Fish of the Nether - for the Nether Depthcrawl

Fish want me, I fear Women, something along those lines

     The following is an adaptation of an existing Minecraft Mod, "Nether Depths Upgrade". For the sake of this project, some details have been omitted or changed, and this write-up does not reflect the functionality or design goals of the original mod. Permission to use these concepts has been acquired from the Author, though no assets or code may be reused. Please support the artists and coders by giving the original mod a try the next time you play Minecraft.

Also, this Post was partly written as a thank you for a generous monetary donation that arrived during a moment of need! The Farmhand requested that in lieu of a bespoke post, that I put the energy into completing a fun draft! 

Thank you so much for your support, Suzy!

Howdy, Farmhands!

    You wanna go... fishing in the Nether? I mean, you could, with a Rod and Line capable of handling the heat. And despite the Nether oceans being filled with Lava, a number of fish-like creatures seem to thrive there. So sure, cast that line, see what you reel in!

 

    As I'm sure your system of choice already has a fishing minigame to use, I'm not going to offer any mechanics or procedures here. Just a simple d10 table, and data on what's swimming about down there. If I were to give you Advice, however, I'd suggest using a d6 instead of a flat d10, and have the quality of the Rod and Bait add bonuses to aim for the more valuable and larger fish on the tail end of that table. Whatever you choose, I hope you have a fun and relaxing time, taking a fishing trip in Hell.

Until Next Time,

    Farmer Gadda

Saying Goodbye (to Twitch)

 

Happy New Year, Farmhands.

    I'm in mourning. (Hi, "in mourning", I'm Dad)

    On April 22nd, 2018, I took a deep breath and clicked a button that read "Go Live." My cell phone whirred and the camera showed a younger and incredibly anxious me, in his kitchen, surrounded by the ingredients he'd need to make Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes. I was a cake decorator, you see, having been trained in the ancient ways of Sam's Club to frost and sprinkle atop freeze dried baked goods. With my move to Florida to marry my beautiful wife 3 years prior, however, those skills had been relegated to the hobby space and left to get rusty. Not anymore. I was adamant that I was going to teach myself the missing skill set, use my flock of chickens and their organic eggs to convince the health nuts in my area that my baked goods were somehow superior, and sell my cakes to them for money. And this was the first step in that journey; asking friends and family to watch me work as a way to pressure myself into consistently experimenting at minimum once a week.

    My channel quickly evolved. What started as a simple motivating tool became it's own unique hobby; I switched to a refurbished computer running Linux, designed bespoke graphics, upgraded my cameras to only SLIGHTLY shitty laptop levels of cheap, bought cool new baking tools to try out- but mostly fell face first into enjoying being an entertainer more than being a baker. I made some damn cool cakes, tried and failed at perfecting various flavors (still haven't figured out from-scratch strawberry), and eventually got the bug to try sharing video games I enjoyed to my audience that were increasingly there more for me than for the cakes. I remember passionately regurgitating the talking points of the latest Matt Colville video to a friend who'd never read 4th edition. I remember cackling like a madman when my cat decided he needed to be on my shoulders in the middle of a frosting session, laying down on my back while I was bent in half to accommodate him. I remember starting to cry when I hit 100 followers and achieved Twitch's (then fairly lax) Affiliate status live on stream. 

    The thing is, as I write this, I'm remembering all the good times and only the good times. Being a Twitch streamer wasn't always candy and roses. I fought tooth and nail with my very shitty and cobbled together PC to maintain any semblance of watchable video quality on an incredibly small budget. My un-medicated anxiety made hitting that button and Going Live feel impossible some weekends, compounded by the guilt of skipping a week when the entire POINT was to make me bake often. I struggled with my internet provider, and in particular, a neighbor who twice CUT OUR LAND LINE because he believed the buried cord to be on his property.  And all of that is before you take into account the amount of Dishes that piled up after any given baking sessh. (Beautiful Wife was mostly upset about the dishes.)

    Existing as a creator on the internet is a lot of work, actually.

    This is why, despite my love for the craft being as strong now as it was back then, I have made the decision to say goodbye to being a twitch streamer. Some may call it "graduating", a term popularized by Vtubers and the Japanese Idol culture that they've basically lifted outright, but I prefer the term "retiring." It isn't that I've aged out of the hobby, nor that I'm leaving to pursue bigger and better opportunities like a high school senior moving states to chase a specific college degree. I'm more like an old man who's accepted that maybe this grind isn't for him anymore. Even though I've long since switched the kind of content I produce from the live baking streams into interactive 2d puppetry Vtubing atop Video Game game play, this shit still isn't easy, and the amount of time required to keep it up and running just isn't available to me these days.

