Libromancer's Apprentice

If 7th Sea  is a game of "What Would Errol Flynn Do?",  Thirsty Sword Lesbians is "What Would Julie d'Aubigny Do?" Confession, my first reaction to the the play test materials was "this is a game of 'What Would a Sapphic Errol Flynn Do?"  And then I remembered there was someone from history that was THE perfect fit for this game.  The swashbuckling high adventure ideals and the structure of the game built around relationships and story brought to mind the much popular game by John Wick... but for me in a much more comprehensible and to the heart package. Thirsty Sword Lesbians is a rolepaying game for telling queer stories with friends. If you love angsty disaster lesbians with swords, you have come to the right place. In this book, you’ll find: Flirting, sword-fighting, and zingers in a system designed for both narrative drama and player safety. An innovative take on the Powered by the Apocalypse family of games. Nine character types...

The following is a narrative and epilogue for a character I played in Pandaemonium, at HLG Con, October 12-13, 2018. Once there was a child, like any of us.  Playing the games we all play.  Running wild with friends, due home by dark to be welcomed back by parents A child grows and changes, the pieces not always fitting the mold set by the parents.  Algebra seems so… tedious compared to the thrum of a tuned engine, the just so fit of a pair of jeans, to secrets held in the shadows.  Childish mischief transmutes into the usual adolescent rebellion.  Or started as such.  There were so many fascinating things to learn, interesting things to try, expanding the consciousness. It was a laugh when the straights started crossing themselves instead of laughing or mocking.  Why not take on their scorn and wear it as a badge of pride.  Watch out for the scary witch. It only takes a moment for everything to change, one decision made so quickly you don...

This weekend, we lived a Gothic Horror/Romance.  With space wizards and light sabers.  On a real life heavy cruiser.  I did horrible things to amazing people, causing characters emotional trauma and player tears.  I lost track of the number of times friends told me they hated me or that I was the worst as they gleefully went deeper into the dark places of the plot. Not only that, I portrayed a space wizard ghost trapped in a ship and who thinks its the AI. Sometimes, life is pretty sweet. I also admit that I'm a strange person. When I was invited to contribute to Legends of the Stars 2 ( website , Facebook ), I think I had a bit of a brain glitch.  Really?  They wanted me to contribute?  Holy crap .  We'll hand wave the ensuing anxiety of whether or not it was a true invite that lasted through my first story development meeting up until I was officially on the writing team. This made for one of my top LARP experiences so far.  I'...

I hope everyone had the type of New Year's celebration they wanted. There is no LotR chapter today, my partner in crime has had a hell of a last week of the year and declared this week a hiatus.  We'll continue with Return of the King next week. Romance Book Bingo starts today.  Thank god, I have a stack of romance novels from the library that I've deliberately not read, and usually they're next day returns.  There's definitely a few squares that I'm not going to actively seek out filling, but if I come across them I'll go with it. Coming up in a few weeks is Arisia, I'll be moderating two panels on the 14th and spending the rest of the convention largely in the background of things. Disability in Speculative Fiction, Saturday, 2:30 PM SFF doesn't always represent people with disabilities well. A flawed model for dealing with disability in SF is that technology is a panacea that can be always, desireably, and often preemptively applied t...

Website Seeks to Make Government Data Easier to Sift Through Always awesome, and the site in question can be found here: http://datausa.io/ Sincerity is the Watchword On horror stories and what makes them compelling. Americanizing Words and Witches Super interesting, and I'm definitely wanting to read this book even if I tend to eschew horror. Blizzard Erases Gaming History By Axing a Fan-Made 'World of Warcraft' Server A commentary on the impermanent and changing natures of MMOs. Encryption bill would force companies to surrender user data More security theater.  Because weakening protection never goes wrong... How music streaming service exclusives make pirating tempting again Irony: the Hulu banner ad at the top of that page.  But access is an issue.  I know that if there's an album that my only option is to buy as a download from a walled-garden account, I will not buy it .  I'd rather give the artist money directly and pirate than deal with ...

