Look man, I get it. You need to know if your utility bill is in. You’ll get it when I get to your mailbox, just don’t attack me when I try to put the letters in.
Stay safe out there, readers! Let your mailman deliver!
-JB Swift
As I was leaving the house for work, my daughter asked if the sky would ‘be good mailman weather’, which tells me she pays more attention to what I say than I have realized and that I’ve found the possible source of her sarcastic Parthian shots (she doesn’t realize she does them, just destroys a conversation as she leaves a room).
“The weather should be perfect for work today,” I said. She brightened.
“Get a good picture for today!” she called as I rolled the lunchbox out the door.
Well, I’m a word of my word, so I kept an eye on the sky for a good photo. She approved of two, but chose one for today’s post.
It turned out to be a great day for the weather, but not so for the postal vehicle. The truck broke down and I was left out on the route for nearly an hour before I could resume delivery.
Meaning I was paid for nearly an hour at postal rates to write Star Wars fan-fiction! *cackle*
Tonight we have a Side-Arc session! I’m going to be working ‘overtime’ to get the rest of my sessions finished before my End-of-Year date, so there will most likely be technical problems that disrupt every damn game night.
It wouldn’t a Swift’s Campaign otherwise.
Stay safe out there, readers!
-JB Swift
*This post will be updated in the evening, after the session*
It’s Friday morning and I’ll be meeting a new player this evening!
What’s more, this player has little experience with tabletop gaming! Huzzah!
If there’s one thing I enjoy more than telling a story through an RPG, it’s teaching people how to play. I may be strict about adhering to the rulebooks (when it isn’t inconvenient and provides the information I need, otherwise I try my best to make a good judgement call), but I also get to see these players reflect on their choices and enjoy their independence with character creation.
I genuinely want players to enjoy my stories, but what’s more important is that they tell their stories within my campaign. If there’s something they’ve always wanted to read about but never find it on the bookshelves, they get their chance via a character sheet and a d20.
Let’s see what he comes up with.
Stay safe out there, readers!
-JB Swift
*Update* We have a new character! I now have new homework!
His character design is intriguing, and it’ll take time in both the real world and the campaign to fully develop, but I’m excited to see how his story comes about. Plus, I get to make a new Character Archetype!
Being a millennial, I’m used to the concept of people “ghosting”, or expressing interest in joining something and then disappearing when it’s time to schedule an event or the event starts.
Being an introverted and socially awkward person, I’m also accepting of the concept. I understand that there are times when someone’s social battery is depleted and they just don’t want to deal with people. I deal with that regularly, myself.
The frustration comes in when I do my utmost to be welcoming to new people, especially with my ‘gaming table’, and the ghosting occurs. The reasons for it can be quite legitimate, but it also worries me about how I’m perceived by these new people.
I’m an excitable GameMaster, I know. When someone says they’re interested in joining, I go all out to make them feel welcome. I send invites, give primers for the setting, and provide extraneous details that have otherwise not been noted in the rulebooks. In terms of introverted nerd, I can get overbearing in my attempts to be welcoming.
There are two ways to react to this sort of behavior: accept the sheer nerdiness or run away from the overeager weirdo.
(This is not talking about the upcoming New Player session happening this week, but a different person altogether. The New Player has shown enthusiasm for the campaign and seems excited to try his story. I’m looking forward to his session!)
I’ll have to work at reining myself in when talking to potential players, but I know myself well enough to understand that some folks will be driven off by this behavior.
To those players: I apologize. I know I’m weird, but I’m really just excited to tell a story.
Stay safe out there, readers! I’m off to sling letters.
-JB Swift
It’s been getting into freezing temperatures the past couple nights, so I’ve been trying to round up my animals from outside. Failing finding them (you try finding dark-colored cats in the Louisiana bush after dark), I’ve set up a few crates that will serve as shelters if they come back after I’ve fallen asleep.
That said, Penelope has shown to be rather dedicated to being an indoor cat, up to and including stealing my seat on the couch.
Of course, Korra doesn’t want to be outdone by the cat, so upon trying to sit down at the other seat, I find this:
So, it’s back to my desk chair, I guess. If Apollo ever gets inside, he’ll try to take that one, and then I’ll be seatless.
Stay safe out there, readers. Gonna try getting the cat twins in the house for their own good.
-JB Swift
In what appears to be an ongoing theme, my Murphionic Field struck again.
I returned to the mail route today after several days of being at home and minding my family. I had fully expected to be back in the routine of gallumphing down the walking path until the lunch break, where I would sit in the back of the Promaster, side door open to let in sunlight and air, and whittle away at my stories like a proper nerd.
Only to discover that I never put the tablet on the charger.
sigh…
But the phone has Microsoft Word as an app, and my subscription is up to date so I can ‘type’ while looking to the world like any other millennial who is obsessed with their phone.
But at least I’m making progress! Via the phone, I can get somewhere near 350 words in a half-hour lunch. So long as I accept that I will eventually be in front of a computer and able to fix all of the autocorrects.
Stay safe out there, readers!
-JB Swift
Somehow, I’ve managed to convince this woman that I was interesting enough to keep me around for seven years. I’m not sure how I did this, really. I’ve been around me for nearly 40 years and I can barely stand myself on some days.
I’m taking a moment to show off this brilliant and beautiful woman because after all, gestures at photo.
Happy Anniversary, Sarah. I’m grateful for the seven years and look forward to the next seven, up until these kids are teenagers and realize we’re just two goofy people wandering around the house in robes and bemoaning the slow coffee pot, instead of superheroes and wizards.
Stay safe out there, readers.
-JB Swift
There was progress this weekend!
Not in the writing, but in the house-spouse work! While I was hoping to get some time set aside to handle up on my story-writing, I fell into the cycle of productive-procrastination. I keep telling myself to not sit down for writing until my chores are done.
