I haven’t written about gaming in a while, but my group’s recent return to King Arthur: Pendragon has inspired me a bit.

This might be the best role playing game I’ve ever played. Our group played it briefly many years ago, then tried again about three years ago and really got into it. Eventually we needed a break, but we all knew we’d be back to continue playing through The Great Pendragon Campaign. After three years of playing a bunch of different games (some of which were great, and some of which just didn’t click for me) we’ve recently picked up where we left off and it’s been a lot of fun getting back into 6th century Logres again.

It’s a complicated game, at least the way we play it, where we spend as much time keeping track of our Manors and the goings on in the extended family of our knights as we do going on adventures as knights. But that complexity, and what it brings in unexpected emergent story is a lot of the appeal for us.

In Pendragon, at least the way we’re playing, your “character” is actually your Manor and family more so than any one knight you might be playing at any given time. It’s a game about in which you play out multiple generations of a family. Whatever knight you’re playing as your main character now has a good chance of dying or becoming maddened and disappearing for a time (or sometimes permanently!). I’ve lost a whole string of characters, but luckily you keep track of your family tree and extended family, and their goings on so you usually have an heir or another relative who can take over. I’ve had a brother-in-law who’s taken over Cholderton Manor several times to keep it running until one of the younger heirs is old enough to be Knighted and take over.

The Great Pendragon Campaign takes place over many years. A given session is likely to cover one or occasionally two years. The game takes place in different phases. Usually with an Adventure or Battle of some kind, and then phases where you manage your Manor and roll for and find out about family events and some other role playing opportunities. You build up improvements to your manor, fix improvements that have been destroyed by various random events, deal with unexpected events and generally just try to keep the whole thing going as well as you can. Family members get sick and die, they get married and have children, they get into trouble in ways you may need to bail them out of (or not!), and generally add a lot of interesting flavor to the game and the story. We’ve had some players who had never ending weird problems with keeping the peace at their manor (fiery Christian priests opposed by Pagan druids, a mine who’s ownership was in dispute between two characters, wyvern attacks, etc.) and others who’s family’s were like something out of a soap opera.

The game has lots of different add-ons and ways you can make the game more complex or simple depending on what your group wants. We’ve tended to go for more complexity, though at times we’ve gone too far and had to reign it back a bit, but it’s a game with lots of different ways to do the same thing (I think we’ve been through at least three different economic and manor systems before going back to the Book of the Manor as our preferred economic system), and it lends itself to a lot of customization and house-ruling without breaking.

This is already getting longer than I planned and I haven’t gotten into half of the stuff I like about this game, so I may have to do a series of posts. But suffice it to say it’s the campaign I’ve played in that has created some of the best memories. There isn’t any campaign that we reference as often when talking about games. The game just creates so many great stories!

I guess I would be remiss if i didn’t end this with a short thank you to the recently departed Greg Stafford who created the game. Thank you for such an amazing game Greg! 🎲

Note: This post contains some affiliate links to Drivethrurpg.com. If you purchase anything through those links I’ll get a very very small commission from DriveThru.

A friend of mine over on twitter retweeted a video of Patti Labelle’s disastrous 1996 National Tree Lighting Ceremony performance.. I’m not sure how, but I’d never seen this or heard about it. It’s amazing. I think I have a new Christmas season tradition.

During the long weekend after Thanksgiving we got our bikes fixed (and cleaned) up, and went for a couple of short rides. They went well! We’re hoping to make it a more regular thing. At some point we may even work our way up to going to work on our bikes (at least occasionally).

Here are a few pics of our newly spiffed up bikes!

So I’ve very much been enjoying being able to follow Mastodon users in micro.blog, but I have noticed a few issues with the implementation that I assume are still being worked out by @manton

Pictures Pictures in Mastodon posts don’t always seem to display in the micro.blog timeline. They seem to sometimes, and I even recall early on one post that was empty, and then a little while later the picture showed up, but it seems like most of the time pictures in Mastodon Posts aren’t displayed in the micro.blog timeline. I’ve seen a lot of seemingly empty posts, or posts that clearly refer to a picture, and I then have to fire up my Mastodon client and look at them from my mastodon.social account to see what it’s about. I’d like to be able to just use my micro.blog account most of the time.

Conversations I generally have my micro.blog preferences set to only show replies to people I also follow, as it can get to be a bit much to see parts of conversations that don’t involve me all the time. But I also like to be able to click on “conversation” on a post and see what others have said about it, including people I don’t follow. Unfortunately, the conversation feature doesn’t seem to work quite right with Mastodon users. 1) The biggest issue is that any replies to other mastodon users, including ones I follow, don’t get displayed if I have my preferences set to only show replies to people I also follow. 2) In either situation if I click on “conversation” on a Mastodon post, I generally don’t see any of the replies to the post from other Mastodon users, though sometimes I’ll see some if I have my preferences set to show all replies, but it seems to be inconsistent in either case.