    Saying goodbye to parts of yourself is never easy. Admitting that you're not the same person you were 10 years ago comes with a sense of grief. Very rarely do we get to have that realization until it's too late to properly say goodbye. So with heavy heart, I look upon my twitch channel, and metaphorically watch as the cake decorator in his kitchen with anxiety and hope pauses before hitting the "Go Live" button, and gently reaches over to close the door between us. It is April 22nd, 2018, and he has Ice Cream Cone Cupcakes to bake. It is January 1st, 2025, and I have a TTRPG draft to edit.  

    Until next time,

        Farmer Gadda

     

    

Sonic the Hedgehog - Where do we go from here?

 

Sonic the Hedgehog had a rough transition to Live Action. 

This Blog-post was written as a thank you for a generous monetary donation that arrived during a moment of need! 

 Thank you so much for your support, Mxfaery!

    I have been a Sonic fan for the majority of my life, and I have loved him in many, many forms. From the very beginning, the character has been interpreted and re-interpreted across basically every form of entertainment media. In the first few years of the original video game's release, he appeared in two concurrently airing animated children's shows, one which portrayed him as a Looney Tunes styled hooligan performing slapstick, and the other in a dark and gritty anti-authoritarian guerilla resistance, with body horror and death frequently featured. So it was no surprise to me to learn that the first Live-Action adaptation was going to be a buddy cop movie with a CG animal sidekick. A disappointment, sure, but not a surprise.

Solo-Ish, An Experiment - Overview

I would lose my mind if I had to type in 65193 every single roll

This post and others like it was made possible by members of my Patreon, where you can see WIPs and Previews of future blogposts a week early! Thank you in particular to Suzy for your continued support!

Howdy, Farmhands

    I will occasionally Poast my regrets on social media. Nothing too deep or heavy, just whatever occurs to me as something I ought to change in the near future. Putting the thought out into public for others to read acts as a motivator to take action, lest my audience think me a waffle (derogatory). One such regret I've poasted about time and again is my lack of experience with Solo Games.

    Solo Games are Games you Play Solo. (lol) Usually, they're designed from the ground up to be a Solo experience, while more frequently in recent years, additional rules for Solo play to multiplayer or gm'd games have become the norm. Lots of people want to play the games they buy, but organizing a dedicated table of players is difficult. Playing by yourself, in whatever free time you have, is a very tempting prospect. But it's a space I've largely not engaged with. Until right now.

    I run two separate campaigns at the moment, each taking up my Tuesday evening slot on alternating weeks. This usually takes up most of my available free time set aside for gaming; if I'm not prepping, running, or facilitating downtime for one, I'm doing so for the other. This fell apart the moment a schedule changed. One player had vacation, another had a work event, then Halloween hit and there were parties to go to and Thanksgiving to prepare for, and here I am two months later having run... Nothing. The stars have aligned. 

    For this project, I quickly decided I wanted two things- first, I was going to host the game on a Discord Server I maintain. Not my brand server, but one of the Group Chats for buddies who've put up with my bullshit long enough to be willing to engage with me while I go on this journey. Secondly, I was not going to enforce the game remaining purely Solo, in the event anyone saw what I was doing and wanted to join in. This meant whatever system or tables I employed needed to be accessible and legible to Other People as well.

    For the basic resolution system, I chose to primarily handle things as if I were playing an Into the Odd hack, using Cairn as a base. HP, STR, DEX, WIS, d20, roll under. I looked for a couple of GM oracles, but settled on using a simple "Yes/No" table I found on chartopia, with the understanding that a good chunk of play would be asking clarifying questions of it instead of expecting it to act as a spark table for me to interpret. Luckily, Chartopia has it's own Discord Bot which can trigger and roll on any table on the site remotely.It even lets you give tables an alias so you don't have to memorize the numerical code for each table you want to roll!

    With the bot and tables handled, I needed to choose which tables I would be using. Lucky for me, a number of existing games, Solo or otherwise, currently are accessible via Chartopia. Scouring the website, I came to the conclusion that I wasn't about to play a standard medieval fantasy. I was envisioning a Stardew Valley sort of vibe, with chill, character and resource based adventuring on the overworld, with danger and mystery found inside adventure sites littered about. Lucky for me, there's already a Solo Game about playing in a Harvest Moon slash Animal Crossing setting, and all of it's tables are available on Chartopia.

    There was just one final thing I wanted, and I wanted it quite badly. A simple Yes or No oracle wouldn't suffice for NPC dialogue, so to google I went. What I've tentatively settled on is this; Let's Talk, by Dr. Gerald Ravenpie. It's a fairly robust system, with a couple moving parts that might be hard to grok by others who join, but since everything else is very simply Yes/No questions and basic Stat checks, a little chunk might be what this project needs. The immediate change I chose to make, was to take the "sometimes" emotions and permanently add them to my deck, as well as label the emotions 1 through 13 so I could "draw" them from a standard playing card deck. I'll report back if further changes need to be made.

