Anti-Starvation: Pantry Basics

I was typing up an email for a friend on food survival when neither you nor your significant other/roommate are used to the kitchen, and I figured this knowledge should be more widely shared.

Now, I’m a pretty darn good cook by this stage in my life. I’ve conquered a lot of the milestones and made my own bread, jam, and pie (which are stupidly easy, despite the fog of glory that surrounds them). But there was a time when I wouldn’t have ventured that far, when my kitchen knowledge was restricted to Hamburger Helper and the five family cookie recipes my mom taught me how to make so she wouldn’t have to be responsible for them at holidays any longer.

I hit the ground running with being able to bake and having a rudimentary knowledge of how to make things boil and how not to burn scrambled eggs, but it wasn’t much of a head start. Even now, when I’m capable of much more, I still fall back on a lot of my anti-starvation, college-era shortcuts.

So here you are. Things To Prevent Starvation, Save Money on Ordering Out, and Not Be Too Terribly Unhealthy:

1. Bisquick, mofos. I spent several years recently poo-pooing it, saying it was ridiculous to buy when I already had all the ingredients on hand anyway. But then I needed it for an emergency pie recipe at Thanksgiving, when I couldn’t find frozen pie crust and did not have time to make my own. Then I remembered that it’s sort of like Miracle Gro for your kitchen: you don’t *need* it, exactly, but it’s damn useful, the recipes are right on the box, and it makes your life easier. I’m not going to go through all the trouble of looking up biscuit recipes and trying different ones out when I know the Bisquick one works and it’ll take me two minutes to stir together, if that. It’s just useful.

2. Steam-in-the-bag frozen veggies. God, I love these. Look, I prefer to cook with fresh vegetables, but that isn’t always practical when you’re busy. I inevitably forget them in the crisper, and they rot, and then I have to clean all that up while whining about how bad a person I am for wasting a perfectly good bundle of green onions. But frozen veggies I can steam in my microwave in 4 1/2 minutes? Sold! These are great. I keep a variety on hand to add onto the dinner plate next to a chicken breast, or stir into pasta.

3. Boxes of pasta. Lots of boxes of pasta. Cook it, drain it, stir it together with other things and eat.

4. Skinless, boneless chicken breasts. I cook a lot of these. I pan-fry them, I bake them, make chicken strips, whatever. Keep them in the freezer, throw a pack in the fridge to thaw the night before, cook for dinner. Pan frying takes no skill – add a bit of oil or butter to the pan, set to medium, add chicken. Flip occasionally. Cook until you see no pink, and if you’re not sure, saw one in half to check. It’s your dinner, you’re not Martha Stewart, what do you care how it looks? Add seasoning of choice. Speaking of:

5. Seasoning blends. There are a handful of seasonings you should always have (oregano, basil, cinnamon, ginger, rosemary, cayenne pepper, onion powder, garlic powder). Aside from that, invest in different seasoning blends (I currently have a Hot Madras Curry Powder and a Mediterranean Spice Blend in my cupboard). Add these to pasta with a little olive oil and butter, with some steamed vegetables and top with grated Romano, and you’re in business. Or at least not eating Ramen.

6. Quick non-meat proteins. This usually means cheese and legumes. I usually have a block of cheddar (for grits & cheese, scrambled eggs, whatever) and a hunk of Romano (I used to buy the kind of Parmesan and Romano that come in glass containers with a shaker top, but the boyfriend put his slightly Italian foot down on fresh Romano, and I’m certainly not arguing). I also always, always have cans of black beans and chickpeas. The Goya brand has a great black beans & rice recipe on the can, and chickpeas can be added to anything. If I’m adding chickpeas to pasta (which I do, frequently), I boil them in a bit of chicken broth in a sauce pan, with seasoning added liberally to them – then I toss them with unseasoned pasta, olive oil, maybe butter, and steamed veggies.

7. Broth. I use Home Basics (a great tip from another friend led me away from Swanson to them – so much better!) which you can usually find in most grocery stores. Their chicken stock is good enough to use for chicken noodle soup without adding anything to it. I’ll sometimes just cook rice and add the heated broth to it when I’m feeling a bit under the weather.

8. Rice/Grains. Look in your grocery stores for the containers of select grains, like a wild rice blend. Something that’s just the grain itself. It will often tell you how to cook it on the back label. I use these instead of the Uncle Ben’s or Zatarin’s or any dishes like that, so I can season how I want it and I don’t get the MSG (I get migraines, so I tend to avoid weird preservatives and heavy salt).

9. Breakfast: Oatmeal. Just grab a container. Quaker cooks in 1 minute, there’s no need for instant. Same for grits – it takes 3 or 4 minutes to cook grits. For healthier breakfasts, and because I don’t much like cereal, I keep cottage cheese (I also don’t like yogurt much), granola, and bananas. If some of your bananas go black before you can eat them, google a recipe for banana bread.

10. Fruit! Let’s not get rickets. I keep apples and oranges on hand because they stay good for ages. I’ll get grapes and cherries in season, and strawberries too, but the trick is to clean and cut them up as soon as you bring them home, otherwise you’ll forget about it and it’ll just sit in the fridge.

So those are my basic Things You Should Keep In Your Kitchen ideas. There’s also a great cookbook called “Help! My Apartment Has a Kitchen!” that I heartily recommend looking up on Amazon. Other than that, just start amassing a collection of recipes you try and like. Don’t be discouraged by failures – keep the pizza delivery info handy just in case when trying out a new skill (let’s not talk about my lumpy potato soup failure). Pinterest is a good place to surf for recipe ideas, and then start following food blogs you like. Also, don’t be afraid to google a term you don’t understand in the middle of a recipe. We have smartphones for exactly this kind of shit. I had to look up “temper” as in “temper in the egg” because I had no clue what the crap that meant (it means stir in the cold thing to a bit of the hot thing, then keep adding hot things to bring the cold thing up to temperature so it doesn’t curdle or cook prematurely), even though I had done that exact thing before.

