Velocimancer Games

Alrighty, let’s ease back in.  My birthday weekend has concluded, and it’s time to get back into the swing of things.  Doing a TTRPG Tuesday today, not because I couldn’t/didn’t want to do a MM yesterday, but because I’m playing DnD today and I just wrapped up the playwriting class I was teaching and I feel inspired to hang out in the role-playing headspace.  So, I figured I’d keep going with one of the scenario ideas I ginned up last time. THE DOLLIE EXTRACTION Alt OPERATION HALL OF MIRRORS The Hall of Mirrors is a former cruiseliner turned colony owned by the reclusive Dr. Sonal Halliyal.  The Company aggressively pursued a contract with Dr. Halliyal at the start of her illustrious career, but she ultimately signed on with a rival corporation before eventually starting her own endeavour, DOLLIE Consulting.  From early days, Dr. Halliyal’s work ethic was the stuff of legend, and her chosen field of custom-grown organ and tissue synthesis exploded as a res...

It may have started as a salvage/cop-out but I enjoyed doing last week’s TTRPG Tuesday.  I need to set aside some designated writing time, and some of that should be game build time - and perhaps I can ease from one to the other with some of the aforementioned scenario building.  An idea I particularly liked from back when I studied improv was to always maximize specificity.  My best friend still quotes “Cough Medicine is good.  Robitussin is better.  Waltussin is best”, and for better or for worse it has put in me a dread of generalities and vagueness.  We all want to connect with our audiences, we all want that universal or timeless experience.  But I think that you have to be timely to be timeless, and you can’t be universal if you’re not you. Lol so anyway, I’m trying to think of the little details that can make those Company scenarios more tangible and strange.  Weathervane could be in a desert, and not just any desert but the Sonoran or the...

Well, despite what I wrote to my accountability team yesterday, it somehow escaped my ability to do a Mechanic Monday.  I have a streak going though and I’d like to keep it, so what better time to resurrect an old friend, warped beyond recognition by time and neglect: TTRPG Tuesday! My friend Logan recently ran a successful KS Campaign for his Zine RPG, The Company.  It’s an obsession letter to, among other things, corporate-exploitation scifi.  The KS release has the core system as well as a starting scenario; locations, enemies, plot, its own set of scenario-unique mechanics.  I’d like to dig into the rules and create my own scenario, so I thought I’d brainstorm some possible setups and ideas for hooks/mechanics. Magic, Inc. (alt. The Dancing Broom, Imagination Lab, The Sorcerer’s Workshop) - The development complex of a monopolistic entertainment company has gone haywire, with a young scion of the ownership family trapped obliviously inside.  Inspired by ...

Must type quickly, as I’ve been working on grants stuff and have run out of daytime.  So the non sequiturs are going to hit hard, and they are going to hit fast.  One thing that’s been rattling around this spent candy shell of a skull that I have, is the half-finished thought “Every lesson is incomplete until you teach it”.  Gonna keep tinkering with that particular cookie fortune but I really cannot deny that teaching my playwriting class has been so tremendously helpful in terms of getting my thoughts in order.  Not that they are, in fact, the best thoughts, nor is the order entirely quite right! I’ve been listening to podcasts at 1.5x speed, and when I get nervous, I certainly teach at that speed as well.  But it’s true: the more I have to articulate, instruct, and tailor the lesson to the student, the more questions I have to answer, the more challenges to my understanding, the better grasp I feel on the subject.  I’m dissecting my own assumptions bette...