cobbledcrossroadtavern

NPC and Location cards

I haven't begun searching through the "Teaching and Learning with TTRPGs" (Munroe and Cullinan, 2025) book, podcast, or Discord, because I want to take them seriously, and I'm not there yet. (tabletopEDU.org) But they recently shared their reference cards for interesting NPCs, locations, and big ideas. I started looking through those as I downloaded them. As the name suggests, they're all geared to help adventurers (real-world students) experiment and explore different social and academic skills, in a story-telling game framework.

Several of their locations are a library, and the authors suggest having students explore the ideas of research skills and media literacy at these locations. But in particular, the Library of the Void, contains secrets that don't want to be found. So I got to wondering, what if adventurers find conflicting information about the topics they're researching? A PC who has more background information might be able to identify nonsense, possibly accurately and possibly not. But if two equally credible (to the players) present conflicting information, how do the PCs navigate the discrepancy?

Posted on 8 Feb

Prompt: TRUTH

“I’m trying to speak — to write - the truth. I’m trying to be clear. I’m not interested in being fancy, or even original. Clarity and the truth will be plenty, if I can only achieve them.”

From one who did not walk away:

We know what we are. But we do it anyway. If we stopped now, nothing would be better. The poor brute wouldn't suddenly know freedom, and we wouldn't suddenly be resolved. It would just make everything bad.

We aren't the first, you know. We aren't the first community to destroy one of our own for selfish reasons. We aren't even the first ones to consider stopping. One community did stop, not far from here. It's gone now. Nobody remembers its name.

[There's something here, but it doesn't really work for a response to "Omelas." There's no simpering self-justification that I could write which Le Guin hasn't already done better.

Written on Jan 5

Prompt: NEW 

“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.” - Trickster

Written on Feb. 4

Prompt: RAGE

“When your rage is choking you, it is best to say nothing.” - Fledgling

Calum propped the animated portrait up against the wall. It was a portrait of an older woman, wearing an austere dress. Calum thought it looked suffocating--the neckline reached up to her chin and the torso looked pinched in. Her steel gray hair was pulled up into a harsh bun. It made a show of looking disdainfully first at the rubble, and then at the scruffy-looking scavenger in front of him. "Look at the state of this place," said the portrait in an archaic dialect. "Once this was the pinnacle of civilization, the greatest center of learning in all our world." The woman in the portrait sniffed. "I suppose you don't know anything about what happened here?" Barely waiting, she continued. "Of course not. You're just here to pick through the ruins of your betters."

The woman in the portrait, whose name Calum would never know, continued berating him for a few seconds, but he was no longer listening. He wondered if he could sell it. A talking painting had to be worth something to someone. Maybe the shamans could pull the magic out of it. He briefly remembered the stories he heard about the people who dwelled in this place, what they'd done to the communities surrounding here, how they'd banned together to pull down the parapets of their seemingly impassable walls. Finally something the portrait was saying caught his attention. "...knew we were too kind. We should have treated the townspeople the way they deserved."

Without another thought, Calum punched through the portrait with his fist. He then shredded the canvas with a rock until the strips hung from the frame, and then he smashed the frames on a chunk of wall.

Day 2, written on Day 3

Prompt: "I sit beside the fire and think/of people long ago/and people that will see a world/that I will never know."

He looked across the table from the empty chair. To the place his wife had sat for the last seven years. To the place where someone else would be coming home.

He hadn't slept after their conversation last night. He didn't know how to feel. He was pretty sure that was normal. His wife didn't know how she felt, either, for the last seven years, and who knows how long before that.

Would his wife still be his wife when they came home? What would they be instead? A husband? Did he have a husband now? He wasn't sure he was ready for that. His spouse? He said it a few times, out loud, in the empty room, to see how it tasted. He could fit the word out of his mouth, at least. Well, another conversation he and they would have to have, he supposed.

Unless they didn't want to be his spouse anymore, either. Or unless he didn't want to be theirs. Then they'd never have to talk about it again.

Written on Day 2, Posted on Day 3.

Day 1 Prompt: "Still round the corner there may wait / A new road or secret gate."

