Posts made by EmmahSue

There we go!

MOD-VOICE: I moved those posts for you.

Add more curry paste and/or spices, I suppose? I'm a wimp so I never do that. The peanut butter cuts the spice into manageable levels; sugar in general when added to something spicy does a good job of softening the initial blow so that the heat reaches the back of your throat rather than blasting you right away.

ES

Peanut Butter Curry; spicy-warm in the back of your throat without crossing the line into godkillmenowhot.

Serves 8, easily halved

Curry Base:
4 cans coconut milk
4 tablespoons Masaman Curry Paste (any Red or Gold Curry paste)
1/2 cup peanut butter
6 teaspoons sugar
6 teaspoons fish sauce or soy sauce

Filler:
Potatoes, Bell Pepper, Onions, Chicken, Carrots, Whole Peanuts, Etc. to taste

Follow Me:

1. Mix the curry base ingredients together in a pot.
2. Simmer!
3. Add the filler ingredients that you prefer – anything you think would go well in a soup, quite frankly. If you add potatoes, cook them for half-hour in the curry. If you add meat, cook it separately and add it into the mix after.

ES

I am super white with family in England and Germany, as documented through records kept by my grandmother (the far distant Blackfoot princess may well have been a tale told to a little girl when she asked her Nana if there was anyone fun in the list). Glow in a blacklight white, yo.

ES

If someone has a lightbulb moment and wants to toss a key-phrase interpretation in now, I'll see about adding it to the list ahead of time.

ES

MOD VOICE: Edited to fix the title.

I realized that we'd (@Glitch and I) posted about this on WORA, but hadn't done so on MSB. Here goes! This is part of what's on our wiki so far.

Theme In General
Shadow War is a game that explores what it means to stand alongside your enemies against a common foe, frenemies for a few brief moments. It's a game to explore the hard choice between fighting the good fight now, or winning the good fight later; which hill do you want to die on? The Shadow War itself isn't just about the Technos and the Trads and the Hermetics versus the Nephandi (though certainly that's an extension of the internal into the external). It's a war waged constantly within the soul of a Mage: which reality is going to come out on top? Can a little give now mean a win in the future, or is it the death of a thousand small cuts? In the end, the only constant is change itself. Whether a Mage makes that change happen, or rides the change like the oncoming wave of the largest tsunami yet seen, or even finds the middle road to do both, is up to each player.

Key Phrases/Theme In Specific
Plots (both staff, meta and player-run) on Shadow War should incorporate one or more of the following key-phrases. It doesn't have to be a central concept, but these are the themes that tie the game together. They're what we're exploring in the stories being told here. Interpret them however you like, so long as some hint is in play. If you'd like your interpretation or suggestion to join the lists below, fire a message to (staff).

Frenemies

• Your friend today is your enemy tomorrow. He may be a friend again the day after that. The world is so much larger than a single instance; a common foe makes all the difference. But just because he's your friend for this fight doesn't mean you have to like him. It doesn't mean you can't take steps to see that his (wrongheaded, stubborn, incorrect, dangerous) world-view is ground into the dirt like the terrible idea it is. Don't worry. He'll return the favor in the morning. -- ES
• Your sister is still yours. Even when she's decided to do something awful and stupid and terrible, she's still yours. The two of you can fight like cats and dogs, but when your backs are against the wall, she's still the one who comes busting through the line to save your ass. Nobody else gets to tear her down. -- ES

Choose Your Battles Wisely

• Can you keep the world from ending if you're bleeding to death in an alley because you decided to interfere in a mugging? If you don't interfere in the mugging, will the neighborhood be just that much more dangerous, leading to the proverbial end of the world? Every choice to interact or not-interact has consequences. You won't always know what those results will be; make your best guess when the moment comes. -- ES
• A Boy Named Sue. Is hatred worth the strength found through adversity? -- ES

The Only Constant Is Change Itself

• Energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed. (Does this still apply to Mages? What does your paradigm tell you?) -- ES
• There will be moments of quiet, moments of stillness and rest. They won't last. They never last. The world is constantly in shift, always moving ever-so-slightly forward towards... what, exactly? -- ES

Control vs Chaos

• The very underpinnings of reality can be tweaked by a Mage when she wills. How much of that tweaking should she do? Just enough to keep herself and her loved ones comfortable? Is reality worth living in, if it's all arranged and programmed like a script? How much worth does chaos have in its own right? -- ES

Mechanics
nMage (someday, when OnP releases the new rule-set) married to oMage. There's a guide out there we'll use to help wed once the rules are out and about. The goal is paradigm and seekings and reality-flux of old, with mechanics that don't make everyone cry tears of rage-and-sorrow.

Setting
New Orleans, post-Katrina. I've gathered census info to get a rough idea of how neighborhoods are shaped, but I expect alla that to change with play. When the game starts, and with some structure in place to make it mostly stay that way unless folks really go whackadoo to dismantle, Trads, Technos and Hermetics (PC-playable groups) will be very very loosely allied against the Nephandi (non-PC).

