The main thing that keeps me from reinstalling and trying to play Skyrim again is the thought of having to do Bleak Falls Barrow for the billionth time. Yeah, I could mod around it, but I just don’t care enough to figure out how for a game I pretty much always play through the first few hours of and then drop for another three years anyways.
No, no, I know these guys. It’s just the Goodfeathers. Watch, one of the ones on the left is gonna start beating up the one on the right in a little cartoonish dust cloud kind of thing. Hilarious.
The Throne of the Gods…
A friend of mine went to the thrift store and sent me a picture of a really weird wooden cat thing with huge doll eyes that stared into your soul. I needed to own it, so I asked them to buy it and I’d pay them back, since it was only a couple dollars. I have no idea what it’s supposed to be, cat is just my closest guess, but I can tell you that, whatever it is, it is now my little buddy. Supremely weird creature, I love it.
I saw you said you like some electronic music, so I’ll throw in Prefuse 73 (or really, any of Scott Heren’s pseudonyms) and Infected Mushroom. Prefuse 73 has some voice samples but is largely electronic/trip-hop, while Infected Mushroom has a decent split between songs with lyrics and songs without, so I recommend just grabbing an album and picking out what works for you.
I can’t prove it, but there’s a florist in my town, definitely still in business, that I have not seen a non-company-branded car in front of in actual years. Morning, noon, and night, never any customers. Never any movement from inside. The only time I ever saw the lights on was in the dead of night. The building is half-claimed by ivy.
If it weren’t for the upkept greenhouse and the sign out front occasionally changing, you’d never know it wasn’t totally abandoned, but it’s still operating. Mob activity is the only way to explain it.
I occasionally roll dice as theatre myself. In my last session, I had a troupe of traveling performers that I rolled for on each act to see if they did well or not, with each roll hidden from the players, and I would then describe the outcome to them. Most of the rolls were real, but some performers I had already decided would fail from the beginning, because they were plants for the enemy faction and had a plan going on in the background that depended on their failure at the act. But of course I still had to roll to not set off any alarms. Going to be fun when my players later piece together “oh, that hypnotist didn’t actually fail, they just used mass suggestion to make everybody believe they did so they don’t come under scrutiny.” If a player catches on - one actually did pretty quick - then great, let them have the victory, but in general it’s one of the ways I like to create expectations so I can subvert them or use them to sneak things by. The enemy faction is very guerilla-oriented, so it fits their MO pretty well.
On a more general scale, when it comes to hidden rolls, if I really need something to succeed, I’ll make the roll not a matter of whether they succeed, but who succeeds. Keeps the story moving if I realize too late that that roll shouldn’t have happened because a failure brings the game to a halt.