Chores are never done, but it does feel good to take a decent chunk of them off the list.
For today, I’m hoping to stick to my goal of “3 chores only, 30 minutes of writing, rinse and repeat” and get further along in the Sidewinder Stories. While Han is staying home for today, she’s obligingly handling her own set of chores. She just doesn’t want Dad to clean her room, because she likes her own setup.
Unfortunately for me, I’ll be moving around a bit stiffly, since I went through my martial arts practice just before bed.
Witness the before and after images of someone in their late 30s forgetting to stretch, managing to impress themselves, then dealing with the aftermath of not thinking ahead.
Sifu is going to have a field day when we show up for training and I’m already sore. In the words of my generation: oof.
Time to whittle away at the priority list and finish the Side Arc (hopefully)!
Stay safe out there, readers. Don’t forget or ignore your stretches.
-JB Swift
Let’s go back to yesterday. I’m taking advantage of the kids going to their grandparents for the day so I can handle up on chores, when one of my players sends me a message:
“Just so you know, the website hasn’t been updated since Tuesday.”
I take a moment to consider this message and go online. I had scheduled a post for Saturday to go online around noon that day, and it had been a couple of hours since. But instead of seeing my “Posting Calendar” full for the week and a couple paragraphs of nerdy excitement at seeing my players go through their strategies, I find a list of posts sitting in the “Drafts” section.
As I told the player, I need a gif of someone flipping over fruit stands to properly express my frustration. Now, why is this happening, you may ask? After an hour of troubleshooting, I think I’ve figured it out.
I have a second website set to come online in a few weeks, provided that it is approved by my unions’ local at the next meeting. I’m adding on to that website a little every day, and it had a ton of information in the “Drafts” section, and I had set that up to be automatic, so I would avoid the headache of accidentally publishing pages that could be searchable by my union members. I didn’t want my coworkers, who have heard about the upcoming website, to go searching for it and see a “404” message. That’d be frustrating for them and mildly embarrassing for me.
Apparently, I had set that up via my whole profile, so both websites kept sending posts and pages to “Drafts”.
So, my morning chore for Sunday, which was going to be mowing the play-yard and picking up the kids’ toys, was replaced on the list with fixing this and updating the thing. Will that actually fix the postings problems?
Most likely not, to be honest. For one, as much as it annoys me, the automatic saving to “Drafts” does give me the chance to check over posts for grammatical errors before I post them and let all of you smile at my mindset of “posting too fast in my excitement to write” and give you a semi-professional article of my life to read.
For two, as I’ve said time and time again, technology just doesn’t like me. My Murphionic Field, as Sarah calls it, is extensive and has odd effects on nearby tech. I can somehow turn off the backroom television by waving at it.
It looks cool, but when you’re trying to rewatch “Bleach” and turn the whole damn thing off because you saw a moth and thought it a wasp makes for an annoying evening.
But the things are up! The posts are fixed, and for now, the headache is abated. I have a list of chores I want to get through before I sit back down and write the day away. Time I went about it.
Stay safe out there, readers. Happy Sunday.
-JB Swift
I am both exhausted and excited. It’s Saturday, so it’s Game Night!
It’s also the third Game Night in a row, and I’m realizing exactly why I am so strict about my Session Schedule holding to a bi-weekly schedule.
I’m tired and getting grumpy. I don’t like that aspect of myself showing itself in my sessions, and I worry that my players would see this as resentment or disinterest. If the past year has been any indication, I’ve wanted one thing to come across: I love being a writer and RPG storyteller. Not only is it fun, but it’s also a personal enjoyment and challenge.
(There’s a voice I’m looking forward to trying out. After hearing other Narrators try their Bith voices, which always sound like Kermit the Frog if he had espresso, I wrote a Bith into the session so I could try it out myself. It’s not great, but damn is it entertaining. Pity the players who have to indulge me.)
That said, I’m looking at the calendar and having to make a hard decision. We’re officially in USPS’ “Heavy Season”, so the mail is picking up and the parcel count is hitting offensive levels. I’m going to be extremely busy during the ‘winter months’.
For those readers who are not familiar with the Southern United States, our winter months are still warm and humid, with occasional patches of “Why is it this cold?! It’s only 50 degrees out here! Damn humidity!”
I don’t want to push myself to the point of burnout, so in the interest of keeping the campaigns going, I’m ending my Main Arc Sessions for the year on November 12th, and my Side-Arc availability on November 19th. I’ll start back up January 7th 2023 for both.
That gives me two Main Arc Session nights left for the year after tonight. I wrote this adventure to be full of interesting details and notes for the players to investigate, and the last session showed me that they’re going about the adventure with intellect and patience. Other players in the main group, those who haven’t been able to join the sessions due to their own exhaustion (two of them have infants, so their exhaustion is absolutely valid) chime in with questions over the recordings and mapping out their decisions from ‘behind the scenes’. I’ve also been complimented by how faithful I’ve been to NPCing those characters.
I am enjoying this group far too much to let simple exhaustion from me drive them away from the table.
This is also to say that though I will be closing down my Sessions in mid-November, I will still be (trying) to make daily posts and adding on to the pages for the campaign throughout the Heavy Season. It’s a bit like therapy for me to sit down and add to a universe instead of stewing on the antics of management.
Don’t worry, I won’t take the remainder of the year off from writing altogether. I might have my month off in April next year, but I won’t know until next March and see what Tax Season looks like.
I’m off to handle up on house chores and finalizing details for tonight. I’ve asked Old Man Casey what he’s thought of my challenges so far:
He’s unimpressed and wishes luck to my players. I think.
Stay safe out there, readers!
-JB Swift
Swift's Corner 