It was much too busy for this time of year. For this time of night, come to that. June 23rd? It felt like December 23rd. Jerry was in a foul mood, Ever since the sun had gone down, some weirdos had come out of the woodwork. One guy had painted himself blue and only spoke to the cashier in cooing noises.Another person wanted to pay for a sizeable book purchase, including at least one extremely rare volume, with a gold coin. Coins weren’t Jerry’s specialty, but if the piece the customer put on the counter was genuine, it would be worth 4 grand, easy. But Jerry had no way of knowing whether it was genuine or not, so he refused. And on and on like that.

So when Karla’s voice came over the ludspeaker, saying “Manager to the fantasy section, please,” Jerry thought, “What is it now?” He made his way through the throng of people to the back of the store. Karla was just staring at the wall that divided the bookstore proper from the receiving and storage bay. To Jerry’s irritation, Stan was back there, too. Just staring. “Stan, if you’re here, who’s minding the espresso machine?”

Stan looked over his shoulder, looking at the line of apparently endlessly patient line of customers. “This is more important, I think,” Stan said in his slow way. Jerry never knew if it was thoughtfulness or stupidity, but the man knew how to make a cappuccino.

Karla said, “We need you to settle something for us. That door…has it always been there?”

Jerry blinked. “What?”

Karla pointed. “That door. Right there. Have we always had a door there?”

“Of course we have. That goes to Receiving. You’ve both been through there a thousand times. We don’t have time for—“

“No, not the receiving door. The receiving door is beige. I mean the one sort of next to Receiving. The gray primer-colored one.”

Jerry squinted and winced through a flash headache. Then he realized which door Karla and Stan were talking about, and his irritation grew. “Of course it’s always been there. It’s a door. They don’t just grow out of walls.”

“I remember…” Stan paused. “I remember the door being there forever. But I don’t remember…remembering that…yesterday.” He shook his head and went back to making coffee.

Karla said, “If it’s always been there, what’s behind it? Stan and I have been arguing about it.”

“It’s a storage closet. That’s where we keep the…” Jerry trailed off. This was ridiculous. This was his store. 10 years he’d been doing this. He knew what was behind this door. That headache just made him forget for a second.

A man, very tall and very very thin, rested a gentle hand on Jerry’s shoulder. “Excuse me. Do you have any Tennyson? A hilarious man. I’m quite overdue for a re-read.”

Karla shook her head, like she was trying to clear it, and said, “Of course. Come this way.”

Jerry stared at the door for a moment longer. Then another customer required his attention, and it slipped his mind. After all, it had always been there.

The rest of the evening was insanely busy. The cashiers kept asking Jerry to approve transactions in unusual currencies, things no policy could cover. He found himself saying yes to as many as he could, and he found himself glad for doing so. Some were straight book swaps. He was surprised by the titles people were willing to part with. Apparently he traded a pretty good edition of Butler’s Parable of the Sower for “one perfect song in perpetuity,” whatever that meant. He just knew he wanted to go to karaoke later.

The bookstore normally closed at 10 on weekends, but closing seemed unthinkable. Until midnight the customers kept them all busy with strange requests. He thought he heard one customer in the café ask for a cup of tears. When Stan replied that he didn’t have any, the customer happily ordered an oat milk latte instead.

Then, the lines grew shorter. Fewer and fewer people required Jerry’s attention. Then the last customer left with their purchase (an adult coloring book and seven copies of the same edition of War and Peace—Jerry hadn’t even known they had that many. He hadn’t sold that many copies of that book in the whole time he’d had the bookstore).

And the place was empty.

Jerry, Karla, and Stan cleaned up, exhausted. There was something slightly different about all of them, in ways Jerry couldn’t explain and would soon forget to notice. As they did a final walkthrough of the book floor, something caught Jerry’s attention, something about the back wall, but he couldn’t put his finger on it. “Hey, Karla?” he called. “Do you member why you called me back here earlier?”

Karla joined him and took a long look at the back wall. “Didn’t I need you to get something from Receiving?”

Jerry hesitated. “Yes, that must be it.” He looked at the beige door. Something was bothering him about it still.

As they all left the store together, Jerry said, “Hey, I know it was a long night, but is anybody interested in karaoke? I have a song I want to try out.”

