Shattered Star

Game Master Zesdead

Yeah, Paizo was down for most of the day, again

Sorry for the delayed post guys; I got back from my trip really early Monday morning but thanks to site issues + work I couldn't access the site to catch up until yesterday evening/this morning. Things seem better for now, though :)

No worries... hope it was a good trip - the website issues have slowed everything right down anyways so you haven't missed much!!!!

So yeah... that just happened (don't worry though, your ever friendly GM is merely enacting the latest part of a cunning plan!!!!)

Good, 'cuz between Zee dying and Titania losing six to nine months, you've got two of my characters in a tizzy!

It's all good. I just want to know if Haladir was in one this plan of yours.

Also hope your not too attached to Gnaeus. If Jonna doesn't kill him, Halli will.

Okay, um, so that just happened...

Gonna need to think on Briana's reaction here ;_;

Thankfully, I know what Joanna's reaction is going to be. It's just going to be hard to write after the fight.

It's all good. I just want to know if Haladir was in one this plan of yours.

That would be telling...

That's a yes. :P

In all seriousness, that was unexpected and I'm looking forward to seeing what happens now. Poor Joanna's going to be a wreck for a bit though. Ravenmoor was rough, but she just saw someone she considers a sister die right before her eyes and she couldn't do a thing to stop it, which I think is going to be worse than finding Nalathi dead, especially since Teldon's been disappeared too.

On another note, I was planning on having Joanna ask Zee to do her a favor, but that's on hold until whatever plan our GM has unfolds.

All I'm going to say is that this is about to get interesting.

I bet. Like I said, I can't wait. :D

Oh. Well. This is a development and a half.

So, I realized that I never really gave much of a report on how my convention trip went. If anyone's curious...

Cool. I'm glad you had fun.

I hadn't heard of Deadlands or FAST before. To be honest, after looking it up, I'm more interested in Deadlands than FAST. Call of Cthulu I have heard of before, which edition did you play, 7th?

I'd imagine that it was 7th or one of the more recent editions, though I can't say for certain. The GM had pregen characters for us to play and I ended up getting a maid who was in charge of housekeeping for the 2nd class passengers. The other players (of whom there were several) were comprised of two Scotland Yard investigators, the ship's 4th Officer (the only pregen lifted directly from history), a professor and an expert on spiritualism (both traveling 1st class), and a 3rd class steelworker. I think the big difference between this particular game and other CoC games is that most of our characters were basically normal people who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, rather than people deliberately investigating the strange and bizarre.

As far as Deadlands goes, the ruleset takes some getting used to but it's definitely tons of fun! I'm not sure if anyone has ever tried running Deadlands here on the forums but I'd be curious to see how they handle things like the combat rounds since live play involves the use of a card deck to determine when (and how often) everyone gets to act.

It'd require some tweaking, probably. I've been working on getting a GURPS game together and I already know that I have to change the per session and per hour things so that they can work in a PBP setting.

I've been meaning to give Savage Worlds a try, so I might pick up Deadlands and run a short adventure here.

^Cool! Maybe by the time you end up doing that (if you do end up doing that) I'll have a little more space freed up on my plate and can submit a character :)

Sounds like fun times... it has been ages since I went to any kind of a convention - although eldest is getting towards an age where he could maybe be interested in such things (and I can be the person to make sure that Briana / Ladile doesn't have to draw on unimaginable depths of patience to prevent table-flip!!!)

...apologies for not posting over the weekend very much, eldest (9 yo) had an argument with the pavement - it confirmed a critical on him when he came off of his scooter... the pavement won to the tune of a broken radius and a broken ulna!!! So the poor lad had to sit on the sidelines when we went to a Gladiator School / Slave Auction at the remains of Roman Villa near us... youngest got to swing a foam sword (and there was an awesome choreographed fight) so not all was lost... Also, I got to have fun painting his cast with stylised flames... it looks pretty good - despite the spots where he dripped spots of chocolate ice cream into it!!!!

Ow. That (the broken bone) doesn't sound fun for him.

Side note: One of my coworkers is married to someone who has Brittle Bone Disease (Osteogenesis Imperfecta or OI) and both their kids have it. It seems like every month or two one of them is breaking something, so yeah, lotsa "fun" there.

At least is sounds like you guys had fun at the event and with decorating the cast. :)

My posting may be a little more erratic than usual for the next few days. First of all, my daughter is graduating high school today, and we have a bunch of relatives in town to help celebrate.

Secondly, I accidentally triggered an anti-theft routine on my phone, and it's now temporarily bricked until Sunday. All of my updates will have to be via my laptop, which is harder to do a quick post from when I have 15 minutes to kill.

Congrats on your daughter graduation, and sorry for your phone...

My Internet is down at home, and I had to buy a new phone yesterday as mine died suddenly. Haven't found how to access Internet on the phone yet. ^^

Yes, congrats to your daughter! That stinks about your phone though, but at least it's not temporary.

Phone is working again, and the cloud backup mostly worked. The reset caused my password manager database to self-destruct (as is intended), so I'll still need to change all of my passwords, but that's not too bad.

