The Ash, the Elder, and the Hen Elm

See previous post ! The game was goodish. The PCs didn't interact much with each other, doing their own things, which is fine by me contra many others, but never sparkles. Two questions about any bit of prep to assess it postfacto: • Did I use it in some way? • Was it/would it have been better than I could improvise? 1. Ideas from the daydreaming walk • While cool, the view down the stairs at an angle wasn't used. It did inspire a little 3rd person intro snippet I did with a view of *somebody* (the doctor) getting arrested • The octopus was referenced, in a big tank in Durret's study when etric went to visit. The image got appreciative comments & bond villain comparisons; without prepping it I'd never have done it, I'm awful at improvising set dressings like that • Didn't use the little oil lamp. Eh. Obviously these are all unimportant descriptive fluff. But does matter in a description based medium. 2. Notes on Notes The player's account of last time I ...

Dear Players of the Pillar of Velkith campaign, I know some of you read this. This post will both spoil the plot and expose my GMing methods' sticky guts in a way you may not actually want to know. I can't stop you, but I recommend: Owwww T his post is being written almost entirely through the medium of  speech to text , w/ minimal post-facto editing for sense.  The reason this happening is because I am to my significant regret developing a repetitive strain injury from work in addition to trying to write for this and for games. I don't want to have RSI; that sounds unpleasant to the long term. So instead I am going to do my writing in the immediate through this medium and I'm going to do something a bit experimental where I try to adapt my normal game prep processes from having my hands available to minimally  having my hands available . This is going to make things somewhat difficult/interesting but I think offers a unique opportunity: because my usual prep method is ...

I set myself a challenge this year to read a big and/or complicated book for pleasure every month and produce a blog-y thing about it. In January, I read Tim Harper's Underground Asia , and then proceeded to make so many notes that it took me until today to get a post out of them! Oops !  If you're playing a character in a port built around a giant mysterious adamantine pillar in the middle of the ocean, I may well be stealing ideas from here, so feel free to read the intro/review and the game-system stuff at the end but be aware that you might spoil yourself if you read the middle sections. Introduction and Short Review TL;DR: How revolutionaries (first Anarchist, then Marxist, then nationalist) began to undermine imperialism in Asia, 1900s-30s. Fantastic read if you're good at remembering lots of names. Underground Asia is a marvellous work of the kind Allen Lane/Penguin History seems to manage on the regular: pop-history enough to be a snappy and enjoyable read, well-cit...