Do I still use this blog?

Yes, yes I do. Just very occasionally.

So, just to keep everyone up to speed on what's going on: I still blog over at my Livejournal (which is here). That's the spot for most of my online blather, but that may change. There's just not much going on in LJ-land anymore, and honestly this site is easier for me to access. So I may move my four main blog projects (cooking, actual play reports, movie reviews and character creation) over here soon.

I'm currently in the process of putting curse the darkness together, with the help of Michelle, Sarah and lots of other awesome people. There's a Facebook page for the game (here, so go Like us) and a Twitter that I'm using to update about the game and to post funny things my gamers say (here, go follow us). And, of course, the main development of the game is ongoing over at cursethedarkness.net.

So that's where we are. You might be seeing more activity here real soon-like.

Speakin' Out With My Geekin' Out - Part 2

Cooking!

I've always loved food. I understand that there are people who'll pretty much eat whatever - they have the attitude of the daddy rat from Ratatouille (whose named is Django, by the way). Food is fuel, and as long as what you're eating keeps you going, it doesn't matter what you eat.

I, however, am not a rat, nor am I unfortunate enough to be in a position where any nourishing food is acceptable. I do recognize that millions of people live in conditions like that, however, and that's maybe a good thing for a foodie to reflect on occasionally. My favorite cooking show, Chopped, is promoting No Kid Hungry at present, so maybe slide over there and have a look?

Anyway: Cooking. I never really paid attention when my mother was cooking, I just sort of marveled at the result. In fairness, she didn't really ask for my help or offer to teach me, either, and mom can be a little...off-putting in the kitchen. That's her space, and she flies around, busy, a whirling dervish of culinary activity (she's slowed somewhat in her later years, but only the pace, not the level of intensity - seriously, you should see the stuff she makes for our parties), but it's a hard environment to learn in. Some of that is because she has trouble talking about what she's doing while she's doing it.

So I learned to cook gradually. I lived on my own and would occasionally throw stuff together rather than make Hamburger Helper, but I was largely winging it and I didn't know any technique. Even for the first several years of my marriage, I would cook dinner, but it would safe stuff, stuff I knew how to make. And I'd call mom for help, and I made a lot of easy stuff like casseroles.

And then Chopped came on. If you don't know, Chopped is a show on Food Network wherein four chefs compete for $10,000. They each get a basket of three or four ingredients, then they have to make an appetizer for three judges in 20 minutes. After that, one of the chefs leaves the show (is "chopped"). Repeat for dinner, and then dessert, last chef standing gets the prize.

I don't know how I got into the show. I think that it probably came on before or after some cupcake show that Heather was watching and I got sucked in. I used to love watching Iron Chef, and this hit some of the same buttons - improvisation and working under pressure is sexy. But what I discovered as I watched was that the basics of cooking aren't that hard. You have to know some things about your ingredients and you have to know some basics (learning to make a good roux was one of the best things I ever did), but mostly, cooking successfully is about creativity, time management, and having a good palate. Which, apparently, I do.

So with that in mind, I had Heather and Teagan choose four ingredients and I made dinner (I did not, however, hew to a time limit). I don't remember offhand what that first dinner was, but I remember absolutely loving what I was doing. Solving a problem, being creative on a deadline (because although I don't restrict myself to 30 minutes for dinner, I gotta get it done in enough time to eat before bed!), and making sure that it tasted good - these were challenges that I wasn't used to.

A couple of years later, I'm still doing these "Chopped dinners" a couple of times a week (doing one tonight, in fact). Michelle chooses ingredients most often, though Sarah, Heather, Aaron and Teagan all contribute. My players in my ongoing Misspent Youth game consistently bring ingredients, as do players in my other games, occasionally.

I generally blog these dinners over at my LJ, but I'll do one here, just so you can see what I mean. Last weekend, I was to Lima (Ohio, not Peru) with Sarah to visit her mama. Her mama had come to visit and had dinner with us once before, and enjoyed my cooking, and so I wanted to cook for her again, with her choosing the ingredients. After her initial protests about making me work (c'mon, this ain't work), we got some ingredients picked.



