Monday Musings #46 š¹āļø
The Exorcist and the Three Musketeers.
I FINALLY got to see The Three Musketeers: DāArtagnan. I streamed it this week from Amazon. I saw it was out when Prime streamed ads for part II!! I wanted to see it in the theatre, but it seems like it didnāt make it to KC. I was never a fan; this is Disneyās fault. I thought the movies, shows, and media versions were what the books were about, and that was all too sappy for me. It was late in life when I discovered the original material was more grim. DāArtagnan gets thugged-up like opening scene! The rest of our Musketeers are harden, broken veterans! Now re-imagine the whole affair, but they also work with an exorcist!! Thatās what Iām doing with Miseries & Misfortunes! ya like that segue! Iāve been reading the Captain Altriste series, the two part Musketeers movie was also on my research list. Iāve started my āre-read for playā of Miseries & Misfortunes. There is a very nice mechanic in there for supernatural things and forbidden books-Iām leaning heavily on that! I hope to get a small game series going in June, likely online.
Weāve returned to The Outer Rim Blues, my Edge of the Empire RPG series. Weāve had a couple of weeks off for IRL interruptions. We ended things during a vehicle fight on a docking pad on Nar Shadda-right as the party split into two groups. Our smuggler/pilot left to remove the refugees from the battle scene; the others stayed to keep Kanjiklub engaged on the docking pad. I wasnāt feeling that fight X+ weeks later, and we were on a shorter time frame this session. Edge of the Empire has a One Roll Combat Check mechanic hidden away at the end of the book under optional. With a tiny bit of effort, this can be a One Roll Resolution mechanic. As it is written, it assumes the players will win the combat encounter and are just going through the motions š. The mechanic has players rolling for one last action, which determines the cost. Burning Wheel also has a one-roll mechanic but is more explicit. Say whatās at stake, build pools, and roll the dice. For our session, weāve got Drace, our smuggler pilot, flying a shot-up Uber hover bus of refugees, the Uber-droid, and a Gank from the Gozanti crew. Kanjiklub on speeder-bikess are in blaster range. At stake, can the player reach the destination before Kanjuklub shoots down the bus, leaving everyone stranded some ways from their destination? It helps that Edge of the Empire has those rich dice of success-failure, advantages-threat, and triumph-despair. These help color the results. Iād argue many games, especially trad ones can use their core mechanic to the same effect. Iād like to see more games add the idea of a one-roll resolution mechanic as another tool in the moderator kit.
š² Mars Express is an IRL movie, not a Netflix series. I guess Iām going to the theatre this week!
š² Prepping Mothership: The Kuiper Belt Anamoly for Sandbox Sundays IRL. Iām drafting up a point-depth crawl map of the alien construct abandoned in the cold, rocky void of the Kuiper Belt.
š² Code-slinging for Grimoires FKA Wizardtime, my Wizard survival-sandbox CRPG, coming to Steam -one day!š
Catch ya next week!
Originally published at https://playfearless.substack.com.
