Needles & Nilbogs

 Happy Thursday! I swear I’m not dead, yet. Just busy. Anyways, it’s almost Homecoming (actually, today is day 4 of hoco spirit week) and I’d like to share a thing I wrote. It is a gaming thing. I have been alluding to it on and off since June.  It’s about homecoming. Specifically, it’s a game about having fun with your friends at homecoming and then realizing there’s an eldritch being at the dance as well. And then figuring out what to do about it. It’s not meant to be a scary game, it’s supposed to be pretty light and cozy.  Anyways, it’s called Rock This Dance and there’s a PDF that looks all pretty and a gdoc in case the pdf doesn’t work. Let me know what you think!  (Technically this was beta read. If you call throwing a pdf at a friend who then skims it beta read. Point is, comments very much welcome and encouraged.)

 I woke up this morning to a bunch of texts from one of my group chats buzzing. Two people had spent about half the night swapping drabbles (in case that’s a new term for you — they’re a term for stories, usually fanfics, that are exactly a hundred words long and a complete story) about any number of things (it started as d&d character drabbles, then switched to actual fanfics). Towards the time I woke up, they had switched to shorter stories, challenging each other to get shorter and shorter but still tell a good story. The last one was only 10 words! I’m also reading some vintage crochet and knitting patterns that were written when space was at a premium. They tend toward, well, short and concise don’t even begin to describe them. More like incomplete (sometimes) and requiring interpretation (always).  So I got inspired. Here are a bunch of really short rpgs and patterns. Each paragraph is a new one, and I’ll give a word count for each, based on the word processor I use....

I’m working on redesigning a role playing game I wrote last year, Ensign of the Week (link is to the current final version of the rules, and the picture at the top of this entry is my sister’s art for a sample character), and it’s having some problems. Most notably, the magic system just isn’t working. I’ve solicited feedback from pretty much everyone I know who’s into rpgs, and everyone’s given me a different answer. From “keep it” to “cut it” to “simplify it” to “cut something else so it’s the easiest option”, they run the spectrum of opinions and options.  I need to decide on something to do about the magic system, so I’m going to ramble on about it here and see if it helps. (And as an aside, the title is with apologies to A. A. Milne and the Winnie the Pooh books.) Sorry this is so late in the day, but today has been high stress and no time.

 This week has been a little hard for me, and there’s nothing I can do about it. I feel out of control and I’m having trouble coping. So I thought today I’d talk about using solo rpgs as a sort of guided meditation, as well as share two that I recently finished writing.  Update, March 27, 2021: I messed something up with the permalink Thursday when I tried to rename the post after I published it, and I had to unpublish and republish the post to fix it  I apologize if it shows up twice.  Second update: Unpublishing and republishing didn’t let me change the permalink, so I’m sorry if it shows up twice for absolutely no reason.  Third update: fixed, after yet another unpublishing and republishing. I think. And at the expense of having to change the date. It was really bugging me.