Last week was the week of the Aberration. I pulled the III of aberrations, which has a green brain with tentacles/nerve tendrils reaching deep into a sea, or a tank of cerebro-spinal fluid, or both. The divination guide gives "resistance" as one divinatory meaning, and "surrender" as the other. Both of these are in the sense of growth or evolution. The first one asks, what's holding you back? The second asks the querent to find the good in the inevitable change. It's tough to know which of these two meanings was speaking to me that week.

In either case, I didn't get the message, because this week I pulled the IV of aberrations, a purple brain over a sea of blood red.

El 24 junio, la Fiesta de San Juan Bautista, se celebran muchas comunidades en el mundo hispanohablante y en muchos países historicamente católicos. Hoy no me interesan mucho las prácticas culturales, muy variados, con los cuales se celebra este día, pero hay dos prácticas comunes que valen la pena mencionar: el de encender fogatas y el de saltar los fuegos para cumplir deseos. Estas prácticas ni se practican universalmente, ni son únicas a esta fecha festiva. Pero aquí las apunto por si luego quiera volver a examinarlas.

Para mí, por lo menos hoy, más interesante es el uso de esta fecha en el Romancero Viejo, una colección de poemas folclóricas de la Península Ibérica de la Edad Media. Nos han llegado más en castellano temprano, posiblemente por el método en que se coleccionaban (aunque eso es puramente una adivinanza mía--seguro que extisten en astur-cantábrico y en gallego-portugués y navarrense y los demás, ¿por qué no los tenemos? O por lo menos, ¿por qué no los tengo yo?). En esta colección de poemas, originalmente coleccionado en forma escrita en los siglos XIV y XV, el día de San Juan es un leit motif. Según Díaz González, es muy útil de marcar una fecha en el medio de verano, pero además es una octasílaba conviniente.

Díaz González también identifica tres temas asociadas con el día de San Juan--el amor, los juegos de combate, y la mágia. Cita como ejemplo del primero "Yo me levantara, madre" (Díaz Roig #100, p. 268), de la segunda "La mañana de San Juan" (#6, p. 91), y de la tercera "La flor del agua" (Según Díaz Roig, de la tradición oral moderna, y en su apéndice, X).

Todo eso es para introducir una lista de poemas del Romancero Viejo que contienen referencias a ese día, posiblemente en preparación para un proyecto de más sustancia, más interés, y más creatividad luego. Para encontrarlos, voy a la página de abajo y ctrl+F "Juan," y entonces intento encontrar el poema en la edición de Díaz Roig (citado abajo, también).

Del alcaide de Antequera (#5, p. 89)

La mañana de San Juan (#6, p. 91)

De don García (#36, p. 140)

Del conde Grimaltos (#75, p. 213)

Arriba, canes, arriba (#87, p. 247)

Del conde Guarinos (#92, p. 252)

Yo me levantara, madre (#100, p. 268)

Del conde Arnaldos (#128, p306)

Mención honorífica: Del prior de San Juan (#33, p. 136)--no se trata de la fecha, sino un lugar geográfico, pero a lo mejor resulte interesante para mi proyecto.

Puede que haya más--mi metodología está lejosísimo de perfecto--pero para una vista inicial, eso es suficiente.

También hay que mencionar el artículo "Fiestas de San Juan en la Poesía Española," por J. Salvador y Conde, que ya ha caminado por el sendero que voy siguiendo.

I'm cis and straight, but I try dismantle the oppression machine when I can. This is important context for what follows.

This week's card is the III of Humanoids. The Humanoids card feature a female-presenting humanoid--possibly elf or elf-kin based on the ears--in front of a crescent moon rising behind her. Three golden swords pierce her neck; one also pierces her left hand. Her eyes are closed and her expression is neutral. Its color scheme is divided diagonally, roughly into quarters. Three of these colors are variations of blue and green, while the right quadrant is pink/purple. It's a fitting card for the first full week of Pride Month.

