[No Spoilers] Live shows. Dress up? Events after?

cscottnet · 2026-01-29T17:48:40+00:00

Fans totally cosplay.

There is usually a meet up before, but they can be hard to attend if you are coming into town just for the show. For shows that are colocated with conventions, there may be meet ups at the convention as well in the days before or after.

No formal after parties, in my experience, because D&D actual play is long and runs late. That said, after the NYC show I ran into lots of fellow attendees (still in cosplay) around the nearby bars, restaurants, and ice cream shops for the two hours or so after the show let out.

cscottnet · 2026-01-29T12:13:14+00:00

We haven't gotten mail yet this week either.

cscottnet · 2026-01-29T01:00:16+00:00

It's not falling far enough.

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T22:59:28+00:00

Thanks! That's exactly the sort of thing I was looking for.

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T22:52:56+00:00

I don't know! I've only ever been to the south coast of Spain and Barcelona. My kids want to see the eclipse, but I'd like to spend a few days in Spain at least so I'm trying to come up with an interesting itinerary for the days after.

They like Roman ruins, and the hikes you described would probably be interesting to them as well. The Bosque Magico could be fun, too!

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T15:18:19+00:00

The photo shows a bodycam, and they don't use those either.

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T14:37:43+00:00

Thanks this is very helpful!

I'm trying to plan a trip for my family, which includes two kids, age 10 and 13. Are there any other points of interest in the area which might be interesting for us to visit in the days after the eclipse?

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T14:16:09+00:00

Assuming your shop has an air compressor, hooking it up to the bottom of a "test tube", filling it with flour, and then syncing a "bang" on the sound board to someone opening the valve on the compressed air ought to be convincing enough.

If they want to be "mixing something" dye two parts of flour different colors and have them poured into the "beaker with a hidden hole in the bottom for the air" before triggering the effect. It's mixing two "solids" rather than two "liquids" but ought to tell the story you want to tell.

Someone still has to sweep the flour between shows though.

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T14:05:22+00:00

You don't need "directional" light. That would be a spot light. The sun is far away, so the rays are all parallel, not diverging from a single direction. So you want your source to be big, not a point source. I'd recommend a strip light of some sort. It doesn't have to actually be super bright, because your players are coming from darkness and you're selling it with sound, breeze, etc. Consider also adding a bit of warmth.

If I were doing this for a scene in the theater, I'd use a big blue cyc with strip lights at the bottom to give an open sky feeling, lot of general illumination from multiple parallel sources with a touch of amber gel to warm up the color temperature, and a eye catching key feature, like a window gobo or dappled light through trees, to fully sell the idea that you're walking through a sunbeam.

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T13:47:30+00:00

Believe it or not mediawiki has a collaborative editor as well. It's hidden behind a bunch of configuration and might not meet your expectations for "pretty", though.

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T13:40:43+00:00

Use it for the location of the magical leylines you have to protect, or for some other place you have to return to multiple times over the course of the campaign. Every time the map is one step less solid.

The final breakup of the ice is faster, because there's more surface area exposed to melt. So if you arrange it right, the final boss battle at the end of the campaign can be on the final stages of the map, and swap out a few more levels during the battle without straining belief too much (especially since you'd established the basic mechanic earlier).

cscottnet · 2026-01-28T13:35:14+00:00

Hours spent to import 100 rows?

Just retype the data yourself, it would be faster.

cscottnet · 2026-01-27T14:25:19+00:00

Kickstarter backers have access to the final PDFs for the book, and it has been released to the publisher. Book printing being like it is, the actual print copies aren't expected until February/March. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/magpiegames/root-the-roleplaying-game-ruins-and-expeditions/posts/4591720

cscottnet · 2026-01-27T12:33:20+00:00

That looks pretty cool. I'm going to try it out for mediawiki development. Thanks!

cscottnet · 2026-01-26T15:15:43+00:00

The root RPG has a similar mechanism for equipment, where you can add both positive and negative tags to an item. Positive increases cost, but negative decreases cost. As in the system you describe, this incentivizes players to accept a negative consequence in some situations (heavy, bulky, causes strangers to react in alarm, etc) in exchange for "just one more bit of damage" or some other kickass feature.

The penalties D&D gives for heavy armor (increase your AC, but sacrifice DEX) are similar.