Here then, are the RULES for Farmer Gadda's Solo-ish Play By Post!

How to be your own GM

• Ask clarifying questions: The Y/N bot can be questioned multiple times about the same thing, it won't get annoyed with you. If you want more details about something, feel free to keep asking yes or no questions; just don't try to make the bot un-answer something you don't like. 
• Be neutral when writing reactions: Its easy to say "well, I dont need to hit my character THAT hard" and never really face adversity. Let consequences happen, and respect the Y/N bot; it will create problems you then can have fun trying to solve! 

CONVERSELY 

• Be a fan of your own work: The best DM's are the ones that put things they know the player will enjoy in front of them. When generating or interpreting positive answers, indulge and let your silly ideas happen.
•  Only Roll when there's Risk: You can spend paragraphs JUST writing what happens without using the Dice at all; it's just you here and nobody can judge you. What you do or do not engage with in your fiction has no requirements to follow, follow your heart and inspiration

Dice Math

• Roll 1d20, Under your Stat to succeed
  
  
• If your HP hits Zero, take any further damage from your STR, and roll a save with the new value. Fail, and you fall unconscious.
  
  
• 1d4: Fists, Generic Damage from Environments, 1d6: Weapons, Actually Aggressive individuals, etc etc
  
  
• You are free to ignore or add as many or as little rulings as you see fit, so long as you're having fun

    And that's pretty much it! Armed with as much prep as I was willing to make, I set out into the wild unknown as Gadda, the Human Farmer. What will come of this experiment is a series of play reports regaling the adventures I get up to and those of anyone who decides to join me.

    Until next Time,

        Farmer Gadda

Ol' Gadda's Pirate Game

 

y'know what, sure, why the fuck not?

Howdy, Farmhands.

    As of the time of writing, it is the release day for Dicegoblin's "Block, Dodge, Parry" (and thus, "Cairn") supplement, "Sail, Swab, Scurvy." The document is available on itch for half off during release weekend, and is apparently only 5 dollars full price once the promotion is over. BDP is one of many Cairn hacks that I return to for inspiration while collating my own personal preferred ruleset, and while I don't yet own it in physical, it's near the top of my To Buy list for a good reason.

    But I'm not actually here to talk about BDP or it's new supplement. Because as it turns out, I've been running my OWN odd-like pirate game for the past 6 months, using it as a testing ground for whatever nonsense I decide to try and put into the Sanic Hack. The first iteration was made of me doing copious amounts of googling to see what other people who wanted to sail the seven seas in an OSR-y fashion had done before me; cobbling together their concepts and roll tables until I had something CLOSE to the vibe I expected. Every change since then has been seasoning to the taste of my actual players. So color me surprised when, at the very end of SSS, there's a short list of credits and references Dicegoblin used while writing the thing.

    - Enthusiastic Skeleton Boys by Sam C.
    - Lilliputian: Adventure on the Open Seas by Manadawn Tabletop Games
    - This series of blogposts on Wavecrawls and Pirates by Skerples

    This is list is, I shit you not, the exact same 3 sources I used to cobble together the first few iterations of my ruleset. Not for a lack of Other, equally impressive sources, mind you. They were simply some of the most immediately obvious results to read from, and so I did.

     I found this happenstance very funny, but it also made me wonder. If two completely separate people could approach a similar project, around the same time, using the same core texts as inspiration, and come out with two different systems, then there's got to be other people who will inevitably try as well. So here's the point of today's post. I could let what I've got fester in the word document I keep it in, polishing it off and on over the next 10 years until it's PERFECT and ready for public consumption. I could dripfeed individal rulings and concepts out as some sort of retroactive design documentary, for you to piece together. Or. I could slap what I've got down here, in the hopes that it becomes useful to the next person wanting to craft their own bespoke Pirate OSR NSR POSR D&DIY Elfgame Mark of the Odd Odd-like Wavecrawl Sailing TTRPG experience. At the very least, I've linked like, 6 different games they might not have found in their search yet. To those future people I say welcome. 

    Quick disclaimer: This is only the player facing rules my table needs to reference; character creation item data, and monster statblocks use standard Cairn notation. We also play in a Shounen Furry Waterworld with Sanics and rubber people and stuff. I hope this helps you, despite this, lmao.

Brace yourself for whatever This is
- Sonic Prime, available on Netflix

Until next time,

    Farmer Gadda