Ideally in the Micro.blog timeline Mastodon users and micro.blog users (and presumably also Indyweb webmention users, though I haven’t see any of those yet) should all work pretty much the same way. If I follow a Mastodon user, and someone else I follow on Mastodon posts a reply to that user I’d like to see it. And in any case if I click on “conversation” on a post by a Mastodon user I’d like to see all replies to that post, wherever they came from.

I have a few other things I’m thinking about with this integration but they aren’t so much bugs as thoughts about how to implement things (and whether to implement them), but the above two issues feel like bugs or things that aren’t quite finished yet, and are causing the most frustration for me.

In the end, even in the state it’s in now, I’m very much enjoying the ActivityPub integration and think it’s a great new feature that’s got me even more excited about micro.blog. I’d just like to see it be as good as it can be!

I’m very excited about the announcement from @manton yesterday about the ways that micro.blog is now supporting ActivityPub and Mastodon. I’ve set up ActivityPub for my blog here and I’m still working out how everything works, but if it works out it could help simplify my online social-identity.

I’m glad to see native cross-posting to Mastodon built in, but I think that AcitivityPub integration is the more interesting and potentially useful aspect of things and that part I’ll mostly be talking about in this post.

I’ve been playing around with Mastodon through an account at mastodon.social, but I’ve been thinking about setting up my own Mastodon instance to have more control over my identity and how I want to run things. (Not that mastodon.social has done anything to make me nervous, I just like the idea of controlling my own usage and identity online and being able to use my own domain name). But this ActivityPub integration may make that far less necessary. I’ve already followed nearly everyone I follow on Mastodon here on micro.blog so we’ll see how that all goes.

There are some aspects of the integration I’m already seeing that I think need to be worked out or I have to figure out my own feelings on.

A big one is content warnings. This is a feature of Mastodon that I think its really neat (though I feel sometimes it’s overused a little). You can basically put text or a picture behind a curtain with a brief description of what it’s about (one of the biggest I see is “politics”) so you have to actually click a button to see the hidden message. This is a pretty neat feature, and one I would support micro.blog adding, though I understand concerns about making posting and reading harder, so whether micro.blog adds that for native posts is an open question, but it does cause problems when you’re following someone on Mastodon who uses them.

I’m already seeing posts from some Mastodon users that just say “politics” in my micro.blog timeline. That… isn’t very helpful or interesting. Setting aside whether micro.blog native posts will have the option to use content warnings, I think there are a few options for dealing with the problem of content filtered posts showing up in micro.blog timelines: 1) Micro.blog could add a way to expand those posts to show the hidden text (I think this would be my preferred solution). 2) Micro.blog could turn the text above the content warning into a link that would send you to the post on the web (this might or might not work well depending on privacy settings and how instances are set up?) 3) Just ignore the content filter and send the full text of the post to micro.blog (so instead of just “Politics” I’d see “Politics” followed by whatever was under the content warning filter (I’m guessing this would probably be the simplest solution).

Another one (that I’ve already spoken with @Manton about) is how ActivityPub posts will show up in Mastodon timelines. On Mastodon you have different levels of privacy (not just public or private). For example, I generally made my Mastodon posts “unlisted.” Which means anyone can see them, but they’re not sent out into public timelines, so someone would have to seek out my posts to find them (or if they follow me they’d see them). I liken this to a robots.txt file on your website telling search engines how you’d like them to index (or not index) your content. I know micro.blog (intentionally) doesn’t support private posts, but I think there’s some middle ground in the different ways Mastodon posts are handled and I’d like to see some options for setting up ActivityPub posts are sent out to the fediverse that support at least some of those options.

There are some other things that I think need to be worked out/thought through too, but I’ll wait a bit to talk about those. This post has gotten long enough as it is!

Anyway, it’s still just the first 24 hours since this feature was turned on so we’ll see how it works out. I’m excited though.

I’m especially excited by another example of how ActivityPub and other such technologies can bring together disparate communities and platforms in interesting ways and help to support a more decentralized, but still connected, web. That’s a web where people have more choice and control over their own content, which is a very good thing!

I’m still figuring things out but if you’re on Mastodon you can follow me here @droct@brandonshire.blog, and I can follow you back and we can talk and stuff! I’m not going to delete my old Mastodon account any time soon either, though I imagine for now at least it’ll see a lot less activity, but if you want its at: @droct@mastodon.social

Just a quick comic book recommendation. I recently downloaded and read the first (and for the moment only) issue of These Savage Shores on the recommendation of the guys from House to Astonish. Boy I’m glad I did! The art (by Sumit Kumar) is REALLY gorgeous, and the story (by Ram V) was great (and looks to be going in interesting directions). I’ve already set up a subscription to it.

The issue opens with a vampire in London in 1766 being banished by the other vampires for being too indiscreet. He’s sent to India. He arrives with a fairly arrogant attitude about what his place in this new society is going to be. He quickly learns that India has its own monsters. I won’t say anything more as I don’t want to spoil it (if you want to hear more before buying listen to the above linked episode of House to Astonish they do a great job of discussing it without any real spoilers). It’s very much worth reading. I’ll leave you with a couple of beautiful images from the comic. 📚