Creating a Rec List

 Oh, hey, guys. How's everyone doing?

Weird, right? Having a blog post up. It's... it's been a couple weeks, huh? I'm back to having a Tuesday off, hence me working on this blog again. Hooray!

Aaaand then I'm working next Tuesday so I can have the following weekend off for my wedding anniversary so.... See you guys again in October???

My coworker says her daughter's wedding was gorgeous and went wonderfully, so yay. Also, congrats to both newly wedded daughters to both of my coworkers. My other coworker's been grumbly about not getting to eat solid foods while recovering from her oral surgery, but she had a check-in yesterday, so hopefully everything healed properly and she's back to normal.

Which means, after next week, where, as I mentioned, I'm taking a few days off so Hubby and I can just have a day to snuggle for our anniversary, I should FINALLY be back to a normal schedule of having Tuesdays and a random second day off per week.

At least, until late November/early December where I may or may not be taking time off to at least see my mom and sister for Thanksgiving. If nothing else, I'll be taking time off for Hubby's birthday.

Plus, both the coworker whose daughter just got married this weekend and myself still have over 100hrs of PTO to chew through, so who knows if there will be more sprinklings of "just taking it for mental health reasons" days. We both feel guilty about ever taking the time off though, because that means the other two workers don't get days off that week. So, who knows?

I feel like I'll be sprinkling more random vacation time in next year though....

OH! And also I want to sneak in a quick congratulations to Dragnime who just got engaged this past week! So happy for you two.

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I think that's all the extra housecleaning I had to do this week. So let's get into some writing updates for this supposedly writing-centric blog, huh?

First and foremost: there is none.

I've been super tempted lately. I've had scenes and mini-plots bouncing in my head. I just haven't had the time or energy to get them OUT of my head.

But I was tempted.

Ronoxym and ChibiSunnie had their birthdays this weekend - Happy Belated to both of you - and I figured "now's the time to break out of my funk! Write stories for them so you can still gift them something without physically delivering or mailing it."

Buuut then I remembered that my story gift for Ron kept me a MONTH to figure out last year, and I had no clue what to do for this one. Try to continue the story? Start from scratch with a completely different concept? Try to find something fanfic wise that he'd appreciate? I was at a loss.

Chibi, however, I had just talked about some fun headcanons with regards to Fruits Basket. Mostly, it was images I hoped the creator Natsuki Takaya would eventually do, or fanart people would make. Things like

Kyo proudly introducing Kazuma (Shishou) to Hajime, or Kazuma getting introductary cooking lessons alongside a 5yo Hajime. Or Machi and Kakeru fighting or Yuki's attention, creating a weird sort of poly relationship. Or just Yuki living as a normal teen/young adult as he and Machi go on double dates with Kakeru and Komaki, and perhaps Machi and Komaki are "forced" to interact as yet again Kakeru vies for most of Yuki's time.

 

Anyway, as I mentioned, these were just scenes. I could do something quick though, right? Even a little drabble would be a surprise to Chibi, and I know she'd cherish it because I gifted something specifically for her, but also because it would be the first bit of narrative writing I've done since the pandemic hit. Considering how much support and encouragement she's given me over the years, but specifically through this one, and considering how much time and effort she puts into ALWAYS making me a Christmas and birthday card each year, I thought it would be a fitting honor to FINALLY get out of my writing funk by creating a story for her birthday.

Alas. It was not meant to be. The week FLEW by (but also dragged on?) and before I knew it, her birthday had arrived and I had nothing to show for it. I debated writing something anyway and still posting it during the weekend of her birthday, but I still ran dry. All of those scenes I stated in that spoiler box above? Like I said, they would be great artwork; freezeframes of these sweet moments. Pictures that didn't need words or even actions to fully capture the essence of the scene.

That, and, while I enjoy the stories, and mangas in general are a fairly quick re-read, I still haven't really read either Fruits Basket or Fruits Basket Another more than once - aside from a couple of Furuba books - so I don't feel confident that I know the characters of Komaki or Hajime well enough to properly keep in-character and get the scenes right. Not without research - i.e. rereads - and not only did I not have the time for it, but also my mangas are kind of buried in the back of a cluttered room right now. So I REALLY don't have the free time to get any of those stories done in a reasonable amount of time.

However, as I mentioned, it DID keep me a month to gift Ron his story for his 30th, so there MIIIIIGHT be hope for me to still become inspired and get something written for Chibi. Plus, there's always the original fandom that brought us together. I just haven't touched anything "Hey, Arnold!" related in so long. I KNOW I'm rusty in their characterizations....

Instead of getting ahead of the game and doing the research I needed to write gifts for my friends, I spent the week on a completely different project that I've been meaning to do for over a month now.

WAAAAAAAAAY back during the week of August 17, the Miraculous Ladybug fandom decided to host a Positivity Week: a week for the fandom to shut down all of the salt and hate and venom flowing through the fandom, and get back to the uplifting positivity it originally had. During this week, people posted what they liked and appreciated about the show. They shared posts explaining the good qualities different characters had. They supported the creators. They supported fandom creators as well by sharing fics, artwork, gif-sets, videos, etc. Most importantly, there were fanfic and fic writer recommendation lists.

I was actually on one of those lists!

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One of the big reasons I kept falling into my writing funks after joining Tumblr was because I'd CONSTANTLY see fic recommendation lists, and I was NEVER on any of them. And it wasn't like I was simply seeing the same stories over and over again. Sure, there's some stories that just about the whole fandom seems to know about and would suggest, but more often than not the lists were all different. A large variety of stories were getting love and recognition.

But I would never be included.

Until August 22.

ML Positivity Week, Favourite Fanfics Day posted by chicoriii

I was... I was dumbfounded. This time period was probably one of my deepest bouts with imposter syndrome and there it was: my name on a rec list. Not only that, on a FAVORITE STORY list! Right above one of the fandom's favorite stories: Under Lock and Key.

I feel so guilty that I haven't acknowledged this honor anywhere yet. And for the dumbest reason too, although, I also feel the most justified with this reason???

So, along with the writing funk, I have been staying off Tumblr because I just don't have the free time or mental energy to go through my active dash. Also, as already stated, Tumblr does, on occasion, hurt my mental health because it is one of my main sources of imposter syndrome. That's mostly due to the aforementioned lack of ever appearing in anyone's recommendations or lack of likes/reblogs on my story shares. Also, because my dash would be flooded with new stories, and I would feel worse about not writing anything myself.

This is why, for months on end, I would only log onto Tumblr long enough to check my notifications, see if I had any messages or asks, and then hop back off without ever really looking at my dash. When chicoriii mentioned me in her rec list, I was still at that point of avoiding Tumblr to make sure it didn't spiral me further. So it was especially surprising and emotional for me to see that I had actually made someone's recommended fic list!

But to get to my reason about not instantly acknowledging how honored and humbled I felt. See, since I was avoiding Tumblr, I only knew of Positivity Week within the fandom in vague passing - usually something stated in the top post of my dash when I first log in - and so I hadn't participated in it. I felt guilty jumping in on the last day of it simply to gush at how honored I felt to have been included.

I mean, that was the point of the fan event, right? To lift up the creators and fellow fandom members while also bringing back a positive view of the show itself? So, to gush about how happy it made me to have been on her list would have been a pretty perfect way of closing out the week. At the time, though? Nope. I NEEDED to add to Positive Week if I were to acknowledge the honor of being on chicoriii's list.

So I decided I would thank chi while also lifting up other works of fiction. Then I quickly realized how many stories I loved, and that either the list would be a bit massive or I'd leave out some gemstones. That was when I decided my new project: write up a Tumblr post of my ML fanfic recs, and then link to it when I acknowledge chi's list.

