Merge branch 'main' into dev

content/posts/first-vaesen-game-retrospective/_index.md.md

@@ -0,0 +1,46 @@
+---
+draft : true
+title : "My first Vaesen Game"
+aliases : ["My first Vaesen Game"]
+date : "2024-09-20"
+series: []
+series_order: 0
+author : "Nick Dumas"
+authorTwitter : ""
+cover : ""
+tags : ["tabletop", "vaesen"]
+keywords : ["tabletop", "vaesen"]
+summary : "In which a Fish is burnt to death in steampunk Sweden."
+showFullContent : false
+---
+{{< lead >}} The dreamer cannot remember.  {{</ lead >}}
+## Disclaimers and Content Warning
+1. This post contains references to murder, gruesome deaths, and the supernatural.
+2. I'm going to try to avoid spoiling the contents of the module we played.
+## The Prep
+Preparing for Vaesen was extremely interesting. Character creation presents an interesting tradeoff early on when you decide your character's age. This choice impacts two things: your attributes and your skills. The younger you are, the more points you can allocate to to your attributes but the *fewer* skill-points you get. The reverse applies for older characters: you've had longer to practice your skills but your body just isn't what it used to be.
+
+You also choose your living standards from options like Destitute, Struggling, Financially Stable, Well-off, and Filthy Rich. This determines two properties of your character: your Capital and the bonus you apply when attempting to purchase items or otherwise apply your wealth for your gain.
+
+Before your first mission, you can purchase equipment ( knives, tinderboxes, hunting dogs, and crowbars ), services ( doctors, barbers, postriders, carriages, and meals ), and weapons appropriate for a semi-rural 1860s steampunk Sweden.
+## The Setting
+Speaking of, the setting for Vaesen is stunning and it sets the mind alight with possibility. The dawn of the Industrial Age spurs sudden population booms in urban centers which begin expanding outward into the wilderness while folk of all sorts are drawn from the countryside in search of gainful labor or to chase their dreams of riches. Forests are cleared to fuel and build machines that belch smoke into the sky, ore is ripped from the living earth in the name of growth and progress, and all the while people quietly forget or proudly forsake The Old ways. All the while, the creatures and forces humankind once carefully and respectfully shared the world with grow disquiet, no longer appeased by rituals and mindful distance.
+
+A rare few humans gain The Sight, the ability to directly witness the strange and powerful forces that move just behind the veil of myth. The Sight should not be called a gift generally being found only after witnessing or experiencing some terrible tragedy, but it grants the ability to intervene in or avoid the activity of these supernatural beings, the Vaesen. If you had the sight, if you were a Child of Thursday, there was a chance that you might encounter or be recruited by The Society. The Society worked to understand the Vaesen and their place in the world, their desires and needs, and to keep the peace between all who called Sweden home.
+## The Venue
+- Alchemy
+- Foundry
+## The Game
+- Castle Gyllencreutz, Upsala: your base of operations
+	- upgrading your base 
+- Investigation
+- Conditions
+	- Physical and Mental
+	- Dice pools
+## The Tragedy
+## Final Thoughts
+Vaesen is not a game of heroic fantasy. Your characters are fragile and powerless to stop the events that play out with brute force. Any hope for intervention requires careful preparation and an immense amount of luck. Each injury makes future successes exponentially more unlikely. Failures cascade quickly. Your character *begins the game* scarred by something tragic in their past and will only be subject to a greater quantity and variety of violence and loss.
+
+Your character can, and probably will, die powerless to save themselves or the people around them. This can be scary and sad but it offers a *storytelling* experience that most standard tabletop offerings do not dare. 
+
+Melodrama aside, Vaesen does not demand that the players be miserable and scared. Like most storytelling experiences, the participants can choose the tone, ranging from Scooby Doo or X-Files all the way to original-printing Grimm gruesomeness. In a world filled with strange and powerful forces, death doesn't have to be guaranteed nor does it have to truly be the end of the story.

content/posts/the-gallery-and-the-toolbox/index.md

@@ -3,7 +3,7 @@ draft: false
 title: "The Gallery and the Toolbox"
 aliases: ["The Gallery and the Toolbox"]
 series: []
-date: "2024-07-08"
+date: "2024-09-19"
 author: "Nick Dumas"
 cover: ""
 keywords: ["", ""]
@@ -21,23 +21,22 @@ Is it stored in a binder, a safe, or taped to the wall above a work-area? Is it
 Is it in a frame, or is it in a toolbox?
 
 ## The Gallery and the Toolbox
-I believe that, broadly speaking, visualizations will fall into one of two classes: the toolbox and the gallery. There's no small amount of overlap here, but I do think it's possible to generally narrow down a *primary* "type" or "use" of a given work or object.
-
+I believe that broadly speaking, visualizations will fall into one of two classes: the toolbox and the gallery. There's no small amount of overlap here, but I do think it's possible to generally narrow down a *primary* "type" or "use" of a given work or object.
 
 ### The Gallery
-A gallery is a space where you don't have a concrete "deliverable" goal, but you want to collect things that have meaning. This could be a collection of porcelain miniatures, your favorite inspirational quotes, or a bunch of pictures of possums. The primary analogy is an art gallery or museum: it is not "purposeless", but an art gallery doesn't have a goal like "Help someone create a medium-rare steak" or "Tell someone what that error code means". It's open-ended, the visitor/user is meant to derive some degree of personal/self-directed value from the experience.
+A gallery is a space where you don't have a concrete "deliverable" goal but you want to collect things that have meaning. This could be a collection of porcelain miniatures, your favorite inspirational quotes, or a bunch of pictures of possums. The primary analogy is an art gallery or museum: it is not "purposeless", but an art gallery doesn't have a goal like "Help someone create a medium-rare steak" or "Tell someone what that error code means". It's open-ended, the visitor/user is meant to derive some degree of personal/self-directed value from the experience.
 
 #### Examples
 I would consider personal journaling a gallery in this framework. You collect your thoughts so that you can later look back over them and have some to-be-determined insight. I've had great success with journaling and it really made me appreciate the process of collecting meaningful things over time.
 
 Here's a brief list of some other examples. I don't do a lot of gallery-making personally, but I'm trying to cover as much as I can:
 - cat photos
-- playlists
+- music playlists
 - collections of quotes
 ### The Toolbox
-A toolbox, believe it or not, contains tools, and tools as I understand them are procedures or objects created to make some part of life easier or better. It's important to understand that tools are not just physical objects. Mnemonic devices are tools, social etiquette is a tool, color-coding your socks by the day of the week is a tool.
+A toolbox contains tools: procedures or objects created to make some part of life easier or better. It's important to understand that tools are not just physical objects. Mnemonic devices are tools, social etiquette is a tool, color-coding your socks by the day of the week is a tool.
 
-Tools are all around you, some of them are even part of your body or feel like it, as is the case with things like glasses, mobility aides, or even our mobile phones and I think this degree of immersion is partly responsible for how hard it can be to get a grip on organization. For the most part, people don't *need* to regularly invent tools just to survive. Whether it's mental models or physical objects, there's usually an off-the-shelf tool that comes close to what you need.
+Tools are all around you, some of them are even part of your body or feel like it as is the case with things like glasses, mobility aides, or even our mobile phones. I think this degree of immersion is partly responsible for how hard it can be to get a grip on organization. For the most part, people don't *need* to regularly invent tools just to survive. Whether it's mental models or physical objects, there's usually an off-the-shelf tool that comes close to what you need.
 
 #### Examples
 My go-to example for tools is recipes. It sounds simple on the surface but consider: