Category: Community

Inspiration

Anniversary

Today is the first anniversary of my big brother’s passing. We interred his ashes in the local graveyard yesterday. It has been a tough week for my family and me. It’s been a tough year.

He died after a short but vicious illness that we could not have predicted. He was only 53 years old. His death came far, far too soon. And even during the years he had, much of his time was spent contending with the draining, exhausting illness known as M.E. But he had made his life so rich and so full in the short time he had that he has been an incredible inspiration to me, particularly over the last twelve months, but through all the years of his life as well.

Lorcan McNamee

Lorcan McNamee was a teacher first and foremost. Most of his working life he spent teaching languages; English, Spanish, Portuguese. He was a polyglot, obviously. Even at the time he died, he was working on learning French and German. But he taught other things too. Most notably, salsa! He taught salsa dancing to all comers in a church hall in our home town.

We, his family, stood for two hours greeting those who had come to grieve with us at his funeral. Many, many of the hundreds who came were his students or his former students, including his dance students and a host of people from Ukraine and many other parts of the world. And so many people from Spanish speaking countries who had been welcomed to our town and helped by Lorcan and the Sligo Spanish Society, which he was instrumental in organising.

I will be honest with you, dear reader, the sheer numbers and the obvious and genuine emotion expressed by these people was something of a shock to me. I knew, of course that he was an excellent teacher, that was not the shock. But I had known so little of the key part he played in the lives of so many through his involvement in all of these different activities, organisations and communities. To me, of course, he was just my big brother. He always would be that to me and always will and I think that prevented me from seeing all the rest. Additionally, he was never one to toot his own horn, except when it was beneficial to a cause. For instance when he led the charge to gain fuller rights and benefits from the government and unions for language tutors. Indeed, a representative of his union spoke at his funeral, reading a glowing tribute from the union’s president. Lorcan had told everyone about the fact that he would be protesting at Government Buildings and that he was interviewed for the news. Such pride I felt then, especially as someone also working in an education sector ravaged by real-terms cuts for decades.

The Front cover of A Year in Lisbon, by Lorcan McNamee

Lorcan was an author. He published two novels and several poems in collections over the years. You can find his novels, A Year in Lisbon and Be Do Go Have here. He had a blog, on which he liked to post things about media he had enjoyed or wanted to to talk about. Never would he be lost for something interesting to say about the latest movies he had seen and the books he had been reading. This man had a first class honours degree in English and three more degrees that he had picked up over the years so you know the blog is worth a read. We’re currently working on getting that back up and running. When we do, I’ll post a link to it here.

You might be starting to see a pattern now.

I think some of the connections are genetic. Both he and I love to travel, are crazy about all sorts of food, enjoy really good science fiction (Iain M Banks was a particular shared pleasure,) we’re both really bald. I was told by his neighbour yesterday that, if I just lost some weight, I would look just like him. All this is true. But why I am writing this post today is the effect he has had on me over the last few years.

This blog would not exist without Lorcan. I started it because I was looking for a creative outlet, mainly for me but for anyone else who might have an interest in the same things as me. That’s very much how Lorcan approached his blog.

I have written several books. I don’t think I would have done that if not for him, his encouragement and his example. I should probably get around to publishing them too… Still you can check at least one of them out here on this blog, serialised with a chapter coming out every few days. Lorcan self-published his books because he very much wanted to see his own work in print. I think it took a lot of guts to do that, have them printed, arrange his own launch parties (I was very proud to introduce him at a couple of those even though no-one knew who I was) and everything else that goes into it. And of course, to write them in the first place. I feel very close to him when I think about these things.

Most recently, after the funeral and the avalanche of grief and love from all of these people who had been brought together by my brother in different ways, who had been made into little communities and who came to learning and creativity because of him, I thought, I could try a bit of that. So, in the smallest way possible, I did.