This was a mistake.

Sure, there were the big ones that I could think of right away - usually involving EdenDaphne in some shape or form - but that list was largely stories I know are already fairly big in the fandom because they have some of the highest hit/kudos/comment counts. Not that any of that means I SHOULDN'T recommend them, because I 100% am going to still. No, instead, and especially because of how I was feeling, I wanted to make sure to also promote stories I feel aren't getting nearly enough love. To make sure I didn't miss any, I started going through my bookmarked and favorited stories on AO3 and FFN. 

I... forgot how much ML fanfiction I've actually read over the years. I did not read nearly as much HA fanfiction....

I have 42 bookmarked ML fics on AO3 alone, and I was trash at actually writing anything in my bookmark notes, so I knew I enjoyed the stories enough to want to save them, but I couldn't really remember what each of them were about per se, or why I enjoyed them specifically.

Sooooo that's what I wanted to do next: re-read, or at least skim, these saved fics to remind myself why I enjoyed them so I could better recommend them to others. Buuuut, I also had work pretty much non-stop for over a month, so I just didn't have the energy.

This week I finally did. All of my main work at my job was taken care of, and all I really had left was optional busy work. On a particularly slow day I decided it was time to finally start up this project. I figured I could get it done in the one shift.

I was wrong.

It's been over a week now, and I STILL have stories to read back through. I've been updating my bookmarks as I go so that next time I know exactly why I loved that particular story and what I felt was unique about it. I've also started writing recaps of what happened in the last chapter of on-going works, because I always seem to forget by the time they're updated. Sure, it means re-reading the previous chapter first to remind myself what happened, and I'm sure the authors appreciate the extra reads, but it also means I have to calculate reading TWO chapters whenever ONE updates, which usually results in a delay before finding time to read. This way, hopefully I can read the updates a lot sooner.

Sorry, getting off topic. Point is, I've been re-reading a LOT of fics lately, and it's giving me lots of feels. It's been really uplifting and reminding me a lot about why I love this show and the friendly bits of this fandom community. Also, while I'm still not quite ready to write anything myself yet, it HAS been helping grease those mental gears so I'm good to go once I'm back to a more normal work and social schedule.

Also also... I know how I'm going to be spending my next day off on Friday:

Official promo poster

Frozen starts at 6:10
Miraculous Ladybug starts at 8:00

The creator of Miraculous Ladybug Thomas Astruc had stated in past interviews that he initially had a whole expanded world planned with more miraculous bearers and other superheroes. He teased that back in season 1 when Alya gushed about her favorite comic book hero Majestia that Majestia was a real American superhero. Then, there was a comic book run where Ladybug and Chat Noir went to the United States and met Majestia.

This New York special seems to have been inspired by that comic run. Or that both this special and the comic books were both inspired off of Astruc's original world builds for the Miraculous universe.

Either way, I'm excited.

Also also also, to lead up to this hour-long special, Disney Channel will be having a season 3 marathon. True, I can watch them all I want on Netflix, and the airing order on the channel isn't any better than the scrambled mess Netflix has, but still....

I'm hoping re-watching this past season after such a long hiatus, as well as getting some new content to tide the fandom over until the next season arrives in 2021, will help respark my desire to write.

Because I miss it, you guys. I HURT not being able to write for so long! Especially this year when March feels like a decade ago.

Tanuki
Facebook sticker
by Yanare Ku

Here's to hoping I can get back into the swing of things finally. Here's to Chibi and Ron and their birthdays. Here's to my coworkers' daughters and their new marriages. Here's to chi and her ability to make me cry simply by enjoying my work and wanting to share it with others. Finally, here's to you, dear reader, for staying by me when I've had virtually nothing to say this whole year.

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(minor edits by me)

Catch everyone in October!

August was Trash, Okay?

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OMG, guys, August was suuuch trash!

Sorry I've been so absent lately. Sorry still that my writing has YET to return to the land of the living. This past month? Well... it IS 2020, isn't it? I'm now feeling a bit guilty about using images like this at the conclusion of last year:

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When you feel bad about how you "treated" 2019, and kinda wish to go back to THAT year? You KNOW the current year is beyond trash.

I'm just so exhausted. I've been exhausted for a while now, and August did NOT help that in the slightest.

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Also, side note, the new formatting for Blogger? 

It's supposed to be more streamline, but a lot of the things I personally do with this blog now takes extra steps. I also do a lot of HTML edits and tweaks, and reading the code is now a LOT harder for me since it all runs together. Here, see?

If you are a programmer, that might look helpful. It's color coordinated, and you're probably used to it all running into itself. Me? I am NOT a programmer. The old HTML view used to have everything set up in paragraphs that I could easily read and understand. To demonstrate, I took the above code and edited it best I could to look like how it used to.

Yeah, it was all one color, but so is just about any text I'd read. The important thing was the paragraph breaks so I could easily skim through and find what I wanted to edit. Now? Well, thank God someone created the CTRL+F search function, because I'm probably going to use it a LOT now. I mean, it's cool and all that code is red when it's incomplete, and then turns green once you've completed the line. That helps me make sure I didn't forget to close a function or something. But I tried to put a little tweak on one of the above images, then continued writing while in HTML mode - something I used to do a LOT originally, just to make sure the spacing is how I want it - and when I want to switch back to composition mode I got a pop-up saying some of my code may be invalid and may not stay if I switch out of HTML. I spent a solid 5 minutes or so tweaking what I did and reading through the above code to see how to mimic it in what I had done, and I still had no clue what I did that would have been considered "invalid." So, in the end, I ended up deleting all the coding I had done, hit "okay" to the "may be invalid" pop-up, and just continued on in composition mode. 

I hope this blog looks the same as it always has, but I may have to consider completely revamping it so I use less coding. Because right now? Well, not to be overly dramatic or anything, but check the shirt.

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I mean, when I previewed this post thus far, I noticed there was a MASSIVE gap between one of the above images and the text following it. It looked like I had hit the Enter button about 3x to create line breaks. Just a few weeks ago, with the old formatting, I could easily go into the code, see the extra <br /> or <p></p> code and know I can delete those to get rid of the surplus spacing.

With this new coding layout? And, frankly, I feel like the HTML somehow got more complicated??? Well, I spent another 10 minutes or so trying to read the code to see where the extra space came from, because it wasn't there in compose view for me to just delete. I finally saw that a line of code was out of place from when I initially tried going into HTML view to edit one of the image codes. Again, something I used to do weekly, so I thought I generally knew what I was doing by now.

Well, after shifting where the code was SUPPOSED to be, I hit Preview, and.... now the entire blog after that picture was center aligned instead of left aligned.

Yona from Yona of the Dawn
Created by Mizuho Kusanagi

Another 10 minute battle or so as I copied and pasted the code ABOVE the image - where it was still properly left-aligned after an image - and edited it to include the proper image (the one I had messed with originally) and the proper text (that had somehow become center-aligned). It SHOULD have worked. I literally used the EXACT SAME CODE of a portion of the blog that was formatting properly.

It... didn't.

After, as I said, 10 minutes of adjusting this, tweaking that, hitting the Undo button about a dozen times, and reading the code with painstaking focus to try to understand it enough to mimic it... and it STILL not working, I gave up. I just went back into compose mode, selected all, and hit the Left-align button.

And I STILL had to select 2 different paragraphs separately and left-align them independently, since apparently they weren't included in the Select All??????

Hacker Girl
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by
Birdman, Inc.

Yeah, I hate this new format...

BUT BACK TO AUGUST!

