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Mark Woodhouse

nono, bliss stage, sweetheart

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May 15th, 2011

Welcome, Friends!

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nono, bliss stage, sweetheart
As of October 29, 2007, just about everything on this LJ is friends-only. However, I am totally easy - just drop a comment here if you'd like to be added.

The Friends-Only policy isn't principally because I'm posting lots of super-private emo stuff (although there is some of that). It's because I post lots of different kinds of things, and I like to use the Custom Groups functionality to manage who sees which posts. Right now, the categories of posts fall roughly into the following groups. Let me know which of these you'd like to see when you ask to be added, and I can put you in the right filters!

StoryGames: Gaming related posts. I principally write about weird-ass Dirty Hippie Story Games rather than "traditional" role-playing or adventure gaming.
SocialCircles: Posts about and for various social communities I belong to. This is more for "public"-level personal posts and the like. If we're LJ-friends-but-not-friend-friends this is your spot.
MippleCity: This is for stuff that's specifically relevant to Minneapolis.
OnlineFriends: We're friends. You care about my life and I trust you at least a little bit, but you're not in Minnesota.
LocalFriends: We're friends, and you're in Minnesota.
Family: You're part of my family or someone I'm very close to.
Political: Stuff specifically related to my various political or social causes. Feminism, GLBTQ issues, human rights, etc.
AdultsOnly: Stuff about sex, kink, and other "mature audiences" content.

Thanks for stopping by, and I hope you like it here!

October 7th, 2009

My Brain, It Is Broken

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kyouka-sama

Not quite as broken as [info]l_the_fangirl, perhaps, what with Katawa Stage and all, but still broken.

[info]blackbluesock commented:

I had a kinda silly but I think would be awesome idea after looking at Tigerbunny icon's...a fandom Bliss Stage where we purposely use characters from anime/video games etc. I'm more interested in finishing in the current campaign right now, and building the backstory might be a tad difficult, but I'd think it'd make for awesome oneshot or something, I'm amused by the idea of the strange pairings it'd form.

And like the fool I am, I picked up the gauntlet.
How about you? )
Not going to make this HAPPEN any time in the immediate future, you understand... other responsibilities call. But....



I am collecting the responses and keeping the All Fandom All Stars page up to date. Who knows where this may lead?

UPDATED 10/09/2009: Noted repository of entries and made readable/searchable by all and sundry.

June 2nd, 2009

Northern Cross

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nono, bliss stage, sweetheart
For those of you who come to me for my Bliss Stage content (I know, talk about your niche audiences!!), my local face-to-face game is getting under way, and I invite you to drop by the web site I've set up for it and spectate, kibitz, or just steal stuff liberally. I think some of the material I've put up would come in handy for anybody planning to run or play the game.

Ben, please, please let me know if anything steps over any IP lines and I'll modify it or take it private.

July 22nd, 2008

I never released this one, because it hasn't been playtested or really tweaked up. It's a fun little accessory, though. It gives the GM basically all the mechanical nuts-n-bolts for tracking the progress of a mission. It's especially well-suited for a big, interwoven mission in which different pilots are targeting different mission goals. Those can be a pain to keep track of for the GM, because they (well, I, anyway) keep needing to ask players to tell me again what their trauma/terror values are at and what the condition of their anchor link is from last mission action.

This one has some warning caveats attached to it. It couches pretty much all the game-mechanical stuff in in-fiction metaphors and terms. These may not mesh up with your game. The look-and-feel may not mesh up with your game, either - I think of this as something that runs on the Authority Figure's laptop or tablet computer. I'd kind of like to try my hand at doing a low-tech one sometime, where it goes with a "chalkboard" look and uses more mystical/spiritual jargon instead of technobabble.

I may try to do something like this for Interludes at some point - probably a "psych report" sort of look. Some of the interlude rules are a lot harder to translate into in-fiction language, though.

July 21st, 2008

Bliss Stage has been in the air lately, and that's reminded me that I have something on my hard drive that I keep meaning to put out there for the world at large. Ben, LMK if it's an issue.

I built a couple of "character sheets" for the game back when it was in playtest. They should still be pretty usable. I don't think they're quite as purely functional as the play sheet that's actually out there, but they are v. pretty. And they feel very Gasaraki to me.

Available in delicious color, or elegant (and printer-friendly) B&W.

Please let me know if you use them, and how they work for you!

June 24th, 2008

Last time out, I told you about how Corellon-who-does-not-belong got himself plunked into Rao's Dream and ended up making himself some Land and some Sun when he got tired of bein' all wet in the dark, dreary Sea. Well, now we got ourselves an actual Cast Of Characters to work with, and things start to get a little more interesting...