My ingredients here were: trout, strawberries, moscado, cream crackers, and brussel sprouts.

Now, I've cooked with all of these things before, except the crackers (but I tried one, and it was just a cracker - like a thick saltine with no salt). I knew from experience that brussel sprouts play nice with bacon, so I got some bacon, fried it in a pan, and used the fat to sautee some onions and scallions. When those were getting soft, I threw in the brussel sprouts, cover the pan, and let them soak in the delicious bacon.

Strawberries are sweet and the moscado is a sweet-ish white wine. I knew they'd go well together, but I also didn't want to make a sauce, necessarily (I always seem to do that with fruit). Instead, since we needed a starch, I got some jasmine rice and made that, and then I boiled the strawberries in the wine until they got soft. I fished out the berries and mixed them into the rice, which was perfect - sweet enough to counter some of the bitter from the brussel sprouts, but not too sweet that it didn't go with dinner.

The fish, well. I love trout, and I like to keep fish simple. I brushed the non-skin side with egg white, mashed up the crackers to act as a kind of crust, salted the fish, and put it in the skillet in some hot olive oil. The trick with fish is letting the skin-side go until the skin gets crispy, which winds up cooking it most of the way anyway. Then I flipped it and let the crackers get cooked (fortunately, not burned).

Wound up being a good dinner, but the brussel sprouts came out really exceptional. Bacon makes everything better.

Anyway, bottom line, here is: Cooking is easy and fun. Try it. Stuff that you cook yourself just tastes better.

Speakin' Out With My Geekin' Out - Part 1

Oh, I know, I don't really update here anymore. But blackhatmatt.com is out there as "my website" in a lot of places on the web, and I'll post this to my LJ as well as to Facebook and everywhere except Twitter ('cause I don't, not yet). But anyway.

Monica Valentinelli came up with this idea following on the heels of some pretty egregious nerd-baiting. The idea is: This week, post about how you geek. And I can get behind that. So I'm-a gonna talk about three of the ways that I geek. Ready? Go.

#1 My Kids: Best for last? Eh. I'm putting 'em first because they are.



Teagan was born in October 2004, and she keeps getting more awesome every year. She's internalized what I've told her about paying attention, about being kind to people, and about being curious. She loves listening to stories, telling stories, and generally interacting with the world (though, of course, she's as susceptible to the glowing lure of the Idiot Box as anyone - don't blame your kids for this, folks).

Last week, Teagan was playing soccer on her munchkin team and a kid on the other team got knocked down. Teagan immediately stopped, asked if he was OK and moved to help him up. This behavior, this kindness, which took me years and deliberate cultivation to achieve, is instinctive for her. I'm often surrounded by people who claim they don't like people very much, and so it's balm for my soul to be around my daughter, who does.

And then there's this monster:



Cael (born June 2008) does not have his sister's intrinsic regard for life and kindness, it's true. He's not a mean kid, just...enthusiastic in some ways. But he is scary smart, articulate and he has this cherubic smile that I know is going to get him in trouble one day. My biggest hope for him is that his resemblance to my father bleeds over into his temperament, because Dad was seriously one of the most respectful and well put-together men I've known. And Cael's a dead ringer for him.

At the same soccer game, Cael was hanging out with me while I watched Teagan play (Cael's munchkin team played before hers). He started head-butting my chest and I said, "What are you, a billy goat?"

Without missing a beat: "No! I'm a silly goat!"

Cael wins.

I geek out about my kids because I'm a parent. Most parents will geek about their kids given half a chance, and folks without kids will sometimes bag on us for that. That's fine. You don't have to get it. You don't even have to listen. Just understand: Literally everything in my life is less important to me than my kids, and that's not to say that other things are unimportant. It's just to say that when my daughter was born after that long night in 2004, I fell in love, and then it happened again three-and-a-half years later.

Part 2: Cooking coming later!

[ctd] New Systems

Well, I haven't posted about curse the darkness in a while, but I've been working on it. Some changes I'm making, with input from Sarah, Matt and Michelle:

• Streamline the Removal Challenge system. This is something that the playtesters have consistently not been real thrilled about (one of the playtesters mentioned it was like playing an RPG and then a bridge game breaks out).
  
