Joshua Kronengold

If you've ever wanted a more relaxed, contemplative place to talk about TTRPGs, Alarums & Excursions' legacy continues with https://everanon.org/ _Ever and Anon_ -- a free collective/collated fanzine (also known as an APA), compiled once a month! We've been getting a lot of OSR new contributors over the last month, but APA hacking isn't really about nostalgia; it's a different flow and approach to conversation and creation, and I'd love to see more people trying it!

I started doing APAs at all back in the early 90s when I discovered fandom -- and very quickly after that, they lost massive ground even from their main sources of support (mostly fandoms and other small communities where having a written forum was a great way of community building where physical presence wasn't enough or for wider nets, even generally possible), as Usenet, BBS networks, and later, forums, mailing lists and eventually social media (like this one!) captured their best potential users.

After all, why participate in costly (APAs were originally, after all, printed on paper and even mailed out, and someone needed to cover the bills), slow (I'll get to this) exclusive way of reaching out -- when easier, faster, and cheaper or even free ways to build community were right there? Even in APAs with organization that made things easier (Alarums and Excursions was run in a semi-commercial, professional way, with accounts kept for readers to cover postage and subsidize contributor costs with per-issue costs, for contributors to cover per page printing and reproduction costs, and zines accepted in a variety of electronic forms [in the 90s, a modem to modem phone call followed by electronic transfer of a wordstar format file, although physical mailing of a stencil, a master copy, or even an appropriate number of copies of your entire zine was also acceptable; by the 2000s this had become submission by email and often in text or other MS Word compatible formats--or pre-formatted in PDF], while new contributors would arrive and stay, kept losing contributors who decided that their time and/or money was best spent elsewhere.

Still, if one thinks of the core appeal of an APA -- a forum where formatting is part of personal expression as well as the text and images therein, and more importantly, where a single contributor's thoughts can be read at length (maximum copy count in Alarums and Excursions went 16 double column pages, and some other APAs had no such limits), contemplated, and then responded to with a month between replies, and plenty of time to rethink ideas as exchanges went over months or years, the conversation just flows differently and has different qualities than faster forms of Electronic communication. Nor are the costs irreconcilable -- sure, if you're printing things to paper, someone has to cover the costs -- but in the modern day, why would you have to do that? We have e-readers, durable formats like PDF, and cheap online storage, so why not put the APA online?

Of course, there are some reasons one might not want an APA entirely online and indexable ad searchable forever. There are things people will put in an APA that's emailed to specific people and kept in physical form for a couple of hundreds of people that they really don't want on something that Google will index, that will be scanned and become part of the corpus for the next LLM.

But honestly, that leads to my real hope. I have no objections to quick and short social media like Twitter was, like Bluesky and Mastodon are -- but there are things I can only really write about here or on other slower blogs.

And similarly, the conversations I get in an APA are ones I wouldn't get even on Dreamwidth. I'd love for more people to have an opportunity to participate in APA-hacking, now that it doesn't involve showing up at someone's house for a "collation party" every month or two, now that it doesn't involve figuring out how to print 50 (or 500) copies of your precious prose without breaking your bank, but can involve just mailing something to a person who has promised to make a compilation and make it available to a select few (or the whole world, if that's how you want to go).

And more importantly, they don't have to, they SHOULDN'T be the same APA. like a forum, like Usenet, the character of an APA changes as you add more contributors (not so much non-contributing readers, though having those reading your not-that-deathless prose can be a nice carrot to contributors). Given how the essential nature of an APA &8212; deriving from the letter columns it supposedly descended from &8212; is each zine commenting on thoughts expressed in previous issues, the effort to contributing (or how much people try to comment on, or even read, every or nearly every zine in the previous issue) is proportional to the size of the APA. Add too many people, and this will discourage prospective contributors, result in them only reading a fraction of the APA &8212; or even split the APA as people group with the ones they most want to talk to; at one point there were I think at least 3 TTRPG APAs running simultaneously--one in the UK, plus two in the US, Alarums & Excursions and Wild Hunt. Or something like that.

But by me, at least, that's a success condition. Have multiple "rooms" where conversations happen and that means people can select the room they like, and the conversations in all the rooms get better and more focused on whatever people are interested in, whether (for TTRPG purposes) that's specific communities (like a focus on OSR or more modern narrativist games that may be more story game than definitely a TTRPG or LARP, or on design vs play vs hacking) or a more generalized approach to sharing ideas.

And while APAs aren't in any way immune to toxicity -- I've seen my share of VERY SLOW flame wars, compared to the modern levels, this is nothing--and for one reason or another (including self-politicing) it's been literal years since I've seen significant unpleasantness in the APAs I frequented.

I've been low key on it, but I left Marigold (my previous employment, although technically I've had the same employment for 23 years) in November, and am looking for a new job--ideally in software engineering. The bulk of my work over the last 20 years has been backend services and daemons, but I'm pretty adaptable; I ended up with a bit of a niche at work because it was needed and I am good at it.

