River Williamson – The Gauntlet G+ Archives

I want to give a dream to…

Jason Cordova and all the other moderators on The Gauntlet for always driving the trolls away.

Kate Bullock, Jason Cordova, Saffire Rainbo and everyone else who stayed up past our bedtimes discussing power structures within our hobby and all those tricky topics early this morning.

My face-to-face group played The Final Girl in the style of a extraction mission gone wrong.

My face-to-face group played The Final Girl in the style of a extraction mission gone wrong. It was amazing. Everyone had codenames, their quirks and skills came easily. The introductory scenes were just effortless. In the heart of the mission, playing the cards held so much suspense.

Highly recommend the scenario.

My face-to-face group played Fiasco’s Rat Patrol scenario tonight.

My face-to-face group played Fiasco’s Rat Patrol scenario tonight. These weren’t metaphorical rats either, we played escaped lab rats a la Rats of NIMH. We had a good time with several scenes in the forest, in the nearby mall, and several flashbacks to the facility.

The crowning moment of stupidity was when a rat convinced the others that we needed to set up a blog. To set up a blog we needed to steal a phone. To steal a phone, we needed to break into a Sprint store. We ended up burning down the mall the Sprint store was in.

Played Millennial Apartment Hunters and Kaleidoscope last night.

Played Millennial Apartment Hunters and Kaleidoscope last night. I played with three former art students who are each full-time artists and fabricators now.

Millennial Apartment Hunters had the first death of a player character. Our hunters were a pot dealer, and a rather misogynistic retail clerk. In the last house, the brute attempted a showdown with an oversized vulture. The player then picked up playing the (apparently sentient) vulture.

In Kaleidoscope we talked about a movie that tried to fill the space of Blackhawk Down via decoupage. It was sold as a grundelist masterpiece, featuring several key tenets of the movement: use of self as fuel, bridging the gaps between things, and inherent imperfections (but with flexibility).

Played #QuietYear for the first time tonight.

Played #QuietYear for the first time tonight. I played with my Monday face-to-face group. Our community of around 200 shepherds, farmers, and boatmen managed to stock up well for winter.

The game ended somewhat on a whimper because we became extremely pragmatic once winter started.

Highlights

– Draft sheep, which pull carts and stand 5.5 ft tall at the shoulder.

– The return of high-tech warrior salamander people

– A mad genius teenager named Garrett who nearly died three times.

– Intense racial and religious tension

– A weapon described as “part lance, part bagpipe, all flamethrower.” Called a Hell Pipe by the militia, a Flame Lance by the civilians, and a Hot Pocket by the scientists.

Need a theme for Final Girl?

https://www.geeksaresexy.net/2016/10/30/horror-movie-plot-generator/

My physical-world crew played Millennial Apartment Hunters.

My physical-world crew played Millennial Apartment Hunters. Our first crew was a 39 year old artist(me) and a 22 year-old trust-fund kid with a trendy dog. They met on Craigslist, and had similar needs. They ended up picking a strange collective living experiment with no internal locks and weird crawlspaces between the apartments.

The second game had a mad scientist family. First was Brian, an AI researcher. The second and third were Spousebot 5000, a robot built to care for Brain’s uncanny test tube baby, Sophia They ended up moving into a Frank Lloyd-Wright style house that’s been left alone so long that the shag carpet gained semi-sentience. Its floors were split-level four ways with quarter staircases between each room. The final four floors/rooms were separated by tempered glass, not real walls. How could a mad scientist pass up a house like that?

I’m working on a hack of Lasers and Feelings based around exploring a (space) hulk.

I’m working on a hack of Lasers and Feelings based around exploring a (space) hulk. Creating the tables for the characters and adventure is good fun. I have the tables nearly complete, maybe even playable. The hard part is finding the right skill dipole. Lasers/Feelings is so perfect for its genre, the same with Sorcery/Swords from its game.

Right now I’m leaning towards Memories/Metal as the names. I’m still all over the place with what those skills mean. I considered using Memories to cover human, familiar things and your character’s connection to them. This would leave Metal to encompass personal risk, the unknown, and your character’s self sufficiency. I’ve thought about a dozen other possible meanings, each with their own problems.

I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

#LasersAndFeelings

#SorcerersAndSellswords

#Lovecraftesque #PlayReport from my in-person group.

#Lovecraftesque #PlayReport from my in-person group. We had six people for the game and we played the House Sitter scenario by Jason Cordova. Our environment was perfect for the scenario. We sat on the floor of a converted porch in a cavernous 1920s brownstone. All we could see outside was the faint movement of trees in the nearly still autumn night.

We had some trouble with the shifting roles, much of the group was either not familiar with Lovecraft or story games. As the facilitator, I had to interrupt a few times to remind the Narrator of their limits, and the Witness of their autonomy, but we sorted through most of that in part one. By the time we came to the Final Horror, we were hitting the notes perfectly.

The Watchers and Narrators did excellent jobs making callbacks to established weirdness or clues. We had an old player piano that would only play “Strange Fruit,” and would start and stop at arbitrary moments, the dog whose eyes reflected red in the dark–the way humans’ eyes do–an arcane symbol which seemed to lie behind in every secret place on the property, and an dark ritual blade which at first seemed to be a military surplus knife.

I won’t pollute your play by revealing our Final Horror. You’ll have to find the truth of The Gardenia House on your own.

We played the conclusion of Jason Cordova’s Death Frost Doom adaptation last night.

We played the conclusion of Jason Cordova’s Death Frost Doom adaptation last night. Aniket Schneider played Halwyr, the wizard and Timothy Bennett played Taeros the druid.

My character–Siglind the cleric–came from an alternate timeline, swapped with my Immolator. She was a friend of Halwyr from her timeline, and they traveled to Death Frost Mountain to research it’s secrets. In the adventure, her version of Halwyr died in a zombie ambush. This turned out to be prophetic.

Through the course of the final session, Halwyr’s detached demeanor began to crack. He halted his experiments and started bonding with his companions.

When we faced down with the big bad, Halwyr performed a big ritual to negate the monster’s power. His rural saved the party, but caused him to blink out of existence.

I think the lesson here is “don’t mess with time magic.” At least don’t have dramatically dooming character growth in the same session.