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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