Redwolf's Journal (continued)

 Last night seemed to be the climactic finale of the ongoing Godbound game. I have some thoughts. The previous session ended with a couple PCs and a shadowy person in the special chamber with access to divine realms and their vacated thrones (in the campaign, the gods were sorta kicked out of their positions, making things up for grabs). Once PC had already claimed a throne. All the others were waiting outside. At the moment the session ended, no one seemed aware that the shadowy figure was Beryn, big-bad threat of the campaign. This is where I feel weird about things, because that little detail came up OOC and it changed everything. If the PCs had been aware at the time, they probably would have started a fight outside the chamber when they saw him. That didn't happen. But suddenly because the players were aware, they wanted to be able to plan before the conflict (with downtime glossed over previous) so they could go into the next session guns-blazing and as prepared as possible. ...

So I was invited into a Godbound game online and, after some struggle to overcome inertia, convinced myself to give it a try. I had to reread a bunch of rules as my previous experience with them was focused on a narrower part of it (heroic mortals). Over a few days I settled on, and built up, a hengeyokai raven (tengu) thief. A character should have goals and a Godbound character should probably have particularly big ones, but the character didn't really feel like one to do nation-building. But... king-backing, maybe. So more a working-from-the-shadows sort looking for another character to support. I hope that's solid enough going forward. Tsukuda “Kara” Karasu was born in Larendre, but remembers next to nothing of it. In her youth, her parents brought her on a trip to Threshold - a mission of diplomacy or trading as she remembers, but her parents were killed. Whether it was a deliberate assasination or mugging carried too far is unclear, but authorities never did find anyone r...

 Cyberpunk 2077 has had me thinking some about RPG characters in general. I have a lot of thoughts. I don't know if I can organize them well, but at least I can put them out in some fashion... Perhaps more than most genres, cyberpunk is about living hard and fast even if it means dying early - being the candle that burns twice as bright yet half as long. That's sort of baked in to the stories, depicting a quiet life under corporate rule as a fate worse than death. To some extent, that philosophy exists in most games. Fantasy adventurers are willing to take on dragons and the like, after all. The motivation for this may be glory, money, or upholding some greater principle. These stories, though, are stories for a reason. Things get messy if you try to inject too much realism. Money as a motivator is one of the aspects that crumbles the quickest - having enough money for that cutting-edge cyberarm or that magical sword often means having enough money to retire in luxury. And less...

It's definitely odd to see so many retail and office spaces closed downtown. Wrrf. Even businesses that are open are going to be suffering from all this. About the only places I can think of that aren't going to take a major downturn in revenue may be shipping and grocery stores - and that assumes they aren't directly  hit by infection issues. Steven Universe came to a full end this last week. Appropriately enough for a series that dealt heavily with relationships, identity, and helping people work through their problems, the final arc leaned heavily into Steven himself needing to find his way. It felt a little too simple for me, though. I feel like it may be unfair of me to say, considering this is a series in which many things span beyond the 15 (10?)-minute episode run time. Many issues have been resolved quicker than they probably "should" have been. I'm not sure if maybe it's just because it feels close to home, but shining a light on Steven's ...

I sort of have to talk about the two together, I think. So, Kit started gearing up to run a little plot in the future of FurryFaire via Discord. Frankly, I'm not so enamored with Discord as a venue for roleplaying, but I see it's got ups and downs so... meh to that part. While Godbound is based on playing growing divine characters, it does have rules for mortals/heroic mortals, and the pitch involved making characters as the latter. As usual, I was fairly slow to really sit down and take a look, though as the game design has a high degree of overlap with d20 D&D the shock wasn't too great. There are a few inherent "problems" in applying it to Faire, though. Now, in fairness, that would be true of virtually any RPG system. The MUCK's reality has been shaped by the systems used before, and any new one introduces things that suddenly can or cannot be done or simply function differently. The Gifts appear to fit in Godbound as a major component of what divine...

Time to shift gears, organize thoughts, and refresh my memory. So, our Blue Rose campaign has officially wound down. The ending was a little anticlimactic, but reasonably suitable, with the party getting to tell their story to the queen and being offered titles/knighthoods. I wonder if everyone else had to ponder that as much as I did in that moment. But that means next week it'll be time to take up the 13th Age game that was pitched late last year for Tuesday night Discord-based play. I did go through the process of making a character, but that was two or more months ago now and I haven't really looked at any of the material since. That makes this a good opportunity to do some analysis. 13th Age itself seems relatively familiar as a D&D derivative. Certainly, there are differences in details, but d20+modifiers against an armor class with a familiar range for abilities makes it less intimidating than something wholly different. There are some notable differences in things...