I don't celebrate Pride Month on my own behalf, but I do on behalf of lots of people that I love. Everything about this card is a reminder that there are many valid, beautiful ways of being human. The background color isn't blocky, it's gradient, and the lines between them are defined by the overlapping of colors rather than the separation of them. The colors are also suggestive of the "blue/pink" divide that so many movie posters use as a metaphor for bisexual characters having identity crises. (Once you see it you can't unsee it. Start with Rey in the new Star Wars movies and go from there.) The swords are obviously hardship and violent oppression. The fact that they're golden was probably just a cool visual effect, but I'm also thinking a lot this year about corporations that make their social media logos rainbow-colored for the month of June and then in July donate to the election campaigns of the most heinous bigots in US politics. (Ron DeSantis leaps to mind.) Her facial expression is one of either serenity or death, but her hands are held upright in a manner I associate with saints' icons and other religious artwork. It looks to me like martyrdom, the transcendence of the limits of the physical form, the persistence of existence in the face of extinction-level events. But it could just as easily be death.

(A tangent on that: queer people exist now, as they have always existed, and they will continue to exist long after DeSantis's reign of terror turns on him and takes his head. Queer people deserve more than existence. Their persistence risks washing over the intense harm, the mindless cruelty that individual real people are suffering right now. A western reporter (I think) once confronted Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (I think) with the idea that there are gay people in Iran, whether he likes it or not. His response was, "Tell me their names and where they live." DeSantis reminds me a lot of that guy. The point is, even though the fascists won't erase the existence of queerness, they're hurting a lot of queer people in the attempt.)

Above I said the figure was female-presenting and I used "she/her" pronouns, but there's no reason to assume that except my own interpretation of facial expressions, costume, and color schemes.

According to the divinatory meaning provided in the book, the positive reading of this card is perception: see through the false to determine the heart of the matter. Between you and me, I could use some of that in the coming week.

Last week, according to my Adventurer's Tarot divination deck, was the Week of the Bard. The divination guide says the Bard means "new beginnings" or "recklessness." I don't hold with divination as a way of foretelling the future, and I certainly don't think the skilled and entertaining writers at Weird Works intended to provide definitive divinatory definitions of their cards. But I absolutely believe in humans' ability to make meaning out of anything. So I looked at the week as a performance, as a song. I tried to pay attention to when I was performing a song I didn't want to be singing and what it felt like when I was hitting the right notes. I noticed that there seemed to be a lot more of the former than the latter. And I spent some time wondering what it would be like to sing a different kind of song.

An annotated bibliography

I'm finally reading through Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra. There are a lot of references to people and events that seem worth knowing more about. I'm still fairly new to Tumblr, so I don't know how editing posts works. So this will either be a short list that gets long, or the first of many posts on the topic, as I read through it and take notes on things. It will be in no particular order.

First things first, the copy I'm reading, from Project Gutenberg, is linked here. There's nothing special about it. It's just the first one that came up.

Irving worked in Spain for a time, starting in 1826. While there, among other things, he wrote a pseudohistory of Christopher Columbus, which is the source of many of the lies we still believe about Columbus--his Italian origin (a source of great controversy), that people believed the world was flat (all navigators and academics knew the world was round, and most of them knew about how far around it was, but Columbus--with no reason anyone can determine--thought it was about 5000 miles shorter than the consensus), and the general heroic nature of his ventures (he wanted to be named Admiral of the Sea and take like half of whatever Spain made from its new source of conquest, and ended up in jail for being a general pain in the ass to the Crown).

Irving really liked the Alhambra and just wrote stuff down. Some of it was true, some of it he made up cos it sounded good, some of it he cribbed from other sources (some of which I'm sure I'll post about).

José María, full name José María Hinojosa Cobacho, called "El Tempranillo," "The Journey." Outside of Osuna, Irving says, "[...]here 'Jose Maria,' famous in Spanish brigand story, had his favorite lurking-places." El Tempranillo was a Robin Hood-type figure. During a time when bandit bands were a constant plague in the Sierra Morena, he made a name for himself ("en España manda el Rey, pero en la Sierra Morena manda "el Tempranillo"--Prosper Mérimée).

This week the II of Celestials came up. The text for the Celestial gives that success radiates from the querent; alternately, that the querent should free themselves of the guilt cause by other peoples' rules. The image is of a scythe-wielding goddess, all red and gold and purple, hand stretched forth and bathed in divine light. Last week I made a fair amount of progress on a fair number of projects, so hopefully we can continue that into this week. It might also be a time to reflect on what success looks like, because I feel like the definition has changed a little.

