babbling plasma; a troika city story, chapter 2

before you hit play (the audiobook is only available on my substack, or read chapter 2 or go back and read and/or listen to chapter 1)

i want to mention something first…

my friend Bolt-Neck Opossum (featured on the blog before: we wrote 36 graveyard encounters and i reviewed one of their zines) has new zine live on Kickstarter right now.

you should totally check it out! (click)

it’s called Spectacle and it’s a new science-fantasy gladiatorial setting for Troika!

it’s for fans of Jack Kirby and Junji Ito’s Hellstar Remina, and weirder comic tropes.

it looks sick as fuck.

please consider backing it, if you can.

i’d like to write an adventure set in Spectacle.

i hope you enjoy the story and my original background music (which you can listen to on my substack)

The Necromancer texted The Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer that they would change clothes and then exercise.

They put on an oversized white tank top and long wide-legged shorts.

They took a photo of the exercise machine and sent it to The Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer. 

"Bout to hit it," the Necromancer added to the text message. 

They spent an hour binge-eating and throwing up.

The Necromancer poured a tall boy into a water bottle.

The Necromancer sat on the exercise bike and placed the water bottle into the bottle slot.

"This bitch," a spider said, shaking its head.

When the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer returned, the Necromancer still rode the exercise bike.

"Good shit," the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer said, waving their fist a little, like 'Hell yeah, man.'

He was holding a plastic bag with a smiley face on it.

The Necromancer took off their headphones and said, "What?"

"I brought you something," the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer pulled a burrito out from the bag, unwrapped the tinfoil a little at one end and held out the burrito for the Necromancer to bite.

"Fub yeah," said the Necromancer with their mouth full. 

The spiders watched, waiting for some of the burrito's filling to fall onto the floor.

The Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer sat on the incline bench, "I heard they unearthed another retrieval pod."

"Oh yeah?" the Necromancer wanted another bite of the burrito. They thought the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer looked really good today. The Necromancer eyed the burrito in the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer's hands and thought, "Choke me, Daddy." The Necromancer reminded themself to keep their distance. They thought their breath and sweat must smell like cheap beer.

"Yeah, traffic was fucking terrible."

The Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer laid back on the incline bench as tears began to fall sideways.

Two weeks had passed since the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer last visited their father in jail.

They wanted to ask the Necromancer to come with them to visit their father but couldn't.

"Calm facial expression," the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer thought. 

The Necromancer hopped off the exercise bike, "Lemme shower real quick and we can check it out and go to Barnes & Noble if you want."

"Bet."

The Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer put the burrito in the fridge.

They showered together.

They saw the retrieval pod in the center of town.

The Necromancer said it was roasted like a brazen bull.

They went to Barnes & Nobel.

In Barnes & Nobel, the Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer walked to different areas thinking, "Where are they? They disappeared."

The Necromancer picked up five large Moleskin notebooks and hid them in their dusty robes.

The Temple Knight of Telak the Swordbringer saw The Necromancer on the second floor.

"Let's go," The Necromancer said, walking toward them.

They walked holding hands to the bus stop.

A low-floating ghost was at the bus stop.

"What happened to you?" asked The Necromancer.

"Brain asphyxiation," the ghost said, wiping its nose.

"Sorry. Now I feel really shitty."

"Here, have at it," the ghost held out a water bottle to them, "it's gin."

"I'm a Necromancer," said the Necromancer, who took a drink and passed the water bottle to Telak the Swordbringer.

The ghost felt confused and a little dizzy as they stared at the Necromancer.

"Are you worried that I'm lying to you?"

"a little; if you lied to me, please tell me"

"Where are you buried?"

"I don't remember."

The ghost reached for the water bottle filled with gin, "Death is like you're listening to this really shitty song repeatedly. It sounds like a moth's ass rubbing against your brain."

"I know."

"Let's see you spend five years in my shoes," the ghost finished the gin in the water bottle. 

"Okay, then I'll join you in death."

The Necromancer spends 3 points of stamina and casts Torpor.

"I'm sorry I accused you of lying."

"It's ok."

Telak the Swordbringer starts playing a game on their cellphone, music on loud.

