pockets.

- I haven't been doing a lot of regular solo rpg playing in the last couple months, but I picked up my Starforged game on a whim last night and played it for about three hours. Starforged is still, seriously, the best game just on a mechanical level, and I'd forgotten how much I love the character and setting I'd made for this game - now playing it is all I want to do. I hadn't actually played since before I got my physical books/cards and it's amazing how much nicer it is to flip through a book to look up rules as opposed to a pdf. I can't play tonight as I have choir after work, but I'm definitely going to on Tuesday. And maybe every day this week - who knows? Really, I need to get back to having a regular weekly solo boardgame/rpg night.

Me: Maybe I will start a new solo rpg - time to daydream about settings and characters!

Me: ::ends up with a vaguely WWI-inspired setting with wizards and probably magic semi-sentient robots::

Me: Okay, so robots instead of airplanes. I don't want them to look human-shaped, I don't think - maybe robot birds of prey? That's cool, right?

Me: Okay, so what do we call them? 'Raptor' is too obvious, doesn't feel right. I only know North American birds of prey - what birds of prey live in Europe?

Me: ...it's a fucking Kite, isn't it.

A shining example of the ways in which I am ridiculous:


Step 1) "I should play a solo Call of Cthulhu game - that would be fun! This will be my first game not set on a secondary world, which is a little more intimidating because of Actual History, but it's a solo game so I can just handwave stuff, right? Historical accuracy isn't really required, since no one else will see it."

Step 2) "Ooh, I should set the game in 1920's Seattle instead of traditional Lovecraft country. The PNW is plenty creepy, after all."

Step 3) "The only thing I know about Seattle history is the song about the Great Fire at the MOHAI*, I should at least read some wikipedia articles first, right? It doesn't actually need to be historically accurate but I should have a vague idea of what the area was like at the time."

Step 4) "The Seattle Library had been founded by the 1920's, right? And the UW? Seattle is absurdly young, can't make assumptions."

Step 5) "Okay, yes, the CoC Keeper's Handbook helpfully lists the names of period newspapers but the Post-Intelligencer can't have been the only paper in the city at the time, right? Time to learn about other newspapers and their political bent in the 20s."

Step 6) "Oh wow, I really need to read some books about US labor history, huh?"

Step 7) "...this is why I don't play rpgs set in the real world."



My library hold list has just grown by several books. Now let's see if my dumb brain will let me play my silly solo horror game without researching the mosquito fleet and learning the whole history of the IWW in the Pacific Northwest first.









*The Seattle Museum of History and Industry has a lot of interesting exhibits and also the most buckwild thing I've ever seen at a history museum: a several-minute long mini-musical about the Great Seattle Fire performed by an array of inanimate objects, some of which were retrieved from the fire and some of which (like the infamous glue pot) are replicas. It is bewilderingly strange and would be wildly inappropriate if anyone had died in the fire (but fortunately no one did). I love it very much. If you are ever in Seattle, please go to the MOHAI and see it - it's entirely worth the price of admission.

I feel like I mostly spent yesterday playing Starforged (I did do other stuff, but it was boring), which was great. I have no real plans for today either, so there will likely be even more Starforged.

I talk about how much I love Ironsworn and Starforged a lot, I know, but I really want to gush in specific about two mechanical aspects of the games.

1) Both games are built on the Powered by the Apocalypse system, which gives you basically three possible outcomes when you roll: a strong hit, a weak hit, or a miss. My first rpg, like many of us, was D&D, where if you fail a roll, the thing you're trying to do doesn't happen. Like, you're looking for clues, you roll a 2 on Investigation, and you just don't find them. That makes sense as an outcome but gods, it's boring. Ironsworn and Starforged doesn't do that. If you roll a miss on the Gather Information move, you still learn something - it's just that what you learn is "a dire threat or unwelcome truth that undermines your quest". That's so much better, because it doesn't simply say "no" and lead to a dead end - it opens up something new. Even in the places where a miss does mean you don't succeed, the game is explicitly written to open up new possibilities, even if they're awful. The lack of dead ends because of failed rolls is great.

2) This one is Starforged specific - I love the way the game encourages and rewards making friends. In Ironsworn, the only way you earn XP is by completing quests. In Starforged, you still earn XP from quests, but you also earn XP from exploring, and from making friends. Further, in Ironsworn, a bond was a binary state - you meet an NPC, you decide you want to be friends, you make a single roll, and if you succeed you get a few mechanical bonuses interacting with than NPC. In Starforged, you meet an NPC, make an initial Connection roll, and then you start a progress track to becoming friends - you get XP if you fill the track and form a bond with them. Marking progress on that track requires interaction with than NPC in a variety of ways - sharing intense experiences, helping them out or them helping you, etc - so you have to continue to interact with them if you eventually want to get that XP. My playstyle already involves a lot of making friends with NPCs, but I love the way the game actively encourages and rewards that. I think Ironsworn is rad and I still play it rules-as-written, but every time I do I miss the way Starforged handles NPC relationships.

On the one hand: I slept terribly last night - the kind where you wake up and can't fall back to sleep for an hour, several times over the course of the night - and now I am very tired and useless on top of being depressed.

On the other hand: while I was trying and failing to fall asleep, I started playing my rules-light tiny rpg in my head and I worked out a really cool thing that the villain is going to try to do next. And it still made sense the next morning, instead of turning out to run on half-awake dream logic.

So that's something, I suppose.

Things:

- In continuing rpg news, I have decided that there are, indeed, sled dogs in space. Possibly giant sled dogs the size of ponies. This is science fantasy, I do what I want.

- I had a long weekend this past weekend, and did a bunch of yarn crafts. Including some yarn dyeing - I wanted to start another of my Christmas 2022 knitting projects, but hadn't been able to buy yarn in the kind of bright greens I wanted, so I made my own. ( It came out quite well and I'm very happy with how it's knitting up )

- Also, I have completed my 100 day dress challenge - my 100th day was the 10th. I've really enjoyed doing it and am, in fact, wearing the dress today, but I'm very glad not to have to take daily pictures anymore. I'm also looking forward to going back to wearing some of my other clothes again, but I imagine this dress (and my prize dress!) are going to remain major parts of my daily wardrobe.

The only thing currently stopping me from starting a new Starforged game that would be nothing but Armored Trooper Votoms fanfic is not the fact that I already have an excellent Starforged campaign in progress nor the fact that I have not actually finished watching Votoms yet, but is instead simply that I don't currently have an appropriate notebook to record the game in.

I maybe should buy some new notebooks this weekend.

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.

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.