That’s it for the Anti-Starvation: Pantry Basics edition. I’ll start sharing some simple recipes soon, too.

 

Interwubs. Or “cool things I found this morning.”

I rolled out of bed a bit late this morning, and have been catching up on Twitter and such this morning (look, until it’s 1pm, it’s morning, shut up). The internet has been hitting it out of the ballpark with the funnies. Thought I’d share.
First up, a Tumblr that’s been making its rounds: Memos from Fury.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I’m a sucker for anything epistolary when it comes to fiction/humor, so I had a great time reading through these.

 

Second up came to me in an email from my boyfriend, whose favorite Beatles song “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” and love of print-making/type-setting came together in this really neat reproduction of the original poster that inspired John Lennon.The video is gorgeous:

 

And thirdly, a trailer for “Ghostbusters” set to the music from “Inception”. I giggled.

 

Sorry, that’s all I’ve got for you today. I did have a couple more Atomic Robo RPG playtests at DC Game Day, but I’ve been too exhausted to write them up yet. I need to get my thoughts and notes in order and present them to Mike and Fred, and then I’ll share with you some snippets and character descriptions. I’ve been lucky in getting fantastically creative players!

‘Til then, adieu.

 

 

Remain calm and trust in science.

Apologies. This post is a little late coming, but in my defense, I was in the middle of a move. I now live in the District of Columbia, where I have no Congressional representative, because that’s what America’s about.

Anyway.

A cool thing happened last month when I was organizing an RPG event for the store during our Celebration of Gaming week. I was chatting via email with Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Productions, as Evil Hat is a local company, and we’re all about supporting the local gaming industry. Fred’s a good friend of the store, and I asked him if he had anything he wanted to contribute to the RPG event. Turns out he did, but needed an available GM. I happened to be available, and of course wanted a sneak peek at the freshly brewing Atomic Robo RPG.

So I got to run a playtest game of Atomic Robo at our RPG event, because I wasn’t too bothered about not getting all the materials until the night before the event. As a GM, I probably don’t do half as much preparation as I should, preferring to fly by the seat of my pants instead. Most of the time, fortunately, it works for me.

The Atomic Robo RPG is being written by Mike Olson, whom you may be familiar with from the Kerberos Club RPG. I had heard of his work from that game, but I’d not gotten the opportunity to play it. I will say that so far, from what I’ve seen, I think he’s doing a fantastic job with Atomic Robo.

If you’re not familiar with the comic (by the amazing team of Brian Clevinger and Scott Wegener), Atomic Robo is the story of a robot (named Atomic Robo) who was created by Nikola Tesla in the 1920s. The comic follows Robo’s life – and not always in chronological order. Robo fights for the U.S.A. during WWII, secretly cooperates with NASA on a Mars mission in the ’70s, is buds with Carl Sagan and a contemporary of H.P. Lovecraft, and eventually founds Tesladyne Industries, a company whose Action Scientists are dedicated to the fringe of scientific discovery. Robo’s own love of pulp fiction as a young robot is carried over in the pulpy, actiony, humor-ridden goodness that is the Atomic Robo comic.

This pulpy goodness lends itself quite well to the FATE system, as evidenced by Evil Hat’s success with the Spirit of the Century RPG. Without giving too much away of mechanics that are still a work-in-progress, the ARRPG features “FATE Core”, a simplified, streamlined version of the mechanics. Character creation on the fly is encouraged, and relatively easy to produce, though I found in my playtest that my players still wanted to take the time and carve out who they were before beginning the adventure.

Skills, at this point, are coming in bundles, which eliminates most of the drag of character creation, in my opinion. Rather than, say, picking over an entire list and trying to decide between lock-picking and safe-cracking, you automatically get both under that parent bundle. You’re a thief. It’s assumed you can do thief-type things. You don’t have to hone each attribute carefully.

Which is, admittedly, not the RPG experience some players are looking for. Some people want the specific skills at specific numbers. FATE has never really been the game for that sort of player, however, even in DFRPG mode, which is its crunchiest iteration to date.

Now, if you read this blog, you know that I adore the Dresden Files RPG, and that I run a (sometimes, when life doesn’t get in the way) weekly game of it. And I do love it, and I see no reason to not continue loving it. But Dresden is a game meant for a long campaign – it grows and grooms characters through all sorts of exciting developments, and it’s built to house a wonderfully detailed and collaboratively made world. Atomic Robo is not like Dresden. ARRPG is much more suited to fast, pick-up games, or a long term story in which one jumps around a timeline, picking up and discarding characters as you go. It’s a pure, compact, powerful punch of just plain fun.

“Listen,” says Atomic Robo in one of my favorite quotes from the comic series, “I didn’t found this crazy organization to not nuke things.”

And that’s how the game goes. You’re not playing ARRPG to not fight a steam-powered mechanical Sphinx in the Sea of Tranquility, or battle Lovecraftian horrors at a remote scientific research facility in the Yukon. You’re playing Atomic Robo to hit things. WITH SCIENCE.

ARRPG (and I’m guessing FATE Core) streamlines your action-y bits into categories of situations that arise. I won’t talk about it depth as, again, it’s still a work-in-progress and may change. But how it’s been divvied up so far has three essential categories that situations fall into, and each category has its own way of handling resolutions with dice rolls. It’s very nice, from the GM perspective, as it gives you a chance to quickly assess a need that arises in-game, and gives you the exact framework on how to handle it. That’s a nice change from Dresden, where I constantly find myself clarifying with my players what, exactly, they’re trying to accomplish. In ARRPG, so far, it’s “This is a challenge, here’s what you do to accomplish your goal” or “this is conflict, and here’s how you determine the winner”. It’s clear and concise, which lets me cut through to the exact bones of what’s going on and control the ratio of “scene time” better. I also found myself doing a lot less note-consulting, which even after months of playing DFRPG, I still find myself doing quite often. (That’s to be expected, I think, of a game that’s as dense in information as DFRPG is, though.) Again, ARRPG is incredibly well suited to quick pick-up RPG games.

