• I find that there are different things to keep in mind depending on if you're planning/writing a scenario, running a scenario, or playing in one.

    The written rules we've got are intended for players, so there are a lot of things that I don't explain from the planning side, things like how I assign stamina (hit points) and rejuvenation (recovery) rates, and from the GM side, things like what happens if one character tries to torture another. I don't put that last into the rules because, if I do, players will immediately start doing it. If I don't mention it, they very seldom do.

    As far as the index card props, yellow cards are knives, swords (much larger cards), and other things that look like bladed weapons. Blue cards are things that look like guns. Green cards are things that don't look like weapons (but still may actually be weapons). White cards are intangibles, special powers usually. Red cards are to be used if one's character dies. The player writes a description of the corpse on the card and leaves the card where the character died. At that point, if it's early in the game, I usually give them a new character to play.

  • I haven't run or played in a LARP in a couple of years (health reasons), but my experience is mostly with small, one shot, theatrical-ish (we don't do costumes but otherwise trend toward that style) games with between 12 and 25 players. Mostly, I run at conventions now, but when I first started, we mostly played in university dorms, either lounges or basements.

    We have our own rules system that kind of grew out of experimentation. It's pretty simple because we have to be able to explain the basics in under ten minutes. We represent all props with index cards (color coded so that people know that, say, a yellow card being waved around is a knife), and a lot of the rules are aimed at not freaking out passersby.

    My tendency when writing games is to throw in everything but the kitchen sink so that there might be spies and vampire and aliens and time travelers and political maneuvering. I want each player to feel like their particular character is the protagonist of their own story. A lot of LARPS with pre-generated characters fall apart because the writers had a central idea that involved a few characters and then kind of attached all of the other characters on the periphery. No one should have (this is a real example from a game I played) a character whose entire plot is that they have a horrible headache when other characters are fighting demons and making political deals.

    I find that twenty is about the right number of players for a four to eight hour game. Many less than that and events unravel too quickly because players have an easier time finding all of the pieces they need. More than that and players may fail to find any of their connections. Generally speaking, if players know they only have four hours, the game will kind of blow up around the end of the third hour. If they know they have longer, they tend to be more cautious. The game will still blow up in the end, though.

    I'm happy to share my basic rules if they're of interest. They're not even remotely suited to a LARP campaign, though.

  • Fandom: Chronicles of Amber - Roger Zelazny Title: The Fruit of Your Intents Length: 32000 (twelve chapters) Pairings: Merlin/Luke (non-con), Martin/Luke (non-con), Merlin/Martin (consensual) Rating: Explicit Tags: non-con/rape, revenge, alternate universe - canon divergence, shapeshifting, alternate universe - dark, angst, captivity, ambiguous/open ending, torture, non-consensual bondage, dark Merlin, introspection, implied/referenced character death Summary: Merlin spent two years as a prisoner of his former friend, Luke, and of Luke’s mother, Jasra. Once he’s free, he realizes just how much of himself he’s lost and wants revenge. Partly Merlin putting himself back together and partly him taking Luke apart.

    http://archiveofourown.org/works/7988410/chapters/18281341

  • Maybe? I was thinking of vivisecting puppies and that sort of thing.

  • I think, for me, it's the long, detailed descriptions of the villain doing terrible things that don't serve a plot purpose but are there simply to underline that this person is Evil.

  • GAD-NOS, agoraphobia. I get fairly nasty somatic symptoms when my anxiety gets bad-- migraines, full body pain (muscle aches and joint aches), IBS issues, etc.

  • I tend to use it to describe the pieces of myself that don't quite fit together with each other and the things I want to be able to do that I can't, the ways that I want to interact with the world and just can't manage.

  • I talked to her once at a convention, and she said that the cover for Warrior's Apprentice hadn't even been designed for that book. It was just repurposed art. She laughed about Elena's 'combat nightie.' The original Shards of Honor cover and the original Falling Free cover both actually look like they were made for those books, but I wouldn't be surprised if the Ethan of Athos cover was another repurposed bit of art.