I started off by joining the discord server of my local game shop here in Bangor, Replay. There, I started looking for players who might want to try out a new RPG. Because I’m not a salsa dancer, I’m a GM at heart. From that, five mostly strangers came together to play a few sessions of Spire in the wonderfully welcoming Replay store where they have lots of gaming tables that you can use for free. That was Tables and Tales in a proto-community form. Not long after that, friends of the blog, Isaac and Tommy, suggested that we set up a local TTRPG community and I leaped at the chance, knowing that that is what I had been wanting all along. I wanted to try to emulate my brother in that all important way; by connecting people and helping in some small way to bring them together to do a thing they love. We are still a relatively small group but have been growing bit by bit and I genuinely love to see it.

A photo of the front cover of City of Thieves, A Fighting Fantasy Adventure book by Ian Livingstone.

You know, it just occurred to me that I might owe Lorcan more when it comes to my RPG interests. He might even have been instrumental in getting me into RPGs in the first place. Probably the first game I played that had any RPG elements was City of Thieves, by Ian Livingstone, a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook from 1983. Of course, I nicked off Lorcan’s bookshelf, didn’t I?

I have not done my brother justice in this short post at all. He was far more amazing than my meagre powers are able to convey, I didn’t even mention that he was the most incredible uncle to our two nieces, that he was an accomplished translator, that he earned a Master’s Degree in Spanish Studies posthumously, that he was an art lover and the origin of all my best musical tastes, that he was a podcaster, that he was the first in our family to get a tattoo, that he will be missed forever by all of those who knew him and that the world is better for having had him in it.

Thanks for reading about my brother today, dear reader. Normal service will resume in the next post.

Non-standard Holidays

Celebrations

I’ve begun to realise recently that I would much prefer to celebrate a fictional or “made-up” holiday than a real one. At least a real western one. I have had to interrogate the reasons for that, of course. But, let me tell you, dear reader, it did not take me very long to hit upon the answers.

Religion is, naturally, the top reason. It’s been a long time since the church and I parted ways. We had a fundamental philosophical conflict that was irreconcilable. Anyway, as a result, I don’t feel I’m a part of the religious side of any of our really major holidays. Christmas and Easter are the ones I am thinking of but in Ireland, at least, there are plenty of other saints’ names attached to days throughout the year. Of course, I know that these holidays, and even some of the saints have been recycled from pagan ones by the church. Same with a lot of the traditions. I’m sure dominant religions have been doing that throughout history as a clever way to stamp their authority on a people or place. You can see it happening in real time to our big holidays too, of course, as they are co-opted by consumerism. The original meanings have become mixed up and diluted and lost. What even is the meaning of Christmas? (there’s a saccharine Christmas movie in there somewhere.)

The second reason is related to the first in that rampant consumerism is the focus of these big holidays that we tend to celebrate in the West. So, as diluted as the pagan purposes of the holidays have become, even the Christian meanings of more recent centuries have been co-opted by Black-Fridayism. These times, when families and communities come together, are often the most stressful and worrisome occasions for those struggling financially in the first place. It just doesn’t feel worth it…

So why not celebrate occasions where the meaning is as clear and sparkling as Caribbean waters, and as fun and uncomplicated as a Hobbit’s birthday party? And let’s not forget, themes worthy of really kick-ass RPGs.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Those of you have been around a couple of weeks might remember that I made a character using Pirate Borg a while back. That was by way of familiarising myself with the game, the setting, the character classes and the general rules. And all of that was in the service of a Talk Like a Pirate Day one-shot on September 19th.

I was the GM for this game so I never ended up using Isabella “Butcher” Fernando, the buccaneer I created for that other post. However, we did have another buccaneer in the party, recently returned from hell, where the devil didn’t want her, was Eliza “Bad Omen” Rackham. She made an incredible entrance (her player was unavoidably detained so she appeared about an hour and a half into the action.) As though rising from Davy Jones’ Locker, she emerged from he water by the other characters’ little row-boat and hoisted herself into it by grabbing their oars, shocking her companions who all knew she was dead. Eliza was, surprisingly enough, the most normal member of this cursed crew. As well as “Bad Omen,” we had a couple of skeletons, one a swashbuckler and one a zealot, a vampiric rapscallion and, a mutant great old one from another reality who also happened to be a sorcerer with a taste for human flesh. So, I decided to skip any town-based interactions with NPCs and start them off in medias res, facing down a British naval vessel who wanted to kill or capture at least three members of the small crew. Raymond, our vampire took the role of captain, despite being disadvantaged by the glaring Caribbean sunlight, while Jolly Roger, the Great Old One Mutant and our skeletons, All Bones McKeown and Hector blasted off broadsides.