The above pretty much describes what little free time I have these days, be it active involvement, planning, or ideas bouncing around in my head. I've been running a Dungeons & Dragons game for a few months now, with a bit of an unintended break thanks to crazy schedules.  Also, I'm still new enough at running games that I'm not at all confident in my ability to create a solid world and plot.  But folks seem to be having fun, so I must be doing something right. Also on the table top/RPG front, I joined Chaosium's Cult of Chaos, which is a fancy way of saying I now run organized play Call of C'thulhu games.  Also, it means I get to GM without having to write the scenarios.  Yay.  First up for that is their A Time for Harvest campaign, which I'll be running at Modern Myths.  Game one takes place this Saturday from 3-7 (part of International TableTop Day activities), and then will continue through on the last Sunday of the month until we've finished a...

Game four was pretty low key, with our party being made up of neophyte gamers, one of the more experienced (and troublemaking) players absent, and of course it being a town game. I know that town games can get quite complicated when players go looking for trouble.  These did not seek out trouble... though thanks to a player joke given the right situation they may have to make saving throws against carousing in the future. Largely they went to their various guild halls or appropriate related place of learning and studied.  In the fighter's case this was to take part in the local (sanctioned) fight club run by a healing temple.  Yes, I totally cribbed that from Critical Role.  Deal with it.  I like the idea and I was pretty sure at least one of my players would chose to interact with it.  I did use the player supplied name suggestion of "Jabrony" for the fighting partner, and I now know there is such a term as "jabrony," and that it has nothing to do with...

Game number three was about getting everyone from point A to point B, getting people in a good place to address large gains from leveling, and of course, further messing around with the characters. Ahead of time I statted out several random and not so random encounters. Of course, this means queue up a player rolling natural 20's for random happenings during the night.  Mind you, this is our half-orc fighter, who has yet to roll any sort of critical when trying to hit something... but gets them instead for things like "does anything interesting happen tonight?" I certainly didn't want to use my more interesting night-time encounter on the first night, so I pulled out something a little more on the random side, and had a bunch of awakened shrubs trying to dismantle the wagons.  This ended up as a less than glorious fight, with neither side doing much damage to the other for the most part.  The dragonborn barbarian spent the fight for the most part asleep and fart...

In our first adventure, no one died to kobold falling rock traps.   The players had their training wheels dungeon crawl, so now I get to start messing around with things.  Our monk couldn't make it, but we had the addition of a bard by the friend who was the peanut gallery last time. The towns folk are happy, the baby-stealing kobolds have been eradicated, and our neophite heroes can spend a few days resting on their laurels. Until another baby goes missing. Now, clearly I'm used to a specific type of gamer.  The ones that decide to poke at everything .  Instead I get the ones that go "Oh, there was a crime?  Let's find the sheriff!"  Come on guys, stop making me come up with characters on the fly As indicated above, the players wanted to find the sheriff's deputy (the sheriff did show up, but they still wouldn't take the bait).  So en-route they encountered a hysterical and panicked woman, babbling something about her brother, her sister-in-la...

I'm a Librarian Who Banned a Book: Here's Why Really worth a read. The UK’s New Consumer Rights Act Will Protect The Right to Return eBooks Neat Virtual Privacy Lab - San Jose Public Library This is pretty cool On The Radical Notion That Women Are People An author reflecting on feminist science fiction, and the sociopolitical issues of today vs those of 40 years ago. Paperless Post Cute It could be worse A disturbing read, but one worth reading.  The speculative nature of the post is uncomfortably realistic. The gamification of social conformity, overseen by an authoritarian government and mediated by nudge theory , is a thing of beauty and horror; who needs cops with nightsticks to beat up dissidents when their friends and family will give them a tongue-lashing on behalf of the government for the price of a discount off a new fridge?  But don't worry, I could make it a whole lot worse. 20 Design Rules You Should Never Break Some really good guidelines...

After nearly 8 years together, and some 15 years of friendship, my spouse finally turned to me and said the magic words. "I think I want to try Dungeons & Dragons" FINALLY! The trick seems to be getting him to think it was his own idea.  He knew I wanted to get him to try D&D or some other RPG system, but I had learned to by and large leave the topic alone.  It seems me watching/listening to D&D games on YouTube was the final snare in arousing interest.  For those curious, over the past year or so I've been watching Acquisitions Incorporated , Titansgrave (not D&D, I know), and Critical Role . Also, this means I'm finally taking a stab as Dungeon Master.  While introducing my other half to role-playing.  No pressure... I told him that if he pulls together a group of friends, I'll run a game for them.  We have lots of mutual friends, and I easily can pull together a gaming group from people I know, but this is in many ways is start...

