New on Desk #39 — Fall Equinox Braggadocio

The week’s been comfortably routine. Let’s see what I’ve managed to pull together for your entertainment. See the clown dance! Why is the clown crying, daddy?

True investigative journalism

My phone can totally take pictures, even if that’s admittedly only because it’s impossible to buy a phone that doesn’t have a camera these days. I’m very much not a smart phone person, and my phone is not a smart phone, but there it is.

So what I did just now was that I went and took a few pictures of my brother’s geek cruft library that I’ve been working to rescue over the last few months. As you can see, the photos look like ass compared to what you’d get with a camera. I used to do freelance journalism in my younger days, so I have the basics of photography down, but eh — not important enough to dig up a real camera for.

The executive synopsis on this library business is that while I’m a pretty non-materialistic person myself, my elder brother is a true OG (original geek) consumerist hobbyist who’s spent decades amassing every imaginable kind of geek stuff in the way only a white collar professional with too much disposable income can achieve. The library’s adventured here and there over the decades, but with the general dawning of the digital age and housing expenses being what they are down in the big city, the vast majority of the library is stored here in the boonies. It is what it is, and I’ve discussed before how for me this is something of a monument to human folly, what with the low practical use rate that a private library like this has, and the great amount of money that a person has chosen to earn and then spend in cultivating the collection.

As the imagery I captured doesn’t really comment much on the contents, let’s just say that the collection has some emphasis in American superhero comics, American genre pulp literature and roleplaying games. The boardgames you can see on the left side shelves are practically an accidental sideline in comparison to the truly feverish march of the infinite Marvel/DC TPBs.

Anyway, the collection’s been stored at the clan seat library wing for the last decade, but what with the family evolving new ideas for how to use the space, and with the general disrespect for superhero comics, it was decided to throw the collection out. My brother, the protagonist of the story, has apparently been cultivating his detachment, as he gave free lien for the clan to trash the entire collection. This being, frankly, insane, I took it upon myself to see to some more rational disposal; at the very least we can arrange to divest the majority by second-hand sales and as gifts, and perhaps maintain an essential core collection for another decade. (Who knows, maybe we’re all digital by that time.)

And that, dear friends, is like 40% of the reason for why I haven’t been the most productive in writing stuff for the last few months. Moving the library took some doing, as we first had to clean out a suitable storeroom, and then pack the library and transfer it to its new home. The library’s current-day size scope is ~200 cardboard boxes, so the move did involve a bit of muscle wizardry.

But now the project’s finished enough to brag about. As you can see from the pictures, the collection is generally packed away in an ultra-dense box formation in a newly cleaned out storage room with a fair bit of insulation. (The white square you can see in the middle of the newsletter feature art is actually not a descending Modron; it’s a piece of styrofoam pressed against the back window to improve insulation.) A brand new space heater should maintain the storeroom temperature above freezing over the winter, too, so for all I know this might prove to be an excellent location to store paper and such. There are already some quite pleasant side plans for how to take advantage of the store room’s excess space, like storing winter potatoes that apparently prefer similar temperatures to what the books enjoy.

Disposal strategy

Related to my great labour of storehouse clearing (comparable to the Augean stables to my mind), I might as well set down a few words on the longer-term disposal strategy for the geek cruft library. Might prove illuminating to others struggling with similar 1st world problems.

As I’ve documented in prior newsletters, I’ve established a pipeline of second-hand sales at a regional flea market. The sales there aren’t the worst, frankly; the locals seem to be willing to buy surprisingly geeky stuff on occasion. I’ve focused on Finnish-language and language-free materials so far, but just yesterday I switched out the music record selection (CDs and LPs) in favour of some geek novel trash and such; if those sell, I’ll probably end up holding a table at the flea market basically indefinitely, what with the thousands of paperbacks stored in the backrooms. If they don’t sell, we’ll have to think of some other venues for the geekier materials in the library.

The current strategy has had an outflow of approximately 50 liters of stuff per week, so about two of those cardboard boxes used in the move. That’s about 1% of the total volume of the library, which isn’t too bad — we could be finished with disposing of the collection in just ~4 years. Unfortunately I suspect that the English-language materials won’t generally sell that well. Old video games fly off the shelves (which in itself is strange; who around here wants to pay 30 € for a somewhat uncommon Playstation game?), but we’ll have to see how the English-language superhero comics and genre literature succeed.

