technonaturalist

Mild content warning: occasional swearing and mild adult themes

We had a slight derailment right at the outset as S was unable to make the session. I only do character driven stories so players not being able to make sessions can make things fall apart, so normally we would just skip (I had previously tried to encourage the kids to make Redcaps that we could use in a casual drop-in/out filler game as a Redcap gang lends itself well to that, plus they could get any murderhobo/random dickishness/silly out, but the older boys had decided “Changeling is cringe”). However in this case seeing as it was early on, I managed to restructure stuff in my head (and later on in my notes) enough to postpone S to the next session.

I have done literally nothing on either project since the last progblog.

This time I got distracted choreographing a “fight” scene for the big boys. And because I’m a bit extra it’s easier to visualise, I 3d’d it.

It’s mostly just positioning I’m visualising as I’m just going to tell the children my ideas, though I’ve casually expanded to seeing if I can still animate flips (the answer is yes and I really should have started parenting to empties a lot earlier, I went through an overly long period of time where I was going out of my way to avoid adding extra things into the scene in a bid to make things less cluttered and confusing, but it’s a lot easier to snap an empty to a surface and I find it a lot easier to just use the root bone when there’s drastic position changes such as inverting).

System: World of Darkness (edition uncertain as the sourcebooks are all over the joint and also I fudge and homebrew a lot)

All players except S were in Modern 1. T reprised his character, the others wanted to try something else. They decided on being a mercenary group comprised of ex-military buddies, except that for some reason which I don’t think even they can explain, they all decided that they were going to be from different countries and not emigrate to one so that they could easily be army buddies -- (the character party is comprised of one Australian, one Greek, one British who seems to have retconned to Irish, and two Russians) I had done individual preludes with each player so we could all get a feel for the character, and decided to use a group prelude to bring them all together as well as give them the shared history and for them to figure out how they would work together as a team so they would have an easier time fitting together as a team (rather than having to work it out) in the actual game. The group prelude ended up turning into a 2-session mini-campaign because sometimes things like that just happen when I get ideas, so this prelude post is really, really long (I didn’t split it). Future writeups should (hopefully) be less long ^^;

There are many and some of them are just things I’ve decided to add on because I’m not very smart like that.

After WoDMod1 finished I started hacking on a dice system I’d written for AER two decades ago x_x when I was roleplaying a lot more. It mostly worked out fine when I was playtesting it with the friends I roleplayed with frequently back then because it was a fork of World of Darkness with a lot of my fudges and homebrew built in (it’s actually more or less the system I run now when we’re playing World of Darkness, just closer to the original than my fork so the children reading the sourcebooks know what’s going on).

I actually had them for the delay for once, and that was going out for birthday churros (not mine, but someone’s).

After that I was trying to render out some super quick and dirty walk cycles (which are literally just hands and feet approximating walking motions, no refinements or personality injected whatsoever, which partially accounts for the jerkiness and the other part is only vaguely remembering how to do looping gifs and animated gifs in general and couldn’t get the timing right when making the gif, I haven’t done one for game engines yet and I don’t use them at all for animations) and my computer crashed three times while rendering the first one (I’m a bit extra so I did three different views because of course I did).

Late progblog is late again but that’s nothing new. This time was an interesting combination of I had to go in to work early and completely forgot to start (I’ll usually make a start on writing in the morning, pick at it throughout the day and then finish up at night when I get back from work and do super basic if any edits) and then because I’m really close, figured I’ll just get a render done to use as a cover image because I’ve been doing my usual doing a lot but nothing to show for it thing.

UASG

Spent today trying to catch up with the last couple of weekend’s worth of work and I have now almost completed the three main items that Yue carries around with her (partly because they’re things that she uses very regularly and mostly because they’re kind of a security blanket).

First is the airfoil, which is a sword when folded up:

and a giant fan that she can both fight with and glide on (skaterpunk Yue’s skateboard wasn’t going to work in an airship setting, and I went with a variation of the Talespin “airfoil” rather than the slightly more sensical Avatar: The Last Airbender glider partly because ridiculous steampunk anime, partly keeping some aspects of Skaterpunk Yue and mostly because I hate staff x_x).

I did not forget July, apparently we didn’t do anything at all.

Or at least we didn’t do anything that I took photos of. The boys had random conversations with me and 16yo with his friends at gym about astrophysics, philosophy, life, the universe and everything and I really wish they would write this stuff down so I had proof. 14yo has been out and about with her boyfriend including going to AQWA. I’m trying really hard to pressure them harder into writing down stuff and basically doing their own reports especially as they’re doing so much stuff on their own now but still having zero luck with that.

I still do too many stupid things to count. This is just one of them.

No not that in particular, that’s just my attempt at approximating Chinese brush painting (I have exactly no idea so I watched some tutorials, and I still have no idea). The *actual *stupid thing is this.

So, with the sheer volume of stuff happening on the weekend (work, training and roleplaying), it will probably come as a surprise to exactly no one that I’m struggling to get progblogs out on those days.

Additionally despite knowing from a ridiculous amount of previous experience that it leads to burnout and intense slowdown at best (I can feel how slow I’m moving and it’s annoying me no end) and downtime at worst, I cut into sleep time again because it’s the easiest thing to cut x_x