Throughout August, my one co-worker's daughter got married, my other co-worker had a bridal shower for HER daughter, the 1st co-worker had a family event, and then the 2nd co-worker's brother got married, so every weekend one of them requested a 3-day or 4-day weekend. Also, the first co-worker had needed oral surgery for about a month, so she finally managed to get that taken care of and needed a week off to recover. We all have all of this vacation time, and boy were those two using it.

And yet, one of them was particularly snarky about me taking a week off in July for my birthday, but whatever....

Anyway, because of all of that, I had to work two Tuesdays in August, the most recent time being last week. Hence me missing two blog post updates last month.

Also, on top of all of THAT, one of our branch stores had a whole new staff hired, which isn't as extreme as it sounds since it only has 3 employees anyway, but still. So I was asked to travel about 40min to the other store in order to train the new employees, as was another employee from one of the other branch stores, that way the other could cover while one of us had a day off.

I trained the new sales associate two days the one week, and then the following week the sales assistant came on and I went out to train her.

And then, apparently the one owner felt the assistant needed more training, so she was sent to my home-store for me to train her while helping cover the store I normally work in - ya know, because the tag-team of my co-workers requesting off.

Now, when I was hired, all employees had two solid weeks of training in their home-store, and then another month of shadowing the sales associates as a way to learn how to sell (back then every employee was in sales). About two years later, there was a shift to include hourly employees as sales assistants. Fast forward another 7 months or so, and that's when I started to get tapped for training the newbies and driving to the other stores for a day or so. For the most part, the "2 weeks of training" were shrunk to just one week - since the 2nd was typically training on how to sell merchandise, something most of the new employees weren't doing - and then that week of training was usually split between me and someone who worked in that employee's store. I'd start with the real meat-and-potatoes of how to run the main program we use for sales and a broad overview of what product we carry, and then the other employee would finish the training with getting into the minutia of the day-to-day and rare issues that might come up.

For the past year-and-a-half or so, this training system seemed to work. Heck, even with that sales associate I had trained early August had that sort of training regimen set up.

For the new sales assistant though? We're not sure why, but the one owner for whatever reason believes this woman needs 3 solid weeks of training with me.

Thankfully, last week and this week were in my home-store, so I didn't have to travel, but my days are completely consumed with trying to think of ANYTHING that I could still teach this woman so we're not just staring blankly at each other for 8 hours straight. Or, alternatively, so she's not like my co-workers: just sitting bored at a desk, wondering what to do, while I have a HUGE list of things *I* need to do still. Things like creating and hanging tags on the new product that comes in explaining the options available for it. Things like keeping up with the company's social media accounts. Things like keeping on top of the new company website so I can send glitches or other such errors to the web master ASAP. Things like updating some of my data spreadsheets so it's easier for us to look up things.

Granted, a lot of this stuff either of my co-workers could also learn to do - such as the spreadsheets or the information tags - but neither puts in effort to learn how to do it. So now it's backlogged by about a month.

And I STILL have to figure out what to do with this woman I'm supposed to be training despite us going through everything she needed to learn in the first 3 or 4 days.

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So.... yeah, work has been EXHAUSTING, and so all I want to do when I come home is zone out. For the most part, I've done that, with the exception of the couple of times I've GM'd our sessions of Blades in the Dark by John Harper. Those have been quite stressful in and of themselves. 

The sessions themselves seem well enough. The group appears to be enjoying themselves, and that's all that matters. Plus, with the scores I keep coming up with so the group has options, I'm slowly building a story of the world going on around the group. I am enjoying the brainstorming sessions Hubby and I have to try to come up with those world-build side-stories we could play off of. While the crew is doing this, off in the background these two warring factions are doing that. The way this score concludes affects this bit of the city. That sort of thing.

The first score the group chose my last GMing session was a continuation of one of the scores they did the 1st time I GM'd. In that first session a professor and his rival were both researching this one particular piece of technology in a race to see which of them could finally solve the problem the scientific world was having in improving the effectiveness of the tech. The professor knew his rival was further along than him, so he wanted the crew to steal her notes so he could have the advantage instead, and he wanted it to look like a random burglary.

Well, the crew did ransack her office and steal a bunch of random items that seemed valuable, along with her notes, as an effort o stage it as a burglary instead of a pointed attack. Problem is, they literally only hit the rival's office. So, I had a new score in which she knew that her rival had plotted the theft and wanted either proof to take to the Bluecoats or wanted the professor to be framed. Either way, she wanted him in jail.

The guys LOVED the continuation of this random side-plot of these two tech rivals, and got a kick out of the fact that she only knew her rival was involved with the theft, not that the crew was the one who actually did the burgling. So they agreed to set the professor up for masterminding the theft of her notes.

It's moments like that - where they gleefully passed around the index card the score was written down upon, and each of them going "OH!" after reading it - that makes me happy I've agreed to tag-team GMing with Hubby.

But then I go to write down what happened.

As I've commented throughout this post, it has been a busy and stressful month. I barely have the free time to write anything down, and when I do, it's a week or two after the session. So far, between 4 game sessions, we have played through 8 or 9 different scores. Hubby had that opening score in the first session. Then we went through three in my first session as the GM. Then we went through 2 or 3 more scores when Hubby took over again, and we went through another 2 when I last GM'd.

The fact that I can't remember how many we went through when Hubby last GM'd is part of the problem. I wanted to write the sessions down SPECIFICALLY because, especially with all the chaos and stress of 2020, my memory is trash. And yet, I only managed to write down the first 2 scores I GM'd before I ran out of time. So I'm now staring at so many backlogged game missions and struggling to remember what even happened. At the same time, as I write out what happened during the scores I ran vs reflecting on the ones I have to write down that Hubby ran, I began getting super depressed. I felt like I wasn't giving anyone any significant challenges. Which of course made me wonder about my overall writing and storytelling skills.

Was this why I have so many stories focused on inner conflict instead of outer conflict? Is this why I seem to write exclusively Man vs Self stories? Am I just incapable of coming up with external conflicts for characters?

Total. Writing. Existential. Crisis.

So even when I did have time to write down the sessions, I still didn't. I couldn't. I shut down. I just got depressed whenever I thought about my sessions. I felt like I was making things too easy for the players; that the complications I came up with the group just kind of shrugged off. 

To try to help, Hubby decided last week's Blades game session would actually be the group watching Let's Plays. That way Hubby and, especially, I could see how other GMs come up with scores and consequences/complications, and the guys could see how other groups played. We hoped it would help everyone get a better feel on how this game played different than D&D and break us from that D&D mindset.

Namely the idea of critical-failures, excessive pre-planning, the fear of complications causing us to fail the mission entirely, and the #1 D&D rule of "never split the party". The mechanics of Blades in the Dark is done so specifically to address and negate all of those issues of D&D.

In the end, Quarthix concluded that the session we watched on YouTube played fairly similarly to how we already play. Hubby more-or-less agreed. I had also noticed that the "consequences and complications" the GM came up with were things like "the floor creaked, but none of the 'sleeping' bodies beside you move". So maybe the complications and consequences I came up with weren't so mild after all. That did help my overall outlook.

Also, because we watched Let's Plays last week, and talked more about our character backstories, Hubby is still on-deck for GMing the session. That also helped because I didn't need the added stress of trying to come up with scores for the guys to do this session. Hubby's in charge again tonight, and it will be nice to just be able to play.

