jack

Come join me for a picnic to celebrate late summer bank holiday (Monday Aug 25th), by the river at Grantchester. About 1pm until we get bored.

Bring general picnic things, anything you're likely to want. I will bring some general things to get us started.

If the weather is hot some people may also swim.

ETA: In fact, we'll aim for the start of Grantchester Meadows, down from the end of Newnham: https://www.openstreetmap.org/?mlat=52.190558&mlon=0.104398#map=17/52.191079/0.103732

I decided that after the homebrew Turtle Archipeligo adventure I ran with the support bubble, I would next plan to run some roleplaying which requires no prep and is very much fun, impulsive and silly. And also that I could invite people to come play when I wasn't already running a long campaign :)

I want to run HONEY HEIST, a simple one-shot without a lot of rules, where you play bears who wear trench coats and big hats and badly disguise themselves as humans, and plan to steal a load of extra special honey from a honey convention. Every bear has a criminal professional, a personality, and a type of hat, each determined randomly with a d6. Every bear has only two stats: criminal (for things that are more like criminal than bear) and bear (for doing things more like bear than criminal) which go up and down over the game. It is designed to be silly and fun and encourage trying things out and not worrying about the overall success or failure of the "mission".

You can see the pdf here: https://www.docdroid.net/KJzmn5k/honey-heist-by-grant-howitt-pdf (the whole thing is two pages in a very large font) and the original author's page (with optional donation) here: https://gshowitt.itch.io/honey-heist

Is there anyone who would like to try Honey Heist over video chat?

ETA: Feel free to invite partners/housemates -- nice to play with people you know and there's little prep so it's easy to organise another session if there's accidentally too many people.

It's my birthday next weekend, please come to my online party!

There will be a mix of different "rooms" in video chat, text chat, and possibly some sort of retro MMPORG designed for a mix of gentle chat, drinks, dressing up, games, as you feel like. I haven't tried this before so I hope it works well! I'll start about 7:30 and go for a few hours, but the time is inherently flexible.

I am sad not to see most of you in person, but glad to do something friends who live further away can potentially join in with.

I will post a link to join a day or so in advance so you have a chance to test it out. If you're not sure what you're doing, that's fine, just turn up.

Anyone I'm mutual with online is welcome to come along, even if you can't usually come! Let me know if there's anyone else you'd like to bring, that's also welcome. And anyone sharing a house with you is automatically welcome.

How much have other people been socialising in person?

Now I consider it fairly safe, who else wants to come visit on our patio furniture for an hour or so (with optional masks and optional drinks)?

The exact combination of jobs advertised varies over time, but work are looking to hire junior, intermediate and senior software engineers and (I think) testers.

We mostly do low-and-medium-level embedded programming, with audio/video and networks. Although for the graduate software engineer jobs, probably any programming background is fine.

I'm not shilling for them as the most amazing company ever, but they've been reasonably good to work for so far.

If anyone is interested I can put you in touch.

I also wonder, is there anywhere I should be advocating they advertise to reach an appropriately diverse demographic of engineers?

After running a couple of roleplaying sessions with quad & family, I would like to try to run something regularly in addition to whatever I run with them. I'm probably going to aim for once a month depending on interest.

I'm going to start by running a lightly revamped version of the DnD 5e one-shot I ran for quad before.

Pitch

Passengers on a ship, driven far out to sea in a storm and beached for repairs on an abandoned island. 30 years ago it was home to a pirate lord, Erik Twicecursed and his BFF Grignir Hammerhead. While repairs succeed, the captain asks for volunteers to explore the abandoned and reputed-cursed pirate lair.

There may be treasure. There will almost certainly be combat encounters. Hilarious misunderstandings of the skill system and trigger happy party wizards are not guaranteed, but likely.

DnD 5e. For people new to roleplaying I will give you a pregenerated 1st level character sheet but suggest you invent a character who's more interesting to you, and change any specifics accordingly. If you're familiar with the system you're welcome to generate a 1st level character however you like.

Invitation

This Saturday 2pm. It may run into the evening, in which case we'll probably have pizza.

If you're interested, comment here or email me by midnight Fri, and I will send you directions. (North cambridge, but may be lifts available if transport is an issue.)

You don't need to bring anything. If you're excited to do so anyway, things that could be useful: bring 5e books if you have them; read a little about 5e online; think about a character concept, not so much detailed background, as what they like doing and how they might be connected to other characters (member of ships company? bodyguard? relatives?)

Also let me know if you'd be interested in future one-shots or campaigns.

Future

I have a campaign in mind following this session, but think it makes sense to schedule several one-shots and see which people are interested in coming back to.

People were very enthusiastic about my putative vorkosigan campaign, and I would really, really like to run that, but it will not be this weekend, it needs more prep time. But if you're interested and think you could actually make time to come, please let me know. (If it happens I plan a series of connected stand-alone sessions, so I might well be able to run one if I'm in london for the day, even if other sessions take place with people in Cambridge.)

I am on holiday for a week from weds, going to Leipzig with liv, ceb, etc. which is awesome!

But means I will miss most of the beer festival. But I am going to go tomorrow evening (tues) while I have a chance, even if it's raining :) Is anyone else likely to be there?

http://www.lamemage.com/microscope/
http://arsludi.lamemage.com/index.php/492/youre-no-white-knight/

I was recently bitten by the roleplaying bug and one of the simplest experiments I wanted to try was playing Microscope. A recent indie game quite well spoken of, way at the "structured improv" end of the scale. The basic concept is collaborative, with each player contributing ideas of any sort, with no fixed PCs but the ability for the players to jump in to a crucial point in the history and choose characters to play for a short scene until a specific question is answered.

It is not a linear narrative, rather describing the history of a whole epoch (typically decades, but possibly weeks or centuries). It is hard to describe this, but I was convinced by play descriptions that the fairly simple rules are well-designed to get interesting ideas from all players without falling into some of the most common failure modes (eg. some people are shy to contribute, everyone feels obliged to submit increasingly silly things, no-one dares to shake-up the status quo).

As best as I can tell, it it likely to appeal to board-gamers and improv-players as much as roleplayers. And is fairly easy to play in a couple of hours including faff.

I'm worried I've fluffed the introduction, see the links at the top for more.

Basically, who else would be interested in trying it? I provisionally planned to invite some people over for food and Microscope, but I could bring it along to a games evening if people were interested.

Squeee, finally! Assuming everything goes smoothly (see previous post) we will have a housewarming on Sat 13th September, afternoon and evening, from about 2pm until midnight.

All welcome!

We will be moved in, but may still be disordered.

We will arrange something for dinner if people are hungry, probably takeaway.

The address is in my previous post: http://jack.dreamwidth.org/904549.html (locked because it's not our address quite yet :)) Let me know if you can't see that, or need proper directions.

I don't have much time this week, but I'd like to go to another of the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival plays today (Monday) if I have time, probably Twelfth Night (Kicking off at 7.30 at the back of John's College). Would anyone else like to come?