There is character advancement in ARRPG, though it’s not as detailed as DFRPG. I’d be somewhat concerned about players hitting a ceiling in long-term games, but I think ARRPG will appeal to the type of player who is what we used to call in WoW terms an “alt-a-holic” – someone who just keeps creating new characters for the sheer joy of putting together something different. Atomic Robo lends itself to that admirably with its fast creation process, but builds in enough advancement to give players a chance to become attached to their characters before they lose them to the Vampire Dimension or something equally terrifying. I hope Tesladyne Industries provides a great life insurance policy, ’cause it’s a dangerous world the Action Scientist inhabits, even though they are exhorted to “Remain Calm and Trust in Science.”

The scenario Mike wrote and gave to me to run was a fun little sojourn to a remote Tesladyne research facility in Oregon that had failed to complete their last scheduled radio check-in. My players, true to their Action Scientist personas, did make a passing discussion about nuking the facility before their plane even landed in Oregon. I won’t tell you much more of the plot, as I think Mike is still using the scenario for play-tests. I’ll just say that it was like a hybrid of Doctor Who’s “Waters of Mars” and that X-Files episode with the dudes in the volcano, but with a distinctly Atomic Robo flair. It was good times.

I will tell you a bit about my PCs, because they’re just too great not to share. I had the good fortune of getting a playtest table with a good mix of those who were familiar with FATE, but not Atomic Robo, those who were familiar with the comic but not the system, and one who had no familiarity with either. They all were able to pick it up and run with it, and easily got into the sharp-witted, bantering spirit of Atomic Robo. All were playing human Action Scientists (employees of Tesladyne Industries).

So without further ado, meet the PCs:

Captain Charles “Chunk” Pylon

Captain Pylon was the mission commander, the team leader, the man calling the shots that no one actually listens to. He’s big, he’s righteous, and he’s dedicated to his job, which is punching things that get in his scientists’ way or anything that harms an innocent. One might think of him as Captain America without the brains. He believes in his mission, and boy how he believes in it. There are pro wrestlers with less intensity and more personality. But he knows science. Well…he knows enough science. Enough to break science things.

Dr. Luis Rodriguez

Dr. Rodriguez is an overly optimistic genius with a specialty in Esoteric (read: Never Been Tested) Materials, and a penchant for too much self-experimentation. He’s what MacGyver would be if MacGyver was a mixture of Rodney McKay from Stargate: Atlantis, Q, and Arthur from The Tick. Did something of his blow up in your face? That’s okay. He can fix that. Hold on, try this…

Dr. Felicity Brilliant

Dr. Brilliant is just that, but only with machines. Put anything mechanical in her path and she’ll set it right or disassemble it in no time flat. She makes motors purr like kittens and computer systems run like satin, but trying to talk to her person-to-person is like trying to have a meaningful conversation with a hamburger. You, as a person, are not made of metal and gears and Dr. Brilliant does not understand how you work, nor does she care to find out. You’re in her way. Please either hand her that monkey wrench or move.

Dr. Julio Dokteur

It’s commonly thought that too much time on the internet can drive you mad. Dr. Dokteur doesn’t think that, but then he only inhabits the “secret” internet, where all the “good stuff” is. Conspiracy theories can be an excellent source of information, if one knows how to dissect it properly. And no, his hat is not “tin foil”, thank you. Only amateurs wear foil. This thing is solid aluminum, carefully crafted to ensure that no Brain Melty Waves can penetrate through its long-lasting, triple-layered protection.

Dr. Joe “Bermuda” Gunther

And finally we have Bermuda Joe, probably the most normal sort of person in a place that doesn’t tend to hire “normal” people. Joe is a particle physicist by trade, but a boxer by passion. To him, the sweet science of the ring is every bit as potent and beautiful as the science inside the Large Hadron Collider. He’s rather fond of Bermuda shorts and Hawaiian shirts, and gives a shirt to Robo every year for Christmas.

The team managed to get themselves into, out of, and back into trouble with perfect regularity, and everyone enjoyed the story and the camp of Atomic Robo immensely. It promises to be a great addition to the Evil Hat Productions line-up and a great use of the FATE system. I’m definitely looking forward to watching its progress and running more playtest games as situations and permissions arise.

Keep calm, trust in science, and if anything bothers you, just use your violence on it. And remember, there’s only one way to deal with giant insects, and that way is to throw a Buick at it.

 

Seriously?

I was making chicken and dumpling soup the other night, and needed something to occupy my attention while waiting for various stages of cooking to be completed. I had one of those “Oh, right, Skyrim!” moments and tossed it into the 360.

I picked back up with a quest line I had been following for the Companions in Whiterun, a group of bad-ass mercenary warriors/hunters who also happen to be werewolves. Because they weren’t bad-ass enough, apparently.

We don’t need motorcycles. Because we’re werewolves.

The passive dialogue in Skyrim kills me, sometimes, when it doesn’t update with the storyline. Like, I’m running around in a full suit of armor made out of dragon bones. The bones of dragons. The bones of dragons I have slain. I have taken these bones and made them into armor, and wear them around proudly to show off my dragon-slaying skills, which are obviously pretty high, as I have slain enough dragons to make a fucking suit of armor from their bones.

Armor. Dragon bones. What?

There’s this one Companion where every time you walk past her, she says to you “Oh, hi. I killed a bear today. Did you kill anything?” and I imagine my bad-ass dark elf just standing there in her dragon-bone armor, looking at this lady like, “Seriously? Yes. Yes, I did. I KILLED DRAGONS. SEVERAL. AS IN MORE THAN ONE. MORE THAN ONE DRAGON HAVE I SLAIN TODAY. But, please, tell me about your bear.”