Especially since work wasn't my only bit of chaos. In Animal Crossing: New Horizons, today is the start of both a new month and new season. At the end of each month, the game cycles out an assortment of bugs, fish, and deep-sea creatures. It also brings in new bugs, fish, and deep-sea creatures. So I already knew there was a list of creatures leaving at the end of August. However, these were also summer-only creatures, so I wouldn't see them again until next June or July. Normally not that big of a deal except for three things:

1. I was still missing a total of 10 or 11 bugs/fish that I would have been able to capture by this time in the game. Two of them weren't active over the summer, but one came back today and the other would be back in, like, December or January, so it wouldn't be AS long of a wait.
2. I'm a completionist player, which means I try to go through 100% of the game. This is why one of my daily "chores" in-game is to go to both shops, and check the Nook Stop, and buy up everything that was "new," even if I don't like it. There's a "catalog" in-game and every time your character has possession of an item - via purchasing it, picking it up, or being gifted it - it is added to your catalog. So, I buy anything not already in my catalog, so I have a record of it, and then sell anything I don't wish to keep.
   This also means that I want to fully complete my Critterpedia: the listing of all the bugs, fish, and deep-sea creatures you could catch in the game. I don't want to have to wait until JUNE OR JULY in order to complete this thing!
3. There is a set of 6 main breakable tools that you frequently use in-game: net, slingshot, shovel, watering can, fishing pole, and axe. You can get the ultimate upgrade of a Golden tool once you achieve certain milestones. You learn the watering can when you have improved your island to the highest rating: 5-stars. You learn how to make a golden axe after breaking your regular axe a certain number of times. You get the golden slingshot recipe after popping x-number of balloons with your slingshot.
   For the golden shovel, you have to assist a side character that literally washes up on your island at least once every two weeks. You have to help him 30 times, so it will take a long time to get the shovel, but it still shouldn't be a "have to wait until next July" sort of situation to complete that task.
   The net and the fishing poles? You learn how to make the golden versions of those tools by completing the bug and fish critterpedias respectively. So, not only would catching these bugs and fish help me 100% my critterpedia, but also allows me to unlock the final 2 tools of the game. On top of THAT you also get Nook Miles - in-game points you receive for completing specific tasks - and stamps for both completing the tasks and building the resulting golden tools.

So... yeah, my Completionist Butt didn't want to have to wait until these bugs and fish returned to the game next July, and I didn't want to start "time traveling" in order to get them sooner than intended. Which all means I HAD to make sure I caught all of those bugs and fish before the end of August. Of COURSE I didn't realize how many bugs/fish I was missing until last week, so when I dropped Hubby off at work at 6am I would then spend an hour or so trying to hunt down any of these missing bugs or fish before getting ready for work myself. Then my Friday off was largely spent trying to hunt down the missing bugs and fish. Again Saturday morning - a rare Saturday off for me - I did little more than try to grind out the bugs and fish I needed, but I also had to deal with the surplus of flowers that had popped up and were going to overrun my island. 

Tanuki Facebook sticker
by Yanare Ku

Sunday morning before work and then more Sunday evening were spent once more searching for the remaining elusive creatures. Sunday post-work was also spent playing a couple hours of Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening on the Switch, a game I FINALLY started up Saturday afternoon while waiting for the next time bracket where the bugs/fish I needed would spawn. Two hours of playing a game within my favorite franchise. A game I had already played the Game Boy Color re-release version of. Two hours, and I somehow managed to die NINE TIMES! This is NOT a hard game. I went through two dungeons on Saturday, and died ONCE. Granted, I left most fights with only half a heart - your character's health meter - but I still managed to survive MOST of the game session. Sunday, though? Nope. I ended up saving in a new slot in case I wanted to go back to my original file and redo everything. Which I did do yesterday and did MUCH better: no deaths. My reflexes were certainly a lot better and I was a lot more focused last night.

Anyway, I was back to searching last night, having but two beetles left to find.

All-in-all, I think I personally clocked about 15 or 16 hours of doing little else in the game other than running around searching for these dang fish and bugs! It was certainly more a chore than fun, and it was EXHAUSTING and FRUSTRATING. But, at the same time, I didn't want to give up, because then I'd have to wait a year to officially complete the game. I mean, it may take me that long anyway, and I may be actively playing the game still anyway, but I didn't want to force it either simply because I didn't catch those creatures before they left for a year.

In the end, it was Hubby, playing my game for me for another TWO HOURS while I was working on this blog post - I'll explain in a moment - for my game to FINALLY get every creature I could by the end of August.

That being said, while I do have an insane amount of hours poured into this game since the end of March - over 800 hours, for sure - my official gamer profile says I have something closer to 860hrs clocked for ACNH. That's largely due to the amount of times the game goes idle while I do things like stop to eat, forget to log off before doing laundry or going to work, or, what happened this weekend, I fall asleep while playing so it just sits there - idle - for the 6 to 8 hrs I'm sleeping.

This ended up being beneficial, however, because there's this trick with the game. You can leave your main island and go on what's known as "Nook Mile Tours" or "Mystery Island Tours". These are tiny islands you can go to harvest things, and sometimes meet new villagers you can invite back to your home island. When you're on one of these islands, time moves normally, just as it would anywhere else in the game. HOWEVER, certain creatures have time restrictions for their spawning. For instance, the beetles I still needed as of yesterday only show up in the game between the hours of 5pm and 8am. So, if I were playing the game at 4pm, the beetle would never show up, but the moment it hit 5pm they would start to spawn, only to vanish again at 8am. On those island tours, you're locked into the time-block you reached the island within. So, to again use that beetle example, if I hit up a Mystery Island at 8:45pm, I'd be within that 5pm-8am time block. Any bugs/fish that didn't spawn at 8:45pm, but might spawn at 9pm wouldn't be spawning at all on that island, even if I stay on it until 10pm. While the clock still advances, and the lighting changes from night to day and vice versa, when it comes to critter spawn restrictions, you are locked into the time it was when you first landed on that island.

So, as I said, this proved beneficial. I had passed out playing ACNH while on Nook Mile Islands both Sunday evening and Monday evening. Which means, as far as the game's creature-spawns were concerned, it was still 10pm. Hubby had yesterday and today off, so I ran around in-game for an hour before getting ready for work yesterday morning, found one of the 4 critters I still needed, then passed the game over to Hubby. He played for another hour or so before letting me know he caught the last fish I needed. Then, as previously mentioned, I passed out again last night with just TWO MORE creatures to go, and Hubby spent a couple hours this morning finding them for me.

"Crisis" averted.

But holy heck was that stressful and NOT. FUN. the past week. Especially since that meant that - except for the few hours I played LoZ this weekend - I was pretty much exclusively playing this game whenever I had downtime. And it wasn't even stress relieving like it was meant to be!

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Sooooooo, yeah. That super sucked. I'm going to try to be a bit more diligent on which critters are leaving each month, and try not to save them for the last week or so of it. Thankfully, the largest collection of critters leaving the game comes at the end of the summer - so August in the northern hemisphere and February in the southern hemisphere - which means I shouldn't be as overwhelmed again while playing this game. A word of caution for any of my readers who also play this game and are in the southern hemisphere, or at least has their game set up for the southern hemisphere: DO NOT SLEEP ON THE SUMMER BUGS/FISH. TRY TO GET THEM ALL ASAP SINCE THEY ARE ONLY AVAILABLE FOR 2 MONTHS TOTAL THROUGHOUT THE FULL YEAR!

My one co-worker's daughter is getting married on September 19th, and so she took that whole week off to prepare and then recover from the wedding. That will be a LOOOOOOOOOONG week and I'll most likely miss my September 15th update due to that, but I'll try to be more on-the-ball this week.

So long to that crappy summer and doubly crappy August. Here's to September being better over-all. And here's to games RELIEVING stress instead of adding to it. (Yes, I'm also looking at you, Link's Awakening, and your stupid 9 deaths...)

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And, finally, here's to 2020 being kinder to us, pretty please!

Hope to catch you next week!

August is Getting Crazy

 Whoo-boy! Sorry about missing last week, everyone. It's been... well, it's been an August already.