Well, Kit's going on about Blue Rose and wanting to start up a game on Discord. So, I took a whack at character creation. Honestly? It turned out to be one of the most disappointing and depressing experiences in a while. Start with a character concept. Okay, that makes sense, but that's either really easy or really hard for me these days. In some games, I can get away with making a character mechanically and seeing how things fall personality-wise. When a game has some focus on goals, bonds, motivations, and relationships from the outset, though, that's not really an option. No solid idea burst forth for me (true more often than not, but it occasionally happens), so I decided I'd at least try going through the mechanics to see if anything gelled further. That process, I found disappointing. The game rules strike me as an odd combination of newer sensibilities (with baked-into-creation goals and such) and ones more befitting an RPG from the 80's (elements depende...

It's been a long time since the (mostly) point-and-click adventure games The Longest Journey and Dreamfall: TJL came out. I enjoyed both, though, for their themes and stories and characters, even if the gameplay was largely just passable. Dreamfall: Chapters was a much more recent time ago, and while I didn't buy in early, I did pick it up on Steam once all five chapters were out, probably during a sale or something. I've recently started playing. I sort of dislike the fact that it focuses on Kian and Zoe rather than the original character I liked better, April Ryan, but I just hit a point in the story that reintroduces one of my favorite supporting characters: Crow. He is a talking bird. In fact, when he found out that "crow" is a type of bird some time after April had named him that, he was rather upset about it. But seeing him again really made me smile. Nostalgia factor to ten! Even without that, though, his sense of humor and quirky nature make him fun...

While I still pondering if there's any interesting directions to go with existing characters, I found myself creating a new one of late that's been rather interesting to think about. Pull an existing character into a new group of people to play with? Possible, but... risks being pulled in too many directions at once, and that's not particularly good. Make a new character? Maaaybe, but what? Plenty of possible family members as characters, though that might be overdone. Hmm. One of the other players is a big anime fan. Hmm. So the idea that came to mind was an alternate-timeline characters. Chiaruscuro Kala S'yalin was born to Dove and Kyn'Elwynn in a world where they got together. She's a family member, but the rosters of her family and the existing S'yalin clan are very, very different. The heritage gives her an affinity for life, light, and shadow. A tiger-striped white vixen is fairly striking in appearance. Add on Tyrael-style "wings" of s...

Now this is work Jezra would enjoy and be capable of...

After the dissolution of the Star Wars RP that was running online, it was suggested I perhaps make a character for Lords of Gossamer and Shadow. It seems to be tashiro 's latest RPG obsession. I've had a lot of difficulty with this. G&S is what I might call an "anything-goes, multiversal" game. It takes place in a setting of essentially-limitless worlds/realities connected by the Great Stair. So, at least as I understand it, a character can not only be from a Steampunk world, but that world can have totally different (meta)physics from the next one. Firearms may or may not work, magic may or may not be real, and so on. In any given "Gossamer World," what works just works. From one world to another, however, the only stuff guaranteed to work is that which is based on certain powers (and thus paid for with character points) that are fundamental to the meta-reality of the setting. There's a lot of freedom in that. Unfortunately, that trips me up. W...

I've used the term "spark" in discussing characters and roleplaying games in progress - usually in reference to something that's lacking. Maybe it's the initial spark of inspiration that leads to a plot/story or maybe it's the spark of chemistry between characters that makes them feel like there's more between them than just carrying out actions in the same location. What still eludes me is how to light those little embers. It's a lot easier to see something is lacking than to fix it, especially when it's something so ephemeral. And though I've pondered it some of late, I don't feel any closer to epiphany either in a specific case or in general. How do you make characters and stories that really "click?"

Okay, the family lines on Furryfaire are pretty screwy. That's what happens when you get a relatively small set of players playing multiple characters over several generations and many of those characters range from "long-lived" to effectively immortal. I never really planned on the conception of Wren (via Arion and Dove) and Ashley (via Shaden and Fireheart), but it had at least a few interesting possibilities. Given Arion's a deity and Fireheart is an avatar, it made sense that the pair would be raised by Shaden and Dove in Drachenkeep. It was a stretch from my current baseline hybrid philosophy, wherein I generally take the physical species/form of one parent and fur patterns or specific minor traits from the other. I had a little image in my head when I started thinking about it of a pair of princesses with enough of a mischievous streak to occasionally impersonate one another. So I split the difference, went with the mothers' vulpine species and settled on...

So, I've mentioned lately thinking about what to do with Jezra, one of my more active-in-recent-memory MUCK characters. Plus, someone keeps encouraging me to talk about characters, so... some specifics, I guess... I said recently: "... she seems to have hit a pretty static point that's not real inspiring either. Relationship drama has died down as she found a niche with Orion and Tash that (so far, at least) seems to be working fairly well. Business is fine and dandy. I find myself thinking 'something' needs to happen to shake things up a bit. Life without conflict is realistically nice, but narratively kinda boring. ;)" Also, the character itself doesn't have a lot of excitement built in, which seems to be a frequent character creation flaw on my part. She's fairly well adjusted and perhaps disturbingly smart. I envisioned her as sort of like the movie portrayal of Tony Stark in creative brilliance, but she doesn't have the ego. That has a lot...