Next time, I'll tell you about a few lessons, a little misbehavin', and a little bit of love at first sight.

June 23rd, 2008

A few years back, I took it into my head to play around with the D&D tropes through a less “Tolkien”/European/Classical lens. I took as my precepts:
  • I should use the existing Greyhawk list of deities and portfolios, but could feel free to re-imagine their nature and relationships and rearrange them into new groups
  • The mythology created should mesh up with a fairly standard “D&D world” – there would be the usual races, classes, monsters, etc., but again I would be free to re-skin (often literally!) and re-imagine them
  • I would avoid the common tropes and narratives of Europe in favor of those drawn from Asia, Africa, and pre-Colombian America
  • The gods would not be remote, Apollonian incarnations of abstract principles. They would *be* those things, personified. And they would be very much like people – motivated by recognizable emotions of lust, compassion, respect, family, anger, etc.

I had a lot of fun with the project, although I never “completed” it – does one ever really “complete” world-building and myth-making? I hope one day to run another game somewhere in the Dream of Rao – maybe one that delves into a cranny of culture or myth that I haven’t yet touched!

Inspired by this thread at Story Games, I’ve decided to start publishing some of the mythology I created here. Maybe it will serve as inspiration (or at least a warning) to others who want to get away from the “default” D&D concepts and venture off into the wilds. Prepare to meet Pelor and Corellon and all the rest as you’ve never seen them before…

These stories are mostly presented as the sort of thing an entertainer or village elder might haul out for an audience of young men & women over a fire at night. They’re rough-edged, often bawdy or scatological, and not especially subtle. I’m sure theologians tell these stories differently, if at all. I hope you enjoy!

The first few stories behind the 

cut... )
Tune in next time, when

Beory and Pelor do what comes Natural

January 5th, 2008

Beware the memage

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yuki, sql
(on edit: Seeing as it seems to have actually spread outside my FL... let's make this one public)

It's all [info]wimsey70's fault. We clearly have different genres of music, though. I think mine is sort of trippy dub, in the vein of Spiritualized or Boards of Canada.

Dig this



Want yours? Rules are

October 25th, 2007

The End of An Era

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yuki, sql
This is it. As of Sunday, the days of Tigerbunny Design Bureau are over. I'm not moving on from here, but the new incarnation that I've been talking about will be revealed on Sunday. Most of the content will go friends-only, and my friends-list will get a haircut, so if you haven't chimed in on the check-in thread, you should!

Thank you to all of you who've dropped in and read my yammerings over the last 2 years!

September 28th, 2007

In my fantasy world, this would be TRUE FACT.



xkcd wins the internet again.

September 26th, 2007

Spreading the meme

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nono, bliss stage, sweetheart
unsubscribe from human rights abuse in the war on terror

August 31st, 2007

Ye gods, how can I be Late To The Party (tm) after only 11 hours. Internet time is scary.

Go look. If you like what you see, you really oughtta buy one of Shaenon's books. She's this good A LOT.

August 14th, 2007

Not So Emo

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himitsu, asahina
It's too true.

August 10th, 2007

The raw stuff. Plus, meta. All in under a hundred words.

By the way, subscribe to Brendan's feed. It's regularly this good.

August 7th, 2007

Dorky music post

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himitsu, asahina
I have been on a music kick this last few days, suddenly feeling the need to listen to new things. (and re-listen to old things)

In the spirit of sharing, here's what has turned my crank in the last couple days - much of it new-to-me and courtesy of helpful suggestions from nice internet strangers. I hope somebody else gets some joy out of it. It's pretty much all downtempo/darkwave/dream/shoegazer stuff, so if that doesn't turn your crank, sorry.

I've been listening to:

Miranda Sex Garden
Auburn Lull
Stars of the Lid
Paik
Mahogany
Hammock (!)
Rumskib
Azure Ray (!)
Bright Channel (!!!)
Alcest
Lamb
Shiny Toy Guns
Tearwave

Got anything you think I should listen to?

June 5th, 2007

Is it just me?

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nono, bliss stage, sweetheart
Or is it just because school's getting out? Every forum I usually read seems to be particularly beset by acrimonious rehashes of old arguments. And me with huge files to load and reprocess, therefore excess web-browsing time at work. Oh internet, entertain me! Point me at something fun to read in 10-minute bursts!

May 30th, 2007

Hey Look - Non-RPG content!

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bouncy, ryo
Way back when, I happened to mention how much I was looking forward to Manabi Straight!

What with one thing and another, I am seriously, seriously backlogged, so I haven't been keeping up very well with it. But I'm now more than half way through, and I have to say that it's in my personal pantheon of great shows. Not in that Totally Awesome! way, but in that "comfort food" way. It's sweet, pretty, and heartful. The voice acting is pretty darn solid. And it's all about the way one remarkable person can make everyone else around them that much more remarkable. This is one I will rewatch.