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At the start of the month, my one co-worker took off for her daughter's intimate wedding: Bride, Groom, Parents, Siblings. The following week, my other co-worker took off to both set up and throw a bridal shower for HER daughter, whose wedding is in September. This past weekend the first co-worker took off again for a family event - someone's 60th birthday party or something like that - and she'll be taking most of next week off to recover from mouth surgery. There's only 3 of us that cover the store, so whenever one of the other two needs off; that means I'm working.

Also, either late June or early July, the manager of one of our branch stores took ill. It wasn't COVID-19, thankfully, but it was still serious and kept him in the hospital for a while. He then had to quarantine on the chance that he contracted COVID while in the hospital. That whole time, the company has been scrambling to find extra bodies in the other stores - we are all running on kind of skeleton crews right now - to help cover that branch store. Finally, the company hired two new employees specifically for the store missing their manager. He's supposedly back to work this week, ironically since that's more-or-less when the new hires are starting as well, but he's still very much recovering, so he's probably going to focus mostly on the managerial portion of the job and leave sales to the newbies. Plus, this way he doesn't have to try to run around covering a store by himself: management stuff, sole sales person, answering phone calls, paperwork, answering emails, etc.

That's where my craziness continues, as well as why I missed last week's post. Both me and one woman from another branch store tend to get tapped for training, so we tag-teamed training Newbie #1 last week - which included me working in that store last Tuesday instead of having the day off and working on this blog - and we'll be training Newbie #2 this week.

I did still manage to get my standard 2 days off per week last week, but on "off" days for me, so it was a bunch of playing catch-up on what I normally would do on my days off, and "write a blog post" kind of slipped through the cracks.

Regardless, add in the complications of trying to keep customers satisfied when the production chain is seriously backed up and we honestly have little to no clue when more product is coming in? Well.... It's been a month, as I said.

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All of that "OMG, I may FINALLY be ready to write something!" energy largely POOFed away, but I still managed to wrestle some of it to the ground by way of pen-and-paper roleplaying.

When last we met, I was preparing for my first go as GM for a game of Blades in the Dark by John Harper. The first session we had, where Hubby was the GM, we were suggested by the rulebook to go with the First Situation written in the book itself, as a means to ease into the campaign. Problem is, the situation went sideways FAST because we didn't pick it. So, instead of telling the players "this is what the crew is going to do this week" and forcing them into a situation again, I came up with an assortment of options the group could pick from. Ended up being a great idea because, while it kept the full gaming session to complete that initial situation Hubby GMed, the group FLEW through three different scores when I GMed. I'm not sure if that's because I went easy on them, or because the players know what they're doing a bit better this go, or if it was because Hubby could play this time and that helped streamline things better than when I played, or if it was some sort of combination of those options. Either way, it proved helpful to have a list of options the group could choose from, so Hubby did the same thing last Tuesday when he was back to GMing, and then I'm doing it again when I GM tonight.

When I made my debut, I gave them the score that Hubby had teased at the conclusion of that first session. I also came up with a way for them to gather more permanent resources for the crew - called Staking a Claim, a way for them to take care of their Wanted level so consequences aren't as severe if one of the crew got arrested, a generic "this is what's going on in the city" in case they wanted to come up with their own Score based on that information, and a list of six generic scores listed in the rulebook.

The group went with the score Hubby teased, and went through it fairly quickly. They then chose a random generic score from my list of 6, handled that pretty swiftly as well, and managed to do a second generic score from my list. All the downtime the group was able to play through that session did help both them and the crew itself level up, so it was a good thing overall. Plus the multiple scores gave them a bit of a variety of ways to play that night. So, in the end, I think it worked out well. Hubby keeps telling me that everyone seemed to have fun. Although, Dragnime did kind of abruptly rush out after the third score concluded. He was commenting on how late it was and how he had work the next day, so I may be reading too much into it, but I wasn't sure he was satisfied with how the game played out that night.

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Anyway, that night the crew managed to find a buyer for a stolen map book, steal research notes from a professor/engineer and sell them to her rival, and break into a university campus in the wealthiest part of the entire city in order to steal a painting for a client and replacing it with a forgery so no one would be the wiser. There were still bits where chaos ensued, but for the most part, I think the game played out so everyone felt like accomplished scoundrels. Either that or, as I mentioned, I softballed the whole session....

Regardless, Hubby unintentionally slammed us back down to Earth last week in our first score of the session. We picked a score where we helped a rug maker whose rugs were smothering people in their sleep; a not-so-subtle nod to the D&D monster Rug of Smothering Hubby kept throwing at us in that campaign. We didn't have to worry about dealing with Murder Rugs for this score. The local police - the Bluecoats - had already shut down the man's business and confiscated his rug-making equipment. Namely, a loom. The rug maker didn't know of any other means of making money, plus he hated the Lampblacks for reasons we didn't bother asking for, so he wanted us to steal back his equipment from Bluecoat evidence lock-up, as well as frame the Lampblacks for the theft. We were already on rocky footing with the Lampblacks, but Quarthix loved the idea of screwing with the rival crew further, so we agreed to take the job.

We managed to get into the precinct well enough. My character Mara used to be a Bluecoat, so she was able to use her old uniform to sneak everyone into evidence lock-up, but we just couldn't get the evidence OUT of lock-up. I forget what roll we screwed up on, but an alarm was thrown, my companions - Dragnime's character Syra and Quarthix's character Kristov - attempted to take out the guard at evidence lock-up. It didn't go well. Mara tried her hand at knocking the guy out with Kristov's dart gun, and... well... I messed up my roll, so instead of just knocking the guy out with the dart, apparently Mara got the guy in the eye with said dart and accidentally killed him. I wrote it off as appropriate for her character because she's used to aiming with a handgun, not a blowgun. We cheesed it the heck out of there without any evidence and wrote the score up as a loss.

Hubby and I may have that failed mission come back and bite the crew on the butt in the future. We're still figuring out how.

We did our downtime roleplay and upgrades and the like, but then our crew was sucked into a turf war. A crew called the Billhooks are allies of the Lampblacks. The Lampblacks were still figuring out if they should come after our teeny crew for killing their leader - which also gave the new leader an opportunity to rule, so they aren't TOO upset??? - but they ARE still in a heated turf war already with the crew the Red Sashes, and they couldn't really divide their attention like that. So, allies that they are, the Billhooks, who already didn't like our up-start crew, decided to declare war on the Lampblacks' behalf. We were NOT in a position to go to war with anyone at the time, so we instantly called for a peace treaty.

The Billhooks have an interesting power dynamic. They are still technically run by this one guy who is currently serving life in prison, but is managing to pull enough strings to still be considered in charge. Meanwhile, his son wouldn't mind terribly if his father suddenly died in prison - the man is quite old anyway - so he could finally take over the crew. On the flipside, the leader's sister wants to find a way to break him out of prison, and/or kill off her disloyal nephew and take over the gang in her brother's absence. It's a weird power struggle as all three family members both vie for power and relent it to the other two in order to bide their time.

Well, somehow, someway, via narrative convenience, I guess, our crew The Void Serpents managed to set up a peace treaty with ONLY the sister/aunt. She confirmed she had her brother's ear, and agreed to call off the war if we did something for her: kill her nephew. She'd sort out the details so the true Billhooks leader won't come after us for revenge of his son's death. As before, I had Mara try to play both sides, wondering if we should bring the assassination plot to the nephew's attention to try to win his favor instead and have HIM end the war with us as gratitude for bringing him evidence of his aunt's scheme. The group decided that it was a definite end to the war if we killed the nephew, but only a SUSPECTED end if we warn him, and we couldn't handle going to war with the female leader of the Billhooks if Mara's plan went sideways.