Neil Gaiman’s ‘American Gods’ Lands Series Greenlight at Starz *Incoherent gibbering* American Gods  as a TV show has been a long running tease, one that I've both eagerly awaited and dreaded (the fear anyone faces when a favorite book is translated into a different medium).  But it looks like this is actually going forward, has a good level of communication with the original author, and is being done by a subscription network which generally results in more money on hand to throw at the show. The Art of Weeding We don't just buy books and put them on the shelves for you to borrow - we have to sometimes take them off the shelves.  There's often a lot of vilification after a library does a huge weeding project, regardless of the reasons (and there are sometimes very valid and pressing reasons that force a library to discard a large volume of its collection), but regular weeding is part of collection maintenance.  It helps us replace damaged books that we can't ...

Minecraft in Education Looks like Microsoft is taking Minecraft in the same direction as Steam for Schools with Portal.  I'm pretty excited. Cory Doctorow Talks About Fighting the DMCA (2 Videos) I generally find Doctorow very good at explaining copyright. 8 Ways Parents Discourage Their Kids from Reading This one hits pretty close to home as I experienced many of these from my dad & step-mom (plus a few that weren't on the list - such as getting in trouble for reading too much and having reading taken away from me as punishment).  Not that I really wanted them to read out loud to me after a certain age, but I was mind-numbingly bored by my collection of books at their place.  In 1st or 2nd grade he had me tested for a learning disability, an action that shocked my teacher and my mother... and it came out that the source issue was that I was bored, I had read all the stories in  Sunday School time and time again, and none of my books at his place were high...

Long Before Snowden, Librarians Were Anti-Surveillance Heroes On the privacy efforts by librarians over the past decade. The quest to save today’s gaming history from being lost forever Digital preservation is a huge challenge, bit loss, planning for accessibility, and for format and technology obsolescence.  On top of that copyright law actively interferes with independent efforts to copy and preserve.  Video games that often have patches and expansions that result in profound changes to the game itself.  Add in the different platforms, add-ons, social aspects, and even the different modes of play (including private servers for MMOs), its a bit of a tangle. Recently Discovered Original Script For STAR WARS Finally Confirms Who Shot First Librarians for Han Shot First. “Let's talk about genre”: Neil Gaiman and Kazuo Ishiguro in conversation  "The two literary heavyweights talk about the politics of storytelling, the art of the swordfight and why dragons are...

Evaluating Transgender Picture Books; Calling for Better Ones "After accepting a solo elementary school librarian position, I increased our collection of picture books with transgender protagonists by 400 percent. That is, I purchased four books with transgender characters, and, with approximately 7,000 titles, the library previously had zero." 6 Things Dungeons and Dragons Can Teach You About How To Work A Reference Desk And the systems that aren't as well organized and indexed (I'm looking at you, Star Wars Saga Edition RPG) are great practice in building a reference index! So, You Want to Be a Library Director?  A bit on perhaps some of the more overlooked responsibilities of directorship. Storing Information In Other People's Heads On division of cognitive labor. Exclusive comments, new trailer: anthology horror “VOLUMES OF BLOOD” I've been following the progress of this film through posts made by a fellow librarian who's library it too...

I've written before about LARPing .  It's loads of fun and a great way to meet new people. My first LARP occurred two years ago, and myself and three of my friends played a group of experts from the Vatican (well, I was there as medical support) searching for holy relics rumored to be hiding in Hungary (in particular the original top of the Holy Crown of Hungary). Just your average team of Vatican treasure hunters So it was that we, along with nearly 40 others, were traveling in December of 1935, only to be trapped in a mountain valley when sabotage knocked the train off the rails.  A valley scheduled to for flooding in two mornings.  Over the next 36 hours we found strange artifacts, encountered cultists and ghouls, were decimated by horrifying creatures from another dimension, and desperately tried to find what we needed to repair the damage to the rails in order to escape. Ten of the original forty escaped, including one of ours.  All with scars and t...