[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 9 points 1 year ago

Same IP; returning characters from the original series; revisiting important locations from the original series; uses a D&D ruleset for resolution; expands upon the story of the Bhaalspawn crisis over a century after the incident, especially via the

spoilerDark Urge storyline.

All of this is apparent through playing the game.

2

Welcome back, fellow Lovercaftian scholars. This is the third week of our book club exploring Lovecraft's Dream Cycle. This week's thread is open for discussion of last week's reading: The Doom that Came to Sarnath and The Cats of Ulthar.

For this week's assignment we have two more short stories: Celephaïs and Nyarlathotep.

Celephais and Nyarlathotep were both written in 1920, the same year as The Cats of Ulthar and one of our future reading assignments, Ex Oblivione; evidently this was a very productive year for the Dream Cycle. While 1920 is the year in which Lovecraft wrote the most Dream Cycle stories, in 1927 he wrote two novella-length stories in the cycle: The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and The Case of Charles Dexter Ward.

Reading for this week can be found in the trusty PDF here, and individual links for LibriVox recordings follow: Celephaïs and Nyarlathotep.

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

With larger groups I tend to stick to less mechanically complex games.

Most OSR games can be run on the fly with any number of players. I had a fixed group of 9 run through Keep on the Borderlands, with 1 or two extras jumping in for a session here or there.

My absolute favourite is Savage Worlds. It'ss great as the maths isn't tight and "balancing" an encounter is just a matter of throwing in more mooks, throw in a wild card per 2 or 3 players. It can fit to any setting, though I strongly recommend Deadlands.

My close second favourite is Call of Cthulhu, which I've run with 8 players. There's not a combat focus so sessions are unlikely to get bogged down, and even then, most combat actions are a simple contested roll. Investigations tend to resolve as people splitting into pairs and following different leads; two go archiving at the library, two visit a sanitarium patient, two head over to the local paper to see if any stories have been published or even blocked by an editor, two stake out points of interest.

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

The Crew - Mission Deep Sea - card game with a simple trick taking mechanic. Difficulty is very modular as you decide a difficulty level before each game. Difficulty is decided by the numbers of missions taken and the relative complexity of those missions (this is all explained on the mission cards). Missions are based on which tricks you win, with simple rules like "I win no 1's" or "I win at least 3 9's".

Hanabi - Card playing game where you don't know your own hand. You describe aspects of each others hands (colours of cards, numbers on cards). Your goal is to place a pile of the cards 1,2,3,4,5 in each of 5 colours. Don't play with mathematicians.

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

My entire argument on burggit...

Your argument was that an unsavoury instance was against hosting your personal flavour of unsavoury content; hence you felt the need to browbeat instead of simply finding a better instance.

This appears to be your main method of "engagement" in discussion: incessantly hammer on your point, making persistent bad-faith invitations to "debate," then when you rile up the user to the point of them flaming you, you claim that you're remaining civil. It's called sealioning, it's a common enough trolling phenomenon that there exists an often cited web-comic about it..

Co-existing in a space isn't an open invitation for you to repeatedly argue the same point past a persons point of comfort, for the sake of your personal definition of "debate". When it's clear the debate has run its course and the person is clearly being emotionally effected, if you persist then you're acting in bad faith.

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Here he is actively flaming/trolling in Main Community and Agora. He even states he's willingly losing sleep because he likes arguing so much. Just because the person you're disagreeing with is being salty doesn't mean you have a free ticket to stoop to that level. It's not moderator-worthy conduct.

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/282908

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/291136

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/291609

https://sh.itjust.works/comment/303830

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yea @imaqtpie, Yea @annegreen, Yea @Seraph089.

From account history they have good engagement.

Nay @Apytele, Nay @sweetholymosiah.

Limited engagement. Can't really comment on them yet.

Nay @goat, Nay @difficult_bit_1339.

Actively enshittening Agora and flame warring since its inception. @goat is evidently some manner of troll and "controversy" isn't a selling point for moderation. This is an alt for his burggit account; he's butted heads with admins over there because not allowing gore isn't "free".

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 5 points 1 year ago

Why would you vote for it to be unrestricted? They've only unprivated due to the threats. Stick to Lemmy.

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

I tend to focus on products which go against certain "maxims" of play; having alternatives to some of the more strict rules inherited from Gygax offers insight into the philosophy behind certain rules and whether such rules are actually fun at the table.

The Black Hack is my go-to book for this purpose: distances are relative, consumables are abstracted to the usage die, experience is based on stories told and not treasure dragged back to town, and all of the dice rolling can be made by players if the GM so chooses. Such a free system allows for easier hacking; You don't need to compare relative power of classes when determining how much XP your homebrew needs in order to level up.

For supplements and splatbooks, I particularly like Wonder & Wickedness and Marvels & Malisons as magic supplements. It's easy as hell to slap together a sorcerer class from these two books and staple it onto the Black Hack. My favourite setting books are Ultraviolet Grasslands and Hot Springs Island; both offer perfect sandbox adventures for the Black Hack. Both offer some manner of departure from the traditional tropes of TSR adventures. I have had to modify some aspects of the latter, such as the

spoilermiscarriage statuette, which I revised as a fertility amulet.; if worn one way up you're guaranteed fertility, the other way you're guaranteed not to fall pregnant.