"Can you put my soul in a robot or something?" asked the ghost.

The Necromancer laughed.

"I don't know."

They talk for about thirty minutes.

The ghost gets the feeling of missing someone like the Necromancer, and when the bus arrives, the three of them step into it holding hands.

original + exciting / remixing adventures

this blog is now sponsored by boxed hawaiian pineapple juice

in the next spooky jaguar international adventure, i would like to copy and paste one of my own short stories into the adventure; a character would pick up a book and read it, and it would show what was read, and what was read will be my short story

when people buy our zine they will also have one of my short stories; if my friends write short stories i could include 3-4 short stories inside one of my adventures

i think this would be original and exciting 

another idea i have is that i think people should copy and paste our new adventure The Weeps into a good doc and then edit it and retitle it and release it

it would be funny if the same adventure with some differences got published by over 20 people

an easy way to rewrite this adventure would be just to change the setting 

i encourage people to take our adventures and edit it and submit it places, and write about it on your blog or comment here or email me or send me a dm on twitter when it gets accepted so tony and i can look at it and think 'haha'

i would like to make a post 2 months from now of links to 10 versions of the same adventure by different people on different websites, it would be funny and interesting to see what different people did

*

in other news i have started a podcast with bolt-neck possum (who has just released a new adventure for Liminal Horror!)

i’m still editing the video but it will be up in a week

we are going to talk about some really cool zines that more people should be aware of

the spooky review is back... (with Skullboy)

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Longshot City chat and updates

news:

spooky jaguar international has released a new zine for the cairn a town, a forest, a dungeon jam that was going on at itch. 

it's called The Weeps.

there's a contest to win a copy of it!

here's what some people are saying about it...

"The weeps is like someone coming up to you saying, 'You are a terrible piece of shit.'" — Fernanda Melchor

"I like this. It is nice to read. It makes me feel better about how lost I am." — Elija Wood

"In 2350 i will be dead and The Weeps will be taught in colleges and published as a commemorative hardback edition with a red ribbon for a bookmark." — Werner Herzog

if you haven't heard of cain it's a game based on knave and into the odd (or electric bastionland) that is about exploring dark and mysterious woods.

red solstice issue 3 has been released 

my friend jert launched their new publishing house!!! 

it's called space penguin ink 

they got some new never before zines for sale for troika, mothership, and mork borg.

captain blowfish has a really great blog post about it.

i recommend reading their blog.

captain blowfish also has a kickstarter going on right now with melsonia arts council for their new super hero ttrpg book Longshot City.

it fucking slays!

i thought it would be cool to chat with him about it here

4:36 PM me: im making anew blog post
and im trying to say something about longshot city
the blog post is mostly about like music concerts
is anything meaningful about music and when you wrote longshot city that
connects
like to you personally
musical inspiration or anything

4:48 PM Captain Blowfish: sure

4:48 PM me: i was thinking we could a chat about it that i can post

4:48 PM Captain Blowfish: hard to describe with a keyboard tho
yeah

4:49 PM me: like you did with that other blog

4:49 PM Captain Blowfish: oh
we can try

4:49 PM me: or if you wanna do a zoom call sometime i can record the audio
nothing like really serious or long

4:49 PM Captain Blowfish: we can try text now everything just feels hard when i'm drinking
sometimes lol
i'm sure it'll be fine
how should we start

4:50 PM me: thats goin on the record ^^^ lol
we already did heh

4:50 PM Captain Blowfish: fair
i mean unfair technically but whatever

4:50 PM me: super heroes and music
x-men the cartoon immediately comes into my mind

4:51 PM Captain Blowfish: oh sure i absolutely can hear that theme song every time i see the
jim lee era costumes
but i was thinking more about music that i've just always been into
i listen to a lot of pop punk for example. i don't mean popular punk by that, i
meansimple fast songs with three chords (four at most)
the ramones are essentially the definition of that, misfits are the sort of crossover
between that and the gothier stuff

4:53 PM me: yeah i always write to music, i feel like some people can't concentrate on writing
with music, especially something like punk

4:54 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah i'm like that with some music but that particular style of punk
to me is like water to a fish
but there's a lot of superhero content in that genre
subgenre whatever
phantom maggot by the lillingtons is an absolute classic