• Add a story creation element. I admit to being influenced by Ganakagok here, but also games like Don't Rest Your Head, Misspent Youth, My Life With Master and many other indie games that eschew "GM does lots of prep" for "quick improvisation by entire group."
  
• A way to make the whole group invested in the immediacy of the scenario. curse the darkness was never supposed to be about saving the world. It's about what's happening right now. That's why mortality needs to be high, and that's why I focus so much on Memory and not as much on, say, long character arc.
  

So, with all that mind, here are the changes I'm making (some have been playtested, some haven't):

Character Challenges: Instead of discarding a card when you go through a Character Challenge, you put it into the bank. Your "bank" holds three cards, and you cannot be involved in a Removal Challenge until it's full. Your bank cannot hold more than three cards, but you pick which ones. Example: I have 3H, 2S and 8S in my bank. Multiple suits are nice, because they help in Removal Challenges (see below), so when I play my next card (7S), I can choose to replace the 3H, or keep that, for whatever reason, and replace either of the other spaces.

Removal Challenges: So, instead of gathering up all your cards, you just use your bank and your Active cards. You don't pick anything up. The system otherwise works much the same, and so the "bridge" problem might remain, but in playtest we found that if you're playing cards that you have face-up as the Removal Challenge begins it doesn't disrupt things nearly as much.

So let's say I've got the bank above (3H, 2S, 8S) and my Active Cards are 7S, 9H, KC, and 10D. We start a Removal Challenge. I have those seven cards to play to Suit Assignment. I play my KC, 8S, 10D and 9H, since I don't have much in the way of high cards and I'm hoping the GM gets shafted on his draws.

The GM plays 10S, 2H, JC and 10D. We tie on diamonds, GM wins on spades and I win on hearts and clubs. I used three of my Active Cards, so I turn over new ones: 4C, JD and 7H. I now have those three, 7S, 3H and 2S to use in Condition Assignment.

I go first because my king of clubs is high. I only have one club left in my Active Cards and none left in my bank, so I assign clubs as Succeed/Leave. The next high card is the GM's 10 of spades. I have a bunch of spades, so naturally the GM calls spades as Fail/Leave. My nine of hearts is next, and I call it Succeed/Remain. That leaves diamonds (left till last because we tied) for Fail/Remain.

The GM grabs the aces from the Players' Decks (just four, though I've found that eight works better for Removal Challenges with more than three people). I contribute two cards from any cards I control - bank or Active. Duh. I put in the 2H from my bank and the 7H from my Active Cards. The GM can spend Between points to add more cards (from my bank, discard piles, but not my Active Cards) and I can spend Memory to remove them. And then I draw and see what happens.

Passing the GM's Hat: And here was the other idea we had and liked, though we haven't playtested it: If you leave play during a Removal Challenge, you become the GM. The former GM takes a character card (and should make a character, at least the numbers, at the beginning of play), writes the character into Memory, and joins at the next opportunity.

Yes, that might seem like a big jump, but here's the thing: GMing curse the darkness is mostly about narration and difficulty adjudication, and I'm going to include charts for the latter. The former, well, everyone, including all the players, will know at the outset what the stakes and goals are for that session (or story). How? Read on.

Story Creation: At the beginning of play, you draw four cards. The first one indicates what He wants and on what scale. So the suit indicates what the target is (same ideas as the attributes; Focus, Humanity, Stamina, Stability) and the number indicates the scale: Ace is one person, all the way up to a whole city. (I have charts for all of this, which I'm not going to reproduce here, though I'll be happy to post an example.)

Next card is the Between Card, and that indicates how many Between Points the GM starts with and how many are necessary to get His attention. What this means, basically, is how important this mission is to Him - the higher the number, the more points are necessary (and thus the less important this is to Him - or maybe it means that characters are better hidden? That's for the group to interpret).

Third card is the Situation Card, which is basically "where are we when this all starts?" Suit breaks down like it does for Scenario, the number raises the tension of the situation. So the ace of spades is the end of a sprint to catch a target (physical in nature, but not a lot of Between-related danger) while the king of spades is an armed firefight between two factions (which adds a Between Point right off the bat, it's so risky).