Right now, I'm on a binge:

Watching fansubbed

Manabi Straight! (up thru 8, made from love and win)
Darker Than Black (up to 5, liking but want some plot advancement)
Heroic Age (up to 3, teetering on the edge of abandonment)
Venus vs Virus (up thru 7, backlogged, will probably finish just because I ought to)
Lucky Star (up thru 3, it rocks, but only in fits and starts. Aya-chan is nailing Konata, though.)
Lovely Complex (up thru 4, yeah, formula, but just enough spin to be fun)
Kanon 2006 (I've waited on this one until I could watch with Kathy. Gorgeous!!! I wish we got a Nayuki ending this time, though.)

Watching on DVD

Shakugan no Shana (melonpan FTW)
Tsukuyomi Moon Phase (nekomimi mode, de~)

Getting tomorrow in the mail

Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu V1 Special Edition. Bouken deshou deshou!

Playing

Finally getting around to the Asumi route in Heart de Roommate. I expect weepage.
Just finished Narcissu Second Side yesterday. Eh. Main story is good, this is bleah. Pretty.

Oh yeah. And the first session of my D&D game was muchly fun. Hobgoblins were killed.

April 24th, 2007

Well, I've got my group together. We've met, scheduled our first session for next month, and are now engaged in the pre-game feely-outy stage via the game Yahoo-group (don't know why I never did one of those before!). One thing that's cropped up is the suggestion of a "party charter" - a sort of statement-of-purpose and setting of rules for the group. I actually think this is a neat thing to do for a game that's tightly team-focused and mission-driven, the way a lot of D&D play is. Everybody comes to the game with a set of norms they've picked up - whether from other games or from general social expectations - and when they clash it can get ugly. I'm going to try to midwife the process of this group working it out as best I can - you can't force this stuff, but I'm glad somebody suggested it (not me!).

I've been brainstorming an outline of "stuff that might come up" that you might want to cover in such an agreement.

Party Charter Issues )
How have these sorts of things been handled in your games? Have there been problems when issues like this were or weren't discussed in advance?</p>

April 13th, 2007

Okay, long thoughtful posts... check. Short, pithy linky? I can do that too.

Many is the time I've seriously considered the "Assess is a move-equivalent action" house-rule. I've never done it. Maybe I should.

April 4th, 2007

Another lesson from MIG rears its head. That game was plagued by a recurring social contract issue – differing levels of rules-savvy and risk tolerance among the group. We ranged from Kathy – who’s at best minimally competent with the rules, and likes to take wild risks in order to make things more exciting, secure in the expectation that I’ll generally make sure that stakes for any action are fun win/lose – to L, who’s an old hand D&D expert whose cleric was a melee powerhouse with carefully chosen feats and spells, but who is quite willing to make suboptimal decisions in service to character – to T, who’s fairly rules-knowledgeable (a bit of a rules-lawyer, even) and extremely risk-averse, preferring to avoid encounters entirely or win through superior planning and resource management and gets quite irked when other people deviate from The Plan.

If I “embrace the hack”, am I also embracing the far end of that spectrum? Risk-averse, rules-mastery-focused, optimization-centered? Am I asking for people like Kathy to be perpetually the “dead weight” at the table?

Well…. I don’t think so. I think that’s a particular manifestation of “hack” D&D – one that’s crunch-focused almost to the exclusion of everything else. I’ve certainly seen plenty of good, crunchy, challenge-driven D&D that didn’t demand perfect builds and perfect execution. Partly, that’s a matter of social contract, partly, of culture of play )I want a table full of people more in the moderate level of crunch-focus, and without T’s strong aversion to risk – willing to embrace the gamble as well as the crunch, but also willing – and this is crucial – to embrace stakes that are less extreme. Kathy’s reckless stunts are a lot more fun for the group if social contract accepts the notion she tends to assume: that the stakes of risk are rarely loss-of-character, but more frequently complications, embarrassment, temporary incapacity. On the other hand, she needs to accept the idea that every character must be designed to be able to reliably fulfill a needed role in the party – that a base level of rules-skill and optimization are every player’s responsibility, and that recklessness should be confined to lower-stakes situations.

So… I will need to select for people comfortable with the kind of game I plan to run. They need to be rules-comfortable, but not hardcore optimizers. On the other hand, they need to NOT be rules-averse – I’m not planning on running a talky-talky roleplaying-centric kind of game, so knowing how your Feats work and what your bonuses are is important. They need to be okay with fun taking precedence over “realism”, and they need to find Killing Things and Taking Their Stuff fun.

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