Collecting some thoughts, I suppose. Youngest daughter of Kyn'Elwynn and Amber, Sarine is not even a year old in "present" FFa time. I have, however, conceptualized and played some ahead. Borrowing shamelessly from the Blades of Namara in the Fallen Blade series , I decided early on that Sarine would be brought up to be Mika's "Talon." The Blades are/were an order of assassins serving the goddess of justice, existing to serve as balance against high-level corruption. When an evil, abusive noble or ruler arises who'd beyond the reach of the law, Namara points one of her followers after him... In the context of Furryfaire, it strikes me that the Horsemen serve a similar function, but 1) they have to be "hired" and 2) they adhere to a very specific set of guidelines for what makes a worthy target. Sometimes, it's useful to have someone who can act a little bit outside a framework like that, and it makes a certain amount of sense to me f...

Dreams last night about family and meals and insecurity, though I can't really recall specifics. Caught the Bourne Identity on TV last night, not for the first time. Somehow, this time I started seeing and feeling (the parallels in tone) similarities to how I envisioned my quasi-cyberpunk Fool's Moon variant of Mika. Movie release? 2002. Hmm. Logs with the character go back to 2001 and possibly earlier. Amusing. Work's been scrambling and chaos, trying to fulfill poorly thought out requests in frustratingly short times amid email server problems that put us down in that regard for about an hour and a half this morning. Plus phones, new users... argh.

After stress yesterday at work and more today, I feel run a bit ragged. But, once again, things are functional for the moment, at least. Yay? Probably going to try to see Prometheus this weekend, though I'm not sure where my expectation level is, exactly. I've been reading more Chronicles of Elantra, and plan a post more on the series than the individual books when I finish the latest. Chatted this morning with a coworker who's really into Diablo 3 (though due to distractions like getting married, is still in Nightmare mode). In the process, I'm realizing/admitting/declaring that it's getting less fun not because of the repetition, but because of the frustration. One of his big points was how powerful the game made him feel. Well, that's true in Normal. Even somewhat in Nightmare, though it gets more challenging. I'm about halfway through Hell difficulty and I dread coming across champion packs and rares. They may drop better loot, but at best I'll ha...

Last night was actually the most fun I've had in a tabletop roleplaying session in a while. I think some of this stems from a chance to really get into and think about some character development. When knee-deep in an active campaign, certainly there are signs of change in characters. You can see the trends of where XP is being spent (or what feats are chosen, or whatever). But it isn't always so simple to see what those changes really mean for the character. Last night we picked up with a little time lapse after a previous campaign. It's unfortunate only two of the four players present had (surviving) characters to carry over, but I was lucky enough to be one. When I started Rowan, she was a self-centered syvani (elf) smith. Her archery was excellent, but she would be more happy in a workshop than out on an adventure. She'd studied as a wical (priestess), but was never very serious about it. Thrust into a foreign land under assault by a demon-guided oroka (orc)...

Jezra "Moonshadow" Falia Born to the hoomiku Cyra and skole Spiritstorm (and there might have been magic or a blessing involved in that hybridization, but they're not telling), Jezra seems to mostly take after her mother... Her underside, paws, muzzle, and tailtip are a light grey color while the base of the rest of her pelt is more a burnt orange. She bears hoomiku markings, including the darker rings around her plush tail and the rosettes over much of her fur - each one a darker umber color framed in wisps of silver fur like the corona during an eclipse. Her long ears poke up through hair that's a soft powder blue. Bright green eyes hint at the sharp mind behind them. Most of her clothing runs in shades of brown, including a double-breasted leather vest with bright brass buttons, knee-length pants, and high boots. A wide belt circles her waist with a couple large pouches and loops for a number of her tools as well as a sidearm holster. For work protection, she ...

I've mentioned before that I usually find characters with motivation more interesting to play (or to play with). And reading an article on the importance of character wants to a story (implying that a lack thereof should usually be reworked). That got me reflecting on previous characters, naturally, and considering nuances as applicable to roleplaying. I do keep coming back to my Exalted character, Alexandra, are one of my most memorably-motivated characters. Heck, she wanted nothing short of to fix the world with the establishment of a new, better order. In most games, that's be a rather unobtainable (though not necessarily bad) goal. In Exalted, though, it fit right in. I sort of regret not being able to take the reins more and have her steer the course due to certain issues that needed to be dealt with "now" keeping any such plans from really taking hold. I was puzzling out possible ways to work an alliance with Lookshy in order to build up support in the reg...