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In which Papyrus gets a diagnosis

i love your takeaway from the JJ Abrams Mystery Box was "it's because what's in the mystery box is developed/good/exists. you wouldn't get it."

It only works if you set up several conflicting theories as to what is in the mystery box that are all equally plausible. The audience has to feasibly be able to reach the "correct" answer, but they can never be sure. That's intrigue! Otherwise, all you're doing is telling the audience that a really deep and well written story is happening just off screen I promise.

One of the writers of LOST came to speak at my school once. He told the crowd "I could totally tell you guys what the island is but I'm not gonna" And the crowd went nuts. That shit made me so mad. It has been a decade since that show went off the air. If you had an actually narratively satisfying answer for that question, you would have said it by now. Or better, you would have put it in the damn show.

my mind is sprung with creatures galore

IN A WORLD WHERE BEAUTY AND ATTRACTIVENESS HAVE BECOME SO COMMONPLACE AND MUNDANE THE EXCEPTIONAL UGLINESS HAS BECOME DIVINE

I'm on my 15 minute break but I tried to list a bunch of my favourite off-brand love languages

List is incomplete

There was a young man from Peru

Whose limericks stopped at line two

Singleplayer

What to do If One Finds Oneself at a Festival

Accept every dance. Everyone dances; do not draw attention to yourself by refusing. They may discover that you do not belong here. 

No, they are not wearing masks. 

It’s alright, calm down, there’s no need to get worked up. They may not be wearing masks, but its best that you keep yours on. 

Have your offering ready. What do you mean you didn’t bring one? You have ten fingers, don’t you?

Do not look upon the gods when they arrive. You are not yet one of them. Gazing upon them will burn you through and through.

When the screaming begins, scream along. You are in pain. You are. 

Participating in the Hunt is a great honour. If you are chosen, do not wait for the starting shot. If you are caught, you will be killed. That is the fun of the Hunt.

Take advantage of the form you have been given, claws, hooves, wings, etc. Do not focus on a form you no longer have. 

Aren’t the flowers lovely? A young something-or-other braids them gently through your hair. The stems pierce your skin and take root. By this time next year, your hair has become a garden.

The music is joyous but something about it fills you with dread. You realize its because you cannot hear it. But you feel it; it is vibrating in your bones and it is beautiful.

Upon the table are laid fruits and meats which you have never seen before. Some bleed, some sing, some shout prophesies up towards the sky. It is all delicious. 

Night will fall eventually. You will sigh, satisfied by a glorious day. You will ask how to leave. You will only receive strange looks. Fond, but strange.

Leave? You want to leave? But the festival isn’t over. It will never be over. Stay for a while longer. Stay forever. Dance with me.

fun fact about me is that when i was a kid id write capital E’s with as many of those little horizontal lines as possible and id call them ladder E’s and adults fucking hated them

Beastly Reminder

Everyone agrees! Your intestines squirming around like eels in your belly is horrifying!

so what you're gonna do is you're gonna trim the top off a bulb of garlic, using the knife's edge to take off the tip of every individual clove, that's important. you're gonna place the garlic face-up in a square of tinfoil, drizzle with olive oil, wrap completely in foil, place in baking tray, repeat with a copious amount of garlic bulbs. you're gonna put that baking tray in an oven set to 375-400°F, for 30-50 minutes, until soft and browned. you're gonna toast some good bread, slather generously with butter and honey, maybe a tiny lil bit o' salt. and then. you're gonna SQUEEZE. OUT. THAT. ROASTED GARLIC. onto the butter honey toast. and you're gonna eat it. food stolen directly from the plate of the gods. that's what you're gonna do.

Today in niche genres of joke that I can never get enough of and will probably still be secretly thinking about four years later

My favourite Wikipedia page of all time is definitely the one of aptronyms - aka, names that suit the person who has them. Here are some gems:

WITCHY SAGE BUTTER ROLLS

These things are really like garlic rolls meet cinnamon rolls but with delicious sage butter!

They are perfect if you have a little extra time on your hands, and can be served alone or with a dinner, stew, or any type of soup and it pairs pretty well.

Quite the crowd pleaser ^_^

INGREDIENTS

For the Tangzhong:

2 tablespoons  bread flour

2 tablespoons water

4 tablespoons whole milk

For the Bread:

4 cups Bread flour

4 tbsp sugar

1/3 cup milk

A full packet of Instant Dry Yeast

2 large eggs

Half a stick of Salted butter

For the Egg Wash:

1 large egg

1 tbsp water

For the Sage Butter:

7 tbsp Salted butter

1 tsp garlic salt

2 tsp ground sage

1 tsp thyme

2 cloves minced garlic

DIRECTIONS:

Heat the Tangzhong ingredients over medium heat until they become very thick, about the consistency of a very thick brownie batter. It should be congealed enough so that it doesn't slide off the spatula very easily. This should take no longer than 5 minutes. Let it cool down completely (If you add it in hot, you will risk killing the yeast and the bread will not rise.