  • It was a combination of the blurb and the cover. The cover made Ethan look like an action hero, and there's a whole sub-genre of fantasy/SF, almost exclusively written by men, about men raised without contact with women who get really, really into sex with women. We'd gotten burned before. I ended up trying it because I was hopeful that the person who had written the other two books wouldn't have written that. And she hadn't.

  • Back when the first three books came out, I picked up a copy of Shards of Honor and, after reading it, I was gushing about it to a friend who was gushing to me about a different book, Warrior's Apprentice, that she'd just finished. It took us a bit to realize that we were talking about books by the same author. I think that it was the name Vorkosigan rather than the name Bujold that gave us the connection.

    Both of us were very, very nervous about Ethan of Athos, but I gambled on it. On finishing it, I called her and said, "He doesn't get laid!"

  • Yeah, I saw the post, too, when I reloaded the page. I don't know why it gave me an error and said it couldn't post when it actually did post.

    Here's a question-- I'm writing for an anonymous, multi-fandom exchange with a due date at the end of this month. How would I go about asking for a beta when I'm not supposed to say what I'm writing? I mean, I may just gamble that nobody from the exchange will see my post. I don't know. The story's not done yet, so there's no urgency to the question.

  • I always thought that 'angst' as a genre meant no happy ending, but that may just be how it was used in my first few fandoms back around 2001.

    I didn't realize there was a limit. I can see the reason for being stingy with tags.

    I just tried to post a beta request and got an error of some sort. I've got a 32000 word fic that I need to post Sunday that's in an obscure fandom and is darkfic with non-con. I'm not actually optimistic about finding someone because I need a beta for canon and characterization and flow. I have no concerns about SPaG.

    Should I try again? Or do I need to do something specific to make it work?

  • I can't watch movies on a large screen at all because of the speed/need to take things in quickly. I also can't drive because I can't see things moving faster than about 10 mph relative to me, not quickly enough to drive safely. I'm very cautious about videogames because certain types of movement can give me migraines if I'm trying to follow what's going on. I had to give up on playing Civ, for example, after a certain point, because the graphics made me sick. I could watch my husband play for a little bit but not long.

    I can be in the same room with someone playing a game I couldn't as long as I'm not trying to watch with focus. Occasional glances are okay. Harvest Moon type things are generally okay. Lego games are middling. First person shooters are absolutely off the table.

    Fast cutting tends to bewilder me, generally, but with most things I watch, I have dialogue and some sense of what's going on to anchor me.

  • I found the book, and I'm looking through it. It uses the Cortex Plus System.

    I think the system is set up so that there are five categories of skills: Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind, and Thief. Each character has a rating in each category. The sample character sheets don't seem to break those down into sub-skills, but the character creation section talks about 'specialties' which I don't see on the sample characters and mentions driving, explosives, and cooking specifically as examples. There are also 'Distinctions' which seem to be advantages and disadvantages and 'Talents' which seem to be special things a character has/can do that alter the basic rules for them.

    There's a rule for players investing xp into 'Trust' of specific other characters. When the group has a high enough mutual Trust, some game mechanics change.

    My impression is that the section on GMing is assuming that players will be good at improvising and enjoy doing that. The book says that coming up with a Leverage caper requires three things: client, problem, and mark. Their suggestion is to look at real life news stories and to twist them as heavily as necessary to motivate the player characters.

    They list some questions the the GM needs to consider with a few suggestions in each category:

    What is the problem?

    Why come to the player characters about it?

    What's the Mark's angle?

    Why is the Mark untouchable?

    What's the Mark's weakness?

    Where's the Mark vulnerable? (They consider this deeper than a weakness.)

    Who else is in play?

    They suggest thinking about the possible endgames at this point in planning. I'm not clear whether this involves the players as well as the GM. I'm skimming, and I seem to have missed that.

