On vacation this week!

Dear Internet Episode 11 - GeeklyCon 2019 Game of Thrones Edition

So I’m writing some one-shots for a con I’m going to in July because it’s fun and I really like writing this shit. I’m gonna be writing for three different systems, one of which I’ve never run before, one of which I’ve only run as the beginning of a campaign that petered out, and one that I’ve run several one-shots and a successful campaign for.

City of Mist: Never run it before, but am interested to see how it turns out. For those who aren’t familiar, City of Mist is a PbtA style game that takes place in a modern day city. The PCs are all an incarnation of some legendary figure/idea (Merlin, Einstein, Famine, Zeus, etc) but the regular populace can either not remember their special powers or find some way to brush it off because of a force called the Mist (hence the title). The conceit of this one-shot is that the PCs will be investigating a bank robbery that will eventually lead them to a showdown that is between two to four powers in the city (the Merry Men, the Wild Bunch, the local PD, and a Pinkerton-adjacent “detective agency”) depending on how the PCs deal with the factions over the course of the game. The one thing I’m having trouble with right now is to get a good hook for the characters to actually want to solve the crime themselves.

Stars Without Number: Started a campaign with it but petered out pretty quick when I pushed all the bookkeeping onto the players. It’s sort of a post-apocalyptic sci-fi setting where a sector has been cut off from the rest of the galaxy several hundred years ago and is just now getting back up on its feet. I’ve got a good feeling about what I’ve got so far with this; the players will get to choose one of two factions within this sector: the police force of a rising hegemonic power who are sent to get rid of some pirates on the edge of their ‘territory’, or as agents of the pirates who want to destabilize a planet on the edge of the hegemony so they can have freer reign while the government deals with the crisis. Still need to make some pregenned characters for this and a couple of ships and NPCs but I’m pretty excited about the concept so far.

This is actually something I’d attempted a while back, during my first attempts at playing with royal icing. Using a basic sugar cookie recipe (which I cut into stars, because my wife loves stars), I attempted the pattern again – this time with much better results. Of course, they were a little off the first few, but since the recipe made about 40, it was clear by about cookie 15 that I was…