While I’m thinking of other disposal strategies, such as gifting selected sub-collections to the public libraries in the area, I have to say that I have become a bit fond of the flea market strategy: as long as the sales flow, the disposal is being effective about sending these materials to new homes where they are appreciated (hopefully in some life-affirming way), and I make some petty cash on the side.

Newsletter filler: old school D&D development notes

Because a couple of hours of old school D&D lab every day is apparently my only regular routine nowadays, we might as well look into a few things that’ve bubbled up this week:

Docket-based asynchronous chat play

The Coup campaign tried a new medium of play this week: instead of spending the entire face-to-face (or face-to-camera-to-screen-to-face, I guess) session dealing with a variety of parallel downtime maneuvers, we could instead resolve these planning-heavy game developments in text chat over the week. The maneuvers themselves can range from equipment purchases to interviewing NPCs to outright resolving simple yet significant pivot situations in the campaign, all to better ensure that when we next convene for further play we can get to the adventuring bits faster.

I call this new format “docket-based play” due to how I’ve formulated a little bit of structure for how we engage with the process. Like so:

1. Somebody (could be the GM) writes up a docket that summarizes the topic to be decided on and the most significant strategic elements involved. The docket describes what the chat needs to decide on, and any resolution procedures used to resolve the events.
2. The chat engages in free discussion of the situation, and hopefully attains a decision of some sort on the docket.
3. If the docket has not been resolved before the next actual session (player disinterest, too complex, whatever) we can return to it in actual session and either delay resolution or put it to bed face to face, the way we normally do.

It’s too early to say if the docketing is useful, but we’ll find out over the next few weeks I’m sure. Here’s an example docket to illustrate what they are like:

A monster I stole from a tv show

I watched a few episodes of Owl House this week; it’s a Disney all-ages adventure cartoon, a little like a less zany Star vs Forces of Evil. A bit heavy on the life lessons for children, but that’s the target audience, so maybe they’ll like. Either way, the phantasmagoric elements aren’t entirely worthless, the show’s got some pretty neat magical things. The second episode inspired me to do a monster-writeup. Nothing extra-special, just a monster that might be interesting for D&D.

I thought that it was a pretty neat monster, as it has this clear puppetry-and-tentacles-based limitation on the extent of what it can do. There’s also a bit of a puzzle element as adventurers have to distinguish a hostile ghost puppeteer from other somewhat similarly behaving creatures like doppelgangers or zombie plagues. In many encounters the actual ghost puppeteer will get away simply because the strange events — whatever the monster is up to — can be explained by other means.

A new take on Wizard spell slots

We talked about streamlining the Wizard Class’s spell slot system just today in the lab. The problem was that the spell slot system makes magic feel like ammunition for a gun. My position is that the spell slot system is too distinctively a part of the wizard’s magic for me to wish to get rid of it, but that nothing prevents us from reworking it into a slimmer and less ammunition-like shape. Something like this:

The Wizard gets slots equal to level, so a 5th level Wizard gets 5 slots and so on. The “spell slots” are an abstract representation of the wizard’s capability for preparing multiple personally maintained spells in the face of magical cross-contamination and awry magical harmonies and whatnot, so the slots don’t “really” exist. Nothing in particular prevents a wizard from prepping more spells than they have slots for, it’s just that you get to roll for it and might end up with a magical mishap if you push your luck.

The slots have to be elevated to specific level, as they do not possess a level natively. Some magical traditions allow you to elevate a few spell slots permanently to whatever level, allowing you to prep a spell of up to that level for that slot, but for the most part you’re forced to elevate your slots yourself every time you prepare spells, and this costs time and money (in the form of ritual requirements like reagents and work-force). The maximum level a Wizard can elevate a spell slot to is their own character level, so e.g. a 3rd level Wizard can elevate and prepare up to a 3rd level of spell if willing to pay the price.

Here’s how much it costs to prepare a spell of a given level:

Level	Time	Wealth	Difficulty
1	1 Turn	1 rupee	[depends on system, but goes up]
2	1 Hour	10 rupee
3	1 Day	100 rupee
4	1 Week	etc.
5	1 Month
6	1 Season
7	1 Year
8	etc.

