#ttrrpg

This will get cross-posted to Cohost.

I'll be honest, this week has been kinda hellish. I'm behind on writing. I'd like to sit down and get caught up (and honestly, start revising things, too), but it'll be a while before I get enough inner/outer quiet I need to do that.

But writing in markdown can be a stress reliever and helpful distraction, too, so I've gotten some stuff done.

You can catch up on my last post about Nottingham and Cape Crescent: The Week 1 #City23 Update and #City23 Day 1 (in which Cape Crescent was called "Lunaris").

Nottingham

There's no clear date for the Nottingham location. I've been making it just the Nottingham of the high and late Middle Ages without many more identifiers, and I'm planning to stick to that.

I've added three NPCs to Nottingham in the past week, all working in or around The Three Foxes (introduced in a prior post), near Chapel Bar/the Bar Gate toward Derby and Derbyshire (and the Peaks).

Azelma the Alewife is a brewer, herbalist, and apothecary. She knows some simple healing potions and healing charms. Her beers are the pride of The Three Foxes since before Claire Jarry and her sons took it over.

Old Ruhl the Baker who's paying the sheriff in cash and favors for the safety of his missing daughter (who's actually the sheriff's hostage).

Brother Earnmund and Sister Mindred claim to be brother and sister begging hermits who offer prayers, visions, and "Words of Divine Knowledge" in return for coin. They're actually a married couple who use their arcane talents to answer people's questions, then sell the information they've gained for the Prior of St. Martin's, who lets them live in the monastery's unused almshouse.

Cape Crescent

I'm still not sure when in the life of Cape Crescent this might take place, but I'm filling a few NPCs all the same. There's just two this week, but both are attached to the Bishop's Diner.

Chet Bickley is the diner's evening dishwasher and a taciturn man. No one knows about the music box he found one morning half buried on the beach or how he falls asleep in teh wee hours of the morning hearing its music. No one, including Chet, knows that the figurine that dances at the box's center contains a trapped demon.

Wonky ice cream commissions are opening TODAY (Weds 28th), 7pm BST!

Saw this drifting around Twitter. Depending on how you count, somewhere between 56% and 52% of Gen Con tickets were for games that aren't from WotC, aren't from Paizo, and aren't built on D&D 5e.

One thing I love about ttrpgs is the Kitchen Sink setting. At it's peak you have the high weirdness of RIFTS/Torg and to an lesser extent you get the wild fantasy settings like Pathfinder's Golarion.

That said, at it's worse it turns the setting into a glorified theme park, and it can be hard to juggle the various power levels. At it's best it opens the doors to crazy character and plot options, while highlighting sci-fantasy/high-fantasy mixes.

I find it ironic that these "mix and match" settings were often the center point of generic systems. But for ages Savage Worlds lacks such a thing (Deadlands kinda was but wasn't.) But the they got the Rifts license and suddenly we have one of the generic kings doing one of the kings of Kitchen Sink. (And frankly I think the Savage Rifts version of the setting and rules is better...)

Flip that around and you get GURPS slowly coming around to the idea of a Kitchen-Sink setting by not having a normal one Infinite Worlds was an old concept they kept playing with in their Time Travel books that they expanded into the Alternative Earth's line...that in 4E culminated in The Infinite World's book. Think of it as para-military Sliders. (90's TV show.)

Built from the ground up Kitchen Sinks are somewhat nicer. West End Games made the TORG setting and it's narrative focused (card using) rules really worked for mixed genre. So much so they tried to turn it into the underwhelming Masterbook line. (Which I talked about previously.) Recently under Ulisses Spiele's management the line was brought back to life with some of it's 90's era problematic elements corrected and it's a hoot to see it supported again!

Now one can argue that D&D's Forgotten Realms is a Kitchen Sink like Fantasy setting. However, it's support in 5E is fixated on adventures and not much in the way of actual world building. Hell they had to get Green Ronin to write the player's guide to it.

Now if you want to talk about well supported Fantasy Kitchen sink I really think Pathfinder2e's Lost Omen line updates to Golarion are fixing some of the excesses of 1E's version while allowing for some (hint: Starfinder-esk) hints at more. Firearms, lost alien tech, weird magic...and it all mostly works.

1E was fun, but I much prefer the 2E updates.

*shrugs*

Now we can talk about when Kitchen Sink goes beyond wild into "is the author okay?" territory we can talk about Synnibarr...or we could leave that.