After they escaped that fight, we did a smash cut to them rowing ashore, greeting the resurrected Eliza and then to the carved door of a lost temple in the jungles of Black Coral Bay. That’s the island presented in the core Pirate Borg book as a place to start your adventures. I took three of the dungeons (Shrine of the Nameless Skull, Sanctum of Nameless Blood and the Lake of the Nameless One, which are all a part of the larger Temple of the Nameless One but are distinct nonetheless) described in the book and used those for the one-shot. It might seem counterintuitive to use three dungeons where one would have been more than enough for a one-shot, but, for the Pirates of the Caribbean type theme and for the satisfaction it would bring, I thought it was important. So, I did the first dungeon entirely in montage, finally describing how the PCs figured out the way through the temple door and let play begin there. For, the second dungeon I took out all but two main rooms, putting several major items and encounters into those rooms instead. The third dungeon, I left in its entirety and I’m glad I did because it had so many cool moments. These were topped off with a bunch of curses handed out by an ancient golden idol in the hold of a sunken Spanish galleon in an underground lake, the skeletons regaining their flesh, and All Bones McKeown being eaten by the giant Cthulhoid monster from the home-dimension of Jolly Roger. The survivors escaped through a maze of flooded underground tunnels and emerged into the creepy and atmospheric Black Coral Reef.

I loved it. It was a very good time and I think the players liked it too. One of them announced that they would happily play a full campaign of Pirate Borg, in fact. Their roleplaying was fantastic, because, as game designer and mutual on Instagram, sean_f_smith recently commented on one of my posts “everyone knows how to play a pirate.” I was worried about the strangeness of the PCs at the start, but the madcap elements introduced by their weirdo characters only heightened the atmosphere. Add in some pirate tunes and a few glasses of grog and we had a whale of a time. 10/10, might just go back to it before next Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Bilbo and Frodo’s Birthday

Did you know that it was Bilbo and Frodo’s birthday on September 22nd? The Bagginses of Bag End? Well, I didn’t. Not until the day before at least (although, I’m sure a younger me would have known it.) Anyway, I got in the Discord for Tables and Tales, our local TTRPG community and requested a Lord of the Rings flavoured game. It was incredibly short notice but our resident Tolkienite, Isaac of Lost Path Publishing did not shirk. He suggested a one-shot of a scenario that came in the core rules of The One Ring 2E from Free League. In no time at all we had swords, bows and axes being proferred in the comments and a full fellowship was formed.

In fact, we had five players and Isaac in total so it was a very fun table. We started off, on the night, with a spot of light character creation. Now, you need a bit of time for this in The One Ring. It’s not as time-consuming as D&D 5E character creation but it’s somewhat more involved, than say, Pirate Borg. Even then, with Pirate Borg, we had plenty of prep time and we had all met for a session 0 online a few days before so everyone had their characters ready to go. Since I had given Isaac only a single night to pull this together, (sorry Isaac) we had to include it in the session. By this point, we already knew this was going to take longer than one night to get through but we were all alright with that.

Actually, by the time we all had out characters ready we still had plenty of time to get into “the Star of the Mist.” The scenario began with our Player Heroes meeting Gandalf in the Prancing Pony! How my nerdy heart swooned! Isaac, producing an Oscar worthy performance as Ian McKellen as the old wizard, sent us off on a quest into southern Eriador where some folk had been going missing.

Our party consisted of two Dwarves of the Lonely Mountain, one of which was played by me. I said I was going to go full Nesbitt (as in Jimmy who played Bofur in the Hobbit movies) But I think I was more Belfast than that in the end. My guy is Frár, the Champion. The other dwarf is Berfa, a Treasure Hunter. We have a second Treasure Hunter, Porro, one of our two Hobbits. The second Hobbit is, Rollo, a Messenger and finally, our Barding, Dagstan, is a Warden. We set off into the wilds to find the source of the trouble and we managed to get a fair way into the scenario despite our time constraints. I don’t want to give anything away but it has Dwarves ruins, monsters in the water and a mysterious “she” who has so far remained unnamed. That’s a trio of Tolkien ticks right there.