4:55 PM me: goldfinger - superman comes to mind

4:56 PM Captain Blowfish: fair
or even rem superman lol

4:56 PM me: im listneing to phantom maggot right now, that would be a cool super hero name

4:56 PM Captain Blowfish: he's right on time always fighting maggot crime

4:57 PM me: when you ran longshot city do you recall ever saying something like "i'm picturing
this song right now as yall do this"

4:58 PM Captain Blowfish: so i ran that campaign you were in over the course of almost three
years much of which i was pretty intoxicated for
but in a few instances yeah
not so much the pop punk thing tho

4:58 PM me: right, it was probably tom waits

4:58 PM Captain Blowfish: lol okay well yeah that too now that you mention it
but also some metal and some hip hop
what's that one big business song... mind the gap? i'll look it up but i wanna see if
i got it right
oh it's the drift i was way off

5:00 PM me: that has a cool album cover

5:01 PM Captain Blowfish: and then like don't come to the woods by backxwash and
guillotine by the coup both popped into my head when related things were going
on in the game
with tom waits mostly stuff like hoist that rag, the more rock & roll stuff, but that's
partly because of the style of campaign

5:02 PM me: this big business song is sick, i can totally see it playing as the party is planning
some shit out to infiltrate

5:02 PM Captain Blowfish: it could have easily been his earlier jazz stuff like romeo is
bleeding or small change if it was a more street level campaign

5:03 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah totally. just any kind of approach where they mostly at least
think they know what they're getting into and feel ready
which to be clear didn't happen often in that campaign lol

5:03 PM me: i was just reflecting on that
i remember you has some like tower
and part of it was a lab

5:04 PM Captain Blowfish: that would either be sentinel tower or the agritower

5:04 PM me: and one room i found myself in was like a lab that was conducting tests on
animals

5:04 PM Captain Blowfish: did it explode at the end of the session?

5:04 PM me: i think so yeah in a big boss fight with the gold guy
no the teleporting guy

5:05 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah that makes sense

5:05 PM me: but like i started letting these animals out of cages and then like this one creature
just ate all the other animals lol

5:05 PM Captain Blowfish: lol yeah that does sound like a game i would run

5:06 PM me: is longshot city something you plan to support for a long time with future
releases?

5:07 PM Captain Blowfish: i have a few adventures cooking for it. one of them is probably
ready for me to run, i'd need to check my notes
basically i feel like i'd be a fool not to at least give that a shot

5:09 PM me: true
so do you keep all of your notes from running games?
i know you had a really small notebook at one point or would design sessions on
stick it notes

5:10 PM Captain Blowfish: it's mostly ephemera in practice. i am an avatar of adhd

5:10 PM me: ephemera would also make a sick super hero name

5:10 PM Captain Blowfish: that's stuff that's for running games. stuff i'm keeping notes on to
actually try and publish something i keep for years

5:11 PM Captain Blowfish: her power is she can create things like green lantern that fade
away when she stops paying attention

5:11 PM Captain Blowfish: back to the music question i think i have listened to every single
genre i am aware of while writing this game
partly because the superhero genre contains every other genre within it

5:14 PM me: yeah i really liked when x-men would do that side stories

5:14 PM Captain Blowfish: mostly thanks to saint kirby

5:14 PM me: like stuff with wolverine and kitty pride

5:14 PM me: so you've been a bunch of wild shows
concerts
whats like the craziest thing you can recall from one currently

5:17 PM Captain Blowfish: one time i was in a pit for i think h2o and i knocked heads with
some kid by accident and i didn't move but he bounced off me and fell down at
least five feet away and then some big guy behind me picked me up and i was
crowdsurfing by accident trying to keep track of my wallet

more upliftingly another time before that it was the misfits with the jerry only + dez cadena + marky ramone lineup and some young kid, like maybe 5, with a pink mohawk got caught on stage in between songs (like he was up there to stagedive)
and he didn't know what to do, deer in headlights
jerry put his massive pro wrasslin arm over the kid's shoulders and they had this exchange:
hey kid didn't i meet you last time i was in pittsburgh?
Yeah
what did i tell you kid?
do good in school
pregnant pause
how you doin in school kid?
good
thunderous applause
the end

