I was at a small roleplaying convention last week. It was great to meet the others again after about a year and game with them. Unfortunately someone was rather generous with their flu viruses and I got my personal helping. So I’m on sick leave for the second say but luckily, according to the test it’s just a flu and not the big bad C. On Monday I clobbered together a small template for my sister to build fake computer screens as props for TV shows… All in all a mixed bag of some good stuff and some annoying things…

Elon Musk supports eliminating rights for people who aren’t Elon Musk… That’s about it, I think…

I’ve seen the fun of “prints everywhere” in production when a colleague forgot to remove a “Why the fuck do you end up here?” followed by a bunch of variables before committing a hot-fix… Customers weren’t to amused…

Edit: That was a PHP driven web shop and the message ended up on to of the checkout page

Let’s pick 2 of my current characters…

First there is Winter, a Tabaxi Warlock in a Strixhaven campaign, who’s full name roughly translates to ‘Starry Ice Night’ (‘Sternenklare Eisnacht’ in German). It’s the only character in the party that doesn’t have a Strixhaven background and originally from a small mountain village on his home plane. Since it’s still first year, he’s still processing the whole school stuff, all these people and that strange idea of learning from books. Even back on his home plane he preferred solitude over the ‘crowded’ village and spent his time hunting and forraging through the mountain forrest. One day he noticed a man fighting a unicorn. Since you just don’t fight unicorns he shot the man in the back without much hesitation, landing a brilliant shot, triggering a magic surge that knocked Winter unconcious. When he recovered he found himself eye to eye with a very angry unicorn who explained that they hadn’t been fighting but were in the process of binding the man to unicorn as its champion and that right now, unicorn was one desperately needed champion short. Seeing that Winter could potentially grow into that role, unicorn persuaded winter to step in, made him a warlock (aka champion) and sent him of to a school he never heared of on a plane he didn’t knew it even existed. So right now Winter is a little homesick, very lost and with way to much to process in a group of people who worked and planned all their life on getting into that very school. He’s trying very hard to do the right thing and safe everyone from everything. Besides him beeing in way over his head one of the most fun things is flavoring all his magic with gold, rainbows and sparkles.

Then there’s Ethan Hayle who’s a young Ventrue in a Vampire V5 campaign. When he was still human, he worked as a crime scene cleaner, making crime scenes habitable again after the police was through with them. He was aporached by someone offering him a very well paid gig cleaning a crime scene before the police arrived. Ethan couldn’t resist the temptation and took that job. This led him to be a crime scene cleaner by day job and by night job as well. His new employer turned out to be the mafia who had to replace their former clean up guy after an accident. While the pay was very good this job didn’t sit too well with Ethan’s conciousness and after he found out that he knew one of the victims, he decided to collect as much evidence and turn that in to the police. As drama needs it, he handed the copy to a crooked cop who informed the mafia, iniciating a manhunt that Ethan only survived because of his inside knowledge and because he had help from a stranger. A few months after they went dark and decided to continue to try to expose the bad guys, Ethan learned that the stranger was a vampire and his sire wanted to turn Ethan into a vampire too. Seeing the possibility to kind of survive that way, he agreed. While Ethan doesn’t really have a Ventrue mindset, his sire decided to turn him into one anyway because he could use the skillset of a crime scene cleaner and all the inside knowledge about the mafia, which is controlled by a Brujah who he has a very long standing feud with.

Additional fun twist in this campaign, my SO has a character in the capaign as well, while being DM for Strixhaven and without us talking about this made a character who’s the white sheep runaway kid from a mafia family (guess which) and we both have this enemy as a flaw. We just had a run in with two ghouls who were sent by that family or rather the controlling vampire and since both characters aren’t very trusting and don’t know each others past, they both think, it’s about them. While they both might be right, roleplaying this has been a lot of fun in the last session.

German it magazine iX has an interview with the mods of r/de. I don’t know if this was mentioned here before…

Interview (German)

Short summary: the mods of the large German communities see a huge issue with reddit not recognizing content creators and mods work and there seems to be growing support for an ongoing blackout or so they say.