The slot has to be elevated again every time you wish to memorize a new spell. The expenditures are somewhat flexible: you can get by with one step less in one category by going up one step in both of the other two categories. Considering the high level of expense at higher spell levels, it is fortunate that the expenses are also mitigable: having a laboratory, a summoning circle, rare reagents, cultist aides, and anything else that might help, will grant reduction to time, wealth and skill required to be successful with a high-level spell. The above numbers are the default negotiation position the GM holds, if you’d like to think of it like that.

So far this has all been a massive nerf on the Wizard, right? Less spell slots, and prepping spells has become very expensive. However, here’s the bright side:

The Wizard can improvise a related cantrip of half the level from a prepared spell. “Cantrip” here simply means a spell cast at-will. “Related” is a metaphysical conceit that depends on the campaign, but Burning Hands and Fireball are probably related, for example. Improvising a cantrip does not expend the spell, as the pattern of magic is stable enough to replenish itself when the Wizard leans on it for a minor magical working.

The kind of Wizard these changes are supposed to achieve is one that has much freedom in developing their magical load-out. You can prep low-level magic into your spell slots and use it, or put the effort into developing a high-level array. High-level spells are very difficult to memorize, so you don’t want to sling them around for trivial reasons; instead, you retain the spell once memorized and leverage it for continuous magical power in the form of the potent cantrips it offers. You probably want to combine low and high level spells in your array to serve different needs, but the choice is yours.

The lower overall number of spell slots at mid-levels combined with the expense of casting powerful spells trivially should make the Wizard feel a bit different than usual, all without really doing much to change the system of spell slots and spell levels.

An idea for magical mishap tables

Continuing from the alternate wizard ideas, we discussed various arrangements of magical mishap tables. These see heavy use in our local scene, as we’re all about interpreting the magic rules as a formal baseline of security; magic-users can generally try out all kinds of wacky ideas, it’s just that you may have a mishap of some sort if you do.

So my brilliant idea about how to implement powerful and usable magical mishap tables:

Mishap tables are Astral random encounter tables: Instead of being merely random mishaps (or even worse, LOL-random), the mishap tables do double duty as the random encounter tables for the Astral Plane. Whatever can occur in a magical mishap can also occur to an Astral traveler. This provides you with a ready-made table format (assuming you have something you’re happy with for a random encounter method), plus a hygienic principle, and the tables are more useful when they apply to two uncommon-ish circumstances.

Astral geography is Dweomer-based, and so are mishap tables: Just like random encounter tables, your mishap tables will probably have some kind of structure, perhaps revolving around schools of magic or colors of magic or dweomers (as in our Coup campaign) or whatever. Whatever kind of structure you attach to magic, that’s also the geographical structure of the Astral Plane: if you have a distinct Necromantic Mishaps table to be used when Necromantic magic misfires, then that implies that the Astral Plane has places where that table rules the roost, as well.

There exists an Astral Ranger, a magic-using class that uses this: Traditionally this class is called the “Wild Mage”, but whatever; I imagine them more as an Astral Ranger who uses magic in its raw natural form instead of shaping it into spells. The core conceit of this peculiar spellcaster Class is that now that you’ve created all these magical mishap tables, here’s a magic-user who doesn’t cast spells — they instead invoke magical mishaps and control them! This is another clever structural backbone intended to keep your mishap table writing honest and creative and relational; not only are you writing up whimsical punishments for a PC spellcaster, but you’re also defining what the Astral Plane is like and arming a potential future player character.

That wild mage thing probably works in practice via some sort of Astral region knowledge skills: your wild mage has a knowledge skill for “Astral Necromancy” that enables them to use the Necromantic Mishaps table. They decide to invoke raw Astral Necromancy, so they get to roll twice in the mishap table and pick the result they prefer (a bit of control there, it’s more interesting than “LOL, so random”), and then roll a suitable skill check or save or whatever to direct and mold the effect a bit, e.g. determining who it hits when it lands. Seems legit.

