for the Encounter Critical fans

Random Vanthian Adventurers Tattoos (d100)
1	A 5th dimensional leprechaun holding a tankard of ale in one hand and flipping the bird with the other.
2	A Beautiful Gjenie Emerging from a Bottle
3	A Broken Sword Captioned WE REMEMBER
4	A club-wielding cave primitive smashing a robodroid, captioned BRUTE FORCE
5	A Grey Alien Holding An Ice Cream Cone
6	A Grimacing Goblin Carrying an Anarchist Bomb
7	A Hand Where Each Fingertip Is A Creature Head: Cobra, Goat, Lion, Eagle, Dragon
8	A Mushroom Cloud with the Caption OVERKILL WORKS
9	Ace of Spiders
10	Amazon in Black Leather Armor Wielding Lizard-Hide Whip
11	An Astronaut Among the Phoenix Asteroids
12	Anarchy Symbol
13	Ankh
14	Bat with a Goblin Head
15	Battlestar Pegasus
16	Bee Girl Stinging an Orc
17	BEEBLEBROX FOR GOD-EMPEROR
18	BLOOD & GLORY in classic Klengon, slightly misspelled
19	Bottle of Saurian Brandy
20	Bozo the Clown as a balrog
21	Butterfly with Dracula Head
22	Centaur that is Part-Fembot, Part-Motorcycle
23	Chainsaw Sword with ABSLOM DAAK FAN CLUB on blade.
24	Chess Knight
25	Clock Face Showing that it is 13 O’Clock
26	Cobra
27	Colonial Warrior Insignia
28	Cosmic Starchild
29	Crossed Swords
30	Cyclops/Satyr with a Unicorn Horn
31	Denebian Slime Devil
32	Devil Girl in a Skimpy Maid Uniform
33	Devil in a Three Piece Suit Carrying a Briefcase
34	Earth Directorate Flag
35	Eightball
36	Eightfold Arrow of Chaos
37	Eye of Horus
38	Eyeball with a Fiery Comet Tail
39	Eyeball with Batwings
40	Flying Saucer
41	Frothy Mug of Ale
42	Godzilla Arising From the Sea
43	Gremlin Smoking a Cigar and Holding a Sawed-Off Shotgun
44	Griffon
45	Grim Reaper on a Surfboard
46	Hammerhead Shark
47	Hooded Executioner with Bloody Axe
48	Hourglass Gripped by Skeletal Hand
49	Hula Girl with Medusa Hair
50	Infinity Symbol
51	KEEP ON TRUCKIN’ with the Usual Art
52	Kraken Attacking a Castle
53	Martini with Tiny Skull Instead of Olive Captioned IT’S ALWAYS 1700 SOMEWHERE
54	Mermaid with Skull Face
55	Mime Impaled on Stake
56	Mirror Ball Captioned DISCO LIVES
57	Mushrooms Growing from a Skull with the Cryptic Caption LIFE OMEN
58	Open Treasure Chest Full of Jewels Captioned LOOT FIRST, ASK QUESTIONS LATER
59	Orc Jester
60	Pair of Numbered Dodecahedrons
61	Peace Symbol
62	Pennyfarthing Bicycle with the Number 666 Imposed over the Larger Wheel
63	Pentagram
64	Pyramid on the Back of a MegaTurtle
65	Radiation Symbol
66	Rebel Alliance Starbird
67	Remember Alderaan on a Banner
68	Ringed Planet
69	Sabretooth Tiger with Caption I HATE MONDAYS
70	Scorpion
71	Scuttling Crab Captioned with Short Word in an Unknown Alien Script
72	Serpent Entwining a Black-Bladed Dagger
73	Sigil of the Galactic Psi Knights
74	Skeleton Playing Pinball
75	Skull & Crossbones
76	Skull with Batwings
77	Smiling, gap-toothed lad captioned WHAT, ME WORRY?
78	Snail But Its Shell is a Spiral Galaxy
79	Space Amoeba Engulfing a Planet
80	Spiral Galaxy
81	Stylized Atom
82	Teddy Bear Holding a .38 Special
83	The First Hundred Thousand Digits of Pi in Nearly Microscopic Numbers
84	The Formula e^iπ+1=0
85	The God Huron Smiting a Smog Monster
86	The Hook and Cross, enigmatic sigil of the Cult of the Azure Clam
87	The Letter Omega
88	The Magic Word MWOWM in Gothic Letters
89	Three Crucified Robodroids
90	Two Planets Colliding
91	Tyrannosaurus
92	Unicorn
93	Unicursal Hexagram
94	Vorpal Bunny with Blood Dripping From Fangs
95	Vulkin Centaur Armed with a Phasic Rifle
96	Vulkinian IDIC Symbol
97	Winged Dragon
98	Wizard Giving Two Thumbs Up
99	Wooky Bodhisattva in Lotus Position with Third Eye Open
100	Yin Yang

just wanted to save this old twitter thread

Spent the today & yesterday learning the Reacting To The Past curriculum, basically What If College Was Roleplaying Games. Good stuff. But at the final Q&A I saw a lot of the newbies asking the same sort of misguided questions that people ask before they DM the first time.

A ton of questions came from a place of fear--fear of failure. They wanted to be in total control of the game and everything to go perfectly the first time they tried it. This is exactly the route to psyching yourself out of running a game.

You've got to leave some loosey-gooseyness in your game and you've got to risk something. It's okay if the first try flops. It's okay if the players run roughshod for part of the game. We learn by doing, not by planning for all contingencies before we act.

I'll admit that I'm lucky in that I started young and was too stupid to know how much I sucked at DMing at first. For adults, the second game is often a bigger challenge then the first, because session 1 inevitably falls short.

So you blame yourself and feel embarrassed and drop the whole project. It's okay to feel those feelings, but you've got to push through and try again. You can do it. It just feels weird because of weird social pressures that have nothing to do with you.

Phantastic!

 

So I was poking around Moby Games, looking at old Commodore 64 games, as I am wont to do from time to time. Today I was checking out Phantasie II. I never played this one back in the day. The only SSI titles I was into were Wizard's Crown and Curse of the Azure Bonds. But Phantasie II is part of the ecosystem of importable character games, so I have some curiosity about it. Overall, I mostly played Ultima III & IV, the first couple of Bard's Tales and the first Might & Magic. I just plain missed Phantasie series.

But I wanted to show you a screenshot I stumbled across. I think it nicely illustrates a couple of small but important points about play.

I wonder how many people named their CRPG wizards Fizzban back in the day. 

This is a top down dungeon exploration view, which I am not normally a fan of in CRPGs. I generally prefer 3D first-person view when computer dungeoneering. 

But what I want to talk about here is the text. "Fizzban hears monsters. Go back?"

What's happening here is important. The party is given an opportunity to engage the monsters or not. Player agency is a critical component of play. But equally important in this moment is the principle of information control. The DM needs to give enough information to the players to make a choice. However, that doesn't mean the DM is under any obligation to give the players all the information. "Fizzban hears monsters" may be a little sparse for tabletop play, but the principle behind it is sound. 

After all, what do monsters in general sound like?  (For a cool example of the different sounds monsters can make, go to youtube and watch some clips of the old Atari 2600 game Crypts of Chaos. I quite like the sound effect used by the one-eyed slimes.) But the point remains that the DM doesn't say "You hear 14 orcs with glaives and one orc sergeant in platemail with a broadsword and mace in the next room." Players get to make a choice based upon best available information, not a complete snapshot of the situation. Sometimes that info is inadequate or just plain wrong. But you have to make a choice anyway. Nobody said adventuring was easy.