(What is Tangzhong?) Its a mixture of flour, milk, water that really steps up your game when it comes to the fluffiness of the rolls. Once you try adding this to your basic breads, you wont go back!

Bloom yeast in warm milk (Put in the microwave for about 15 seconds, it should be lukewarm, not hot. Add Flour, salt, and sugar into a stand mixer with the dough hook attachment.

Crack egg and milk into the yeast and with the stand mixer’s dough hook attachment, mix into the flour mixture. Add in Tangzhong. Add butter 1 tablespoon at a time and mix until the dough is elastic. Then mix for another 5 minutes. If the dough looks too dry, add a tablespoon of water, and repeat until smooth. If it is too liquidy, add a couple pinches of flour.

Put the bread dough in a lightly greased medium bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let rise at room temperature for 2 hours. In the meantime, make your sage butter by beating your salted butter, garlic, and herbs.

Flour the workspace and roll the dough flat to about 1/4 inch thick. Smear all of your butter mixture onto the dough. Roll as you would a cinnamon roll, from the widest side of the rectangle to the other side.

Cover for 2 more hours for them to proof. Then combine egg and water to form your egg wash and brush it onto the rolls briefly before putting it in the oven. Put in the oven at 350 F for 25 minutes or until golden brown.

Enjoy!

I scribed all the spells my wizard learned in our last D&D campaign!

The present tabletop RPG resurgence is great, but I can’t help but feel that a lot of the received wisdom that’s developing about how to run tabletop games is leading new GMs to make things harder for themselves than they needs to be.

Stuff like “I ignore 80% of the rulebook and constantly fudge dice rolls, that means I’m a strong independent GM with a clear vision for my game” – like, yes, that may well be true, but that you’re having to do all that is a pretty clear sign that you’re using a wildly inappropriate system for the kind of game you want to run.

Basically, game rules are not unopinionated. Any game that claims to be universal is lying to you; yes, it’s true that a given set of rules can be reasonably setting neutral, but even the simplest rules bake in a huge number of very specific assumptions about how the game ought to be played. They have to, because that’s what rules do.

Of course, whenever the rules and the GM disagree about how the game ought to be played, the GM is going to win, but that’s not necessarily an argument you need to be having. To draw a parallel, it’s totally possible to start with the rules of soccer and gradually rewrite and pare away bits and pieces of it until you have miniature golf, but you’d have saved yourself a lot of headaches if you’d just started with miniature golf in the first place!

And the thing is, I don’t think most novice GMs are getting themselves into this position on purpose. A lot of folks seem to be getting misled – sometimes by overzealous advocates of this or that popular system, and sometimes just by their own inexperience – that there’s basically only one kind of tabletop RPG, and if the the game they want to play is anything other than that very specific game, it’s on them to figure it out from first principles.

Which just plain ain’t the case. Tabletop RPGs are a hugely diverse hobby, and whatever your perfect game is, there’s probably something very close to it out there already, no matter what it is you’re dissatisfied with. There are tabletop RPGs without dice, tabletop RPGs without GMs, and even tabletop RPGs without player characters – and all of those are totally separate considerations from how complex the rules are. If your ideal game is a highly structured three-hundred-page tome about Regency era comedies of manners in the mode of Bronte and Austen?  That game actually exists – as do countless others.

(Plus, even if you prefer to hack your own systems, you can benefit from expanding your horizons and seeing how other people have approached the subjects you want to take on. As a game author myself, I’ve frequently found myself in the position of having spent weeks or months bashing my head against a particular piece of game design, only later to discover that some game I didn’t know existed had solved that problem thirty years ago!)

And just so nobody can say I’m being a grump without offering any constructive alternatives, there’s an annotated rec list of forty-odd free or pay-what-you-want tabletop RPGs under the cut. If you want to take my advice but have no budget for expanding your library, check any of these out!

Keep reading

ever done a mini-campaign?

When most of us think of a ttrpg campaign, it’s fair to say that long-form campaigns are the prototype. Playing with the same group of players in the same world, following multiple plotlines for a very. long. time. The iconic examples of The Adventure Zone Balance, Critical Role, and Rusty Quill Gaming span out-of-game years in the making. And plenty of folks hold those up as the ideal way to play the game.

Have you ever considered…not doing that?

