Happy new year, Ask the Stars TTRPG, Galaxy24 (not the phone), Prodigies and Termites
Happy New Year! Hope you're doing well, crickets!
Celebrated Sylvester (New year's eve) by spending some days with beloved friends in a cabin in the woods, like we always do for many years now.
And it was wonderful! Hopefully you had a great passage as well.
Now that I'm back, I'm trying to get a feeling for both doing work and creative stuff again. And I realised ... that full prose texts are way to much effort!
Sooo ... bullet points? Bullet Points!
Here is some stuff that occupies my mind currently (only read the stuff that sounds interesting to you):
Ask the Stars:
- Mythic Bastionland by Chris McDowall had an amazing success on kickstarter.
- This was the first time that I could follow the developement of a TTRPG from the general idea to the final product.
- Used that as a reason to look back at its beginnings; namely Primordial and in extension Ask the Stars
- Found out that I still own a PDF of the now unavailable Primordial Module for Ask the Stars, got a bit nostalgic about it and realized that I've never actually played Ask the Stars
- Tried out Ask the Stars with three different groups of people; Only setting and character creation for now; no active play
- I really like it! The settings were all very loose, but unique, and the characters were highly evocative
- A game that is mainly based on a spark-table mechanic-wise seems to work quite well for me
- Will try out actual play and then maybe write up a session report or something. We will go into Collaborative Gaming with dynamic exchange of the Conductor Role between players, I think
Electric Bastionland:
- Wrote up a Borough for Bastionland and am looking forward to test it with two groups of players
- Very happy with that one! It is concrete enough to give me something to work with, but is still ambivalent enough so I don't get bored of it after finishing the prep
- So much trial and error in that regard and finally it feels like it clicked for me. We'll see how it works on the table!
Galaxy24 (not the phone)
- Chris McDowall had an Idea for a follow-up thingy for Dungeon23, called Galaxy24
- Here is the premise: Every week you'll create a star system. Monday is the star, tuesday to friday are planets in its orbit, weekend is for creating extra hooks
- Didn't participate in Dungeon23, because working on dungeons isn't my thing. They are too concrete. I can do a small one, but not a big one
- The alternative that is starting at different places in the bloggosphere is lore24. Making a piece of lore every day of the year
- Also not my jam ... or better, I already did something like that some years ago. Although for creative writing, not for TTRPG. Was fun in the process, but the results ended up too concrete again (one day I'll explain what I mean with this) and I didn't wanted to do anything with them after my notes were finished. Made me kinda sad.
- But with Galaxy24, I'm in! Describing a planet in just three bullet points gives it that jaunty looseness I'm yearning for. I can do that!
- Also I could use the result for scenarios with 2400 or Blighters
- Catched up with the current day today and had a lot of fun
- Exciting that I have to restrain myself from doing more than one thing for this per day. Maybe this is a method that could help me to get along better with other writing projects like Mitternachtstorte
- Maybe I'll layout some of the results and put them on itch for free
- No hard sci-fi since I don't know ass about machienes or physics. I'm more oriented on something like Trafalgar by Angélica Gorodischer.
Prodigios or Prodigies
- The novel Prodigios from Angélica Gorodischer got an english translation and I finally have a copy!
- She is my favorite author and I already love everything about the book
- I'm actually thinking about learning how to read spanish, because there has been translated so little of her work to german or english at the moment. And since her death in 2022 wasn't even mentioned in the german book scene, I fear that there won't be coming much new translations in the next few years.
- If you are able to read spanish, english or german, go ahead and read some of her books! She was the Grand Dame of Argentinian fiction!
Termites:
- Realized that I haven't posted any weird Bio-Infos here, eventhough I've talked about that on the Homepage of the Blog. Let's change that
- I'm a spider-dude through my ways of study, but I'm also in love with certain Hymenoptera, like Vulture Bees, and with Termites.
- As social and "state-building" (we say Staatenbildend for social insects in german) insects, Termites often are compared to other social insects like Ants, Wasps, Bees, etc, BUT they are actually not closer related to them
- The families of the Termites are summarized in the epifamily Termitoidae (or alternatively the Infraorder Isoptera), which is assigned to the order of Blattodea, the Roaches.
- So the "White Ants" are actually no ants at all!
- One of the many differences between Termites and the Hymenoptera (Ants, etc) is that the Hymenoptera are holometabol (from the egg hatches a larva, the larva pupates, and from the pupa hatches the imago)
- Termites on the other hand are hemimetabol (from the egg hatches a nymph, which goes through several moltings while developing into the Imago; no pupa)
- Interestingly Termites are most likely the first group of social insects that developed a cast system. More than 100 Million years ago.
And that's it!
Next post will be about something or nothing!
Best wishes for you in this new year!