I don’t do these regularly, so here’s a catch-up post. I might throw out another one later, because I have Thoughts on a Thing that I want to get out ahead of tomorrow, but we’ll see how that goes.

Pi NAS

I bought a Pi 5 a few months back and it was one of the Uber editions with 16GB of RAM and an M.2 drive in place of the standard SD card. I had always wanted to journey into this foreboding land, but not because I fancy myself some kind of Linux cowboy, bucking the trends and feeling smug about it, but because they’re cheap and can do stuff that I might not want to have done on my main PC. Right now, it’s my Docker machine, running Appwrite for development, Homebridge so I can control my home automation devices from my phone, and a Foundry VTT server. Aside from that, it’s not doing a hell of a lot.

I have a multi-TB HDD connected to my main computer here, but it’s a PITA and I hate it. So as I was perusing things to 3D print, I came across a lot of Pi NAS cases. I then found a decent one that’s apparently identifiable on sight by a lot of folks, so I watched a few videos by it’s designer and have decided to put together a Pi NAS of my own.

I have an additional Pi 5 (only 8GB this time, and running a standard SD card) and the proscribed Radxa Penta-SATA Hat that allows for 4+1 SATA drives to be added, and have printed a small form factor case. I just need some screws and, of course, the drives. I’m going with 4 1TB SSDs, which I’ll configure in RAID formation, and will move my HDD archives to that device. My wife scanned her family photos a few years back and is hosting them on Dropbox, so I’ll move those over as well.

I’m thinking about connecting the HDD to the Pi as the “archive” section, leaving the SSDs as the “active” section. I’ll put my current projects on the SSDs and, gawd willing, figure out a way to move files from the SSD to the HDD after they haven’t been touched in some way after a time, keeping the SSD open and maintaining a decent storage shed of files that I might need but certainly do not want to lose.

Satisfactory

My friend @CakedCrusader shares my love of open world games, and he had mentioned that Satisfactory was on sale. I urged him to pick it up because I owned it already, and one purchase and a bit of a headache later, he set up a server at home that we’ve been playing on.

Truth is, Satisfactory gives me gut pains. I had never gotten very far because placing the machines always causes me consternation. “Is this the best place to place this?” I ask myself. “Will I regret placing it here later?” I usually quit before I find out, but in playing with a friend and having gotten a lot further this time than in times past, I can say with certainty “yes, I do have regrets”. Thankfully he’s the kind of player who rushes ahead, so he’s unlocked a whole lot of things, while my job has been setting up the base for production.

The Secret World TTRPG

OK. Here we go.

I have had a massive mental roadblock for the past, um, five years or so that has really prevented me from being as imaginative as I used to be. I feel like I know why, and I am working on fixing that, but throwing caution to the wind, the recent release of Foundry VTT version of The Secret World TTRPG from Star Anvil Studios has forced my hand. I have been working hard on coming up with a homebrew adventure, but where other designers might coast along, I’ve been really struggling every step of the way.

Coming up with the main narrative has been relatively easy, but I tend to think about these things in terms of narrative. As the author, I know where things start, roughly how they progress, and theoretically where they end, or could end. What I’m not good at is slowing that down so the players don’t just steamroll their way through logical events that connect the dots and reveal the final picture. To do this, I have been relying on two different approaches: narrative stonewalling and side quests.

Narrative stonewalling is when, say, a key NPC who the GM knows has information critical to the plot has to have that information pulled out of them. My natural inclination is to reward PC’s who ask the NPCs the right questions with the right answers. I need to not. NPCs need to be cagey, they need to distrust the players or, as we often see in crime dramas, need to consider certain key information irrelevant until it becomes relevant for the pace of the story. Side quests are, of course, the other things players get to do instead of doing what they’re supposed to do. While I don’t like the idea of an NPC asking a team of high-powered Anima users to get a cat out of a tree or some mundane shit like that, TSW is notable for having some pretty cool puzzles. A side quest need not be a task given to the PCs by an NPC, but it could be some kind of activity that forces the PCs to slow down and figure things out, to put pieces together, and to draw conclusions. Bonus points if the conclusions they make are completely off base, because I think that would be a mark of a well planned adventure from a GM’s point of view.

Star Citizen

4.3 has dropped and I don’t remember if I’ve talked about it yet. The good news is that it seems that a lot of the freight elevator crap has been fixed — not totally, mind you, but it’s significantly better. I and @CakedCrusader and @Mindstrike were able to take some of the cargo ship defense missions with a decent amount of success. Sadly, when sharing a “Save Stanton” mission among a group, the SCU total is divided amongst the participants, so none of us have gotten a good amount of progress when running these as a party, but it’s been fun to have a group space combat scenario to play through.

I haven’t really been in SC a lot recently, having been working on the TSW adventure and playing Satisfactory. Last night I went to the Stanton-Pyro gateway to pick up some of the radiation suits in a bid to get @CakedCrusader and/or @Mindstrike to the ASD facilities which I did on the PTU (the first step only) but which none of us have done since they were released to the PU.

In tangental news, No Man’s Sky continues to put Star Citizen to shame by releasing an update which allows players to construct their own ships, Starfield style, walk around in them, exit them for some EVA action, and even skydive from them holy crap. I picture this metaphorically as Chris Roberts on a tennis court, ready to hit some lobs from a ball-delivery machine, only to find that the ball delivery machine was replaced by Hello Games who is just saturating the court with tennis ball after tennis ball, causing Roberts to cringe at the back of the court for safety.

And finally I’ve switched my loyalties from Bored Gamer to Space Tomato Gaming. Bored Gamer now just reads patch notes, while Space Tomato provides some of the slickest video analysis that’s light on opinion but heavy on data culled from the community. And the dude has a voice like butter. I only mention this now because his latest video, “Star Citizen is Entering it’s Vanity Phase”, is a hot take I didn’t realize until he said it. While I appreciate Bored Gamer’s occasional foray into hot topics gleaned from Spectrum and beyond, Space Tomato has some really well considered perspectives on the project.