This will almost certainly get cut, but for now it tickles me:
“What can I call you?”
FRANK.
I was expecting “Killatron” or “Defense-o-Matic” but Frank?
A trans AI? I mean, why shouldn’t they regard “Killatron” as the dead name?
Still. A.S.P.S. abandoned the whole death robot thing and became a poet in the nuBeat movement. Drone 118 became a mid-level soap opera star after appearing on Silicon Falls, though the other Drones had filed a class action suit against the soap for slander.
Icons
My wife will be out of town for four or five days in July, and I think I want to run something ICONS online while she's away.
Possibilities that occur to me are:
Let's discard the last one for now; I have four of the five sessions named and plotted out but the work so far is in Mutants & Masterminds.
Fainting Goat has produced many adventures, but there are five or six that are candidates for this. I've been thinking of "Vampires of Red Square," "The Other Side" (an adventure with Cthulhu-esque monsters), "The Sugar Hill Invasions" because I want to see Saturday morning cartoons as the enemies, or "Return to the Crimson Frontier." The last one I'm most mixed about, just because I am not sure how well the adventure works with your bog-standard superheroes.
For the Justice League one, I was going to do something with satellite-era JLA. A piece of Starro fell in the ocean, various Atlanteans got possessed until one of them was Aquaman; he took over the satellite. Players play unaffected members of the JLA who have to get into the satellite, take it back, and turn on Amazo's head to counter Starro's influence. (Or something. The choice isn't formed in my head yet. For all I know at this point, the whole thing is engineered by Despero's ghost and Felix Faust.)
Icons
This is a link to all of (Hugo nominee) James Nicoll's posts about ICONS, including games we have played.
Eventually I want to produce a pruned list of the Halifax and Hope Prep campaigns I ran. (I had one such list, but it pointed to LiveJournal, and James has nuked all his LJ entries in favour of Dreamwidth.) So as a starting point for creating the list again pointing to Dreamwidth entries, I need to refer to this:
https://james-davis-nicoll.dreamwidth.org/tag/icons
Personal stuff
I got some interesting news from the oncologist on my last visit. Until recently, the time-span for follow=ups on my particular cancer were two years: if it didn't show up again in two years, you were declared cured and off you go. (Survival rate for five years was still about twenty-five per cent, which mans that there was probably a tremendous death toll in the first two years).
However, it is now five years. On the one hand, this is bad, because I still have to keep going to the oncologist and having MRIs every six months.
On the other hand, this is good, because it probably means that the lethality rate has gone down enough that I am worth a doctor's time for five years.
I choose to focus on the good interpretation. (I should probably get serious about exercising, though.)
Any
I was listening to Encounter Party! (a podcast...an actual play that works very hard on editing it down to less than an hour) and it was close enough to fiction that I was thinking about the differences between roleplaying and fiction, and something came to mind that might be useful for writers and GMs.
Interrupt NPCs.
That is, they have lives of their own. They're presumably doing something at the point when your PCs or protagonists interact with them. What? It doesn't have to be something big or obstructionist; a character might be there to help (an Uber driver, a doorman) but it's still the beginning of a shift to be dreaded or the middle of a weird day, or the end of a long one.
And other characters were actually doing something else. That guy at the beer store has a list as long as your arm to complete before going home for the weekend, and it's 3:55, buddy. The concierge at the hotel has just been taken to task for helping guests but at too high a cost. The gossip just wants to tell somebody in her group that she just met StupendousMan and really, it looks like he's wearing lifts.
Even the people who don't look like they're doing something significant might be doing something else in their heads, too. That professor going into her office is fuming about her placement in the published proceedings. The old guy pushing a broom is thinking about the argument he had with his wife.
So maybe part of coming up with an NPC is name, attitude, and what they were doing.
Any
So I was playing with a friend's kid while we were visiting, and the kid's name is "Hannah" which means that her family calls her "Hannah Banana." Very cute. (For the record, her sister is "Riley Smiley.")
Except I wondered if a group of women might adopt names like that, ones that reflect their powers instead of their actual names. Something like:
I just have this image of burly tattooed women kicking open the door and one of them shouting, "We're the effin' princesses! Hands on your heads!"
(If I were to use this idea and write them up, I'd put more thought into who does what, how many people do they really need, and what names sound distinct enough to be used as code names.)
So it's the season for home repair. And some folks across the way (I'm near the end of a court) are having their roof redone. (Good idea; we have to do it.) And the city is predominantly white. Not all white, but our particular neighbourhood doesn't have much besides your pale northern European descendants. There's a few, but most of them live in the controlled-cost housing at the end of the lane.
Anyway, I came home at lunch (because I can, now) and one of the roofers called me over. In a concerned tone, he told me that a tall black guy had gone into my garage.
"That's my son," I told him. I can understand his surprise: I'm short, white, red-headed, and dumpy; my son is tall, black, dark-haired, and thin. My daughter takes after me, so we kind of have salt-and-pepper kids. (It was my son; he had forgotten his key, so he was getting the one hidden in the garage.)
I choose not to be offended by this casual assumption that my son is going to cause problems. I mean, if he did it again and again, yes, there's be a cause for concern. And my son looks different: if you've seen me come out of the house, you're not prepared to see him. I hope by telling the roofers who he is, that's helping educate them. And if we were in a place that was, say, fifty-per-cent non-caucasian, then I'd see it as a more systemic stereotyping.
That stereotyping does take place. I just think that gently educating people is better than beating them over the head with it.