If you’re wondering about the Ranger simile there, perhaps imagine a non-astral, physical (maybe not mundane, though) version of this magic-user class, one that utilizes random encounter tables to invoke semi-random stuff. Maybe it’s a “Summoner” or something like that. Could be a pretty cool power, being able to call up stuff from the random encounter tables at will and direct it a bit. The tables are right there after all, you’re maintaining them anyway, so why not gamify them a bit more…

Monday: Coup de Main #15

I guess I should say a few words about our actual session of play from last Monday, too. The session involved a lot of urban adventure maneuvering as Rob Banks had meetings and gathered information on this new adventure that the party is pursuing; they’re attempting to do a covert check-up on a Thieves’ Guild member who’s been exiled into the PC base town from the City of Greyhawk. The session was a bit Rob-centered, which is part of why we’re trying out that docket-based chat play format: if we can get more of this prepping and planning stuff out of the way in advance of the next session, that might make the actual session slightly more productive.

My favourite event of the session wasn’t about Rob’s deliberate spycraft (really, Heikki does play a pretty solid spy game here), though, but rather Astur the Fighting Man’s antics in the meantime. Astur’s been trying to pump iron and make friends in Yggsburg on the premise that he’ll be able to improve on his Constitution score by clean living and muscle wizardry. (I haven’t had the heart to tell him how much work it’ll take to improve his formidable CON 15 up to 16, but I guess every victory starts with a single step.) The efforts at socializing with the locals have generally been sad failures, which is starting to make Astur think that maybe he doesn’t need any friends, he can do his gym routines alone just as well. (Shows what he knows: Astur’s self-improvement initiative will require a will of iron and great motivation, which isn’t easy if you’re working alone.)

So anyway, the highlight of Astur’s adventure in non-murderhoboing was indisputably when, on the Waterday of the Spring Festival Week, he joined the Yggsburgian youth in swimming to and fro over the Ery River. It’s something of a local tradition, the youth get to show of their mighty thews (they swim naked) and constitution in the chill waters. The folk tradition is that various citizens send their prayers “over the river” with the swimming youths and pay them for the trouble of carrying the pious hopes, so there’s a bit of a spiritual side to it as well — and an opportunity to make a bit of money if you’re young, husky and comfortable putting on a bit of a show. A matter of constitution, surely, to swim to and fro for many times over the day.

Astur’s a doughty farm boy from a shepherd family, so of course he joins the festivities, intending to impress the local boys and girls with his swmiming proves. Hench #3, a local boy himself, even goes with to collect the money and run a rescue boat in case Astur gets into trouble. This is all nice slice of life stuff, I improvised the entire little scenario for the heck of it.

Now, Astur apparently has a problem that we weren’t aware of before: he can’t swim for shit! Or rather, Esa can’t roll a swimming roll to save his life, which for Astur could well be a literal consequence even at a friendly town festival if Esa can’t get his dice-rolling act together. Astur struggled his way over the river with great difficulty on the first try, only barely making it to the shore, and certainly not drawing any great attention to his athletics when there were all these local young rakes there, experienced in the feat and willing to put the goods on display. The river was shallower than it seemed, and there were treacherous rocks there where it’d be easy to bash oneself by accident when trying to swim vigorously through the current.

Astur wouldn’t be deterred, though, so he went for a second run on the premise that the law of averages would win out. Not so! On the second swim Astur mis-called the waves, breathed in some water and went into drowning panic. Good job, hero! So now Astur’s drowning, and where’s Hench #3 with that rescue boat? Why, he’s still on the shore chatting with the fellow who paid for Astur’s second swim. This could be the most hilarious death in the campaign yet, as it’s not like people on the shore would necessarily notice, or even be able to help, if Astur goes down.

The funny conclusion to the story is that Astur has this dog, Turri, who’s supposed to be something of a dungeon dog — he’s seen some shit, this dog, what with falling off the stairs into the vermintide back at the adventure location and such. Turri has a 1/6 chance of noticing Astur’s difficulties and reacting appropriately, so of course Turri rolls that ‘1’ on order. The dog’d already swam over the river once after Astur earlier, but hadn’t yet gone into the water for the second trip (he clearly didn’t like the water), but as Hench #3 was too dumb to react to Turri’s barking, he had no choice but to jump into the river himself and go fetch his master from the undertow.

As far as I understand, the party is not intending to reward the heroic dog in any way. I guess dogs are truly Good creatures, though, doing their best with out any expectation of reward. They’re not even going to let Turri stay home when they go on their next suicide dungeon run.

State of the Productive Facilities

I dunno, maybe I’ll just keep working on the Coup campaign. I’m a good GM and it’s a good campaign, so what if I can’t be bothered to write anything for the rest of the world to enjoy?