As the others have said, congrats to you daughter! Any idea what she's gonna major in?

As the others have said, congrats to you daughter! Any idea what she's gonna major in?

Thanks!

She's taking a gap year, so she'll be living at home, working, and picking up a few classes at the local community college next year. She'll start the college application process in the fall, intending to start college in fall 2018.

Cool. Sounds like she's got a plan. :)

Hey, folks.

As much as I hate to say it, my posting will continue to be erratic for the next two weeks. This week, I'm at a week-long off-site training session. I just found out this morning that the new person I'd trained to back-fill for me is now also out of the office due to a family emergency. This means that I'll need to put in 3-4 hours of work after hours every night. I am not going to have much (if any) time for online gaming this week.

And next week, I'm on an actual vacation, with limited access to the Internet. My regular back-up should be back to back-fill for me, so at least I won't have to worry about work piling up.

Hopefully, I'll be able to return to my regular posting schedule after I'm back from vacation on 7/10.

Zed: Please bot Zee as needed.

Oooops, forgot add in my Gameplay post - Everyone may act now!!!

I will GMPC Ziomarra....

No worries Zee, hang in there!

@Zed and Joanna - I see you two posted interest for my Portent's Peril game! If I'd thought or realized that you had an interest in PFS I would have sent you a personal invite and reserved a spot for you, which is what I did for Arsith who I already knew plays PFS. I'd kinda toyed with maybe trying to run two tables of each scenario (which would mean running two games at a time during each Session) if I had enough people interested but I've already had one PbP friend advise me that I might want to wait until I get a little more GMing experience before trying that. So, we shall see.

Either way, if I end up not running for one or both of you for Gameday and you still have some interest in PFS, I'd be happy to run something for you guys specifically once Gameday ends though that will still be several months off. This invitation also extends to Shadlah, Zee, and Teldon :)

No worries Zee, hang in there!

@Zed and Joanna - I see you two posted interest for my Portent's Peril game! If I'd thought or realized that you had an interest in PFS I would have sent you a personal invite and reserved a spot for you, which is what I did for Arsith who I already knew plays PFS. I'd kinda toyed with maybe trying to run two tables of each scenario (which would mean running two games at a time during each Session) if I had enough people interested but I've already had one PbP friend advise me that I might want to wait until I get a little more GMing experience before trying that. So, we shall see.

Either way, if I end up not running for one or both of you for Gameday and you still have some interest in PFS, I'd be happy to run something for you guys specifically once Gameday ends though that will still be several months off. This invitation also extends to Shadlah, Zee, and Teldon :)

Thanks... It was all rather spur of the moment, I saw a post for PbP gameday and followed it until I found the spreadsheet of PFS games being run - I saw your name and knew I had just had to put my name down!!!

I'm having to recruit some new blood for a game I'm GMing again. I saw that you were running a game and thought I'd try PFS again. I'll have to make a new character though since I'm not sure I have my sheets from back then.

By the way, if any of you are interested in a gestalt game, please check out the Guardians Three recruitment I'm running. Given some events from before, I'd rather have guys and gals that I knew we're good players than take a.chance on things blowing up in my face again.

Aw, thanks for the vote of confidence! Whether I run for you guys sooner or maybe a bit later, I'll do my best to live up to the hype :)

No worries on needing to make a new character if your name comes up Jo (or Zed), there'll still be nearly two months before Gameday starts so you'd have plenty of time. Also as much as I'd love to actually get into a gestalt game, I'm going to have to pass on the offer for now. Between my other games that are largely regularly active and trying to get into GMing, I know I couldn't take on another long-term game right now. Thank you for the offer though!

No problem. I just thought I'd bring it up. We'll see if the third time's the charm for this campaign.

I want to send a quick update letting you know that I am still alive. The training was intense, and of course I had a ton of work come in while I was there, so I was up pretty late after-hours keeping my head above water.

My back-up returns next week while I'm on vacation for the upcoming week. I won't have regular wifi or wireless phone service until at least Wednesday, so I'll probably stay dark for another week.

Thanks for you patience!

Hang in there and enjoy your vacation!

Same here! We'll make sure Zee doesn't die again in the meantime.

Happy 4th of July to my fellow Americans, happy Tuesday to the rest of the world! And remember kids, it's not a proper rendition of the 1812 Overture unless it has cannons!

I'm back!

Vacation was great.

On the Fourth, I saw one of the best fireworks displays I'd ever seen, too!

Glad you had fun. :)

I'd like to take a moment to say that I really hope that I'm not hogging the spotlight here. I've been planning on asking Zee to do a reading and I want Joanna to reconcile with her sisters and deal with her step-mother before the start of the next book, but really that depends on what the GM wants to do. I do have a plan for getting them out from under Mother's Dearest thumb, but that probably needs to wait until we get back to Magnimar.

I still want Joanna to have a chat with Briana, because I think what happened with her snapping at Joanna and Teldon is significant enough that Joanna would be worried about it, and once the shock of Teldon going missing and Zee's death and resurrection wears off, Joanna's going to be worrying about it.

Not at all; I actually think it's a good way to help add some additional flavor to our wanderings down here while we're trying to find Teldon and come to terms with what happened to Zee.

