Der PigDog's PigBlog

Spoilers for the scale 1 Burning Shores and Ice Palace locations in Martin's Trollbabe game! I've played two sessions of Trollbabe with Martin and Eero. Martin is GMing and Eero and I play Trollbabes, very large and powerful troll-human women. Our job as players is simple, to play the Trollbabe honestly and to advance her interests. My Trollbabe is Honea, initially defined as follows: Forwarded Honea the Smart (5) Trollbabe Start with Xena, Warrior Princess, but 7 feet tall, purple hair with a side and undercut, all teeth slightly pointed, a row of short horns on the shaven side of her head. Purple lip-dye when she can get it. Fancy earrings. Wears an armored bodice, mail skirt, and a smile. Fighting 4-, unarmed: naturally graceful, without training or a killing instinct. Magic 6+, troll magic: confident, brash even, meticulous, long traditional trollish sitting-ceremonies and quick little hexes too Social 5+, perky: confident, loud, happy when all eyes are on her. Items: 1 pai...

 Here's my prep for the game: There's some heavy stuff in there; content warning for sexual violence, drugs, and all kinds of prejudiced -phobias.  A disclaimer about the depiction of Mormons in this scenario: it's totally fictional. I know/have known many Mormons, none of whom were serial killers. This scenario is based on a paranoid fantasy of Mormon-Pentecostal syncretists. Unlike modern Mormons, the villains in this scenario still believe in polygamy (now forbidden by the Church of Latter-Day Saints), they make and take drugs (always forbidden by the LDS), they worship the cross, speak in tongues, and handle snakes (Mormons don't worship the cross, and the latter two activities are Pentecostal), and they kidnap, rape, and impregnate women to serve as their "wives" (which is not something I associate with any modern religion). Prep and writing  This scenario evolved from a dream I had, in which killer hillbilly farmers worked a pumpkin patch, and simultaneo...

This post has some bad language in it, including gendered and homophobic slurs. It Was a Mutual Decision 's pitch is strong, incredibly strong, maybe the single best pitch for a game I have ever heard: you are in a breakup, as civil or toxic as you like, and one or both of you may be a horrible rat-human monster. Oh, and the game ends either when you've both gracefully exited the relationship, or one or both of you are dead. Also, it's a team-based game: all the boys play the girl, and all the girls play the boy. -- Every single time I have delivered this pitch, I see eyes light up. It's so obviously fun, funny, and resonant. Cover of It Was a Mutual Decision with a thumbs-up representing my positive opinion of the game Unfortunately for the reader, there are no digital copies, it is not currently in print, and the writer has no immediate plans to make it available again. I ordered a copy off ebay but it got snatched by porch pirates. Luckily when I was complainin...

Coup de Main, Tuesdays. I'm getting burnt out on big groups. Also, I think I need more visual stimulation while I play; ideally I'll be using video chat for most games in the future. The Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, take 1  Bloody-Handed Name of Bronze, Codex Edition cover A cool game about bronze-age swords and sorcery heroes; buy it here .  Jay and Simon. Not very good play. A failing of dramatic coordination. We created a situation, in which all the characters were present, but failed to involve them in an interesting way. I had some pretty good takeaways for future games, though. When you're playing, you should always give a name to every single entity that acts in a scene, and you should be expansive about your sense of "acts". Feel free to switch around who plays what entity.  The Lover of Jet and Gold (name of bronze take 2, 2 sessions) TBHNoB started life as three pamphlets: The Lover of Jet and Gold, about Namedealers, Heart of Bronze, about Fated Heroes...

It Was a Mutual Decision (2002) Photo of It Was a Mutual Decision, stolen from the internet Played with Misha, Divya, and Ken. Misha and I are a real-life couple, and Ken and Divya are a real-life couple. Misha and Divya are women, Ken is a man, and I am nonbinary, though I played on Ken's team in the game. All three, and everyone else I have talked to, were absolutely charmed by the premise of the game. It is an extremely easy sell. The rulebook promises that the rat content will serve to soften the blow of the breakup content, and this is certainly what I observed in play. We would go from shouting and breathing hard as we hurled in-character invectives across the room, to giggling uncontrollably while figuring out how to add rats to the scene. Authorities in play were natural and easy. Ken and I, and Misha and Divya, handed of narration without a word and without conflict. Everyone was creatively focused. We did not put much work into establishing the social landscape around our...