5:21 PM me: that's awesome
i think jerry only is vegan

5:21 PM Captain Blowfish: no idea
i've been told by vegans that cannibalism doesn't violate it btw, just sayin

5:23 PM me: why doesn't the kickstarter say you have an ennie lol

5:23 PM Captain Blowfish: at least two of those particular vegans were also texans which
makes sense
uhhhhh because dan didn't think to include bios and when he asked me to look
over the page i didn't either
jrat also has an ennie, he worked on early development. and it's basically leaving
money on the table not to talk about evlyn

5:26 PM me: her art style is instantly recognizable

5:27 PM Captain Blowfish: it is. i think the same is true of jecorey

5:27 PM me: i know she was a player in your years long campaign of longshot city

5:28 PM Captain Blowfish: boson's i have to look a little harder to be sure it's him but that's
not a bad thing by any means
she was, very early on
she basically gave me the idea for the k.o. table

5:28 PM me: jecorey did art on academies of the arcane too

5:28 PM Captain Blowfish: correct

5:28 PM me: the KO table is one of my favorite parts from playing the game with you

5:29 PM Captain Blowfish: i agree, it adds so much
what she noticed was that longshot's character creation being more involved than
troika's led to being a little more attached to the character
that combined with the absurd damage tables means people were dying too
much

5:32 PM me: yeah its cool how longshot city is building on the troika rules and evolving them

5:32 PM Captain Blowfish: i forget if it was her or me who was like what if they just come
back like superheroes do? if it was me i couldn't have gotten there without her
and i wouldn't have noticed that kind of problem as easily

5:32 PM me: im thinking it might give other people new ideas to do the same with their settings
is there a k.o. entry that like takes a player character and turns them into a
villain?
like as an NPC

5:35 PM Captain Blowfish: there are a few bait and switch things
lemme check if that's one
yes
recovered, revived, and brainwashed by the enemy, now your old pc is a villain
roll up a new one

5:38 PM me: i like that

5:38 PM Captain Blowfish: that's the only one specifically like that out of 36

5:38 PM me: yeah it makes sense to just have the one

5:38 PM Captain Blowfish: there's only like maybe six that actually end your character
mostly they just make you weirder

5:39 PM me: the k.o. table is awesome too because it really pushes people towards longer
game play
like campaigns
like being able to really get character growth for one

5:40 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah i think having the range of rogues' gallery npcs i did helped
with that too
like they already had killed the thanos equivalent by the time you joined

5:41 PM me: is there anything in the book on building up a base?

5:41 PM Captain Blowfish: yes there's starting bases and inventions and upgrades

5:41 PM me: hell yeah

5:42 PM Captain Blowfish: what is available in your starting base is defined by the wealth
category (on a scale of 1-3) of the richest member of the party
which is defined by the origin roll
so if you have someone with an inheritance you have like a tower downtown and
a helicopter and all kinda bullshit
or if everyone is struggling then you live in a not great apartment and get around
in a utility van
the inventions and upgrades are pretty simple mechanically, just skill rolls. The
only limiting factor is that you spend a point of maximum luck, permanently

5:45 PM me: could i invent something that grants luck? lol

5:46 PM Captain Blowfish: the playtest campaign started out with everyone struggling btw.
their first team name was the tenement superpals, but by the end of the first
session they could never go back there again

5:46 PM me: was that when they killed all the cops?

5:46 PM Captain Blowfish: then they switched to the van superpals and totalled the van
no that was the first two or three sessions

5:48 PM Captain Blowfish: there's nothing that says you can't, but if i was running the game i
would probably put some kind of monkey's paw effect on that
that kind of thing might get the attention of cosmic entities off the top of my head

5:49 PM me: oh that's a good one
fuck, so you got cosmic entities in the book too

5:49 PM Captain Blowfish: only a couple of the npcs in the book qualify as that

5:50 PM me: ok so now you've got something i'll hold you to for future releases

5:50 PM Captain Blowfish: there are a few that i used in the playtest campaign, but i think i'd
like to explore them further in their own supplement sometime down the line
yeah pretty much lol