But there are no dialogue interactions with her, because Bethesda obviously felt that would take away from the time you spend killing dragons. I’m cool with that.

So, anyway. I’m off on this quest for the Companions, and I take three of their bad-ass selves with me into this dude’s tomb. We go in the tomb, but then one of them has to leave because his suddenly-grown conscience is itching.

Fine. Whatever.

We continue on, fighting our way through, and then we approach a door with tell-tale spider-webs all over it. There are very large spiders in Skyrim, but though they’re large for spiders, they’re not, like, the most fearsome monster *ever*. I have a sword that does shock damage and armor made from dragon-bones. Also, I’m a werewolf. The spiders can suck it.

Then one of the Companions, the biggest, toughest, axe-wielding muthafucka around, stops. He looks at me and says, “Sorry, I can’t keep going. ‘Cause, you know, spiders.”

I might have been paraphrasing, but not by much. The big bad dude is stopping because of spiders. We just hacked our way through an army of ghost warriors, but spiders? Oh, no. Can’t handle the two-hit spiders.

Despite the fact that he is an axe-wielding fucking WEREWOLF.

But, no. Spiders.

Wimp.

 

 

 

 

And sometimes you get a naked Viking covered in honey.

The Backstory:

There are a lot of drugs in my Dresden Files campaign.

This is not my fault.

See, one of the PCs built their character around being a drug dealer. Also being gay, which     has nothing to do with the drug dealing, though I did have to insist that “Gay Drug-Dealer” is not a valid high concept. Because it’s not.

So now with one character who’s a drug-dealer, the other PCs – a Rastafari cab-driver, a cop, and a college student – all immediately latched onto him as their point of contact and overlap. And when we brought in a player later on who wrote up what is essentially a stoner hard-rock Viking (seriously – his high concept is “Freewheeling Valhalla Rocker”), that kind of sealed the fact that everyone in the campaign except the cop is smoking up. Usually at the most inopportune times.

Meaning all the damn time.

(This is all roleplaying, just to make that clear. No one is actually smoking up on my table, unless by “smoking up” you mean “eating pizza” or “drinking Yuengling”.)

At any rate, having one PC as part of the underworld and another PC as a cop, this has actually given me a superb range of material to work with. It creates fantastic dramatic tension between the party members, who are all grudging allies that have been forced to unite in the face of the world coming off its hinges.

A couple times now, the group has run across a new gang that’s been carving out territory lately. The cops have nicknamed the group “Boneheads”, because the only uniting characteristic of its members (they run the gamut of race, economic background, neighborhood, and age) is the presence of glow-in-the-dark bone tattoos, representing a phosphorescent skeleton drawn on the outside of the body.

Also, these bitches are crazy. Off-the-hook crazy. Mostly because they’re all hyped up and controlled by a new drug called “Ghost Dust”, which seems to be a mixture of cocaine, caffeine, and something supernatural that no one in the D.C. Paranet has been able to identify.

The PCs have endured a run-in with the gang’s head, a man called Mr. Saturday, who was revealed as the loa known as Baron Samedi. When the Spartan tried to skewer him, he only succeeded in running his spear through what amounted to nothing more than a straw dummy. Flash forward, skipping past a few other story lines, and the group has once again run across the path of the Boneheads, this time while attending the Black Cat Club gig of their friend Nathan Reynolds – known to you as the Freewheeling Valhalla Rocker.

This is where they encounter Ghost Dust. Both the drug-dealing changeling (Lukas) and the cop (Nic, whom you’ve met) noticed this new drug, and obtained samples. The cop and the Viking took their sample to the crime lab. The changeling, the Spartan, and the Crazy Cabbie took theirs back to the changeling’s apartment to analyze the sample magically (the Crazy Cabbie is a hedge wizard).

So the cabbie analyzes the sample, confirms his suspicions that it’s a highly dangerous substance to be taken only in small doses – yet he concludes this at the same time the drug-dealing changeling has taken the powder, rolled it up in his joint, and lit it up.

Everyone simultaneously exclaims “WHAT THE FUCK LUKAS” (The cop and the Viking were on speaker phone. God, cell phones are such a great gaming tool, seriously) and Lukas promptly falls over unconscious after the first drag.

The Part with the Naked Viking Covered in Honey:

Lukas’s player, Jeph, was absent at this last session, which actually worked out pretty well, seeing as he was out cold for the majority of it.The Spartan (Arcas, played by Chris) elected to stay behind with Lukas to make sure he kept breathing, a task which wasn’t made easier by Arcas sitting on his chest (just in case he suddenly woke up crazy and violent).

The rest of the group converge on Madame Woo’s in Chinatown, the liquor/convenience store that also serves as the hub of Paranet information in the District, and are given an instruction manual to revive their friend and directions to the place at which to pick up supplies.

So, armed with a self-published book on Native American spirit walking rituals written in the comforting and reliable font of Comic Sans (complete with helpful diagrams of smiling hippies) and having purchased a blister-pack of ritual supplies from the goblin in the basement of Hank’s Used Books, the rest of the group are now ready to try and call their friend’s spirit back to his body so he doesn’t die of a drug overdose.

They also have syringes of adrenaline, just in case. They’ve seen Pulp Fiction.

Now, the ritual needs a Seeker, a Caller/Cheiftan, and any chosen number of Guardians inside and outside the circle to guard the Supplicant/Questioner (He Who Doth Misplaced His Spirit). The Seeker is the person willing to separate their own spirit from their body and walk the Spirit Plane to bring back the soul of the Supplicant, or to seek out a particularly spirit to garner information.

They pick the Viking, seeing as the Viking’s already halfway there, as he’s brought two drops of LSD off Madame Woo because he was bored.

The Cabbie pours over the ritual, and notes that the Seeker must “cleanse himself according to the ways of his people”. The Viking ponders this, points out that he really doesn’t feel like going on a killing spree, but that some mead might do the trick. There is no mead in Lukas’s apartment, but there is, however, an abundance of beer and a big plastic squeeze jar of “Guaranteed Value Honey”.

