I am presently in Seattle to work Emerald City Comic Con and working through my jet lag. It’s a good show, or at least it was last year when we were upstairs with artists’ alley. The new Summit convention center has nice windows and skylights and it made for a very pleasant experience. The majority of the vendors were down in the basement, which had a lawless flea market vibe, packed with random old toys, bootleg merch, and tattoo booths along one wall. It seems they’ve packed all the vendors down there this year, including us, so we’ll see how that goes.

Between ECCC and PAX West, this is my fifth trip to Seattle in the last two and a half years. The city has taken on an uncanny quality, as I’ve acquired a certain degree of familiarity with it, but it isn’t the same as living here. Two restaurants have closed that I went to just six months ago. There’s an IHOP and a Whole Foods that I must have walked past a dozen times, but I swear I’ve never seen them before. It’s weird, in the proper sense of that word.

In my downtime, I’m reading, playing games on my Switch, and watching the Bad Batch. My son wants me to catch up on the latter, though he’s already watching the new episodes without me. It’s really quite good. I haven’t seen the Clone Wars series and I feel like I should go back and watch it. The original Star Wars movies never held the same prominence for him that they did for me, and that’s always felt odd. Now I can see why Clone Wars and the Bad Batch clicked for him. They’re really “his Star Wars,” and they have a long form dramatic tone that the movies didn’t have. At the same time, there’s such a deluge of entertainment content readily available now. I can remember watching the original Star Wars in French on the CBC because it was a rare chance to see it pre-VCR. My son cycles between Star Wars and the MCU, Transformers, and Fast & Furious movies as the spirit moves him. What a time to be alive, I guess? I’m not sure that easy access forms valued connections. Are these really things we should have deep personal connections to? I’m not sure about that either.

Reading: I went back and finished the last few pages of Holy Mountain Shaker after setting it aside a couple months ago. It may have me convinced that it works and would be fun to play through. I’d like to run it and see what happens, but I would definitely explain to my players that it’s a dreamscape that plays by its own rules. I think I read that the author, Luka Rejec, said that it was about half of what he would like it to be, and I can see that. I think it’s runnable as is, but it would be an astounding work if it was fleshed out fully. I’m still not sure about Gradient Descent, but I’m withholding judgment until I finish it, as one should.

Yesterday I read Palace of 1000 Stone Faces, a snippet from the upcoming Swordfish Islands book Marlo’s Mire. It’s alright, it has a dash of the magic of the Dark of Hot Springs Island but doesn’t take it very far or really give me enough to go wild with it. I hope it gets developed further for the full publication.

I bounce around between a lot of books at any given time, and I added Mortzengerstrum the Mad Manticore of the Prismatic Peak to the current rotation. My only observation so far is that I didn’t realize it was written for 5e, especially since it provides condensed stat blocks in the sidebar column. That is one 5e problem I haven’t been able to satisfactorily solve. The 5e stat blocks are so damn big, and they’re hard to trim down. You don’t need most of the information in them until you do, so it’s tempting to cut things, but you might find yourself put out and needing to refer back to the books anyway.

Forge of Foes took an interesting approach to the subject by boiling down quick monster creation to the combat essentials, but I find that even that isn’t quite enough for me. I settled on a happy medium with the salamanders in my Sunday game. I used the salamander stats from the Monster Manual but I replaced the combat essentials with the ones from Forge of Foes to change them to CR 3. That gave me saves and powers that I could refer to consistently while re-tuning their combat strength. I then lowered their hit points and increase their damage output, making them dangerous unless taken care of quickly, but that was just a personal preference. Get this fight over, we have other things to do!

(Literally) random mechanic of the day: The humdrum d6 is often overlooked in 5e games, but I like it as an oracular device because it divides so neatly by three. I often use it as such: (1 or 2) the situation worsens, (3 or 4) things remain the same, (5 or 6) there’s a benefit or improvement. In practice (and I’ll repeat this in the upcoming chase post), I like the idea that when moving, like in 5e with 30’ of movement, a player can roll 1d6, and on a 1 or 2, they can only move 25’, a roll of 3 or 4 gives them their standard 30’, and with a result of 5 or 6, they can move 35’. Now everyone has some variety to their movement speed and you can actually chase someone down or escape!

This can be nudged along as well. You could use advantage or disadvantage, but this skews the results wildly.

I think it most cases it works better to nudge the result range, so that (1-3) is bad, (4-5) is the same, and (6) is good.

This simple tool can be used for all sorts of things, like determining NPC reactions or the results of dangerous actions. If a PC throws a torch into the gas-filled mineshaft, the explosion could (1-2) trigger a cave-in, (3-5) unleash dangerous blowback, or (6) safely burn off the gas. Kaboom!