So we set up a neat little trap for the nephew, and it was a MOSTLY clean assassination. I can't recall what went wrong, but Kristov ended up running away from the nephew's guards and throwing a grenade back at them, completely forgetting we were in a drug den. There were a LOT of bodies the ever intimidating Spirit Wardens would need to clean up, and we were now on THEIR list of people that might need to be "dealt with" for making their jobs so much harder with the trail of bodies we leave behind.

Honestly, with this week being the blur that it's been, I can't recall if we called it a night there or if we tried one more score. I feel like we left it there....

Now, I had started up a notebook, as I believe I mentioned last time, where I'm trying to keep track of all the major story elements of the campaign. It would be a good reference guide as well as a nice keepsake of this first attempt at Blades in the Dark. I didn't have any time to write in the notebook the week I GMed, and I tried to fill some of it out this weekend to play catch-up, but the details are already getting hazy. I'll have to chat it over with Hubby so he can help refresh my memory. There's just SO much to try to jot down.

I have to admit, one of my favorite things for this side project is jotting down the NPCs we name throughout the game. Keeping track of them so they could potentially come back seems like such fun. Plus, while we're watching the Oxventure campaign, it's always great fun for all involved to have an NPC cameo or otherwise return for an adventure. I'm excited to do the same with the NPCs Hubby and I introduce in our game.

I already have a score written up for tonight's game which will tie back into one of the missions the crew took the last time I GM'd. I have another in mind, but I'm trying to sort out the specifics of it right now, and I kind of want to run it past Hubby as well. Sure, he'd be running his character, and so it gives him a semi-unfair advantage knowing what I have planned, but at the same time, it affects our Crew in a way I want him to sign off on since he's a co-GM.

I'm hoping to get into some legit writing soon, but in the meantime, I'm taking baby-steps by "writing" these Blades missions and further fleshing out Mara's backstory and character. Not to mention trying to figure out side-stories with the rest of the world-build of the game.

It's a start. Right?

Shifting gears to reading, I still have a backlog of fanfic updates I need to take the time to sit down and enjoy. In the meantime, however, I read Chewy's original story. There were definitely notes. Anyone I've ever beta-read for can attest to that. You ask me to do a job to help better your story, and by gum, I'm going to do the best I can to accomplish that job. He seemed appreciative of the notes and we chatted a bit about it. He has a neat concept, and I can't wait to see what his more polished story looks like.

As of right now the story is more-or-less thus:

A boy of 12 is living in a dystopian America of the near-future. He has an alcoholic, and probably abusive, father who vanishes frequently while on benders, but comes back with a feast of food for the otherwise starving family. The mom seems emotionally and mentally broken; not really caring for her child and only doing the bare minimum to keep them alive. The boy also appears understimulated by his schoolwork, which results in his struggling to stay invested in his lessons. Because of this, his teachers have more-or-less written him off as a lost case. It's a depressing downward spiral for our protagonist.

But there's hope by way of a mysterious voice projecting through the child's otherwise useless one-way radio. All of the radio stations shut down roughly a year before the story begins, but the boy still hears a lone voice calling out for any contact. Without thinking, the boy talks back to the voice, knowing full well his radio is simply for reception, not projection; there's no way the voice can hear him too.

And yet, it does. The two start up a conversation, and things get weird and promising for the boy. Even when he has to spend his days in the depressing life he's always known, he at least has the nights, and the voice through the radio.

If/when Chewy publishes the short story - either professionally or for free consumption somewhere - I'll be sure to let you fine folks know.

My mom is also attempting her own writing project, so I'll be working with her on that. I'm gonna wait until we're further along before I give more details there, but at least I'm kind of writing-adjacent lately, right?

What about you fine folks? Anyone out there writing? Anything good that you've read recently? What about other creative outlets, or games you've been playing? I'd love to know.

Until next week, everyone!

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Ironically Studying Blades

Nothing yet with regards to new fiction to share with you fine folks. However, that doesn't mean the gears haven't been whirling this past week!

Last Tuesday Hubby and I hosted our first Blades in the Dark session. As I mentioned in my previous post, Quarthix came by to create his character as well. He's a Leech - a tinkerer, alchemist, and saboteur - named Kristov. One of Hubby's friends and coworkers still wants in, but will be busy until mid-August, so it will be at least two weeks - today and next week - before he can be free for our sessions. He may also bring his girlfriend along, which will bring our over-all crew up to six people; five playing at a time since either Hubby or I will sit out our characters as we GM.

But otherwise, our crew is built. There's Ashlyn "Nev" Kindaith - the nickname "Nev" is short for "Nevermore" - who is a Lurk. Basically the Thief among all of us thieves. Lurks are the "stealthy infiltrators." Next up is Mara "Jackal" Basran, a Hound; sharpshooter and tracker. The third crew member is Syra "Silver Song" Vale, a Whisper. She is our arcane adept; our spellcaster in this game, if you will. Rounding us off is Kristov "Hammer" Keel.

We... um... we forgot to get anyone that could be good at hand-to-hand. Whoops! That's fine, with the mechanic the game has in play, anyone can still do anything with enough real-world dice-rolling luck. I'll touch upon that again in a moment.

Also, fun factoid: most of us chose either "Iruvian" or "Dagger Isles" as our heritage, which means Hubby's character Ashlyn, who is "Skovian", is the only traditionally "white" character in our crew with a more Scandinavian look. Mara appears more Northern African/Middle Eastern/Indian (haven't decided on which quite yet), and both Syra and Kristov appear more Polynesian.

Anyway, together, Ashlyn, Mara, Syra, and Kristov make up the Void Serpents, a daring up-and-coming Shadow crew specializing in burglary, robbery, espionage, and sabotage.

So, naturally, we assassinate someone in our first session.

Okay, here's the breakdown. First of all, we had to build up our Crew as if it were its own character. It actually kinda-sorta is, in truth. This way we can retire our current characters, bring in new ones, have the game go on for years - generations within the game, if we wanted - and that Crew will still be there; evolving with each game.

Anyway, as we were building our Crew, we had to pick a place to be our "hunting grounds;" a place where we did most of our shady business. We wanted to focus on espionage, so we picked the district of Charterhall, "the city's civic offices and the hub for shops, artisans, and commerce." In doing so, we had to pick a random faction whose turf we were invading and suffer some negative reputation among that crew. After flipping through the options, Hubby randomly selected a group called The Lampblacks. Not entirely sure why he picked them since they're described in the book as "akin to folk-heroes among the working class, who see them as 'lovable rogues' standing up to the powers-that-be." I personally would have thought they would be good allies, but I wasn't really paying attention when the faction was picked, so I didn't voice my objections then. Also, the Lampblacks are currently at war with the rival crew the Red Sashes, which is made up of Iruvian sword masters. Seeing as how my character is 3/4 Iruvian, I guess Hubby figured I'd want us allied with them????

No matter. The decision was made, and we took a few blocks from the Lampblacks' hunting grounds, causing an uneasy rivalry between us, and helping us ally with the Red Sashes more. There were other bits of our Crew build that caused other Crews to either befriend us or start up their own rivalry with us as well, but those aren't important right now.

Fast forward to our first session. The game suggests using the starting situation printed in the rulebook if you haven't played before. That way your GM won't have to struggle to figure out a good starting hook. Hubby, without reading the situation, decides that's probably best, and we all agree to just dive in using that scenario.

Then Hubby reads this:

You're in the cramped office of the Lampblack's leader, Bazso Baz, overlooking the coal warehouse floor below. Several of his thugs hang about, armed for war, sizing you up. Bazso wants your answer. Are you with them, or against them? What do you say? Will you side with the Lampblacks? Will you just pretend to? (Good luck, Bazso is very sharp.) Will you tell him to [censored] off?