As I said to the rest of the players, this session was special to me. It felt like the realisation of the dream of Tables and Tales; the ability to get a game together at a day’s notice for people to enjoy and to celebrate an important occasion, Bilbo’s onehundredandeleventh birthday!

I’m so looking forward to continuing this adventure. It had been a long time since any of us had played the system so there was a fair amount of scrabbling through the book for rules by all concerned. I feel like next time, we’ll know what we’re doing a lot better and, from recent experience, I find Free League games to pretty intuitive once you grasp the basics.

Other festivities

These are just the latest games played with a particular non-standard festival in mind. On May the Fourth, we played a Never Tell Me the Odds one-shot set during the events of Star Wars Episode Four, A New Hope. The PCs had to infiltrate the Death Star to rescue a certain Princess before the storm troopers got them, or indeed, before anyone else could rescue her!

Obviously, we are coming into the season for horror and spooky games as Halloween approaches. This is one holiday I can get behind. There are so many games that could suit this season that I am excited to start coming up with a few ideas.

How about you, dear reader, are there any occasions, events or holidays that you like to mark with a festive game? Let me know in the comments!

Motivation Part 1

Player vs character

Are you always wanting to play an RPG? I’m not. I mean, I like them, I write about them, I talk about them and post about them on social media, but do I always want to play them? No, of course not. Sometimes I’d prefer to be cooking, or walking or reading. Sometimes I’d rather be doing literally anything else.

So, how do we ever end up getting everybody to the table all at the same time? When at least one of the players in your group who isn’t busy or sick or traveling is probably just not feeling it that night? Oof…

And when you do get them all there to your table and you have this great idea for an adventure, a couple of hooks to get the PCs to take interest and some of the smartest, most memorable NPCs they are ever likely to meet in store for them, how do you make sure that they take the bait and go the way you are hoping they will? How do you ensure that the motivations of the PCs align with the goals of the adventure?

OK, so these are two different problems, really. The first suggests that the players may not want to be playing at all, and the second suggests that they want to play, they just can’t see their characters doing what you hoped they would. Still, we are going to discuss both because that is the central conceit of this short series of posts.

Player motivation

Open door

This is so tricky that, I am tempted to say, don’t try to tackle it at all. I mean, if you don’t want to be at a party and someone drags you along to it anyway, there are only two potential outcomes, really. Either you do that thing that your mum always said, i.e. enjoy it once you get there, or you will have a terrible time, confirm your own biases and bring down the average vibe score of the entire occasion just enough that you feel even worse about it and leave early.

An RPG session is not likely to be this drastic. In most cases, if you are not feeling it, you probably just don’t contribute as much as usual. Of course, the other players will notice this and maybe try to draw you into it a bit more or make more allowances for you than you really want. After all, you are probably happy being a bit quieter that day.

This is one of the reasons I appreciate one of the Open Hearth community’s policies. The Open Door policy says that you can drop out at any time from any session without the need to explain or excuse yourself. They only ask that you let the game facilitator know that you won’t be there or, if it’s mid-session, that you won’t be coming back. I think this policy is more to account for unforeseen life shit but it works equally well for those who are just not feeling it that day. And let’s be clear, mental health has to be a priority too. Some of us struggle with mental health issues of all stripes and on days where those issues flare up or are particularly serious, you have to take care of yourself first. I, myself, have struggled more with physical ailments a lot, in the last couple of years post-Covid and I have had to take advantage of the Open Door more than once, and was always grateful when, upon my return, that no-one had any blame to dish out for my not being there or any guilt to trip me with.

I guess, what this comes down to for me is, if you are not feeling it on a particular day, don’t do it! Go do the thing you really want to do instead or just curl up in the foetal position on the couch with a steady stream of rom-coms and popcorn being fed intravenously into you. You don’t need to make any excuses. You don’t even have to provide an explanation. In fact, I don’t think you should. After all, it’s just a game. We should all treat it as such.