    The GM also has to consider whether or not the Mark going down actually fixes the original problem and have ideas for how to address that if it's not quite that simple.

    The next step is to plan some ways in for the player characters. Not flashing neon signs but little cracks that can be exploited with some creativity.

    And my daughter's home from school. I must go.

  • Mostly older folk music with a little bit shading into country but not much, some bluegrass, and a bunch of Top 40 songs from the late 1970s and 1980s that have nostalgia value. Some filk. Stan Rogers, Leslie Fish, Heather Dale, Kate Wolf, John Prine (I love his lyrics more than I do his voice), Simon and Garfunkel, Doc Watson, Johnny Cash, early Judy Collins, Flatt & Scruggs, John Denver, Tom Smith, Pete Seeger, Gordon Lightfoot, Steeleye Span, Sweet Honey in the Rock, some Tracy Chapman, and a local duo called Mustard's Retreat.

    I do not like Loreena McKennit, Fairport Convention, or most Alison Krauss and Union Station.

    I've been using Amazon recommendations, my local library, and YouTube to find new to me artists to try. I don't like most of them, maybe one in twenty goes on my to be purchased list. I also don't tend to like stuff by artists I liked as a teen unless it came out then and is something I heard over and over again, so I think that my connection there is not so much to a type of music as to the comfort of familiarity. I'm just not willing to listen to something seventy times a month now just to make it comfortable, you know?

  • I mainly think that breaking non-con out of darkfic (I didn't see g:darkfic as an option when I looked yesterday. Is it?) is useful because there are a lot of people who very specifically want to avoid that and because it's a relatively common form of darkfic. I would apply it fairly narrowly (other people might not) and wouldn't use it for stories that only reference rape or where there's a 1000 words of that and 20000 words of other stuff. Possibly g:recovery might also be useful?

    My impression is that SPaG issues with ESL writers can be different from those of native speakers, especially for new ESL writers. When I see a request for SPaG from a native English speaker, I make assumptions (potentially false ones) about the amount of work involved and think that I'll be looking mostly for careless errors. In my experience, some ESL writers are vastly better at not making errors than native speakers tend to be, but there are also new ESL writers who need more help. Sometimes, it's a question of differing rules of punctuation between languages. Sometimes, it's a question of a word technically meaning what the author intends but having a load of baggage that makes it inappropriate. Spelling tends not to be so much of an issue, but word order can be. Basically, if you say you'll look at an ESL story for SPaG, you could be doing something quick and easy or something that will take a good bit of work (and tact) from everybody involved.

    Something I'd love to see-- A post that lists the available tags and that gives a few words to define each. I could only find the tags when I clicked to post, and that seems kind of late in the process to be considering tagging.

  • I'm fanfic all the way. Basically, I'm not very visual, so art doesn't make an impression 97% of the time. Screencaps don't do much for me either. I have had poor luck with vids because I can't process rapid cuts; I need several seconds to be able to actually see something and understand what it is. I'm also way out of the loop on music. I think I might have seen a vid to a song I knew once.

    I haven't tried podfic, so I don't know how I feel about that.

    Fan films are okay but not something I seek out.

  • A couple of tag suggestions: g:non-con would be useful for me, and I think some people looking for betas might find s:esl useful. I think the latter is enough different from s:spag for it to be worth making a distinction.

  • Title: Dark and Deep Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C.S. Lewis Rating: Mature Characters: Jadis | The White Witch, Peter Pevensie, Susan Pevensie, Tumnus Tags: Graphic Depictions of Violence, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Dark, Villain POV, Child Abuse, Suicidal Thoughts, Physical Abuse, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Muteness Word count: 8391 Summary: Tumnus delivers Lucy to the White Witch, and Aslan never comes. All four children end up in Jadis's hands, and she decides to see what she can mold them into.

  • I really think that this hinges entirely on having the right group of players.

