Last map of the campaign

First Played: Stormbringer
First Run: Vampire The Masquerade (heavily homebrewed)
Played Most: gosh... I have no idea ..
Run Most: ???
Most recently played: Grimwild
Most recently run: Constellation Cards

The Real Work

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

~ Wendell Berry ~
#Poem

"You can say that people like Mekaneck, but I think that's a stretch."
-Dr. Bilbo

Theme from Superman (Official Trailer Version) John Murphy, David Fleming · Theme from Superman (Official Trailer Version) · Song · 2025

One thing that left me uncertain was the echoes of John Williams in the background. Would they bring back that theme? Could they?
open.spotify.com/track/3G5160...

holy shit, they very much did. ngl, this made me cry a little. The moment i heard the theme, it just hit hard.

When i first saw the trailer for Gunn's Superman i was caught in the middle, somewhere between, "no, don't, we're burnt out, we can't do this now" and "omg, we need this character right now so painfully, desperately."

But the possibility in every shot really got me hoping.

For me the core of the Superman mythology is pretty simple: what if you were, at the end of the comic, the strongest, most unstoppable character, and you still cared. About everything. Everyone. What if you had power, but you were not corrupted, and you used it to save people, to save the world.

It took me some years to become a Superman fan. Took as many years, i'm sure, for the mythology to find the stories it needs to make that fiction meaningful.

Now i go back to a lot of those stories to remember the shape of them, and to remember the shape of who i want to be.

a man wearing a black sweater with lightning bolts on it is smiling Alt: David Rose feeling feels

Guh.

This gives me a fast-and-easy way to find an image i can work with and convert it to a game-useable NPC portrait.

The hard part is not getting too critical of my output - the goal is to make it fast and easy, so i'm not losing time rendering imagery for the game.

So for this campaign i've got a new angle - i find the celebrity i want to use as the core of the character, i find a portrait that conveys that 'version' of them, and then i print them out in small squares the size of a transparent post-it. And i sketch over the image.

Eventually i decided to start rendering images of the character, based on the celebrity. I first did this in Illustrator, in the same style as Dungeon World.

This took a lot of time, though, and i ended up with a backlog of illustrations to finish.

For the campaign i'm currently running i'm trying a new thing for NPCs.

In the past i would use pictures of celebrities to say "who plays this character" - this gave me not only a clear visual, but a voice and personality to play toward when portraying them in the game.

I don't think anyone, though, is 100% just one of those three types of player though.

So it leaves me wondering - what are the sockets i'm plugged into? What expectations to i have that leave me at odds with other folks?

All, of course, in an effort to answer, "Do i really hate everything?"

Some people call it "Gaming" and that's their socket to plug into. The discussion of the rules, how they work, what to expect is a big part of the fun. Some people experience this by playing a ton of different games, just like board games or video games.

Some people call it "Role-Playing" - the story is incidental, maybe something you get from the premise or the structure of the game, the mechanics are optional. The real value is getting to bring your character to the experience; maybe to perform, maybe to disappear into someone else for a bit.

Some people call it "shared storytelling" and they mean exactly that, it's a collaborative work of fiction, crafted via conversation. That's what they plug in to. The Role-Playing part is optional, maybe a hassle. The game-design part is problematic if it gets in the way of storytelling.

Another throughline is about how the medium is experienced. How much is it storytelling? How much is it role-playing? How much is it gaming?

If what i love isn't really any of those three, though, it's tough to get on the same page with people.

One throughline i can see is the concept of competition. I hate competition. I've never enjoyed a game based on winning vs losing. In that regard it took me a LONG time to appreciate the idea of dice determining what happens next in a story - and ... that's a big complaint, covers a lot of games.

But my friend ain't wrong. I have never found a table-top game i wouldn't house rule into a whole new shape. I'm like someone saying they love sports, but they've never played a game by the rules in their life.

It must be pretty shitty to hang around someone like that.

I've never felt like my opinion had weight or worthiness, especially from the people i looked up to most, so i spend my days trying to scream a world into existence where every opinion matters, and every Thing that could be Loved is worthy of love. From fan-fic to bananas duct taped to the wall.

I won't hide it, that accusation devastated me. I feel like i've spent most of my life defending the things i like, doing my best to hold all criticism as _subjective_ and only valuable if it's requested and open-hearted. I loathe professional critique, academia leaves me bristling.

A couple months ago a friend (someone i used to feel close to) told me "you hate everything." We were talking about tabletop role-playing games, i'd just commented about a new design he'd picked up to start playing with a different group i don't know. He hasn't invited me to games in a long while.

No worries! I'm glad to help, good on you for using the positive side of social media.

I wish I had an easier answer, but honestly, my 10 years in preflight and print design were literally doing just this- asking question after question to narrow down the solution

Thegamecrafter.com might have a solution

Oof - that's tough - any reason not too go with a print and ship on demand service? Seattle is pretty solid between "rich opulent printing" like Lantern Press, and "punk rock zine" like Saigon.

Also I should note I've been out of the print game since pre-lockdown, so I can't promise these places are all still.. even there, honestly. I've been to Saigon Press in the past year, but the rest are possibly defunct or may have flagged in quality.

For high quality stuff, you might give Alphagraphics downtown a call and get a project person to help you - they can handle all the outsourcing for assembly if they didn't do it in house

For budget, and if A4 size is non negotiable, I'd try Saigon Press on Rainier Ave; if they won't do the bindery, then get with Seattle Bindery first and see what kind of prints they want for assembly, then get those from Saigon.

This is a pretty short run, are they doing a small amount for budget reasons or do they want a small sampling of high quality stuff?