There are a stupid number of blogs and zines that I could namedrop, but the one I find myself agreeing with the most is The Alexandrian.

2

Hello Everyone. This is the second week of our Dream Cycle book club. In this thread we will be discussing the stories read last week: Polaris and The White Ship.

Our reading assignment for this week are two more short stories: The Doom that Came to Sarnath and The Cats of Ulthar.

Our first story, The Doom that Came to Sarnath was written in 1919, the same year as The White Ship. It is available via the Internet Archive here and can be found in audio format via LibriVox here

Our second story, The Cats of Ulthar was written in 1920. It is available via the same link provided above, and in audio format it can be found via LibriVox here

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 4 points 1 year ago

The same for me. One of my favourite settings.

2

I'm registered on sh.itjust.works, which is a general purpose EN/FR language instance. I'm currently learning German as a second language and I would like to create a community for speakers of German as a second language. It seems to me that as a primarily DE language instance, feddit.de would be the most appropriate instance for such a community.

Is there a way of creating community on a different instance than the instance on which I'm registered, or would I need to, say, register to the other instance, create a community, then add moderator privileges to my main account?

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I'm looking for community engagement without the homogenised superculture. I'd like to be able to discuss books on a small book community without someone jumping in with "I also choose this guy's dead wife" or "not my proudest fap" because it's a low effort way of garnering meta-points. I also like the lack of an account-based point system.

So far Lemmy is delivering and so I'm engaging here a lot more actively than I ever did on Reddit.

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 13 points 1 year ago

The site defaults to sorting by active posts. There are options for hot, new, and top over the past day. I tend to sort by new.

[-] WillOfTheWest@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago

Managed to play Arkham Horror twice in one week, though missed playing War of the Ring with my partner.

Wednesday was an 11 hour Arkham Horror marathon due to 2 friends moving away. Four of us took the day off. We attempted the two-party Dream Eaters campaign with two groups of 3. The awake team blitzed through their scenarios while the dreamers struggled through theirs (having already played the other way, the dream scenarios are more complex). This resulted in the awake team waiting 30 mins - 1 hour per scenario for the dreamers to finish. We finished at the end of scenario 3 as we were so exhausted.

Saturday was my Path to Carcosa group, which proved to be a lot more fun, probably because we weren't trying to cram a whole campaign into one day. Completed scenario 3 before the final agenda came up. Our seeker is ridiculous at hoovering clues.

3

Greetings fellow seekers of the Unknown and Unnameable. To help kick off this community I propose the formation of a casual book club exploring the works of H.P. Lovecraft.

The Dream Cycle

I have chosen the Dream Cycle as the body of work which we will study. This collection consists of 22 short stories and novellas (discounting the posthumous "The Thing in the Moonlight" based on a letter of Lovecraft). In the Dream Cycle we are introduced to many notable characters in Lovecraft's mythos, Including Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Azathoth, and Randolph Carter.

Through the Dream Cycle we will explore the bizarre warped spacetime of the Dreamlands, and its intersections with our own waking world.

Goals of the Book Club

The main goal of the book club is to encourage Lovecraft fans, whether neophytes or seasoned veterans, to read and enjoy the work of H.P. Lovecraft. Our primary method of encouraging engagement with the literature will be by weekly assignment of modest reading goals, followed by a discussion of the material the following week.

While united in our love for Lovecraft, we as readers come from a diverse set of lifestyles and thus have differing amounts of time available for reading. I will begin with the provisional goal of no more than 50 pages per week or 2 short stories, whichever proves shorter. This should provide a manageable goal for someone with only a brief period to read before bed, and allow an avid reader to supplement their regular reading with a sojourn into the Dreamlands.

Reading will be done in writing order, rather than any chronological order devised by Lovecraft scholars.

Reading Lovecraft

The majority of Lovecraft's work is now in the public domain (with the exception of his collaborations with C.M. Eddy). Therefore, the majority of his work can be found via public archives. The Arkham Archivist has done a wonderful job of collating Lovecraft's works and providing them in a variety of formats. Notably, this collection excludes collaborative works and thus does not include the final story in the Cycle, Through the Gates of the Silver Key which can be found via the e-books directory.

For audiobook listeners a variety of options are available. Most works can be found in audio format via the lovely volunteers at LibriVox. Many horror fiction YouTubers provide high quality audio recordings, sometimes including foley, and are a simple search away.

Many iterations of Lovecraft's work have been published in physical and audiobook format under various companies and while I offer no endorsement of individual products, I advise buyers to look for products which contain the complete works of Lovecraft. This will usually be advertised in the title or description of the book.

Reading for this Week

This week we begin our adventure in to the world of dreams with two short stories.

Our first short story is Polaris, written in 1918. The full text is available on the Internet Archive here, and a LibriVox recording is available here.

Our second short story is The White Ship, written in 1919. The full text is available via the same link above, and a librivox recording is available here.

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WillOfTheWest

joined 1 year ago