A short-form ttrpg game might be for you and your friends if your schedules are tight; playing a one-off, single-session game may work better when you never know when you’ll have the chance to play again. Some ttrpgs are also simply designed for shorter gameplay, with natural breaks built in where you can end a campaign.

But at times, you still want the character arc, the delight of building character relationships, and the sense of growing tension across multiple “episodes.” Or maybe you prefer the D&D or Pathfinder system and don’t want to learn to play games that have shorter timelines built in.

Enter: the mini-campaign. Spanning anywhere from five to twenty sessions, it can last as long as you and your GM want. Examples include Dimension 20′s games, as well as the Exandria Unlimited series by Critical Role.

To run a mini-campaign, all the GM needs is a few simple elements.

A contained setting.

A problem endemic to the setting.

An antagonist involved in making the problem worse or better.

A defined end-point that will occur in the near-ish future.

For the first, just come up with a specific setting as normal, then have a pretext to keep the party from leaving for too long.

A simple setting could be a single town, sizable enough that the PCs don’t know literally everyone, and the pretext could be the PCs lack the resources to pay for travel. Or they have homes and family ties in town that they don’t want to leave behind.

More complicated settings could be a snowy mountain range where the PCs are stranded after a zeppelin crash, a tropical island resort where they are on vacation, or a polar research station. The world is truly your oyster here, and the more wildly specific your setting, the more wild the storyline can become.

For the second element, a problem endemic to the setting simply means that this place has a problem that is unique in some way. If I leave the tropical resort, the problem likely will not follow me. For example, the tropical island could have issues with their power grid that lead to frequent blackouts, ruining countless vacations. It’s important to understand that the problem doesn’t have to be this major, systemic issue like speciesism or climate change.

The third element, an antagonist involved somehow, means that either the antagonist wants to deliberately make the problem worse for their own gain, or who thinks they’re solving the problem but it has extremely bad consequences in another way.

In a polar research station setting where the problem is that they’ve lost contact with the outside world, one researcher might be trying to kill their coworkers, having accidentally made contact with a chthonic being from the Fantasy Arctic. The researcher thinks they’re saving the world by preventing the group from drilling any deeper and freeing the being–but it’s only chthonic madness encouraging the violence. In reality, the survivors are the world’s best chance at keeping the entity from rising.

In our tropical resort setting, perhaps a scheming tourist is trying to take advantage of the outages to revenge himself upon his annoying in-laws, frame the PCs for the murders, and sue the resort for emotional damages.

The fourth element makes this into a mini-campaign. The story has a win condition and a lose condition, and the campaign ends with one of those two options. In the tropical resort, catching the murderous tourist and clearing the PCs’ names is the end of the story–or failing to do so, and being arrested or murdered themselves. In the polar research station, either the PCs stop the rise of a chthonic entity or they don’t. Win and Lose.

Essentially, the whole campaign has a ticking clock attached to it. Waiting too long to act means the bomb goes off. Failing means the bomb goes off. And you can’t drag the story out for too long, because one way or another, that bomb has to be dealt with.

Final Notes:

A mini-campaign is best run at lower levels–anywhere from 3rd to 9th, in my opinion. Any higher and the PCs have too much power. Any lower and they’re functional disasters. I encourage a loose level-up structure based on milestone leveling rather than XP, since mini-campaigns don’t have the structure for several high-XP boss battles.

You can add additional plot threads and antagonists as much as you like, but keep in mind they will make your campaign longer accordingly.

Let the campaign be silly, or break out of the usual genre of swords-and-sorcery. Having a secondary genre, like a murder mystery or cosmic horror, can really make a mini-campaign stand out to your players.

You must run a session zero. This is nonnegotiable. The reason? You will need to establish the relationships between PCs before starting, or they will spend too long in the “getting to know you” phase. It’s also just more fun for your players to have established grudges, inside jokes, and so on. Additionally, since you will not be running a sandbox campaign here, you will need to be sure your PCs are buying in to the setting’s premise.

What I mean by that is, if the party is at a tropical resort, they most likely are there because they like tropical vacations (or got dragged along by someone who does). A PC who isn’t built for a world where they take tropical vacations, or who has no vested interest in enjoying their vacation, is unlikely to care about someone else ruining their vacation. Some things need to be established pre-game to make sure everyone is on the same page. I recommend you also discuss the genre: if it’s going to be a murder mystery, the players shouldn’t act like it’s a slash-and-burn total war environment, or what’s the entire point? Good players will respect the genre they’re told they’re playing in, and avoid being too genre-savvy or too genre-stupid.

I know exactly what that is, that’s what my papa-in-law’s been producing