Progress, sort of?

Some day, this will be a living room.

Sheesh. We/re still unpacking, cleaning the old house, and getting to new the new housemates. We each took falls and scraped joints, we’re banged up and bruised, sore and tired, but we’re making progress.

We’re deeply grateful for the help and moral support we once again received from our friends.

The new neighbourhood is less suburban and more mixed-urban, which means less privacy and more traffic, but also three bus lines right on our street that connect to CalTrain stations. The terrain is rather flat, not steep like our old neighbourhood, so it’s less daunting to take a walk. It also appears t be the world capital of ice cream vendors, with the chimes of ice cream trucks and bike-powered carts constantly ringing. I have not broken down even once yet. Yet.

Big Week!

Two big events in our lives this week, which should help a lot with mental health! First, I accepted a half-time job that I can telecommute for, thanks to a tip and recommendation from my friend Bryanna. If all the hiring paperwork can be taken care of in time, the start date is July 8. I’m very excited about this!

Second, I just signed the lease earlier today for a shared house, and our cats can stay with us. 💖 We heard of this through our friend Karen, and the people we’ll share with seem super-nice. The only sad part is that we could not find anything we could afford in San Bruno, so I will have to step down from the city planning commission. This is not very far, though, a little further south and closer to the Bay.

We’re moving – but where?

You know how we have been struggling in the past year. We had hoped to be able to sublet the main house area and live in the in-law unit; this project dragged on with one hurdle after another until we finally learned that although our friend and landlord was willing to accommodate this arrangement, it is illegal where we live (not permitted by the zoning code). Now we have to leave by the end of May.

We don’t really know where we’ll end up; it’s too expensive in the Bay Area, so we are looking at rural California (Humboldt County), Portland OR, Vancouver BC, and other less expensive places. We’re also looking at shared housing programs.

To be honest, homelessness is on the list of possibilities and pretty darn near the top. We have used up the finances raised for us by our friends on GoFundMe, all our savings, and all our retirement funds. We both have health challenges, physical and mental. My energy level is low, I have not managed to work full-time since my bout with cancer. And we have two cats, which always makes it trickier to find housing.

But since we let our local friends know a few days ago, we have also received offers of help to find a new place, get employment and move, invitations for temporary stays while we search, and so forth. We are poor in money, but rich in friends. As soon as we get back to a sustainable living situation, I will be satisfied; I don’t need more. I love you all.

Play report: At the Stroke of Midnight

Continuing with play reports from Big Bad Con: Friday morning in Games on Demand, I ran Meguey Baker’s At the Stroke of Midnight (Night Sky Games). The premise:

The sun sinks in the sky, bringing long shadows and a wisp of cool air. In a handful of hours it will be midnight. The veil between the world of the living and the world of the dead is growing thinner with each passing moment. At midnight it will open, and those who are able to stand unshaken before the Beloved Dead will be allowed a boon. You and your friends set out for the graveyard, each eager to meet the Beloved Dead and ask a favor from those who have gone before.

It felt perfect to play in October.

System and Setup

Meguey released it three years ago; the full version which I was using is on her Patreon site, but she also released a basic free version on her Medium blog, so you can take a look.

I had scheduled it as a two-hour game, but it’s hard to gauge how long a given episode will take: you can play with 2 to 6 players and the Yahtzee-like mechanics make it difficult to guess when the end is near. As play aids, I had created a cheat sheets for the Signs; and I used my dry-erase Noteboard so we could draw the elements we created.

Misspent Youth: Young, Gifted, and Black

Setup

Last week at Big Bad Con, I ran Robert Bohl’s role-playing game Misspent Youth. Because I was running in a four-hour time block and it’s always a challenge for me to stay within the scheduled time, I cut through setting and character creation by using Misha Bushyager’s playset “Young, Gifted, and Black” from the recent supplement Sell Out With Me. The premise:

“What happens when a group of students from a predominantly Black, inner city public school score highly on a test that propels us to a predominantly white private, suburban boarding school? Will the other students accept us for who we are or will they make stupid ass assumptions about us?

“Will we be able to fit in with them? Do we even want to? Will we have to sacrifice our identities to become more like them or can we plant the seeds of true multiculturalism and make them more like us?”