5:51 PM me: ive got some ideas percolating for stuff id like to put together for adventures in
longshot city
i definitely plan to force this game on my friends that arent too familiar with ttrpgs

5:52 PM Captain Blowfish: it's an easy one
you might need a tiny bit more buy in than in troika during character generation, if
the archetype and origin don't immediately make sense together for the player,
but that's like on the level of choosing a name honestly

5:53 PM me: yeah but once they get started i think they will definitely be invested

5:54 PM Captain Blowfish: you've made a few characters in it, how smoothly did you feel that
step of marrying the two rolls and settling on an aesthetic went?

5:55 PM me: i was a scale shifter on my first roll as an achretype for one character
big as a whale small as an ant or something

5:56 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah the ant man powerset

5:56 PM me: but my other roll for origin or maybe it was complication
one of those had my character become an alien
that had crash landed

5:56 PM Captain Blowfish: that would have been origin

5:57 PM me: im looking at the google doc lol
yeah i was an alien soldier
and i had a -3 luck modifier cuz i was struggling

5:58 PM Captain Blowfish: that only applies to wealth tests

5:58 PM me: oh yeah it says resources heh

5:59 PM Captain Blowfish: so yeah to answer my own question, i think that archetype and
origin make a lot of sense together without having to make any effort at all

6:00 PM me: oh back to that
it reminds me of the life paths from traveller
ive played more traveller character creation than i have of just traveller in general
lol

6:01 PM Captain Blowfish: oh man if you just rolled on the ko table like 1d6 times during
chargen it would be exactly like that

6:02 PM me: that's really interesting actually
that's like a whole new mini game or soemthing for solo play
we're already thinking of hacks lol

6:04 PM Captain Blowfish: i mean i ran habergoun with it for awhile already when we were
doing mass combat

6:05 PM me: yeah that was really fun
a highlight of the campaign for me

6:06 PM Captain Blowfish: probably cause you were soccer kicking your way
throughplatoons like they were kittens

6:06 PM me: heh
whats the last comic you read?

6:07 PM Captain Blowfish: well i most recently re-read "jack kirby: the epic life of the king of
comics" by tom scioli
i had started hate watching that new stan lee documentary on the disney plus

6:08 PM me: i feel like i wanna rewatch the peacemaker show

6:08 PM Captain Blowfish: and i got like 15 minutes in before i felt like was drowning under
all the lies

6:09 PM me: was stan lee a good guy or a bad guy?
ive heard so much shit surrounding him

6:09 PM Captain Blowfish: so i went back to that kirby book to refresh myself on the details of
exactly how and why he was lying about each thing
bad guy

6:09 PM me: like stealing ideas or not sharing pay

6:09 PM Captain Blowfish: both of those things
also ended up in charge of marvel by getting jack kirby and joe simon fired by the
parent magazine company
by the time kirby came back it was about to be cancelled entirely from what i
understand

6:11 PM me: ok, so don't waste my time by pirating that disney documentary

6:11 PM Captain Blowfish: eh you can pirate it just assume that every single thing in it is a lie
at least for the first 15 minutes or so
"i made up spiderman! i made up the hulk! the army saw my talent and ordered
me away from the front line to write instructional comics!"

6:13 PM me: oh god, does he talk about being in combat in the army?

6:13 PM Captain Blowfish: no the records would immediately prove that wrong
even back then if you're as famous as he wanted to be
kirby has occasionally talked about combat but he was actually in it

6:15 PM me: maybe im making this up, but i swear you told me the kirby style of art
the kirby explosion or whatever
was directly inspired by like grenades or something
is that true?

6:15 PM Captain Blowfish: i think it is. this is my conclusion tho
he saw artillery shells exploding firsthand in france
and the shrapnel from those explosions is what the kirby crackle looks like more
than anything to me

6:16 PM me: the kirby crackle
the way you explain it makes hella sense
it's cool that he was able to make something artistic from that experience despite
having to suffer from it at the same time
im just assuming he was fucking up from war though now

6:18 PM Captain Blowfish: i think it informed everything from then on
nah everyone was fucked up from that war

6:19 PM me: for sure

6:20 PM Captain Blowfish: and the only person you could talk to about it was your faith
leader if you had one

6:20 PM me: thats an aspect that gets really overlooked

6:20 PM Captain Blowfish: the fact that the resources we have now weren't available then?

