Game Prep: The Fantasy Trip

Then I realized I have a face-to-face Fantasy Trip game coming up this next Saturday. I have to catch up as it has been a while since we ran. And funnily enough, it has been 1 year since we started this game. But this will be the 8th session. Getting together consistently is hard, plus this is a once-a-month game.

Recap so far:

S1: Sewers, found crypt, rescued Keg https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2024/02/to-sewers-once-more.html
S2: return for the crypt, find Ax (goblin rat catcher), Hexis has sword https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2024/03/fantasy-trip-game-recaps-two-for-one.html
S3: shopping, get medicinal weeds for sick child thieves, stay at Olmsted farm https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2024/04/saturday-fantasy-trip-recap-to-weeds.html
S4: back to Edge City, twin Elf children of possible royal descent. mission to head north for Orc Fist Gauntlets, fight a sect https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2024/07/battle-of-sects-followup.html
S5: escort Clybe to Bresselwyth, fight demon, meet Marian Harefolk, stay in goat town https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2024/07/battle-of-sects-part-3.html
S6: heading north, meet harpies, fight wolves, find strange green crystals in the wolves https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2024/09/meeting-harpies.html
S7: Battle of the Cutting https://traveller-ct.blogspot.com/2024/12/fantasy-trip-game-recap-7.html

See - I knew there was a reason I do game recaps in electronic and shareable format!

One of the things I am doing is putting the NPCs on note cards - old school style for an old-school game! I did have them printed up on paper but that kept getting lost in the other papers. I *could* use a notebook with tabs but the only one I have at the moment is filled up with characters I've played in games. Though yeah, I could get a notebook! But I have a set of index cards that came with the recipe box I got to put the TFT monster cards in, and they can in 4 colors. So blue are NPCs to help track things.

I am also planning on doing a jump cut to get straight to some action: they are trekking through the Cutting Fields, Sister Ishbarra will get a little better, but she was sorely injured last session. But they will be in sight of what appears to be a small tower. And then hopefully will notice the goblins and gnolls also approaching the tower. 

And when I was looking for kobold and gnolls for TFT, while kobold still are not there, the Old School Monsters book does have gnolls in it!

TFT Old School Monsters

And I am using some maps I got from the Campaign Cartographer series - 24x26" dry erase maps. Plus, I got the map tiles from their last KS and have some ideas for extending the map beyond what is there. And I've been told I am far too stingy with treasures and magic items. So, I'll have them roll on the d20 table from the OSR Booster. I may not explain all the effects though as some of those things are more than a literally 2-edged sword. I still need to stock the new section not on the map - thinking I do have these gelatinous 2" dice...

what's on the other side of that door?

I have the maps set up the way I think will work, almost finished painting 2 additional gnolls I picked up from some KS (and sadly think there are more eventually on the way). I am hoping we'll have a good time. 

it is a narrow staircase to the castle entrance

Entirely unrelated to games

And entirely unrelated to gaming, I managed to add a new process for work that is infinitely expandable as I know that there will be more options down the road. And the actual code to get the correct mapping is only a few lines long. And this was in Ruby, so we also ported it to the .NET C# code base we are replacing the far out-of-date Rails application (safer to start all over than to try to update the old application as there are significant breaking changes to get it up to date. Plus, I really prefer .NET / C#) But the fun part was once I had the Ruby code, working (and yes, it worked in production in the first order that came in. But I did test the heck out of it before deploying), I got AI to translate it to C#. And that worked out of the box with just some minor tweaks. I know people keep saying AI will take over, and while it is a tool, they've been saying this sort of thing since I started almost 40 years ago. And I am still writing code.  And as I retire with any luck in just over 4 years, I'm good. Like a lot of things, it may be close, and in some cases good enough, but for a lot of problems that are not simple, it still takes the creative spark to figure things out. After all - you need to know just what to ask the AI. All it does currently is spit back out the stuff it has been trained on, though it can find interesting combinations from that morass of data. Which someone has actually written, drawn or whatever. Eventually the androids will dream of electric sheep, but we are not there yet.