Sunday Salutations: Unexpected Joy and Unpublished Fiction
From cats and frogs, to games and fiction, look for the unexpected joy in your life.
We find joy in many unexpected places.
Mr. Hoppers finds joy at the base of a transplanted rose bush.
Beleth finds joy napping on shoes.
Aki finds joy in the simple pleasures of an open-top bag.
And Dante and Crokell find joy in being strange siblings.
Joy in RPGs
The picture prompt for the unpublished 50-word story at the end of today’s post also fits this section. If you’re not interested finding joy in role-playing games, feel free to scroll down to today’s flash fiction story.
In the past, I’ve been the Forever-GM - the Game Master - the person who always ran a role-playing game (RPG) and was never a player. Almost two years back that changed. My wife and I found a gentleman on the East Coast who was starting a Traveller campaign - a science-fiction RPG.
Two years later the GM and three of the players are still the same. We lost a few players but have two more who have been regulars for a year now.
We’ve all become friends. Although you’d never know it the way some of the characters treat each other.
This month, we had a break, so I looked around for a Foundry Virtual Table Top (VTT) fantasy game system that had lots of automation that was relatively rules lite, without excessive extra feature books or high costs.
Several systems I want to try are not yet available. But I found one with a high level of support and plenty of adventures available. Weirdly, it was also the hugely popular media-darling of the last few years.
Shadowdark
I won’t go into too many details, but Shadowdark hearkens back to the Old School Renaissance (OSR) style of play. Death is easy. Rules are light. Randomness is added by dice. The GM makes rulings and changes as needed. It took the gaming world by storm with a huge Kickstarter. Thanks to its many fans, the Foundry module for it has a lot of community support.
The first change I made was we decided not to use Luck. Luck, by whatever name, is a modern addition that lets players change what happens in a game, beyond the agency of their character. Shadowdark Luck lets a player re-roll a die if they don’t like the results. For us, this breaks character immersion. And my wife and I often forget it even exists. (We play-tested DwD Studios’ FrontierSpace and were completely oblivious to its existence.)
The fun thing about being a GM is Players.
The frustrating thing about being a GM is Players.
Players never do what you expect. In this adventure, in a lost citadel, there were a couple of chest-high bowls. In the write-up, playing food or gold inside gives the character a Luck point. Hints of this were in the murals of the room, showing peasants pouring grain and gold into the bowls.
My wife’s character climbed into the bowl. (I thought if there was a trap it would be an interesting way for the character to die. I had been checking EVERYTHING for traps. ~Anna) [She was checking everything for traps. At least once, she found treasure instead. LOL -Tod]
On one level, it wasn’t a big deal.
Because I’d never considered or thought of that, her actions brought all the best things about being a GM into my mind. It wasn’t a game-shattering change like calling out the bad-guy - successfully - a quarter into an adventure. Or bypassing potential combat by acting as go-between for two star-crossed love-struck teens.
But the totally unforeseen (I won’t use the word “unprecedented”) actions were a joyful additional to the night.
50 Word Throwback
One of the best series Raconteur Press via The Three Mom’s of the Apocalypse did was their “Postcard” series. We each got a different, random picture for which we then wrote a fifty word story (no more, no less). Here, we’ve redone pictures similar to what The Three Mom’s used. To see the originals, buy the hardback books here https://amazon.com/author/casasent.
This story was submitted, but not accepted, to Postcards from Liberty.
But getting the unexpected prompt and the joy from the surprising story, makes this my favorite of our fifty word stories.
Our First Date
"Jolene, our date was going well." His ears drooped as his sword decapitated the last opponent.
Her nose twitched as she retrieved her spear with a splat. "Rupert, the date was wonderful."
Rupert's ears rose as she took his paw.
"Dear, nobody expects the Zombie Apocalypse at the Renaissance Festival."
Chaos Tip of the Week
Remember, you don’t have to be a cat to climb into a bowl. Look for joy in your own life too!
Chaos Question of the Week
Which is harder: convincing a cat to join your adventuring party, or successfully balancing on the rim of a soup bowl during combat?
-Tod and Anna