Nibelungs play report! I will be light on module details, since I plan to run this scenario again. 2 players, Adam and Never, a knight and a witch. Plenty of debating about equipment. I decided, "Tell me what your item is, and then we will figure out what it does. The effect comes second." The most important two pieces were rope (which we said could come untied any time the user wished, a la elvish rope in the lord of the rings) and an oak twig, which could grow instantly into a full oak if planted in the ground. Before the scenario started, one player noticed that they would need a disposable follower in case they rescued Gunther, otherwise they would violate the rule of 7. They took 2 war dogs, 1 hunting dog, and 2 men at arms. The journey to the Unkensee was pretty easy. Encounter with a revenant who level-drained the witch but killed no one. At the Unkensee, the knight tried to rule-of-three intimidate the hunting dogs into following him after driving them off twice, but...

Impromptu freeform game with Aalisha and Brentley, two coworkers. I had played one abortive session of Vigil, and one successful session of Basic D&D, with Brentley. Aalisha had never heard of roleplaying before, which is how the game started. We played over a series of three workdays, advancing the situation between pizza orders. I explained what we do -- we have a conversation about fictional events, with different people responsible for different things within the fictional situation. The fictional events could be anything. For instance, in a recent game  one character, a chad fuckboy, went to bed with a woman much less cool than him, intending a one night stand, but woke up the next morning to find that he was infatuated with her. I asked Aalisha, what do you do in this circumstance? What would the fuckboy do? She and Brentley both gave guesses and explanations about the fuckboy's feelings and actions. Brentley, it was clear, had a stronger vision for the fuckboy than Aali...

Untitled Vampire Game with Martin. Martin played a refugee and orphan from a civil war between rival ethnic groups in a small east African country. I played a charismatic older boy assembling a gang of child soldiers among the refugee. Despite the oppressive subject matter, play was in a sense relaxed; we didn't drive towards any climax or conflicts, we simply narrated events as they struck us. In the end, the boy survived the gang, but his overall odds look grim, and I doubt he'll live much longer. I have complicated feelings about the ending of the game. It worked, as in, it felt right, that the boy should escape the gang by jumping off a bridge, and in the process breaking his leg. But I don't want things to be up whim like this in general; the chance of wimping out and pulling punches is too high. I want a resolution method with teeth. My current thought is that the Vampire should add a die whenever they take steps to feed on the Victim, and the Victim sh...

I'm 10 or more session reports behind and it's time to stop pretending to write the old ones and start actually writing the new ones. Here we go! Second session in Simon's Under the City . Just Jay and me. He is returning with his character Hanbul Al-Alawi, a Sufi mystic and newcomer to the city. We determined that he's living in the crusader state of Odessa, and filled out a lot of detail about the city, its current religious and political tensions, and his place in it. We started with some  downtime maneuvers , three of them since it had been three weeks since the last Under the City session. Normally that would be so much window dressing, but he spent a week collecting rumors in downtime, and he rolled the rumor "Several prominent citizens stand accused of grisly murders." I don't give bum rumors, the whole point of the rumor table is to see if you hear anything scenario-relevant, so we know it's going to come up sooner or later. We figured out who ...

Played two games of Murderous Ghosts with Misha, Divya, and Ken. I was the MC for the first game. Ken was the MC for the second game -- his first-ever time MCing! Unfortunately, I don't remember the sequence of pulls or moves precisely, so this  Before play I thought up a pretty detailed chronology of the violent act which spawned the ghosts. A husband, the owner of the hotel, found his wife cheating on him. He castrated his wife's lover and tossed their twin babies in the fireplace, and then hung himself. His wife clawed her eyes out in despair and slit her own throat. The precise chronology turned out not to matter at all during play. And the whole thing was more complicated than it needed to be. We started off with "Fang" finding the husband's corpse, still swinging, dripping someone else's blood from its hands. Fang recalls that he doesn't want children any time soon. Fang moves to another room, a richly appointed living room, where he finds the burnt ...

CW necrophilia Here's the playlist I made and have been listening to as I prep the game: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ih9SFciZe1a38sHqXWDsP?si=d7552f0144114e5f Played with my partner Misha, our friend Divya, Divya's boyfriend Ken, and our friend Evann. Misha has played a little bit of wargamey DND with me, Misha and Divya have played in the last session of Monsterhearts, and Ken played one session of some kind of DND before. Otherwise, no RPG experience. We spent a really long time -- maybe too long? -- talking about the nature of play, how it works, what the skins do. Ken and Divya (werewolf and ghost, respectively) chose their skins eagerly. Misha was happy with infernal, and Evann eventually settled on fae. The game is set in  Hudson, Ohio, where Ken grew up. 20k residents. Majority white. Educated, middle class or higher. Headquarters of Jo-Ann Fabrics. He did not like it there, and does not want to go back. The seating chart is still a great method of scenario prep. ...