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1/19/16
Jason: “So, about a dozen armed Settites have just poured into the room. What do you do?”
Jim: “…What’s the look on Bell’s face?”
Jason: “The look on Bell’s face…is as cool as it fucking comes. It looks like you could chill beer on his forehead.”
Jim: “That’s it?”
Jason: “Well you have to understand, Bell has been dealing with a lot of bullshit in this city lately. He’s been dealing with politics, Masquerade violations, a Sabbat Priscus, werewolves, mages, you sons of bitches, all sorts of shit he doesn’t have the capacity to control. But a shitton of armed fuckers standing right in front of him? That he can do something about.”
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Movie Review with the Vampire (Player): Blade
My life, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.
As I’ve mentioned before, before this whole endeavor started, I spent the majority of my life not giving two shits about vampires. I knew the basic gist of most of the classic stories, but beyond that nothing about them seemed very appealing. I spent my high school years devouring Terry Pratchett and Monty Python, not gothy poetry and sales at Hot Topic, and though I did have a black trenchcoat, it was only cause my tech-nerd friends and I got into The Matrix in a big way. The result of this is even though the 90’s and early 00’s were a big time for vampire stories, I am barely familiar with any of them. Thus, even though many of these works directly influenced Vampire the game, the game is what I experienced first.
Jim and I were discussing this fact recently and how funny it would be to go back and view these things through the lens of someone more familiar with World of Darkness. I kind of already started that a couple years ago when I started watching through Buffy with Chris and immediately started assigning clans to all the characters (Drusilla: Malkavian, or MOST Malkavian?) The last straw came when I mentioned that I had never seen Blade. Jim put his foot down, saying that I, player of Tom, definitely needed to see it, so finally this weekend we sat down to watch.
In that evening was spawned many snarky commentary, and from that snarky commentary spawned this:
But I couldn’t let it stop there. More thoughts and comments ran through my head until I spent most of the next day writing up a full-on review of the whole movie, complete with screenshots grabbed direct from our ripped copy of the movie.
I share the review with you now.
And, just in case anyone else out there is just as much of a troglodyte as I am…spoilers alert.
Continue reading
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So I have this going for me, which is nice
Bad news: I’m getting laid off from one of my jobs. I’m hoping to get a full-time teaching job for the fall, but in the meantime, with SF rents, I’m more than a little stressed out right now. I’m squeezing in writing as often as I can, but please excuse the extended delays now, and the inevitable creeping backlog.
Good news: The same day I found out about my layoff, someone was giving away this Giants promotional shirt for free in the faculty lounge and I grabbed it because holy shit, just look at it.
Edit: Now with clearer picture!
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1/07/16
Jason: “Give me an Intelligence + Investigation roll.”
Kara: “Okay. Do either ‘Analytical’ or ‘Malkavian’ apply to this?”
Jason: “…Where do you have a specialty in ‘Malkavian’?”
Kara: “Investigation! I’m pretty sure you gave me that.”
Jason: *pauses* “…Oh my god, I did give you that, cause you extracted science from Malkavianness….”
Jim: “Your specialties are amazing. Look at this. Science is ‘SCIENCE!’ Crafts is ‘Cooking’–”
Kara: “Oh yeah, I got that from Slayer.”
Jim: “–Academics is ‘Elements’–”
Kara: “Occult is also ‘Elements’! Oh, and in backgrounds, I have five dots in Snakes.”
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Misery Loves Company, Part 2: The Enabling
As I mentioned before, I seem to have started a trend. Not specifically in retelling our RPG adventures; that seems to have gone on for as long as the genre has been around. No, more specifically, writing up RPG adventures based on audio transcripts, interweaving them with out-of-game commentary, and reworking the whole thing specifically to have the pace of a story. I already mentioned the “Shadow-world-Dungeon-run” game Jim and I are in, and if you didn’t notice there in the sidebar, friend-of-the-game MorienneMontenegro has started writing up their Vampire game set in Brussels (also, incidentally, realtalk shoutout to Brussels, hope everything is going alright! 
) Finally, friend-of-the-game Mike has been working on writing his Mage campaign, and though I’ve read some drafts of it so far, he’s yet to get it onto a blog (and perhaps calling him out like this will help encourage 😉 )
As people have embarked on their own narrative journeys in this, the first comment I seem to get back from them is, “Oh my god, this is a lot of work.” My response to all of them has been some flavor of, “I know, right?” followed immediately by sobbing. But once the tears stop and I stand back and take a look at the thing, I realize that in three years of throwing myself at this, I have, amazingly, learned some things about how it can be done, things both relating to game-play transcription and writing in general. I shared some of this advice privately with Eric when he started City by the Brink, but I realize now that perhaps I should share it here as well, to help others who may want to follow along in my madness.
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12/17/15
Chris: “I’d like to declare at this juncture that Georgia is a crazy old cat lady and has no less than three cats: the dragon, the space whale, and Bob.”
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12/10/15
Jason: “Okay so, two werewolves, a mage, two gargoyles, a ghoul, and I think…three vampires are still here?”
Chris: “Does Paul count as a vampire?”
Jason: “…Yes.”
Chris: “Then yes.”
Jim: “Oh! We had a wraith there too!”
Jason: “Okay, so basically we got the entire World of Darkness in this house.”
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12/3/15
Jim: “Scout’s going to end the Settite problem.”
Me: “There I fixed it!”
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Misery loves company
Believe it or not, despite the two paying jobs I’m working and the essentially-third job that is working on the writeups for this blog, I actually find time to participate in other role playing games. Since everyone I know is constantly busy, many of them have been one-offs, like the Feng Shui session Jim and I participated in a few weeks ago run by ChrisM and which had some amusing dramas of its own.
But for the last year and a half, Jim and I have also been participating in a Dungeon World campaign run by a good friend of mine. It’s a monthly game, filled with more hijinks than drama (although it is important to note that once Jim joined the game, backstabbing, PvP, and even fucking necromancy started showing up as well :P)
This year, though, the GM of the game decided to try an experiment. We agreed to stop the regular Dungeon World fantasy-theme and try a re-skinning of the system called Sixth World, which is a Shadowrun-themed Dungeon World hack.
Now, the GM came up with some amazing concepts for this world–set in a near-future San Francisco–and, since he is an aspiring writer himself, I encouraged (read: practically forced) him to record our sessions and play around with writing them up as well (because he only has one to do a month, how hard could it be?)
And believe it or not, he actually did it. He describes it as such: “‘The City by the Brink‘ is a bit cyberpunk, a bit urban fantasy, and a bit sci-fi. The setting is a San Francisco in 2065 where cybernetics, genetic augmentation, and magic have become real, everyday things and are stretching the idea of humanity to new, unimagined limits.”
So, if the lag-time between Vampire posts is getting you down, and you’re itching for more gameplay novelizations, check it out! Jim plays Morgan Croft, aka “Wisp,” and I play Virginia Anne Burgess, aka “Scarlett” (because I’ve discovered a Southern belle accent is the only accent I can do, and basically all it is is copying Jason’s accent for Doc).
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The Vampires of San Francisco 