Finally, the Complication card adds a wrinkle into things. Might be a natural disaster, a sugar crash, the sudden arrival of another group of rebels from the Between. The GM keeps it secret and the players can ask the GM to play it any time to reduce the number of Between Points in front of the GM. Or, the GM can cash in a black joker, if he has one, to introduce it (but more importantly, screw the players out of the chance to do so).

So! That's where we're at. Been trying to playtest this, but life, weather and illness haven't been cooperative. Next Monday, I hope. :)

[ctd] Playtest B

Maybe I should summarize the changes we made last week?

Death and Memory: We had some deaths, though we haven't been able to test the Memory system yet because the deaths occurred at the end of the session. We did, however, decide that players should get a play mat, rather than a character sheet, and then use an index card (or I'll probably make a character pad and sell it cheap-like with the book) to make the character. Once I make a mock-up, this will make more sense, but the idea is that the players can make one character at the start of a session, and then make another (just distribute the numbers and define one Scope, but nothing else) that they can pick up in the midst of the session if their first character dies. We also talked about taking over NPCs, and decided that players should absolutely have the option of taking on an NPC (and thus statting him up real quick, with the GM giving some input for Scopes and the like).

We also talked about letting players play a red joker to switch characters without having their existing one die.

Between Points: On that subject, NPCs opening gates does add to the Between point total.

Removal Challenges: Some good changes here.

• If you've got a relevant Scope during a Removal Challenge, you can draw an extra card during Resolution (this rule worked out nicely, because it gives you a fighting chance and makes burning Memory to remove cards from the deck more useful).
  
• We need to nail down the order of players who draw during the Resolution of a Removal Challenge. I'm planning to say "common sense," but it just needs to be addressed in the book.
  
• I'm thinking that 8 aces is too much to form the basis of the Resolution deck; gonna try it with 4 next time.
  
• A Removal Challenge refreshes all decks for all survivors.
  
• We removed the Reserve deck entirely. We're just using two cards from any that the player has access to to form the Resolution, plus the aces.
  
• A suggested rule: The GM and the players each choose four cards, one from each suit (if they have 'em) and turn them over at the same time. No escalation unless the GM plays a black joker, or maybe just ditch that rule entirely.
  
• Another thing to try out: You can donate a result card if you're involved in a Removal challenge with another player (or request one). So if I draw a heart and that means I'm safe, but another player draws a spade and that means they're fucked and I'm OK with dying but they aren't, we can swap. We have to make that make sense in the context of the game, but that's not usually hard.
  

Character Challenges: If you go from a four to a king, there should be some roleplaying accompanying that. It can be as simple as "second wind," but players should use that progression to flesh out their characters more.

Card-Caps: Characters can accept a card-cap voluntarily (in our game, Matt's character was blind, and so he had a cap on actions requiring sight). We decided that when such a cap comes up and hinders a character, the GM loses a Between point.

OK, next step: I want to make up a playtest packet that I can send out to other folks.

The Breakdown of Society

He removed ethnicity, religion, politics, economics and all of the other artificial divisions we'd made for ourselves. He forced them out of us. He killed those that didn't comply, and that result in a dip in the world's population that's nothing short of surreal. He commanded us to use our skills, whatever they might be, for the good of all humanity. And then He disappeared, maybe into the Between, maybe on some now-depopulated estate somewhere.

It's easy to picture Him in a dark room somewhere, maybe one of the Hindu temples in India, nothing but rats and Them around, looking through a thousand shadows, searching for hints of dissent.

But as the world's gotten smaller, he has to look harder. The number of people has shrunk, but not the number of shadows. You just don't see Them as often anymore. You don't see shadows opening randomly.

It's not that He's gone. He makes his presence felt. The fact that the Symbol still works is evidence of that, because I firmly believe that They would kill anyone in the Between without His will to keep them back. That said, when I've been in the Between lately, I've felt something different. There's a hunger that wasn't there before, and I don't know if that means His grip is slipping or if He just doesn't care as much.

If He has any conscience at all, any concept of the billions of lives He ended and what that really means... I hate to say it, but I really hope He doesn't. I think we might need Him.