Also I've not forgotten about Briana's snapping at Jo either but you're right that it's not something that would be at the forefront of either one's mind just yet :)

Here's hoping that I didn't just cause a big headache for Zee's player and Zed then. ^^;

You know, I have to say that you write characters struggling with inner demons very well. It's actually something that I feel is a weak point with my own writing/RPing so I always appreciate reading those who have a talent for pulling such things off :)

They say write what you know. :D

In all seriousness, I do and part of it is because a lot of those demons that I write are ones that I've struggled with. I've gotten better. I'm still awkward and tend to be reclusive, but at least I no longer angst like I did in jr. high and high school. Thankfully, that's not all I write. Gwyn's a bit of a daredevil, but she isn't very moody or troubled. There are some ghosts haunting her, but they tend to be tied to her time in the Acadamae in Korvosa. Tella's interesting. She can be creepy and downright frightening, but issues with self confidence and wondering if people like her or hate her are pretty much foreign to her.

Joanna can be hard to write at times for much the same reason I don't think I can bring myself to watch Inside Out. It's too close to home at times. Other times it's because I feel deeply for people, even imaginary people. I can feel what she's going though and that can be hard, especially when I bust out the nightmares. I've tried to have her grow. She's not as self-conscious as before, but at the same time, she still struggles with it, though on a lesser scale than before.

This is probably my favorite of all the games I've played, though Haladir's and Nate's games are close.

Er, sorry for the rambling. You probably weren't expecting that.

If you are looking for help with the writing, Writing Excuses is pretty good. If you want pointers specifically on writing someone suffering from their demons, well...

Imagine that you're in their shoes. Imagine what they've gone through as if it has happened to you. It can be hard, but picture it and imagine it happening again, and again, and again. Now, imagine how'd you act if you'd lived through what they'd gone through and were now in the same situation. For some of my characters, this is easy, for others, I have to think about it since I'm not wired the same way they are. It's easier to do when the game's moving along at a good clip and I'm having to do it every day, but if the game's slow, well. Those characters tend not to get very deep or detailed.

It's not rambling at all and it actually makes a lot of sense. I suspect a large part of my issue is that I tend to throw up a mental block that prevents me from delving too deep into the darker aspects of any given PC's personality or past. Like...awhile back in one of my games I did actually allow myself to really get into a character's mindset while I was writing; she'd discovered and used a new power (she's an oracle) in the middle of a battle but in doing so had accidentally hurt one of the other PCs. She felt horrible because it's how I would've felt and have felt when I've made mistakes IRL that caused trouble for others. She cried and I made myself cry while writing the post. Apparently it was a good post because it got 'favorited' by the GM and two or three of the other players but the odd thing is that I wasn't really sure how to feel about that. Obviously I was happy and flattered that people liked it that much but on the other hand I can't say that I enjoyed making myself upset to accomplish it, if that makes any sense?

By and large I've been lucky enough to not have much in the way of major difficulties, inner demons, or traumatic experiences in my life. However the past few years haven't been easy in a personal sense. February/March of 2014 was when I decided to give PbP a try and of course this game started September of 2014; 2014 was also a dumpster-fire of a year and 2015 wasn't all that much better. 2016 saw some improvements and 2017 has improved beyond that but there are still a lot of moments where things IRL get me down and those feelings aren't really ones that I want to channel into something that's supposed to be a fun distraction - at least not very often. There are some other factors too (like the fact that I probably try to juggle too many PCs at once) but I think that's the main culprit. It might simply be that I need to pick my 'dark' moments carefully and sparingly, at least for the time being.

(I do try different things from time to time. One of the previous incarnations of Salomae was someone struggling with survivor's guilt and also had a death wish, for example.)

It does make sense. For me, it can be cathartic. For someone who may have other outlets for negative emotions and memories it could be very draining. As far as juggle too many PCs, well, I think we've all been there. At my worst I had somewhere around 20 or so games I was in.

There's nothing saying that you have to write dark and moody characters. I tend to gravitate to the same few archetypes, though I do try to branch out. I play female characters because I like picturing them in my head and I find something about a woman who is able to overcome adversity and strife attractive. If playing a character who suffers from some trauma isn't enjoyable, then don't. I don't think anyone reasonable is going to fault you for it. There are other ways to make a character flawed and interesting.

I'm happy to hear that things are looking up for you, though. Life gets to all of us, so if you ever want to talk, I'm always just a chat away. A lot of times, just having someone to vent to helps. I do it a lot, so I always try to be there to be a sympathetic ear for people, even if I don't advertise it a lot.

I enjoy to write too, not only here but generally. It's liberating.

I try to find something different for each of my characters, and I enjoy interacting with other people's characters.

I have great memories with one of Briana's aliases... ;-)

Thanks for the advice and encouragement, you two! I'll also keep the offers to talk in mind should I find myself having a bad time again :)

Any time!

It would be a pleasure, Lady L.

In case anyone was wondering, I really did a spread with my Harrow deck. I will admit that I used a little knowledge of the upcoming volumes of the AP for the future reading, but those cards really did come up in those positions.