See, the opening world scenario for the game is that the former leader of the gang The Crows died mysteriously, and his second in command Lyssa took control. Problem is, the original Crows leader had brokered a treaty between the warring factions of the Lampblacks and the Red Sashes. Without his influence, the two have again crashed into a turf war.

How did we end up in Baz's office of all places when we were already at odds with the Lampblacks and mildly allied with the Red Sashes? Don't know. The situation doesn't specify. We know we're screwed from the word "go" because we had just stolen some blocks from this guy's hunting grounds. Plus, were we ready to flip on our ally right out of the gate? It wouldn't have been disastrous, really, it's not like we were firm allies with the Red Sashes yet.

The trick here, though, is two-fold. First: Hubby neglected to read off some key info about the factions we were allied with and the ones we were at odds with. He just read off their names and the key description of them.

So, for instance, for the Lampblacks, we were told, "Lampblacks: the former lamp-lighter guild, turned to crime when their services were replaced by electric lights." We were then told, "The Red Sashes: originally a school of ancient Iruvian sword arts, since expanded into criminal endeavors." We were also told the two factions are rivals/enemies. Based on those descriptions? Of course we'd want to side with the far cooler-sounding Red Sashes. Again, especially since Mara's mostly of Iruvian heritage.

None of us heard the bit about the Lampblacks being sort of the "scoundrels of the people." I don't know if Hubby even read that far into the faction description before we dove in. Whoops.

The second issue with the starting scenario is that it concluded with this lovely suggestion: "Are you actually here to kill [Bazso Baz] for the Red Sashes? (If so, do a flashback and pick a plan for the assassination.)"

Oh, Quarthix grabbed INSTANTLY onto that one. Sure, we're a crew that specializes in standard spying and thievery, but that doesn't mean we can't take on other styles of job, and Quarthix leaned HARD into that mindset.

Baz is the leader of a faction we don't like, and he's warring with a faction we do like. We could get more Brownie Points from the Red Sashes, potentially, if we off their greatest opposition at the time. Plus, the guy has us cornered, what else would we do? Flip on our ally and align with HIM?

I did offer that we agree to side with the Lampblacks and then just stay neutral in the turf war; ignoring the bit in the situation description that says, "Good luck, Bazso is very sharp." Quarthix held firm though that he wanted to assassinate this guy. No one managing to talk him out of it, we stumbled for a bit to try to come up with a plan. Getting into the new mechanics of Blades was really rough after playing D&D for years, but eventually Hubby and I just kind of threw the other two into the game - by me having Mara straight up intimidate Bazso to leave us out of his turf war with the Red Sashes; we will remain neutral and not side with either of them - and went from there.

I actually did surprisingly well for my roll - I was getting the highest roll possible nearly all night; I was shook! - and Baz let us leave. Kristov had planned on assassinating this guy, however, and dang it, he was going to follow through. So, he used the opportunity of Baz being shaken by my intimidation to attack him.

Chaos thus ensued.

Remember at the top when I mentioned none of us were built for melee combat? Yeah.... Luckily, as I also mentioned, if you roll well enough, your character can accomplish virtually anything. I more-or-less took the lead to just bash and shoot our way back out of the building; clearing paths for my crewmates to slip through.

Syra and Kristov took some damage each, but nothing terribly too major. Mara just TANKED most of the damage and barely made it out alive, but made it we all did. On the other hand, Mara killed two Lampblacks, Kristov pulled an audible and decided to kidnap Baz instead of kill him after Syra incapacitated the Lampblack leader, and, while trying to deliver Baz to the Red Sashes, we were stopped by a Bluecoat; a city cop, basically.

Luck wasn't on my side then, and apparently Mara and this Bluecoat knew each other from when she was still on the force. And he did NOT like her one bit. I tried to have Mara schmooze the Bluecoat, but the dice rolls were no longer in my favor. Finally, Quarthix got a good enough roll to convince the Bluecoat - whom I had named James on a whim since Hubby never named or described the Bluecoat - to let us go with a warning. How'd he manage that? He reminded James that the sooner he let us leave the sooner he could get rid of Mara and not have to deal with her crap.

Meh. It worked.

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After delivering Bazso Baz to the Red Sashes, we were quickly reprimanded by the faction's leader Mylera who had asked for Baz's head, not him as a hostage to ransom back to the Lampblacks. We were told that we would only get our pay if we completed the original job, and now we had to make sure it was loud and public so the heat wouldn't be on the Red Sashes.

So we did. In one of the busiest bits of the city - the center of the Crow's Foot district - Kristov executed Baz with one of Mara's pistols. Ashlyn, who was our getaway driver so his character was still involved even if Hubby wasn't playing him at the time, refused to stop for the execution, and so it was very much a public drop-and-go. Boom. Shot in the head, and dumped onto the streets without us even slowing down.

Needless to say, our crew got our first Wanted rating after that fiasco. Although, to be fair, we would have been "fine" except we got extra heat - which tipped us over into a Wanted level - as consequence for me failing miserably to convince Bluecoat James to look the other way as we smuggled the abducted Baz.

At the end of every score - the "missions" the characters go on; the detailed action roleplay - the group gets their payoff and reputation, discovers the amount of heat the crew has on them, determine if they have increased a Wanted level, discover entanglements and other complications that the Crew suffers due to the actions of the score, and then the individual characters can have some downtime to work on independent character-building things and/or heal.

Well, the entanglement we got was that the Bluecoats brought one of our allies in for questioning. Basically, we deduced that James saw how banged up I was, figured I'd go to my doctor friend to get patched up, and so he sent the Bluecoats - or maybe went himself - to collect my ally. I dropped some coin to bribe the Bluecoats, and we all moved on. My ally is safe, the Bluecoats don't know anything else about our organization, and I'm back to being broke....

Mara did manage to de-stress, but she didn't heal at all, and basically one more hit would have killed her. So it's probably best that I'm GMing tonight. Gives Mara more downtime to get properly patched up. Her injuries are even a great excuse as to why she's not going on this next score. Although, everyone getting so banged up DID convince Quarthix that maybe we should aim for a non-combat score this time.... so... yay!

To further drive home the chaos of this first score - probably mostly due to the fact that we are all green and don't quite know the game mechanics yet - one of the pages offered in the player's kits is a way to track the scores the crew has been on and any key elements that might be important story beats for future gameplay. This is what a blank sheet looks like.

Fairly simple. The categories to fill in include: Score Type, Target, Location, Payoff: Coin/Rep, Heat, Entanglements and/or Faction status changes, and finally Notes, Events, and Clocks Advanced.

Well, er... it was ME who decided to fill this out for that first session and.... You guys know me. I'm not very concise. For me, a lot of details could prove important down the road, so if they feel even remotely significant I want to include them.

So it actually kept me three attempts before I managed to keep that first score confined to just the allotted third of a page....

First attempt on the bottom (upper left), then the 2nd attempt in the middle, and the final attempt on top (right side)

To sate my desire to capture as much of the game as possible, I instead turned to the single-subject notebook Hubby initially purchased for his game of Sigils in the Dark before buying his leather-bound one instead. This way we have a record of our games, which is something I've wanted to do with EVERY RPG I've played, but never managed to follow through except for Jolene's game, and that was largely because the gameplay was all text-based anyway. I like being able to look though records of the games and remember the fun we had playing. Plus, for situations like what we've been through with D&D being on hiatus due to COVID-19, it's a way for us to remember what happened last time, especially after long game droughts between sessions. We can also use it as reference points to make sure we keep continuity with regards to the overall campaign. For instance, if we come across a Bluecoat in Crow's Foot again, maybe it's James once more, but this time we DON'T get a warning because we've just irritated him enough.