    I played a scenario that turned into a caper once at GenCon. It was a demo thing, back when the D20 spy game was still called Series Archer or something like that. There were four or five tables in one room, all doing the same scenario. We were supposed to capture someone who had taken refuge in a foreign embassy. All the other groups went in shooting. Our group... didn't. It never even occurred to us.

    My character went in, posing as a journalist, and poisoned the guy so that they'd need to send him to a hospital. We made sure that our driver was in the ambulance and that using a helicopter wasn't an option. The GM freaked a bit because it was too easy, so he had people chase the ambulance and shoot at it which I thought was kind of unnecessary.

    I know there's a Leverage game book of some sort and that my husband owns it. I'll see if I can dig it up and what they say about how to run a caper scenario. I can't see any way that the game designers didn't have something to say about it. They might not have said anything actually useful or workable, but there's no way to talk about running Leverage without talking about GMing caper scenarios.

  • It may have been one of Todd Ruthven's Space Cat books, probably in first or second grade, but it didn't make a big impression on me. The one that did was a time travel book called The Girl Who Slipped Through Time by Paula Hendrich in third grade or maybe fourth grade, and it was an H.M. Hoover book, The Treasures of Morrow, that made me search for other books by the same author because it was clear reading it that there was a book that came before it that my elementary school library didn't have. Fortunately, the public library did. That has to have been fourth or fifth grade because I was able to go to the library by myself.

  • Thanks for the pointer! Looking at Wikipedia, it does appear that the numbering for the English translation is mixed up. There are eleven volumes in English according to the publisher's website.

  • Oh, neat! My local library has six volumes (going by the images, 1-4 and 6-7. The library doesn't actually track volume numbers in catalog records). I've put a hold on the one with a number 1 visible on the cover thumbnail.

  • I strongly suspect that, having been written in the 1980s, The Feminist Tarot is pretty thoroughly iffy in terms of recognizing the possibility of being non-binary or asexual or trans or... Well just about anything beyond a very narrow range. I don't remember any references in that direction, but I'm not optimistic that, had there been, they'd have been positive.

    It also doesn't address race at all unless one counts the fact that it decouples the court cards from indicating people with particular physical features.

    I tend to assume that personal interpretations matter more for reading than 'official' interpretations do. Our culture, our knowledge of the world, everything changes constantly, and at every point in time, there are ways in which we're being terrible to various people and grounds.

  • I am way, way out of practice because I haven't done a reading in years. I did a fair number for friends in the late 1980s and the 1990s, but I've been mostly housebound since 2001 and had a baby in 2003 and just kind of stopped doing readings because I can't read for myself without getting tangled up and because I didn't want a small child mangling any of my decks.

    Mostly, I used three decks, the Rider-Waite, the Hanson-Roberts, and the Sacred Rose. I prefer the Sacred Rose, but many people I read for weren't comfortable with it. The Hanson-Roberts deck was mainly a thing for me because it was very conservative in imagery and smaller than a standard deck. The smaller size makes it much, much easier for most people to shuffle and meant that it fit better in my purse.

    My preferred layout is the reflected Celtic cross, and I treat readings as more meditative than predictive.

    I have somewhere between twenty and thirty different decks. I pick up new ones when I find them at a price I can afford, so I haven't gotten many new ones in the last decade. Most of them, I've never tried reading with because I tend to get lost the farther things go from the Rider-Waite imagery/interpretations. I'm not very good at going from symbol to meaning unless I have a text based guide.

    In the late 1980s, I picked up a copy of The Feminist Tarot. I like how the book is structured-- It has the authors' interpretations and the classic Rider-Waite interpretations together on the page so that a reader can look at both and pull out the things that seem to fit best with everything else in the reading. I prefer the authors' interpretations of the court cards for every suit except swords (there, they go heavy into the suit being the Patriarchy which tends not to connect to anything sensibly in the readings I've done).