If you want to find my resume, it's on my minimal personal website; the html and pdf versions are here:

https://www.labcats.org/mneme/resume.html

https://www.labcats.org/mneme/resume.pdf

I need to remember that if I want to see more content from other people on Dreamwidth, I really should post a bit more myself.

Our con activity has been -way- down since 2021 for the obvious reasons, so it was something of a trip (as it were) to do two cons in two weeks.

Dexlite was a dizzying array of games, separated by semi-scheduled bits of relaxation. Lisa and I volunteered to run our Good Society hack, Dangerous Refuge, twice -- once on the official schedule and once for Sparks (the rebranded "games on demand" non-scheduled games system); drcpunk ran one session and I ran the other. Interestingly, both of these sessions differed from our core concept and how our previous sessions have gone, in that the players constructed a world and session that was replete with external threats/problems and light on internal ones.

On the one hand, we could probably reduce this frequency by writing a deck of suggested Desires that pushed players towards internal tension. And should; not only can we not, in fact, use the base desires without either permission or referring to them by number (and I'd rather have the option to publish a complete game rather than a supplement, since I really like how playtests have gone), but obviously, dark fantasy school adventures do have notably different core motivations, typically, than regency romances.

On the other hand, it was really fun seeing how, despite the PC group being less strive-driven and more focused on external dangers and threats, whether they were from the Connections (who are, in fact, intended to do exactly that and the players were brilliant at bringing that) than our core setup, the games worked quite well -- in Lisa's game, the players dreamed up a Problem where the previous graduating glass had all failed to graduate, and in less than four hours, played themselves into a stunning conclusion where the PCs had to, despite difficulties, graduate One Year Early, freeing the school from Doom.

And in my run, the players doubled down on YA Dystopia, building a school that was a prison/indoctrination camp for teenage psychics the entire world was afraid of, whose greatest enemies were the faculty themselves and the school building itself, and whose allies were...well, the school building itself and and one another--if they could be trusted. The game climaxed when the players decided that the Newcomer PC would allow his connection to DIE in a challenge set for both of them (while she saved him; the player playing the connection signed off on this, of course), and that the faculty would decide, after the telekinetic PC intervened to save the matter-transmitting PC from a humiliating pop quiz, that she needed to die, resulting in a Danger phase full of menace and culminating in the students BREAKING OUT OF THE SCHOOL to be airlifted to a secret rebel base. I'd definitely read that first of a trilogy book!

I also played a small array of board games, other RPGs, and even a LARP of course, including getting to try a session of Daggerheart, but I think RPGs were thinner than they've been at previous Dexlites (not to mention Dexcons). In order to reverse this, we'd need more larps I like on the schedule--having some on Sparks is great, of course, but those serve as an outlet for players that don't have enough games to play--for the players to even be there there need to be games for them on the schedule.

The following weekend, I went to Summer Larpin', a rocking, larping convention, which I've been doing as an extra larping convetnion for...quite some time now. I was signed up for three games and played in four (sunday is unscheduled for SL); S.U.F.I.E.T.R.A, a fighting game-themed game (this time using a Street Fighter playset complete with a martial arts tournament) with a solid plot core that got elaborated on a bit with workshops where I played The Monster (character names were workshopped here so my name was unique to this run and ended up inspiring an extra relationship, though I forgot to get resolution there but did use one of my flashbacks on that), Shadow Soiree, a dark fantasy secrets and powers and quests game with solid inspiration from the Witcher, among others, where I played the Flame Reader (character names actually were usually titles here, which honestly made them way easier to remember; the only "names" I remember were Prospero and Pandora, both of whom were exactly what it said on the tin), Arabian Days where I played Aladdin's Djinn (which means I'm not going to say what name was on my badge, as that was not public information at the start of the game, although that Aladdin was in the game was)--which was also a secrets and powers and quests game, and as my one "signed up at the con becauese the game had lost players game, also played in Jubilee, which was an interesting psychological game--you played both your own character, who had two "voices" governing your behavior and future, and also were one of the representatives for those voices for the other three players who had the same voice as you had. It was a fun experience!

I also showed up late to the Dance, but still got to dance for over an hour, which just goes to show how much my endurance has improved--I did take breaks, but mostly not because I was tired but because the pairs people had formed didn't include me--or just because my face was running with sweat and I wanted a chance to cool off a bit.

I've been seeing some hilariously bad takes being pointed to on Bluesky or otherwise on the blogosphere.

( This is long and smofy, so skip if you're not interested )

Ok, so Worldcon happened.

( Worldcon report included )

I'm playing in three D&D campaigns on thursdays, which rotate on a loose schedule (one player in one campaign is playing in another Thursday game, so that game needs to be on a strict "every other thursday" schedule even if it skips some weeks, so when we went to three GMs, we just had the third GM steal thursdays from both GMs; thus that GM is mostly on a strict "every third thursday" schedule while the other GMs run on a 101000 (every other but then skip a week) schedule). The normally every third Thurs game ran twice in a row because one of the GMs couldn't run today for some reason (we then go back to our regular schedule for the above reason), so we got two Netherworld games in a row.

