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TTRPG Tuesday: Spaghetti, Meet Wall

Here we are, face to face with, I believe, another Tuesday.  I kind of want to keep it short so that I can go for a run, but also have a lot of thoughts buzzing about my brain.  Let’s just barf out some freeform thoughts for this May the Fourth TTRPG Tuesday!

  • Recently talked over the possibility of writing more scenarios for The Company.  While I’m going to write whatever my grotesque heart and sad little brain want to write, what was mentioned as an actually usable contribution is a pamphlet sized (<1k word count) scenario.  The draft of the DOLLIE Extraction that I handed in was ~1600 words, so that’s still a fairly large amount to work with.  I mean, cutting out the Shepherdesses or otherwise reducing the enemy list, building in less plot or backstory - the same concept could easily (ok, perhaps not EASILY) have come in under 1k.  What might make a good candidate for a shorter thing? Well, it should definitely be one Act.  I’m torn as to whether it should be a standalone adventure (fewer connections backwards or forwards) or perhaps, Romance Novel Christmas Epilogue Novella style, a prelude or coda to something else.
  • On that note, I paged through my full long Mechanic Monday Google doc (which is where I draft all entries to my blog, MM, TTT, or otherwise) and was reminded that I wanted to write The DOLLIE Reprisal.  That could be a good candidate.  In terms of stringing together little arcs, I also think that the grafted weapons one I sketched out could take place after (and feature tech evolved from) the Eurydice Incident.  And the climate tech catastrophe from Weathervane could be what causes the extreme heat for the… one based on extreme heat.  Let’s give that one a working title of Asphodel.
  • Speaking of which, I think the one I’m most inspired to work on is the grafted weapons one - which I’m currently calling The Envy of Ajax.  Things to incorporate: relatively few kinds of enemy template (basically human-machine and test-animal-machine hybrids), though there can be some cosmetic variety; the research lab is a circular compound called the Bullseye; the first few enemy encounters are BRUTALLY hard, to entice the PCs into using the weapons; the players encounter more powerful weapons soon after, which they swap painlessly out for, so the weapons seem benign; the weapons can be upgraded, to further tap into the part of a gamer’s brain that sees the equipment as the character; upgrades take the form of increased player connection to weapon, and hasten the bonding process; the mission objective can be procured about halfway into the Bullseye, so if they’re smart they can leave before the bonding gets too bad, but there’s clearly something toward the center that’s heavily guarded and worth pursuing for the Corp’s (and the characters’) greed; upgrades start to have a cost, sapping blood or energy, replacing body parts; after a certain number of kills, compulsions kick in - if the players don’t escape or kill the supercomputer at the center of the bullseye, they will start to succumb to the will of the machine.  Man, can I fit that into <1k? I think I can.  I should at least try, since writing it longerform than that might decrease its publishability.
  • Also randomly I’ve been thinking of doing a variant of What Makes It Move that’s set on the ocean floor, and uses water to ruin the ink, rather than fire to burn the paper.

And I think that’s plenty of TTRPG content for one week.  Til next time!

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