September 2017 Newsletter

Hello! Here is this month’s newsletter.

Four NPCs for Any Inn

1. Pepper the Golden Elf

You see an elf of medium height who appears to be gilded in the shiniest gold. His name is Pepper, and he’s been living in this inn for the past two years. He makes a decent living allowing people to gawk at him or touch him, but there is a sadness in his golden eyes that is unmistakable. The inn’s bodyguards perk up when people get near pepper; more than one person has come to the inn with the hope of taking a finger or an ear from Pepper. 

It is unclear if Pepper has been magically enchanted, if he is a golem, or if there is some unthinkable explanation for his condition. He does have adventure in his heart, however.

2. Gestheb the Midwife

At the bar you see a plain, middle-aged woman with a wry smile run a finger down a pint of ale. Her clothes are worn, but obviously clean. She seems to be thinking of something amusing and something far away from here. 

She's called the midwife, although she hasn't worked in years. After one miscarriage a few years back she disappeared for a few days. Some said she had walked into the forest to meet her end at the hands of wolves. When she returned she was changed. She said she no longer felt the need to bring more life into the world. “It's full now” she would say with a smile. “It's overflowing.”

3. Gregory, Dwarf Lord

“An entire kingdom, felled by Myconid scum!” the dwarf shouted for all the inn to hear. You make eye contact with the barkeep and their look tells you this is not uncommon.

“They don't even know the value of the sacred halls they now occupy!” You feel very uncomfortable hearing this racist spiel, but the Myconid patrons of this establishment seem used to it. You even sense a little pity.

4. Jambo

There is a humanoid sitting at a table alone. Its skin is rough and ashen, with huge riven crags running up and down. It is only when you get close that you realize that this being is clearly covered in tree bark. It speaks with a mournful, cracked voice, and if you engage Jambo it will explain its curse: A hundred years ago, a wizard named Pallipo was lost in a dark wood. Frustrated and alone, he hurdled a curse into the trees. In an instant, the forest was gone, and Jambo woke into consciousness.

Notes From CMRN During The Month of August

This month has been very busy for me for a lot of reasons, but I consumed some Media. I watched the documentary Future Shock, which is about the magazine/comic book/whatever 2000 A.D. There’s nothing much to learn if you know anything about the magazine, and if you don’t, well, there’s a documentary with your name all over it. The British really seem to believe in satire. It must be those Swiftian roots. In the dead middle of the documentary they take a moment to try to figure out why there aren’t very many women in comics. You’re never seen more white dudes from the British Isles puzzle harder, let me tell you. 

I also watched The Girl With All The Gifts. It’s a middling film, but I have a lot of respect for what they were trying to do, and Mike Carey (the writer of the original novel and the writer of the screenplay adaptation) is a Prime Talent in the world of comics, novels, etc. It’s clearly doing some interesting things with race, what we take to be “natural,” who we consider to be “human,” and all sorts of other meaty philosophical issues, but the last few scenes really fumble it. I mean, it’s coffee slam bad.

I’ve also been listening to Bob Seger’s “Hollywood Nights” on repeat. Literally. I’m listening to it right now.

Danni’s Board Game Review: Concept

Concept is a 2014 board game developed by Alain Rivollet and Gaëtan Beaujannot and published by Repos.

Concept is basically the following - a big ole’ board with a bunch of symbols on it, a bowl filled with brightly colored cubes and weird plastic punctuation marks, and a stack of cards with stuff written on them.

The symbols on the board are arrayed in columns and express concepts - potential interpretations are listed on some player cheat-sheets. Ideas like “young” might be represented by a picture of a baby, whereas ideas like “under” would be represented by a picture with a box and an arrow pointing below the box. 

The cards have nine “concepts” written on them, grouped by threes into easy, medium and complex. These could be anything from The Empire State Building to idioms like “beat around the bush.”

It's basically charades or pictionary without the acting and drawing - instead the players must place tokens on the board to relate the chosen concept. For example - if you wanted to get tyre players to guess “blind as a bat” you might have a primary concept (denoted by a question mark) on the symbol for “saying” (a speech bubble) and a sub-concept (denoted by color-coded exclamation points and cubes) on symbols that represent animals, the color black, a plane, etc. to have the players guess “bat” and another set of tokens on the binary “0” and an eye to have players guess “blind.”

This sounds difficult and it is even harder than it sounds. My party group attempted to play this competitively - pitting two teams of 4 against one another. We quickly found that we needed the entire table thinking and guessing in order to get anywhere, so we transformed the game into a cooperative venture.

What's fun is that the instruction booklet actually encourages this - the developers basically admit that while there are points they generally disregard them while playing. The main engine of the game is driven by the satisfaction players get when they come up with a clever way to convey complicated ideas with such limited means (and, at times, awe, when a player guesses “Catwoman” and is correct when it seems like tokens are randomly strewn across the board.

I like Concept, but you have to give yourself time to learn the game for it to be really fun. I would not recommend it as a one-shot game, but I would for a regular playgroup. 

What Did We Do This Month

There is a podcast you can check out if you’re a $5/month subscriber here on Patreon.

Episodes 31, 32, and 33 of Mages & Murderdads released!

Danni’s Dark Souls rating videos keep on trucking! We watched him do Part 2 and Part 3 of the Undead Burg.

We also released a video of us playing Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds.

Wowee! What a really exciting month. Tune in next month for more stuff.

CMRN + Danni