So...last session: The PCs finished the Longest Day Ever, in which they, um. Helped crush a much higher level cult of Dagon fishpeople (the paladins who had recruited them took the lead, and they (at 3rd level) were very content at this when the bad guys started throwing out cones of cold and and 7th level spells on the paladins. Accidentally tricked a party nemesis into meeting them when he was on his way out of the city after looting the castle treasury and captured him. Tried to take a passage by boat out of the city and ended up getting atttacked by the crew of the ship, defeating them. Realized that the rumors about the city being attacked by the revolution (who they were friendly with) were actually true, and after trying (and failing) to hand their prisoner over the rebellion, instead camped out at the most likely escape route of the soon-to-be-ex king. And captured him on his way out. All in one day, and mostly without even a short rest. (we did level to 4th level...after the day ended).

So this session, the party:
Got awards for service to the new king (which apparently included summary justice? Good to be a hero).
Got awarded a base....which after some wrangling, was taken from the evil college of evilnesses' now empty frathouse. So, basically, an "explore a dangerous haunted house which you will now own" adventure.

Huh. Just realized I never posted this!

This is, of course, fan-filk about seananmcguire's Incryptid series.

Aeslin Mice
By Lisa Padol (drcpunk) (with help from Joshua Kronengold) (who wrote the parts she didn’t and then fixed the parts she did)
May be sung to the tune of Elelweiss (Rogers & Hammerstein)

A minor note: Aeslin is pronounced "ash-lin" like the name.
Also, this is written as a duet. All caps are the mice. Things with a slash are gender-variant versions. Indented lines are spoken word.

Aeslin mice, Aeslin mice
Every morning you greet me

HAIL THE SINGING PRIESTESS / HAIL THE GOD OF SONG AND SILENCE

Small and light, brown and white
Every day you entreat me

GIVE US CAKE!
I have a cupcake. Will that do?
YAY, CAKE! ALL HAIL!

Long may your colony live and grow,
Live and grow benignly,
Aeslin mice, Aeslin mice
Chronicle a divine me.

ON THIS DAY THE PRIESTESS/GOD BLESSED THE COLONY!
What!? Sure, ok, whatever.

[During this verse the mise are sneaky]
Aeslin Mice, Aeslin Mice,
You guys are really sneaky,
Following day and night,
Starts to get really freaky.

Although I love you, I need to roam.
Need to rom-ance privately,
Can I please offer cheese,
For some hours of privacy.

AND THUS WAS THE ANCIENT CONTRACT RENEWED! FOOD FOR PRIVACY!
I also got another cupcake.
HAIL!
Alright--that’ll buy us about three hours.

[Priestess/God] Aeslin Mice, Aeslin Mice Teach the next generation, Though your faith is not ours You might be our salvation

[Mice] La la la - lal la la Teach the next generation, Though our faith is not yours You are our revelation

[ALL]
In your scriptures is every Price, In our scriptures is every Price
(and) Every price that we have paid,
(for) What we’ve learned, trust we’ve earned,
Help us keep what we’ve all made,

Family feud, Family wooed,
We will keep what we’ve all made.

For the roleplaying gamers among you all, I've just now written an essay on the two playbook cycle in Masks, a New Generation.

It goes through why there's a two-playbook cycle in the first place -- but also some ideas for a rather over-ambitious hack/expansion that could, if written, let people play Masks games that ran with a somewhat longer cycle without getting stale (and potentially have some other benefits, since it involves technically tripling the number of playbooks; I did say this idea was over-ambitious, right?).

I answered a webcomic roundup somewhere else that's more private, and I figure it's long and interesting enough to be worth just pasting here.

This is, to be clear, NOT all the webcomics I follow; just the subset I thought was interesting to write about (plus a few others that I decided to just list).

I read a lot of webcomics (I read them on RSS. If there isn't an rss feed for them or it isn't working I build one). So hilights-only:

Spacetrawler(  more...  )

PS238(  more...  )

Gunnerkrigg Court(  more...  )

Girl Genius(  more...  )

Headless Bliss(  more...  )

Lore Olympus(  more...  )

Megatokyo(  more...  )

Namesakes(  more...  )

Order of the Stick, Questionable Content: People mostly know these.

Use Sword on Monster(  more...  )

Freefall(  more...  )

The rest are in my NSFW folder, but talking about them isn't NSFW. Roomie is also here but is mostly there because it trips net nanny filters; it stopped showing boobies after the first hundred strips or so (also it's in reruns so boobies ahead).

Oglaf!: (who doesn't read oglaf? Some misses, but enough hits to be great).

Tiger, Tiger(  more...  )