Trying to get as much narrative detail as I could remember down on paper kept me HOURS on Friday, and five full notebook pages. My hand hurt so much when I was done....

I wasn't quite done yet, though, because we're now up to what I mostly did with my week. Namely, study this dang game!

I knew bits and pieces from Hubby reading passages off to me as he read through the book, plus he had to explain the base rules to the other players, so we all had enough to go off of to play, but was it enough for me to RUN a session?

I brought the roughly 300pg rulebook to work with me this past week, and whenever I had downtime I read. I read this book like it was a school textbook that I needed to study. I copied pages I wanted to make notes on or highlight passages. I jotted things down in a notebook to keep in mind. Most importantly, I tabbed the HECK out of this book so it would be easier for us to quickly flip to whatever rules we needed to figure out in the heat of the game so we didn't bog down the gameplay too much.

While reading though and studying the rulebook I reflected back on the session Hubby ran. He was new to the game as well, and one of the first pages of the rulebook stated that you shouldn't be expected to understand the rules your first go. There's certainly a learning curve with this game, but it's worth it. That said, I did use my knowledge of how the game DID play out versus how it probably SHOULD have played out, based on the rules, so there's some housecleaning we need to do before we officially start playing tonight.

But that's good. We're learning, and I can now help Hubby when he's unsure about a rule, and vice versa. I definitely have a much better understanding of the game and the rules I need to know specifically as a GM. I'm still a bit nervous about running the game tonight since I SUUUUCK at improv, but I feel a lot more confident with Blades than I ever was with D&D. Mostly because a means for me to answer player questions is right at my fingertips within the book, plus the players certainly have more storytelling and storycrafting control with Blades than in D&D, so it's less load on me.

I actually came up with a handful of scores the players can choose from tonight, that way they even feel like they have more control on the situational hook they follow, instead of being strong-armed like we did with the first session.

I have the score Hubby teased the group with at the end of the last game; utilizing our Crew's contact Fitz. I also have a Staking a Claim score, which is another key element of the game as a means to upgrading the Crew. Quarthix and Dragnime both figured last time that we should probably wait before staking a claim on anything, but I have the option available for tonight in case they change their minds. Another option I will literally have on the table is a potential way for the Crew to get rid of our Wanted level; something that doesn't happen until SOMEONE goes to jail for the crimes associated with our crew. Finally, I narrowed the 18-option list of potential Shadow score opportunities down to a list of 6. If they choose "random opportunity" they can then decide to either pick one of the six, or have me roll for one.

On top of all of THAT, I also started thinking about the world-build of the game itself. Another key thing of this game is that the city of Doskvol and the world of the Shattered Islands is supposed to be ALIVE in the background. The world doesn't revolve around our crew, and the environment surrounding each game session should reflect that. I won't get into the mechanics of how the game suggests doing this, but the long and short is that each faction has its own goals, rivals, and allies. As the player characters do things on their scores, during downtime, and while free-playing, they are going to somehow affect the delicate but unsteady balance within Doskvol.

For instance: murdering Bazso Baz.

Baz was the leader of a well-loved criminal faction; champions of the People, as they were. The citizens will NOT be happy about Baz's death. Also, Hubby had headcanoned that Baz's second in command Pickett was out with the majority of the Lampblacks, fighting their war against the Red Sashes, but could there be rumors that Pickett staged a coup? Did the 2nd strategically set up the meeting between the Void Serpents and Baz at the same time the warehouse and Baz would be mostly unguarded, wanting the faction leader to be killed? Would this cause unrest in the gang and a potential power vacuum? Or would Pickett step in as leader seamlessly? Would members start in-fighting as some begin to distrust Pickett? Would they be torn as to who to go after for Baz's death? Because there are other candidates as well. Such as the Red Sashes. They clearly would have the most to win from Baz's death, and there were rumors that he was taken to their HQ before his execution. Does this mean the Lampblacks push harder against the Red Sashes, winning advantage in the turf war? Or is it the Red Sashes that now have advantage since the Lampblacks are trying to recover from the assassination of their leader? What about the new leader of The Crows, Lyssa? The turf war started because she took over for Roric, and a lot believe she actually killed Roric so she COULD lead. She's known to be both connected and brash along with the suspicion of being a killer. Would she purposefully start up a turf war to try to weaken both the Lampblacks and Red Sashes - factions who are fighting over Crow's Foot which the Crows also obviously have turf within - in an effort to eliminate them? The Void Serpents are this daring upstart crew that is barely worth paying any mind, and yet they were somehow both smart enough to execute a faction boss and dumb enough to cause such a ruckus doing so? There's also that rumor about the Void Serpents taking Baz to the Red Sashes, only to execute him themselves. Was this all a ploy to try to convince the citizens to riot against the Red Sashes and weaken them as well? How deep does this rabbit hole go?

And that's just one district of this city! There are 12 districts in total, and 48 factions! Let alone other starting crews like ours - Hubby and I could come up with a rival starting crew of NPCs if we wanted - or anything going on outside of Doskvol. There's six countries that create the Shattered Isles which makes up the game world. There's also 20 other named cities in the world. At any point, Hubby and I could have something happen in any of those locations, or the ink-black Void Sea, or the vastly uninhabited Deathlands. I also didn't touch upon the Bluecoats and how things may have shifted for them as well due to the turf war and knowing Mara's potential involvement. Or the Spirit Wardens who had to clean up three scattered corpses from just one scuffle, before the spirits could emerge from the bodies and add to the already overwhelming ghost/haunting infestation within Doskvol.

There is a LOT to manage in the backgrounds, is what I'm saying. And that was largely what I was doing this week: studying this game, trying to understand the world already fleshed out in the game, and trying to figure out how our characters already affected the world, all while also trying to figure out score options for the players tonight.

It was a HUGE undertaking for me - Hubby says I put in TOO much thought when most of the world-build answers are at my fingertips via the rulebook, and he's probably right, but... meh? - but it was fun, and it did get the creative storytelling portion of my brain moving again. Shake off that dust! The true irony mentioned in this blog post's title is that Blades is a game designed to AVOID extensive planning. The point of the game is to just dive in with only the vaguest of plans - you're actually not allowed to plan via the rules - and then plan backwards by way of the Flashback mechanic. So much of the world and a TON of NPCs are already psuedo-fleshed out in the rulebook. All I'd need to do is flip to a page and read it for the group. The Score that Hubby teased the group was based on the "goals" section of one of the Faction descriptions. Again, this should be easy. It's all more-or-less already built.

I dunno. I guess it's easier for me to dive in with regards to fanfiction because I could immerse more into the worlds of "Hey, Arnold!" or Miraculous Ladybug or Legend of Zelda. I just need to be patient and spend more time with the last chapter of the book that explains the world itself; not the game and game mechanics. I'm hoping I'll get there.

In the meantime, let's see how well the game goes tonight. Hubby will GM next week, so I'll be able to take a bit of a breather and can go back to focusing on reading fanfics and maybe start thinking of my own fanfics.

Plus, I now have an original short story to beta read! A college friend we lovingly nicknamed Chewy - as in Chewbacca, but we spelled it with a -y instead of the -ie - asked me this weekend to look through a story he's been working on for pretty much all of 2020. Or, maybe it was a side-project he was working on whenever he needed a break from the main 2020 story that has already filled 2 journals? Either way, I'm excited to see what he came up with. Reading his story is on my To Do list for tomorrow.

Hacker Boy
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by Birdman, Inc.

What about all of you fine folks? Aside from bots, I haven't had any comments in a while. I'm curious as to what you've been up to. Any writing on your end? Any good stories you've been reading? Any fun games you've played? Have YOU tried Blades in the Dark or other Forged in the Dark games? Let me know below!

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