They then proceed to combine the beer and honey in the bottom of Lukas’s bathtub, then roll the Viking around in it.

So, he’s now naked, covered in honey, and since the ritual requires the Seeker and Supplicant to be in close contact, the Spartan picks up the Viking and puts him (sorry, “tastefully arranges” him) on top of the unconscious Lukas (the irony being that he’s too unconscious to actually enjoy this process). The Spartan also takes a picture.

The Cabbie and the Cop laugh, take pictures, and then stop fucking around with the Viking (who is rolling tits at this point from the acid) and place him should to shoulder with Lukas. They then force down a noxious potion (using a beer bong – which Arcas happens to have in the same bag* as his spear and shield, because hey, he is a college student) that creates a spirit bond between Lukas and Nathan, and also forces Nathan into a different plane of consciousness (despite the LSD keeping him awake).

On this spirit world, the Naked Viking Covered in Honey manages to turn his axe/guitar into a Tron-like light cycle, and rides through a cartoon forest gone creepily wrong, tracking his way to the soul of his friend by following a path of golden flowers that sprout up before him. He finally finds him, tucked away in a little story-book cottage, having tea with a tiny girl who proclaims herself to be Lukas’s sister and the Queen of the Spring Faerie Court, who has staged a Mad Hatter-esque party in the garden of the little cottage.

The Spring Queen is not pleased that someone has shown up to take her brother away.

Meanwhile, outside the Circle, the cop hears heavy footsteps downstairs and the group belatedly realizes that they forgot to put up defensive wards around the apartment. The cop, however, is the only one who can do anything about it, as the other two are inside the Circle with the Viking and the changeling, and if they break the Circle while their souls are outside their bodies, then their friends are lost and their bodies become hosts for any spiritual nasties who feel like romping around the mortal plain for kicks.

The cop, however, has a nasty spiritual problem of her own in the form of a demonic silver coin she happens to possess, and a little voice whispering the back of her head that speaks of unimaginable power…

 

*The bag in which Arcas keeps his shield and spear is a hockey bag. There is a 6’8″ tall Greek Adonis wandering around a tiny university campus with a hockey bag, leading his fellow students to have the following conversations:

“Hey, there’s that hot hockey player. He’s Greek or something.”

“Do they play hockey in Greece?”

“Wait. Do we even have a hockey team?”

 

Some of the Happiest Places on Earth.

Whoo, boy. It’s been a busy time since I last posted. Apologies for the inconsistency. I’m resolving to be more prolific with blog posts: let’s see if I can manage to do every Friday from here on out.

Yeah, smart money’s against me, but hey, let me have ambitions. It’s good to set goals, or so I’ve been told.

So what’s kept me so busy? Where have I been? A few places. PAX East was up first, and I have a few snapshots and addictions to share from that:

1. Tabletop at PAX East is the hoppin’ place to be. Which is kind of awesome, considering that it’s always been sort of an afterthought at Prime.

Play ALL THE GAMES.

 

2. I fell head over heels for 7 Wonders. This is a game that’s been out for a while now, and it’s been on my list to try, but I hadn’t had a chance until this PAX East to really get a crack at it. Verdict? I loved it so much I woke up the next morning thinking about playing it again, and stalked the board game check-out station for the demo copy all day long.

Cracky, delicious 7 Wonders.

 

Our buddy Nate the Enforcer helps us figure out the scoring as Fill “Ascension” Palero and Chris Yates (my significant other) look on. Note that Chris is wearing the awesome t-shirt he designed for Labyrinth Games. I wore mine the next day.

The scoring is a little odd at first, but it all makes sense once you get the hang of it, and I like that there are myriad ways to rack up points. The game has a steep learning curve at first, especially if you’ve never played a game where you drafted cards before (like Magic). It’s also very symbol-heavy (which I rather like, as it cuts down on art clutter and gives the game a clean look). But once it clicks, it clicks, and you realize it’s really a relatively simple game. Once everyone knows what they’re doing, it plays pretty quickly, which I also dig.

 

3. Carnival, by Dice Hate Me Games, is one I actually packed and took with me. It was a Kickstarter game that we’d supported through Labyrinth. I took home the demo copy to play, and it never left my house. I wound up buying a new copy for the store.

Carnival. The only paper game our friend Jason has actually asked to play again.

On the surface, it’s a simple game of constructing carnival rides by gathering a stack of the correct cards. There’s a luck variant added in with the rolling of dice to determine actions, and Wild Cards are a really interesting strategic element. Some of the actions let you remove or trade cards from another player’s “Midway”, so while you can consider a ride with a Wild Card “built”, it’s only when you build it without Wild Cards that players are no longer allowed to touch those cards. You can also use the Wild Cards to effectively cycle through your hand, which is incredibly useful.

The real fun of this game, and the reason we have subtitled it “Carnival: Because Fuck You, That’s Why” are in the tickets. Each player starts with three of them, and you spend them to change dice rolls or to cancel another player’s actions. You gain them back when you build a ride without using Wild Cards, so you have to use them sparingly. Or you use them just to piss someone off, to which hilarity of the cursing variety ensues. Good times. I love this game.

 

4. Have you seen her bear, Tibbers?

Tibbers will eat you. Rar.

I think it’s neat how Riot Games has become sort of the de facto Big Guy at PAX East. Blizzard never puts in a showing, and even Wizards of the Coast doesn’t get as much foot traffic as the Riot booth does. League of Legends is a big damn deal lately.Too bad I suck as hard as I do at that game, ’cause I like it a lot. I just…I’m bad. Very, very bad, and that’s not a forgiving set of players. The opposite, in fact.

 

5. Local faces abound at East.

Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Games, Dave Chalker of Critical Hits, and Josh Drobina of Looney Lab Games.