6:20 PM me: exactly

6:21 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah it used to be that ptsd was just normalized for a generation
after any big war
that's a big part of why the wild west happened, everyone had ptsd from the civil
war
or happened the way it did at least

6:23 PM me: i always get some kind of new insight talking with you i feel like
a new perspective that is

6:24 PM Captain Blowfish: well thanks man

6:24 PM me: i've been reading silver surfer black, per your recommendation a couple months
back

6:25 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah that's some really solid work
soundtrack to that is prog rock
probably like hawkwind and rush and his name is alive

6:25 PM me: what about coheed?

6:25 PM Captain Blowfish: hmmmmmm okay so i know all of their albums are different but
i've only heard a couple

6:26 PM me: yeah i didnt follow them after like their 3rd album or something like that

6:26 PM Captain Blowfish: there was a series a while back tho where there was a continent
full of hulks except for steve rogers who had a shield an axe and devil dinosaur
as a mount

6:26 PM me: wait what
like a universe where everyone was a hulk?

6:27 PM Captain Blowfish: yeah that was part of the whole secret wars 2 thing
well a continent
the universes had all collapsed because the incursions got to be too much for the
Illuminati
dr doom was king of the one remaining universe and his enforcers were the thor
corps
planet hulk probably would have been a better example

6:29 PM me: immortal hulk is really great, i need to finish that, have you read any of it?

6:29 PM Captain Blowfish: only the first volume so far
it's on my list tho, i dig it so far

6:29 PM me: i really liked how you had Constantine as an major npc in our campaign hahwe
would just show up at his apartment and raid his fridge lol
most of the food was spoiled but i dont think it stopped some of us lol

6:30 PM Captain Blowfish: lol yeah that was because i too drunk and high to realize i should
just use mad tom instead
same thing in terms of how the game went

6:31 PM me: i was drinking with you during most of the games

6:31 PM Captain Blowfish: i just managed to avoid any characters that weren't mine except
him you know? lol

6:32 PM me: i know you're always there for me to chat with and likewise

6:32 PM Captain Blowfish: but hellblazer has been my favorite mainstream comic for like 30
something years so fair enough

6:33 PM me: i need to read some of it eventually
im a big fan of swampthing and i know they team up a lot

6:33 PM Captain Blowfish: start with all his engines
he was introduced in swamp thing
volume three i think?
of alan moore's run

6:33 PM Captain Blowfish: his artist wanted a character to draw who looked kinda like sting
and full circle back to music
you never asked me about the crow soundtrack

6:34 PM me: dude!
the stone temple pilots song on that cd is my favorite

6:35 PM Captain Blowfish: oh come on burn by the cure obviously

6:35 PM me: i do love the police

6:35 PM Captain Blowfish: narc

6:35 PM me: im not familiar with sting's solo stuff
i have read the crow graphic novel

6:36 PM Captain Blowfish: i don't like either particularly tbh. they kinda feel like the same
thing as like generation x and billy idol in that i don't care about either

6:37 PM me: i think the police is more nostalgia for me, reminds me of my mom type of shit

6:38 PM Captain Blowfish: the crow is solid. a little rough around the edges, clearly a labor of
love, but solid and focused

6:38 PM me: do you know about the creator?

5:39 PM Captain Blowfish: i feel like there was something fucked up but i haven't thought
about it in long enough to not remember

6:39 PM me: he wrote the crow after losing his fiance to a drink driver
and he's a marine lol

6:39 PM Captain Blowfish: right. yeah that all tracks

6:39 PM me: any last words before i get offline to have some dinner and you most likely sit by
the fire and make a 'pizza' ?

6:40 PM Captain Blowfish: stop cop city

6:42 PM me: fuck that's going to change everything

6:42 PM Captain Blowfish: 🇻🇳

(if you'd like to support me there are links on the right to purchase zines)

(i'm open to taking art commissions)