I had two players, Kai and Joshua, and they were fantastic. The two characters selected from the clique in Misha’s playset were Mike (played by Joshua) and Sandra (played by Kai): 

My Big Bad Con 2018: Part 4

Sunday

Regional map

Initially I had not signed up for anything on Sunday morning because I feared con exhaustion might set in by then. But I woke up in plenty of time to make the 9AM games so I grabbed a free coffee at the registration table and signed up for Brian Vo’s “It Makes A Village,” which sounded like Dungeon World meets The Quiet Year. Spoiler alert: it was. Our characters were:

• Tenrissa the gnome artificer and tinkerer (played by Joey);
• Matais the human fighter and village carpenter (played by Matt);
• Elizabeth “Lizzie” Silverstone the elf bard who lived above the bakery (played by Summer);
• Odd Ev the human thief, secret Santa to the village, who did odd jobs (played by Jim); and
• Ysolde the human mage and would-be schoolmistress (played by me).

My Big Bad Con 2018: Part 3

Saturday

For my Saturday I had scheduled an array of playtests, all games currently being designed by people I love. I started with (Abyssal), a game Forged in the Dark by my friends and colleagues Ash Cheshire and Edward Turner. The premise:

Whenever humans build cities, they create shadows… hidden, dark places beneath the surface, where creatures that aren’t human gather. Some might call them monsters, and they wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But you? You don’t belong to the surface or the shadows. You are in-between… cursed, or infected, or bitten but not yet turned. You stand at the edge of the abyss. Will you hold on to your humanity at all costs, or will you embrace the change that is happening to you?

It was cool to be the first outside group ever to playtest this. There were three settings to explore: Paris, 1793; London, 1888; or Las Vegas, 1971, and the players were asked to pick.

My Big Bad Con 2018: Part 2

Friday

My offerings for Games on Demand (2nd year in a row)

On Friday morning I was scheduled to run a shift at Games on Demand from 9AM to 1PM. Although GoD shifts are all four-hour time blocks, GMs are encouraged to run two-hour games twice because this is useful to attendees who have just a bit of time between events. I was offering the same two-hour games as last year: Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year and Meguey Baker’s At the Stroke of Midnight. It was a treat for me to get to run both: the first group chose to venture in a graveyard at midnight to get a boon from a departed loved one, and the second to follow a community’s preparation for the expected winter hardships. Both groups of players totally “got” the spirit of the games. 

My Big Bad Con 2018: Part 1

Last weekend was the eighth edition of Big Bad Con. I have had the privilege of attending every single instance and even to be part of the staff for the last few ones. It’s my very favourite weekend of the year, my Christmas.

In the last 25 years I have worked for many other conventions (organized events, volunteered, or been on staff) and attended many more, but Big Bad Con is different. It launched in 2011 with a mission to build community among tabletop and live-action role-players. Within a few years, this expanded to mean more: to make the community welcoming to all and particularly to marginalized, vulnerable, under-represented groups. Here are a few of the practical steps taken: 

Play Report: Fate of the Inquisitor

Inquisitors are a dour lot.

After a delay of over two years, I finally ran Fate of the Inquisitor for the first time yesterday at KublaCon.  It was a moral victory to finally be able to do this!

This game is my hack using:

• the rules of War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus I wrote for Evil Hat Productions (PDF available on a pay-what-you-want basis on DriveThruRPG, and Open Content rules on Fate SRD);
• the Warhammer 40,000 (WH40K) setting,
• particularly  as  presented in the Dark Heresy role-playing game from Fantasy Flight Games/Ulisses Spiele, and
• borrowing the random tables from my husband’s Fiasco 40K playset for, well, Fiasco.

Why? Because on the one hand I don’t enjoy the native system for Dark Heresy, it’s just not my cup of tea; and on the other, we have a bazillion WH40K miniatures which were handy to demonstrate the miniatures rules for Fate from War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus. 

I had four players, including my husband Edmund. The other three players (the very nice Gregg, Thomas, and Jon) were new faces to us and to each other. Edmund is well-versed in both the WH40K universe and in the Fate rules I was using, of course. However, the other players had minimal knowledge of either setting or mechanics. Their role-playing background was primarily from games like D&D or GURPS, and were there to learn about the Fate system.