One of the things I’ve found to be so awesome working at Labyrinth is that there’s a *huge* collection of indie game designers and publishers right in the greater D.C. area. And I like all of their games. Fred was there play-testing a new board game that’s Spirit of the Century inspired. I didn’t get a chance to play it, but the design looks great. Evil Hat will always have my undying loyalty for giving me the Dresden Files RPG, which is quite possibly my most favorite system ever. My co-worker and I are currently hatching a plan to hack it together with the Leverage RPG to create a Mistborn-based game. I’ll blog about that later, if we ever get it underway.

 

So that was PAX East. It was chock full of more awesome than I can even fit into a proper blog post, as always. I did notice that by the end of the con this year, I was actually pretty exhausted and ready for it to be over. It was a nice feeling of fulfillment and contentment, rather than the sadness and feeling like I’ve missed something that’s categorized previous PAXs for me.

Next up in events, we had the Avacyn Restored prerelease to contend with. On Saturday, we ran two back-to-back Sealed Deck events, which were packed and a blast. We’d managed to hit the Advanced status in the Wizard Play Network a couple weeks before, so both of our Saturday events had a Helvault.

Om nom donuts. We heart our players, so we brought them donuts.

 

The clock ticks. Talk less, play faster.

The real fun, though, came with Sunday’s Two-Headed-Giant Sealed Deck event. We’d used up both Helvaults on Saturday, since most of the players in the 2HG event had played the previous day. But we still had an empty Helvault shell, and it took only a little imagination and the indignation of our boss, Kathleen, who felt that we should have gotten to bust open the Helvaults like a pinata, to put that shell to use.

Making a pinata, of course.

Take one empty Helvault, and $20 worth of candy treats…

 

Re-seal with embossed logo stickers. Remember, branding is everything.

 

Have at thee, with a foam bat from the kid’s section.

So that was fun.

 

After the Avacyn Restored prerelease, Chris and I traveled down to Florida at the start of May for his brother’s graduation from the University of Florida. Alex received a masters in student affairs, and everyone was suitably proud.

And I learned the Florida is apparently on the surface of the goddamned sun. I don’t do well with heat, but I managed to not melt and enjoy myself anyway. But Jesus, it’s hot there.

Part of the festivities involved a trip to Universal Studios, where there were cups of frozen Butterbeer and bottles of Pumpkin Juice and rollercoasters for everyone:

Hogsmeade! You walk into it right from Jurassic Park, which is a rather odd shift.

Universal was fun, but the real highlight for me was finally getting to go to Disney World. The following day, Chris and I split off from the family unit, and he took me to the Magic Kingdom. I’d never been before, and I wanted the experience that my 8-year-old-Little-Mermaid-obsessed self would have wanted. I wanted classic Disney, and I got it in spades, because my boyfriend is amazingly awesome.

Disney! Disney Disney Disney!

 

Eeeeeeeeeeee! (I was very excited.)

 

I get terribly motion sick, but Space Mountain was just short enough to give me a thrill without making my stomach desire to empty itself.

 

I love that they have a genuine steam train. It’s pretty awesome.

That day at Disney was the hottest of the weekend, but Chris had the savvy of an experienced Disney-traveler and took me to all the indoor rides during the hottest part of the day. We also both managed to somehow avoid any terrible third-degree sunburns, and I’m not sure how.

It was awesome and I want to go back for like, a week next time. We did have to fight what Chris calls “Park Effect” which is where you’re presented with all of this cool Disney merch and you really want it because it looks awesome, but you have to realize it’s only awesome when you’re in the park. When you get home, you’ll be like “why the shit did I buy salad tongs with Mickey Mouse hands?”

In my defense, those tongs were awesome.

 

Cross Pollination

So. I’ve discovered Skyrim.

Yeah.

It’s had the effect on my productivity that I’m sure you predicted after the second sentence. However, I’ve not been immersed so deeply as to miss the great release day of Mass Effect 3. A hilarious tweet from EA to the “literal trailer” (below – “shoulder massage of death” nearly ended me) got me looking up the other Mass Effect trailers, which led to an interesting post on G+ that I subsequently deleted and decided to turn into a blog post.

Literal Trailer:

The subject that caught my interest is that of the live-action trailers that have popped up of late. The two most notable examples are, I think, the recent trailers for Mass Effect 3 and, well, Skyrim.

Skyrim:

Mass Effect 3:

Producing and filming live action bits of this quality are extremely costly. It’s made me wonder – with so many games reliant on cinematic clips and actual game-play, why break the mold for live action when it’s far more expensive? It raises some interesting questions, I think.

Is this a sign of video games as a rising market, with stiffer competition between smaller and bigger box studios?

Or is this a sign of an industry reaching out to try and emulate – and thereby compete with the market of – alternate forms of entertainment? E.g., film and television? Are they, by using a medium that’s traditional to those industries (both the live action and the trailer format – whether a brief teaser spot or longer trailer, both formats are native to film, not game, though games have been creeping up on it for a while) trying to capture a portion of that market that otherwise wouldn’t be theirs?

For example, take me. I’m no stranger to video games, but honestly, I haven’t played one that wasn’t a simple $15 or under Xbox Live Arcade game in a good long while. Even then, I tend not to finish them. The last two I played from start to finish were Limbo and the first Duels of the Planeswalkers game. Back in college, however, I had well established my love of single-player RPGs, from FFX to the .//hack games. I had assumed, though, that my interest had waned in them, along with my funds.

Granted, I borrowed Skyrim from a friend, but stay with me for a minute. I borrowed it because my interest was grabbed by the live action trailer. I borrowed it rather than bought it outright because I don’t make that much and it’s expensive – however, now that I’ve played it (and fallen in love with it) I totally intend on purchasing (legally and everything) my own copy, because the creators of a game this good deserve reward and encouragement to make more. If I hadn’t seen the live action trailer – and confused it for a moment with a Game of Thrones spot – I probably wouldn’t have paid it the slightest bit of attention.