Various Policies As They Come To Mind

• We want a Mage-game that's willing to roll with the punches. If a player(s) can figure out how to do something big that sticks, or even if it's only temp, we want to play it out and see what comes. All plot results get the same treatment.
• Mage-only. We might use other splats as background and story-hooks, but that's not fully decided yet.
• There's a possibility of sister-city with Eldritch; that is to say, same universe. @Coin and @Glitch and I are still discussing that and how/if it would work.
• Creative Thaum: Spells work on a per-ST basis, rather than requiring immediate Staff decision/approval. Your ST for a scene (the group at large if you're just RPing at random) will decide the various details about a CT spell. If you want it to work all the time, you go through Staff, and we'll probably be slow and harsh. Sometimes magic won't work quite the same way. That's a feature, not a bug.
• Seekings are important, but how they'll be handled is still up in the air. I have Opinions, but so does @Glitch, it turns out! TBD.
• No 'spheres'. No one person will be in charge of the PC-groups on a staff level. Well. Me I suppose as the head ST type, but it still won't be spheres.

That's all I've got so far. It's all still in development, mostly because without the rule-set, we're treading water and not pushing to make it happen rightnow rightnow.

ES

Is there any more definitive due-date? If I'm supposed to have a game ready to go when the stupid rules finally eventually maybe never come out, a date would be helpful. :<

ES

Due to confusion since @Glitch, @Thenomain, and I are all posters as well as mods, we've agreed to institute MOD VOICE. That is to say, if we're speaking as moderators and board-tidy-uppers, we'll mark the comment or post to indicate as much. If there's no tag of that sort, you may disagree, argue, spit at, roll your eyes towards so hard they rattle and/or backtalk^ to your heart's content.

ES

^ Note: equally available are agree, chime-in, smile-at, flutter lashes and/or coo.

I will admit, dealing with the OOC aftermath of this sort of thing fills up my deep and abiding reservoir of UGH ennui. If you want to play rape-plot, do your thing. But if someone doesn't want to be involved, back the hell up. Help them find a way to not be involved. You are not your character. You are a ST who happens to have some skin in the game.

ES

@The-Tree-of-Woe: They didn't like how chummy (they felt) the other Trads were getting with The Slightly Lesser Enemy in order to hold back The Bigger Enemy. But they're not strong enough to go it entirely on their own against both, so they pulled out to make their own terms. On an OOC level, I wanted three groups, and Hermetics have enough internal stuff going on to be that separate group (like @ThatGuyThere suggested).

ES

As part of the theme for Shadow War, I want to have a nebulous sort of city-level chess game going on between the three groups of PCs and the Nephandi, over time throughout the length of the game (2 years minimum, maybe more). Where will the Neph try to make a move this month? Have the Trads arrayed their defenses from the north, leaving the south open? Will the Technos and Hermetics actually present a unified front, or are they too busy poking at each other to hold the enemy back? Etc.

But I don't want to be the sole "Nephandi-Player" in this regard. As head-ST, I know what all the sides are doing, so it's hard for me to make chess-related decisions from a place of IC not-knowing.

So I'm wondering if anyone has any thoughts on how to implement this, using the players on the game as resource?

Things to keep in mind:

• There are no actual Nephandi-PCs. Setting is: Techno, Trad and Hermetic loosely allied against the Nephandi.
• I'd like it to be somewhat 'fair' in that some jackass doesn't OOCly send the Nephandi against his IC enemies.
• All other details of this level of 'game' are open for decision at this point.

ES

It's the delicate sweep of the calf punctuated by the angular edges of the spider-legs that does it for me. He looks so good en pointe!

ES

@Cobaltasaurus, go grab The True Game, by Tepper. 9 books total, currently sold in omnibus-form because they're out of print otherwise. Science-fiction disguised as fantasy.

@2mspris, are you looking for Erotica in general, or a particular flavor of it? If it's just in-general, you might look at the Clan of the Cave Bear sequels. There are several, and Our Heroine has sex sex sex all the damn time with everybody she likes even a little throughout. It's not the best-written stuff in the world, but I remember it fondly from whenever I read them ages ago.

ES

Try to keep it mildly constructive towards the topic at hand, pretty please.

ES

It's cool that's what you do, sounds like it ought to be something done more often. But common sense is rarely actually common. We have no way to know if that's how the WW writers meant this to be done, so we shouldn't assume it's the case. Better to go with 'all equally important' and let it go, since arguing about this particular point isn't productive. Any ST/game-runner can then add their own personal weight as above, no harm no foul. In this instance, what the writers intended is not germane because we don't know what they intended.

ES

I'm confused why it matters which order they're in? All the themes together make up Werewolf. You can slant in certain directions if that's your gig, but all of them prolly ought to be there. Why worry about what order or importance they have?

ES

If you played with someone named Miss Betty Spanks Spanks on Shang who claimed they were me, they were lyin' through their teeth. I had a bit on Shang, but she was for playing with one person a good long while ago; I've forgotten the name and never interacted with the game itself.

ES

I'm not a'gin it. But my knowledge of how to create something like this can fit in a thimble. Nor do I know how to reach out to and invite the non-WoD community to join in; they'd be just as necessary to the effort, after all. We would need to create enough splash that folks who don't know other games exist at all, would come looking and want to join in. Not my baliwick.

So A++ would help mod/run, but I dunno how to get the engine started.

ES

I played a coroner in New Orleans -- Wendy the Sluagh, who took the last breath from the lungs of corpses and used it to flavor her tea, at Crescent City. Dunno if that's who you mean, though.

ES