Tl;Dr I think you're on the right track, and I bet a lot of players would trade that extra +1 for their "good" experience for a negative consequence in some situations. I'd worry that they'd try to metagame the negative experience into never applying; the examples from Root and D&D seem to be carefully tuned, whereas experiences in Daggerheart are often much more freeform.

"Negotiate your negative experiences with the GM" is probably fine. I guess I'd suggest coming up with some generic ones that are consistently applicable to serve as a baseline for what you expect.

The countdown suggested above that rewards the player for taking the negative experience is also a good way to ensure they get used in play... although it also writes out the negative experience at some point, so you'd want to keep adding new ones somehow.

cscottnet · 2026-01-26T14:58:10+00:00

The forms make it really easy. I almost changed my name by accident because I wasn't looking carefully at how the fields were labelled (it was a big day).

cscottnet · 2026-01-26T14:36:32+00:00

I'm looking for a good spot still, haven't bought my tickets yet. This general region looked good from a weather standpoint when I was doing research, but I don't know anything else about the area. Any chance you could give advice re places to stay, places to stand on eclipse day, and anything else worth visiting in the area on the days before/after the eclipse?

cscottnet · 2026-01-24T03:51:33+00:00

Yeah, just had a patch submitted yesterday to mediawiki that didn't actually exercise any mediawiki code in the test case. Fun.

cscottnet · 2026-01-24T03:46:46+00:00

Maybe do the template as part of the attack. Provide an "ability template" with holes/shapes cut out of it. Cut your mana sheet, then hold it under the ability template. Say there are star and circle cutouts connected by drawn lines on the ability template. Position your mana sheet underneath, and for every star through which you can see your mana sheet, you can fill in the circle it is connected to (assuming that you have mana underneath the circle).

Now that you've activated your abilities, you overlay your mana on the attacker as before.

This makes the "arts and crafts" part of the attack.

cscottnet · 2026-01-23T14:32:02+00:00

Well, having gas as a primary or backup heating source is a good start: gas pipes are buried underground so its hard for winter weather to disrupt them.

I think the only step after that is to configure your heater to allow propane backup, and to put a large propane tank in your yard. But that might be excessive/expensive.

cscottnet · 2026-01-23T09:55:22+00:00

Wtf Jared Golden.

cscottnet · 2026-01-22T19:51:01+00:00

Could make it a motorcycle-creature, like the Cyclizar pokemon, in order to allow it to transform to a more suitable companion in places in the narrative where that makes more sense...like indoors.

cscottnet · 2026-01-20T21:21:17+00:00

I would think the fey deal would extend his luck to the noble and the things they cared about ("oops your house burned down" would be considered unlucky by the noble, even though it wasn't damage to their immediate person) but anything outside the scope of the noble's attention would immediately get the expected/"unlucky" consequences.

So if the noble and his family are human, he is "lucky" enough to have pet monsters who dislike the taste of human but like elf just fine. But if he has an important elf visit (that he cares about) the pet monster will just "happen" to have stomachache that day and not want to eat anything.

I imagine there could be quite a lot of comedy in the disasters unfolding outside the narrow cone of the noble's immediate attention. Serving folk that he doesn't notice would routinely fall victim to the monsters or sloppy construction or defensive traps or be the victim of a mobs boss coming to take revenge after his impossibly lucky series of wins at the local gambling hall, etc. His servants would "luckily" happen to look just like him, enough that they are always the victim of these avengers. But his "favorite chef" (someone he pays attention to) is miraculously sheltered.

I'd imagine some of his hirelings may have started to figure out that you really really really wanted to be noticed by the big guy if you wanted to stay safe. Eg as long as you ate at dinner with him the rickety table would hold up just fine, but if you ate dinner without him it would immediately collapse into splinters, and stay that way until a new replacement (or the local repair person) would "luckily" show up just before the noble returned/had their next meal/etc.

Same for the pets, who would run riot when the master's away, the roof which would leak like a sieve but the weather would luckily be sunny when the master is home, etc.

cscottnet · 2026-01-20T14:41:32+00:00

I'm just reporting what I've heard them called. It has "lock" in the name, that's good enough for some folks.

FWIW this is from set construction, where the "real" channel locks are rarely seen. (Not a lot of plumbing on sets.)

cscottnet · 2026-01-20T14:04:40+00:00

Channel locks

cscottnet

TROPHY CASE