Why? Well, I’m used to looking at and ignoring video games as pastimes I have neither the time nor money for. But I’m a high fantasy lover by nature, whether it’s book, game, or film. Lately, my indulgence in the genre has come from film and television, and seeing that little teaser of live action, complete with very polished special effects (that dragon was well done) caught my eye. It related to the part of me that wants to live the adventure of a hero versus great odds, with swords and sorcery and dragons. It tapped that part of me that wants to be the hero better than any gameplay shots or cinematic clips ever have.

And let me tell you, they’ve gotten me with Mass Effect 3, too. This, in turn, has made me see another possible sub-strategy, and this time in actual game design, along with the live-action trend. I have never played an Elder Scrolls or Mass Effect game before. Skyrim was my first delve into the Elder Scrolls domain, and to my relief I’m not swamped in history and lore I don’t understand. It’s easy to pick up on, and they’ve threaded it through very well.

Mass Effect 3 I find interesting because they’ve set it on Earth. On one hand it can be construed as a gimmicky reveal to titillate fans of the series and give them something different. On the other… Earth is a recognizable setting, whether future or past, it’s something that everyone playing the game can relate to. Setting it on Earth allows a newcomer like me to be able to set a foot down in the game without trepidation. I know there’s something here I can relate to, even if I don’t have saved game data from the previous two to load in, even if I’ve only ever heard of Shepherd in passing. I steered clear of ME2 because I felt like I should play the first game to understand or appreciate the second. But with ME3, I feel like I can jump in because I know the environment, and if I want to play catch up with the other two games later, I can.

The open nature of the Elder Scrolls games gives Skyrim that same feeling, and I know they’ve been very successful in drawing a new crowd to the games, with marketing, design, and production value. I think EA/Bioware might be trying to do the same thing (also worth pointing out the Dragon Age live-action series here, though I haven’t watched it yet because I haven’t played the game – points for the trailer format) with the Mass Effect series.

I find this interesting, because generally sequels and series installments fall flat or dwindle away. Now, these are both series that have a very true and established following, and Mass Effect is much younger. But is this Bioware’s attempt at not letting Mass Effect go the way of Halo, a series that cranks out sequels to appease its very focused fan base (not saying there’s anything wrong with niches)? Skyrim has, I feel, done a very successful job of breathing life into the Elder Scrolls, much like an adrenaline needle to the heart. Will ME3 be the same (if that’s even its intention)?

I think it’ll be interesting to watch this trend and see what it’s telling us. What do you guys think? Discuss.

Quick edit to add: I realize that this might be getting discussion elsewhere and by more knowledgeable individuals, but I’m coming it from the angle of being among their possible target demographic – a sometimes game player who tends to overlook most video games, whose attention has well and truly been gotten by these interesting marketing approaches.

 

Off the Face of the Earth

No, I haven’t fallen off of it. Hanging by a thread, perhaps, but I’m still here! I don’t want to go on the cart!

Christmas was a very busy season for me, unlike last year – where I pretty much chose to ignore it until I suddenly realized it was December 21st and I hadn’t bought presents yet. This year I did things ahead of time, as well as putting up a proper tree and throwing a Christmas tree-trimming party (during which our tree was trimmed with dragons, Boba Fett, bacon, and warring hockey teams).

Tree! Prior to the Boba Fett and bacon.

 

This year, I also had a very special project to finish up for Christmas. You see, in addition to being a normal, run-of-the-mill I-like-games-and-scifi geek, I’m also one of those crafty geeks. I knit, I sew, and my favorite Christmas present this year (in addition to the egg-poacher that my sister and I purchased the exact same model of for each other, and yes, we totally decided to have eight poached eggs on Christmas morning and it was hilarious) was a sewing machine gifted to me by my awesome boyfriend, who deserves the modifier “awesome”, even if he isn’t the Miz.

Whut.

 

With this crafty background, I undertook a very special project that was near to both my heart and that of my boyfriend’s family. Both of our grandmothers were avid needlewomen, and Chris’s grandmother had produced these huge, gorgeous pieces of angels and Victorian women and lovely seaside samplers. She passed away some years before we started dating, but the family had held on to the last project she had been working on: a pretty ice angel, all beads and glittery thread.

My own grandmother, my father’s mother, had taught me to cross-stitch when I was somewhere around eleven or twelve, and though I hadn’t done it for years, I still remembered well enough to volunteer to finish the angel. I got my skills back up to par by working on a kit I got from Micheal’s (a cat on a bookshelf, if you’re curious), and then figured out how to stitch on linen with beads and shimmery thread-like-tinselly-stuff (that snaps and snares and makes me curse like a sailor).

Finally, a couple days after Christmas, but before my boyfriend’s sister – the angel’s intended owner – left to go back to Texas, I finished it and we were able to present it to her and the family (which also corresponded nicely with the giving of anniversary presents to their parents).

So before I go into talking about the games we’ve been enjoying over the holidays, let me share a few pictures of the Ice Angel with you. I’m rather proud of the work I was able to do to finish it (and have developed a new preference for stitching elaborate designs on linen instead of pre-packed kits on Aida cloth):

This is the whole of the finished design.

A closeup of the face. She has beads in her hair.

This one small tree and the snowfall took a disproportionate amount of time to do, weirdly.

So. Many. Beads.

I love the way the skirt lifts and puffs.

Another shot of the fully finished piece.

 

So, now that’s completed, I have time to blog again! Let’s talk about board games, shall we?

There are two that Chris and I have been focusing on playing lately. They both feature copious amounts of dice-rolling, and they both have nifty designs. One, however, is rather an in-depth afternoon sort of game, and the other is a quick thing we can set up and play a few games of after dinner or whenever we want a fun, fast game.