Hype

All of that being said, I don’t think it’s impossible to hype people up to play the next session of a game. We do this in lots of ways, don’t we? In our Tables and Tales community we use the discord chat to chat about what happened in the last session, dissect the events, talk shit about the NPCs behind their backs, develop plans and share stupid memes and puns. I love this sort of inter-session banter. It definitely makes me excited to play the next session and, if I’m the GM, it often gives me ideas for stupid bits to introduce into the game itself, just for laughs or tears.

Homework

Our DM in An Unexpected Wedding Invitation 5E game likes to give us homework! She has asked us to do things like:

  • have a conversation with another player, in character, in DMs, that you haven’t had much interaction with yet
  • provide feedback privately to her that you wouldn’t in front of the whole group
  • discuss our theories about what is going on in the plot.

This has made the discord chat really entertaining and makes me want to get back to the table to keep going.

World-building on discord

Another GM, this time from Blades in the Dark, went above and beyond. He would not only write up a summary of the events of each session in an entertaining and enjoyable narrative style, but he would also compose entire articles from the Duskwall Observer, the city’s Newspaper of record, letting us know about the happenings in the rest of the city both in the heights of the ruling classes and the depths of the crime-ridden underworld. On top of all that, he would come up with new rumours after every session so that we had something to work with when planning with our own scores and downtime activities. Truly herculean efforts there, and they certainly made me excited to meet up with the rest of my crew every Friday evening and start inhabiting the, very much living, city that he so adroitly created under our feet.

I’m afraid this is not an area that I excel at as a GM. The most I am likely to do in between sessions is ask if people are free to come on the usual evening or share a social media post that seemed summed up a character or event from the game. There are definitely techniques I can learn from my learned GMs. Maybe I should start handing out homework too!

Tune in to the next post in a couple of days if you’re interested in character motivation within the game.

Meanwhile, is there anything you do to motivate your fellow players in between sessions or even before the first one? Let me know in the comments so I can steal your ideas!

Back to Troika with Tables and Tales

Whalgravaak’s Warehouse

We’re going back to Troika for another one-shot tonight! I’m very excited for a couple of reasons.
The first is that I finished reading through the Whalgravaak’s Warehouse book last night and it seems like a lot of (potentially very lethal) fun. I don’t think it was necessary to read the whole thing before beginning play, actually, but I was enjoying it so I kept going. That can rarely be said of RPG products so that’s a big tick in the plus column already.
How does it play? Only time, and my players, will tell, dear reader. But I will say, I love the setup of it. I think it has done enough, to lay the groundwork for a session full of strange and dangerous settings, fun and dangerous encounters and weird and dangerous NPCs.

They call it a Location-based adventure and, in the intro they admonish the DM to pay attention to
“the classic tenets of danger, resource management, exploration and player agency.”
This says a lot in just a few words I think. But it neglects to mention that it also involves elements of the classic dungeon crawl and a hex crawl in too!

New Tables and Tales members

The second reason for excitement is the introduction of a couple of new members to our little, local RPG community, Tables and Tales. We have been in existence only since February and after a small initial influx, recruitment died down somewhat. Our aim is to be able to have a few different games going on, in person, that interested players can get involved in and to continue to grow in our relatively small local community.
Although our growth has been modest, it has meant a lot to me, personally, to get to play with lots of people I would otherwise never even have games with. As a blow-in to the place I live, it’s also a great way to get to know people with similar interests and meet up face to face.
So, I love when I am able to share a table with some new tablers. Maybe talers is a better moniker? Hmmm. We’ll have to workshop that one.
I met these new recruits at the recent celebrated birthday party of one of our founding members. One was a friend of hers who has never tried TTRPGs before and one was the bar-tender, who just overheard me nerdily chatting about D&D while standing at the bar.

I think that shows that the RPG nerds are everywhere. If you want to find your people, just announce yourself loudly at the bar.

So it’s an exciting evening ahead. I hope I don’t end up frightening off the newbs…