Eldritch Mlems

https://x.com/rikunow/status/1871569532973985800

https://www.instagram.com/riku_0710/p/C0Mc3qqvxhG/

Based in San Antonio, Holley serves as the executive director of Thrive Youth Center, a nonprofit organization working to provide homeless queer, trans and nonbinary youth with a safe and supportive environment. While being queer was never going to be an issue on surface level, Holley tells Reckon that this internal battle he dealt with regarding his sexuality led him to substance abuse—a point of connection he makes with the youth he sees at the center.

“My parents loved me, yet I didn’t feel loved enough. And although it’s not necessarily the reality of what was there, it was [still] my reality,” he said, explaining the profound significance of giving people a safe space. “If we can create that environment to individuals that have already gone through trauma, they can get back on track in their early teens and 20s instead of having to wait when they’re much older to deal with those issues.”

He recalls a particular story from last year, when a 19-year-old trans girl briefly stayed at Haven For Hope, another homeless shelter in San Antonio. Thrive Youth Center enrolled the teen—who had dropped out of school in seventh grade—into their own program. Within three months of staying with Thrive Youth Center, she earned her high school diploma. Today, she is in college.

I'm working on a Solo RPG supplement around modeling relationships with NPCs, it's meant to be genre/system-agnostic so that it's not tied to any specific setting or ruleset per se. It's just something that could be used alongside other games if a player wanted to include a companion NPC (romantic, platonic, business, whatever) in their game and work out how that NPC might behave in different scenarios, or provide different prompts for random events or different factors that might affect how two characters relate to each other. In a weird way, it's trying to gameify or abstract out 1-on-1 character relationships (PC to NPC).

I was kind of just throwing the idea out here for feedback and ideas on what other factors I might consider when trying something as ~~stupid~~ weird as trying to model human relationships? As this is mostly intended for solo RPGs (though it could be used in multiplayer RPGs), I'm not trying to overcomplicate things, alot of things in Solo RPGs are left open and to the discretion of the player, but it can be helpful to have an unbiased set of Oracles to help with generating ideas the player can react to.

The general idea is kind of weird to me, even attempting to model something as crazy and convoluted and messy as human relationships just seems like an exercise in futility, but I figured I'd try it anyways for the challenge. The closest thing I can think of that's similar to this is a "dating simulator", but in my mind that's not really the point of this, this is more a general storytelling tool that helps create potential plot points or drive character development. Most RPGs tend to focus more on action & adventure, while kind of ignoring social interactions.

Currently, the basic mechanic I'm going with is that the relationship status exists in two different ranges: Current Mood and Relationship Level. Current Mood is a short-term reading on the relationship (5 steps, from 'Very Negative' to 'Very Positive'), while Relationship Level is the overall state of the relationship between characters, (10-steps ranging from 'Hatred' to 'Love'). Individual actions/events push the Mood up or down, which if it reaches either end of the spectrum (1 or 5) and goes past either of those numbers, it pushes the Relationship Level up or down a level. So even if the Current Mood is 'Very negative', the overall Relationship level might still be high, it just indicates a rough patch, while conversely, just because you have a good day in a shitty relationship, doesn't mean everything is gravy.

After that, many of the other tables are a series of Oracles that help determine NPC character elements, like a supplemental character generator for determining personality, appearance, beliefs, quirks, sexuality, and other non-mechanical factors. There's also randomized Oracles similar to Ironsworn Action/Theme tables or even topics of conversation and the general disposition of the conversation.

C'mon, ESA Solar Orbiter team, just give the Parker probe a LITTLE nudge at aphelion. Crash it into the sun. Fulfill the dream of Icarus. It is your destiny.

https://explainxkcd.com/3029/

While running Phandelver and Below: The Shattered Obelisk I decided to forgo drawing the Wave Echo caves and put the map on the TV in my game room via iPad screen share to my Apple TV box.

I had the map up in Affinity Designer 2 so I could cover undiscovered parts of the map. But no matter what I did I could not get the screen to zoom in on any part of the map image, it only showed the full map on the screen.

I know I can purchase the module on roll20, or I can put the map in and draw on it to hide sections. But I am hoping for something more on the fly. I would prefer to use my iPad rather than my MacBook since it is more portable if possible.

This is the inlaws' rescue cat. She hasn't been with them 3 weeks yet and she's settling in well. It's a still from a video so a bit blurry.

video