Graph Paper Games

My daughter wanted me to run a Bash! session just for the younger members of the group.  She likes her PC, the Lioness, who happens to be a trained martial artist tasked with hunting a group of supernatural villains (similar to Daredevil or Iron Fist from the MCU, or Sara Lance from Legends of Tomorrow).   So, what fun high-stakes adventure with mystical overtones can I possible reconfigure for a superhero episode? I went with arguably the greatest episode of The Real Ghostbusters  animated television show, "Ragnarok and Roll." Jilted boyfriend turned supervillain Jeremy. If you need the rationale as to why "Ragnarok and Roll" is one of the best episodes, this blog post does a good job making the case.  Fun side note: it was written by James Michael Straczynski, who would go onto do Babylon 5 .  I went with the general skeleton of the plot: morbidly depressed Jeremy decides to use a magical flute to not summon Ragnarok (as in the cartoon), but Fimblevi...

So, a couple of months ago, everything shifted.  Some of it was well and goodly expected and some of it wasn't dreamed of.  But in a very short order practically every major relationship in my life changed: my spouse, my kids, my friends, the people with whom I work, and the people whom I serve in my work. Now lest this seem like some kind of pathos-ridden post, a lot of those changes were positive.  The last couple of months have seen my grow and helped me discover a lot about who I am.  But it has been a huge struggle, and some things have taken a real hit, like the amount of time and mental energy I have to dedicate to my hobbies.  I moved away from my basement where I keep all my paint and miniatures and plaster and gaming books.  I'll move back there, probably in another month or two, but in the meantime all that has lain fallow.  I think it is pretty noteworthy accomplishment that I've been running three or four gaming sessions in that time, an...

I haven't been doing much on this blog for lots of reasons (including major life changes), but it isn't as if I am doing nothing  all this time. My gaming group played their third session of the game Bash! a few weeks ago, a game session that introduced an mysterious NPC group of metahumans (aka the Miscreants), an evil corporation (Kort Technologies, which only now I realize sounds like the Blue Beetle's Kord Technologies.  Damn.), and a handful of villains including Hot Rox, Brute, and Gunfire. Gunfire is the latest NPC swiped from the book The League of Unfortunate Superheroes , the first entry from their modern section.  Gunfire was a DC comics character, part of the company's desperate attempt to catch up with Image and the Iron Age of comics with their "Bloodlines" event that introduced a slew of violently-named gritty "heroes." Gunfire had the curious ability to shoot energy blasts from any object, meaning he could turn a wooden mal...