Remember?

curse the darkness

[ctd] Setting - What do characters do?

OK, the long-awaited post on what characters do.

Lemme tell you, I've been dreading this post. Not because I don't have any ideas, because I do. But because...hell, I don't know. Because I hate explaining things like this. I hate telling people what my stories are about; I'd rather you read the story. "Mistress" isn't really about dogs, it's about loyalty and submission, but when I tell people about it, I usually say it's about dogs. Argh.

Anyway, curse the darkness is a game about what's important. It's about survival and about freedom, and which you choose when you're really up against the wall. It's about a world where stupidity really does get punished...but how that reveals that all of us have our blind spots. It's about memory and which details of people stick with us.

So how does that translate into the game itself? Well, let's consider the setting. The world is largely fucked. Some years ago, He showed up and killed off many of the most powerful people in the world. World leaders, military leaders (both of official and unofficial armies), CEOs, religious leaders, drug kingpins and anyone else who had built a cult of personality and was using it to exploit, all vanished or died openly. Monuments to ideology were destroyed, starting with obvious stuff like the Dome of the Rock and St. Peter's because it's obvious. He completely annihilated Jerusalem, and used that as the staging ground to reveal Himself.

Then He made the Riyadh Address, in which He outlined the rules for the world. No more religion, no more ideology. The whole of the law, basically, was that you did what you could and you took care of the rest of the world - one race, one planet, one nation. Except that He backed that up with "or else you're dead," and He only ever delivered the Address in English. It was translated and retranslated, and yes, it spread across the world, but it wasn't always delivered in pure form. It hasn't reached everywhere, and it's not enforced evenly everywhere.

Overt displays of religiosity or fervent belief in a...well, belief system, spiritual, economical or otherwise are a good way to get killed. Covert displays aren't safe, either, but they're safer for longer. Entrenched belief dies hard...but it's dying, because He's been killing off the people who are willing to fight for it. Parents take a big risk by teaching their kids to pray, because as any parent knows, kids don't know when to keep their mouths shut. You instruct your kids to believe in God and they say something at the wrong time, He might hear, and if He hears, They aren't far behind.

But quite beyond that, the world is in shambles. In some places, basic amenities like water and power still happen, because people are willing to go to work and produce them. But officially, money is verboten, and that means you don't get paid for your work. You're supposed to have everything provided for you by providing for everyone - if people were involved in production before, they still should be, only now they're doing it because that's how they keep their part of the world running. And in some places, that might happen, at least for a while.

But remember Office Space, and the discussion about the hypothetical "what would you do with a million dollars" question? Michael's response is that it's a bullshit question, because if everyone went by that there'd be no janitors, because no one would clean up shit if they had a million dollars. And something similar happened here - the people on the other side of the world are out of sight, out of mind. There's some import/export because you can Open a gateway (Openers aren't uncommon, but no one knows how common they really are) and go anywhere, but people are afraid to cross the Between. Communities grow insular because it's hard to sustain a larger community (every person not working is a burden on those who do), but people are afraid to set up any kind of working system for fear He'll take issue with it. As a result, people live hand to mouth, people steal, people kill and prey on each other.

Now, why doesn't He prevent it? He does...if He knows about it. But despite what people believe, He can't see everything at once. Life in this world is a constant fear that He's going to open a shadow at exactly the wrong moment, peak in and hear you say "thank God" or something out of reflex and send Them to kill you. Life in this world is fighting for food, shelter and other basic necessities, and then worrying once you get them that He'll see and figure you're hoarding. Mortality rate is high, and it's small victories that matter.

But I want PCs to be outside that, in some ways. There's got to be some resistance, people that figure that if they can learn enough about the Between, about Them, Him and what's happened to the world, maybe they can change it. I want the PCs to have some hope, and to have some reason to be brave. So a game of cure the darkness might involve hooking up with other resistors, transporting data, trying to get people established and communities running smoothly (so there's a base of operations), figuring out how the Between works and under what circumstances the Symbol works and doesn't, and other such dangerous work.

Need some suggestions, here. Brainstorm with me, folks. Oh, and you can read the existing curse the darkness posts by clicking here and working backwards.