This week the Fire Elemental card came up (I of Elementals, XXV). The divination guidebook invites the querent who draws the Elemental to think about their achievements in a positive way. So: I've started an exercise routine I'm relatively happy with. I've moved forward with some of my professional goals. I've been writing regularly, regularly enough that I'm starting to see patterns in what I write. I can see things that I want to lean into, things I want to work on, and things I want to avoid. I would tell my students that that means I'm developing voice. Related to that, I'm learning to reflect on my actions, my choices, and my circumstances with a little emotional distance. I've started doing a little programming again. Not regularly, not as often as I would like, but it was always going to be a "catch as catch can" activity. I might start writing about that on here too. I'm generally pleased with my home life. I'm not saying more here now, but don't mistake my lack of writing about it for a lack of reflection on it.

Alternately, if the querent is having trouble moving on, they're invited to channel the attributes of the elemental to move on. The fire elemental summons courage, passion, and exercise, all things that heat up the blood and warm the spirit, so that makes sense. I don't currently think I have anything I'm having trouble moving on from, but I think I'm going to go exercise all the same.

First the water fell. Then it froze. Then it kept falling.

Rains fell first on feet of snow, then on rock-hard ground. Drops of water the size of candle flames bounced off 6 inches of underground ice. The snow had never melted so fast, like it was trying to beat the rush.

The river took as much as it could swallow, and the rain kept coming. The river began throwing up, then, throwing up all the water that forced its way out of the sky and that the frozen ground refused to drink.

It didn't take long for the river to show its disdain for our back yard. The marshy border, normally hundreds of feet into the woods, emerged out of our lawn in a matter of hours. The space under our house was next, with the river flowing from above and below. The pump couldn't pump fast enough, because there was nowhere to pump to. Every gallon pumped out of the crawlspace just became part of the river which now flowed through the yard.

This was not the civilization-ending rage of the hurricane, the mindless violence of the tornado. This was not the deceptively peaceful snow blizzard that buried the world in silent white that started all of this. This was just a gentle rain, that didn't stop, on top of a foot of snow pack, on top of frozen topsoil. It was just an utterly indifferent river, flowing from everywhere to the lake, not caring much what was in between.

Jeremy enjoyed his wall calendars. He wasn't weird about it, he didn't collect them or have a closet full of them or anything. It wasn't a point of contention in his marriage and his children didn't make fun of him for it. It was just every year he found a calendar that he liked and hung it up on the wall and wrote important events on them, like one does. Nobody in the rapidly-approaching-mid-21st century used wall calendars. But Jeremy did. He looked forward to the changing of the months so he could see what the picture for the next month was. He didn't stay up til midnight on the last day of the month; he wasn't a weirdo. He didn't even rush over to it first thing in the morning. Sometimes he'd even forget until after work. But whenever he did get around to it, he'd enjoy seeing the picture he flipped up.

So it was with some surprise that his entire family woke up on June 1, 2023, to a shrieking sound none of them knew Jeremy was capable of making. His wife Margaret leapt out of bed and sprinted down the stairs. Jeremy stood in front of this year's wall calendar, one hand claw-rent over his mouth and the other pointed at June's picture.

This year's calendar was something silly--Nuns Having Fun. It was, as they say, all there in the title. June's picture looked more or less like all of the others to Maggie: a woman in a habit and a wimple in an improbably whimsical situation. In June's picture, a very white nun held a trombone among a street jazz band. It looked like they were really swinging together. And for some reason Jeremy stared at it in utter terror.

"What on Earth is the matter with you?" Maggie slapped his arm. "You scared me. You scared the girls."

Jeremy looked in terrified confusion back and forth between his wife and the painting. "You--you don't--you can't see it?" he stuttered.

"See what? It's a trombone-playing nun. No more terrifying than the nuns playing soccer in their convent or the nun being chased by seagulls at the beach." Maggie suppressed a shudder. That one had actually given her the willies. She did not care for seagulls.

For a few more moments Jeremy looked dumbfounded at the calendar picture. "It's gone! But I saw--in the picture--they were--"