The in-depth game is Fortune and Glory, and since I witnessed his interest in it at PAX Prime, I went ahead and bought it for him that week for his birthday present. We’ve played it a few times since August, though we’ve yet to plumb its depths fully, having mostly resorted to the Quick-Play variant in order to teach friends the ropes. It reminds me significantly of Merchants & Marauders, only with far clearer instructions and less complicated combat.

The production value is quite high, and – I feel – worth the lofty price tag. This is a game with high replay value and certainly an investment in a quality game night. If you’re a novice board-gamer, though, this probably isn’t for you, yet. This game wants a dedicated group, and time.

There are a few kinks with the dice-reliance and time between turns, which while less than ideal in no way interferes with my desire to keep inviting people over to play this game.

Pretty. And big. This is a full-figured game, lads.

This is even more fun to play if you can get the players into a bit of tongue-in-cheek roleplaying. The characters are such great pulp fiction heroes that it’s hard to resist a lofty British accent when you’re Dudley or a sour-faced glare and raspy one-liners when you’re playing Carter.

I will end you.

I’m not going to go into a lengthy review of mechanics – you roll dice, you draw specific cards, you do what they say, and you roll more dice. If you fail, you go into a cliffhanger and on your next turn, you have to resolve the cliffhanger. They can get rather hilarious, especially when you’re trapped on a Nazi submarine in the Gobi desert. (Yes, that happened.)

The second game we’ve been playing quite a lot of is Quarriors. I almost feel like this game shouldn’t be as good as it is, but it really works. It’s like Dominion, but with dice. Even with the inherent problems that come with a game based on probability and randomness, it’s fun. Stupid amounts of fun. I just want to keep playing.

It’s fast, too, which is another thing I like. And I think it’s clever how they use different cards to denote different levels of dice type without having to give you three nearly-identical sets of dice. If you’re a fan of deck-building, or dice, and you haven’t given this one a look, you should. You’ll like it.

Diiiiiiiiiiiice. Cannot resist dice.

It plays quickly enough that it doesn’t get stale. It’s lighter than Dominion and because of the chance involved, it’s harder to get derailed by someone’s superior strategy. It’s got the same element of chance and upset that Fluxx does, which makes me like it more, because no one will kill this game for me like Dominion or Ascension.

So that’s what we’ve been playing, and what I’ve been up to. And now I leave you with a message from our sponsor.

Kidding. It’s a hound dog. He doesn’t sponsor anything.

Except cuddles.

D'awwwwwwww.

 

(His name is Blu and he belongs to my sister. I snapped this during their Christmas visit. He was my cuddly alarm clock when I lived with them in Baltimore.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Minecraft Inspiration Dump

Lonely Creeper is lonely.

Dumping some videos I’ve found this morning during a YouTube crawl. I need to figure out how to film in Minecraft so I can upload some of the cool things we’re doing on Gallifrey Server. By “we” I mean mostly “my co-worker Dan” because I haven’t been on much lately, between all my Christmas craft projects and the dwelling of the Apocalypse Spider in the basement.

(The Apocalypse Spider has been dispatched by the Other Half. The Christmas craft projects remain, however.)

My Current Minecraft Projects:

1. The Colossus of Rhodes (yes, still – it goes a hell of a lot faster now in Creative, though)

(Out of the Seven Wonders, completed are the Hanging Gardens, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Pyramid of Giza, and I’m working on the Colossus.)

My Minecraft Project List:

1. The Second Temple

2. Ancient Rome

3. A Giant Tree City

4. The Parthenon

So, anyway, here’s some inspirational Minecraft building videos I’ve found.

 

Some neat modern-style houses:

 

Timelapse of a floating island village

 

Timelapse of an Elven city

 

The Parthenon

 

The best Colosseum I’ve seen

 

Very clever Hogwarts

 

Meet the Dresden Files PCs, Part Two: Nic

Previously: Meet the Spartan

Every superhero group needs a straight man, a Batman, an Iron Man, or a Karrin Murphy. And of course, it’s hard to get those buddy-cop moments without a cop.

Meet Sergeant Monica “Nic” Romanez.

Yes. It's a bit like that.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(The only videos of Jo I could find were sappy ones of her and Zane. So here’s a picture instead.)

Nic is a cop. She’s a good cop, and that’s pretty much her life. Content, or resigned, to remain in uniform as a beat cop because of her inability and unwillingness to break through the ceiling of graft and corruption, Nic has soldiered on day in and day out trying to keep safe the people of the District of Columbia, the people that are overlooked because “no one lives here”.

But her life changed during an unusually cold September night, when a drug-dealer she’d busted previously came to her for help, his sister gone missing. The search pulled her down into a world of chaos and magic, and she had to jump feet first into the fire to avoid choking on the smoke. Rushing headlong into a quest to recover the missing woman – and the subsequently missing drug-dealer – brought her through the crucible of Ckazka (the Russian fairytale portion of the NeverNever) and pitted her against immortal foes, faeries, and monsters, all of which she managed with steel nerves and the cold iron of bullets, and the help of a few new comrades-in-arms that she’s still a little nervous to call “friends”.

Nic has a small, English-basement-style apartment in the very southeastern tip of the Eastern Market neighborhood. It’s a one-bedroom, kitchenette, tiny bathroom, and cramped living room style affair, furnished entirely with purchases from second-hand stores and family hand-me-downs. This tiny apartment has become the de facto meeting place of the ragtag group of oddballs that she seems to have accidentally gathered around her, and who fancy themselves as some kind of heroes. It’ll be all she can manage just to keep her head above water and maintain the rule of law among them.

Picking up the Denarian coin probably isn’t going to help that much.

Monica “Nic” Romanez

High Concept: Dedicated Cop

Trouble: Sticks Her Nose In

Other Aspects:

One of the Boys

Believes the Best in People

Loyal to the Badge

Suspicious of Higher Ups

The World is Going Crazy

What the hell is wrong with these people and why do they keep following me?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Next time: Meet the Rastafarian