Sin City: Reconnecting (Geist)

Howdy there, folks. Back with another write-up from my Geist: The Sin-Eaters game.

Not a whole lot of news to add. There haven't been a lot of personal changes in my life worth talking about as of late, and there's not much else worth getting into that you aren't already reading this post to avoid. 

Before I get into it, a quick word -- I've mentioned before that the Geist game should have a general content warning because it gets into some heavy topics in places, particularly towards the end of this session. So this has been your warning before you go forward.

Sin City: Treasures (Geist)

So here we are again, continuing the adventures of the Crossroads Krewe. I'm not really sure what else to add here -- as I think I've pointed out before, actually doing these every week means there's less news and updates and stuff to talk about during the pre-game show, as it were.

So let's just get to it.

Sin City: Season of the Witch (Geist)

Welp, here we are again. This one's running a little behind -- I realized as I was writing it that I'd actually made a mistake in the session, and wanted to sort it out with my players first before finishing the post (reflecting the correct version of events), and then got tired last night and forgot to post it. Apologies.

Sin City: All That Glitters (Geist)

Greetings once again, folks. We've been on a pretty good roll with these so far. But having regular posts does mean these pre-game bits are less interesting because I usually have less news to report or comment on.

That said, I do hope folks are being safe with everything going on right now. In a better year, I'd probably be lamenting the month flying by after Anthrocon, preparing for running Æon at Gencon and trying to get it ready before the last minute. Here's hoping we all make it out the other side of this stronger than we went in.

And after that little downer moment, let's get to the fun stuff!

Sin City: Bringing Down the House (Geist)

Oh crap, two of these in a single month. Been a while since I managed that.

So yeah, back with my coverage of my Geist game, which for the moment I'm calling 'Sin City' (because sin-eaters). If you need a refresher on the cast, the first entry is here. I can't really think of any additional commentary to add here, other than to hope everyone's safe and wearing their masks.

And awaaaaaay we go!

Sin City: What Happens in Vegas... (Geist)

Hey there, folks, dusting off this blog a bit. I dragged my feet on it, but with everything going on I'm running a game for some of my tabletop folks via voice chat (or at least trying to). As I don't want to go to the trouble of learning any special software for running stuff online unless I have to, I'm holding off on Starfinder as it's a little tactical for running like that. Instead, I've worked something out with a few of my players to dip back into the Chronicles of Darkness for a bit. Specifically, we've started a Geist: The Sin-Eaters game.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, Geist is a game of second chances. The player characters are sin-eaters, people who've died and in the moment of death made the Bargain with a ghostly entity called a geist who's brought them back to life. Now they walk in the worlds of the living and the dead (both metaphorically and literally), driven to resolve what's brought them back (referred to as their Burden), and what keeps their geist going, and along the way they have to decide how to deal with the ghostly remnants of people who are now stuck in a half-existence designed to chew them up and swallow them into literal nothingness. They organize into groups called krewes made up of both living and dead members who work together to help the ghosts under their charge and maybe -- if they're lucky and put in the work -- reform the Underworld itself.

(Note: Geist is a game about ghosts and the raw deal that being a ghost is. It's not inherently darker than other CofD games but death and the roads that people to take to get there can be touchy/tricky subject. So consider this a general content warning.)

This will take place in my Woodburn Chronicles setting, but with a bit of a twist... this game is taking place in a different place and time. Almost none of the existing setting elements I've established in my other games are likely to matter, aside from maybe some cosmic behind the scenes stuff. It's taking place in (or at least starting in) Las Vegas in 1951. We just sat down and started talking about what we wanted to play, and that's how the conversation played out.

So Vegas it is, hence the appearance of one-time mascot of Vegas, Vegas Vic up above. And further down, below the cut, we'll meet our krewe and get started!

Some built-up personal stuff

So a quick ICYMI from a couple months back: At some point, probably next year, I'm going to try and put out an RPG supplement for my Conversion story setting.

And in some more recent positive news, a short story of mine won a Leo Literary Award a couple of weeks ago, for my story "Swipe Right, Now What" in the FANG 9 anthology from FurPlanet. (ebook available here) I didn't say anything at the time because this was right when the BLM protests were picking up and I didn't want to be all "Hey, everybody, stop paying attention to important things and acknowledge this random white dude and his minor writing accomplishment."

Speaking of which, in case it needs to be said: Black lives matter, ACAB, trans women are women, trans men are men, and Rowling can go fuck herself.

And now that that's out of the way, to some other business. I don't often talk about personal stuff here, and I'm not going to get too deep into it in any case. But I've just been struggling with a lot of burnout, largely from the state of the world around us. But that burnout has made it hard to write, which is difficult because writing is one of my best de-stressers, and one of the few available to me with the pandemic closing certain businesses and keeping me holed up at home. On top of that, thanks to the weather and certain other issues, I haven't been sleeping great so I'm just kind of falling apart in general.

One of the few things I do have, which sometimes helps, is cooking. Like a lot of folks I've been cooking at home a lot more during the pandemic, and I've been expanding my recipes and such. But I often post pictures of the food I make to Twitter, just to share. I've refrained from doing that for the last couple of weeks because it just feels inappropriate to dump food pictures on folks' timelines when they're sharing info about the protests, ways to help the protesters, etc. So I saved them up because I thought there would be a good 'breather' moment to share them. But now the collection has grown large enough that it's going to be just annoying as hell to everyone if I were to just dump a thread of food pics on the timeline. So I decided to post them here instead. Check them out below the cut.