#pomegranateseed

[eggpaw]

sorry for being inactive i never look at tumblr these days. take some kitty art as an apology

[ozonenaturals]

Spice are essential ingredients of our food and eatables. But their use is not limited to food only. It serves many other functions in industry like preservative. Ingredients of spice are extracted and used in various application in food industry. Oils and other ingredients are obtained from spice for various uses. Oils are extracted as concentrated viscous liquids form of the spices. They can be extracted with non-aqueous solvents followed by removal of the solvent by vacuum distilation. These spice derivatives have the same character, flavour and property of the spice it is obtained from. It contains both the volatile and non volatile constituents of the spices. They fully reproduce the character of the respective spice and spice oils. Oils can replace whole/ground spices without impairing any flavour and aroma characteristic. Spice oil guarantee superior quality of flavour & aroma and are complete and balanced, consistent and standardised. Read more : https://bit.ly/2Mxf5Hm #SeaBuckthorn #food #Oregano #Lemon #PomegranateSeed #Thyme #SCFE #CO2 #Extract #naturaloils #ozonenaturals #Orange #Ingredients (at Ozone Naturals) https://www.instagram.com/p/BzueREblnyg/?igshid=1xvk5srsm0pf

[gamenightswith-blog]

Changing Expectations

Hello Adventurers! As some of you may have read we took a break from our normal game sessions last week to play an extra special haunted house game of Dread. The w has already gone over the gist of what happened from his perspective as GM, but I found something very interesting happening as a player in the game. I played the Insider on the bank job and as such constructed a formal persona around the character. Cassandra Elanore Winscotts, codename The Lady, was someone who looked out for themselves. As it was a stand-alone game and I have tremendous trouble coming up with character concepts I decided to play towards an archetype of Femme Fatale. She was supposed to be out for herself, while she understands the value of teamwork to pull off something like the bank job, she is a strict survivalist and doesn’t hold herself down with petty loyalties. Every time in the past she has done so, she was disrespected, mistreated and burned and she would certainly not undergo that again. As it was a one-shot I didn’t care to think about character progression or about getting into her head too much. After all, it’s Dread and if the characters didn’t die by the end they certainly would be shelved and likely never played again. So my expectations for the game was a fun, frightful romp in a haunted house playing a stone cold classy but selfish survivalist who wouldn’t go out of her way to hurt anyone… but certainly wouldn’t go out of her way to help anyone either. In fact, on her sheet one of the questions was “You sold out one set of friends, but would you do it again to survive the night?” and the Lady scoffed. “Friends? A concept of the naïve.” Funny thing happened over the course of the short chronicle though, and at the end of the game I had to add a caveat “Except Ghost.” Which was unexpected. I hadn’t designed the character to progress in any way. I designed the character to survive the night and hopefully get away with some of the Bitcoins they’d hijacked, but once mortal danger was introduced it seemed as though there were only two people who forgot about the score and simply were trying to survive: The Lady and Ghost. Ghost was our getaway driver and a closet witch, who was more practical minded than nearly anyone else in the gang. After a couple of encounters and turns it became clear that the party was going to split. While none of us wanted to wander alone, each of us had different ideas of how to survive the haunting. I have to say, that I will give folks in horror movies a little more credit as long as they are separated in the head of something going on because we tried our best not to separate but ended up splitting the party a total of six times that evening. The w tried desperately to reunite us each time but… players what are you gonna do eh? Ghost and Lady were the only two who seemed to forget about getting rich and only wanted out with their necks intact, as such they ended up spending a lot of time in the house together following the same path, which we considered to be the “main group” considering we didn’t deviate but everyone else kept going down side passages and trap doors. Lady started out not believing in magic and ghosts and the like but ended up with a renewed respect for her mystical grandmother Elanore and for witches like Ghost. It was odd how the tense sense and the hand-shaking tower pulls pushed Ghost and Lady together, after all Ghost had a similar friend question to Lady and also answered that friends were dumb. Neither of us expected character growth in the end, but both of us got it. This raises to me an important notion: Changing expectations. As this was just a one-shot, changing expectations holds little weight to the situation, after all once the game is done it is done. There is no pick up and resume next week. However what happens when expectations and characters change in the course of a longer chronicle? This is a difficult situation to find yourself in because the changed expectations and character play may no longer fit the story given or the original tone of the game. What then, adventurer? Do you push forward without concern? Do you stifle the growth and continue to play the old persona that matched the tone of the game? Or can games shift in tone and expectation and still maintain? I would like to think that discussion with the GM and perhaps group may be required at that point. If you find the character or game no longer meshing or you unable to get back into things you used to because of a changed expectation or perspective. I think it’s important to keep in mind the other players styles and not expect the entire game to shift just because your character has, but perhaps once a shift takes place one should talk about it with their group. After all, the rest of the group may have felt a similar shift and would like to take the game in the new direction, or perhaps it is just your character and elements of the shift could be incorporated without ruining the tone and style for the rest of the group. That’s why touching base with your players and your GM every once in a while is, I think, something quite important. Just to check in and make sure everyone is one the same page. In gaming things can change fairly quickly, because of the nature of stories even if you don’t want change it will be hard to deny it in the end. As such, it’s also important for continued communication about expectations of the game happen once a perceived change takes place. What about you Adventurers? Do you ever find yourself with a character radically different from what you expected? A story that went in an entirely different direction? How do you deal with these shifts of expectation? 

[gamenightswith-blog]

Breathing Life Into Characters

Hey there Adventurers! Pom’s back and, well, still healing. My ribs were jolted way out of place again and I have muscle tension and whiplash from the whole thing. Concentration is still fleeting so I apologize if the article is sub-par for my part. I wanted to share things I was thinking about lately while comparing my play styles to others I’ve seen. Perhaps it was because of my free-form RP roots or perhaps because even before that I was writing and even before that I was storytelling, but I’ve always felt the need to breathe life into my characters. Not simply give them a fairly deep and well-rounded personality and build, but even more than that. I’ve always been one to think about what happens during the “down-time”.  Between Adventures, what does my character get up to? I’ve always found these details to be important to the overall story. After all, the action is only part of the character’s story and as much as I am working to resolve the metaplot I also play to see how my character can grow and experience the changes. I’ve always found that this requires some processing time, some reflection on the characters part, about the events and how it impacts their worldview. As such, I’ve always kept little side-projects on my characters. Either stories that allows me to dig more into their mental states than game allows me to express, or personal journals or dairies the character keeps to even going so far as to map out the floorplan of a character’s house. Others I’ve played with in the past have never thought of anything of the sort. As far as they are concerned their character doesn’t exist “between games”. Something like watching a television episode where it doesn’t show the down-time between episodes, there is nothing to show the down-time between games. This concept was jarring the first time I heard it. I’ve never not given characters a rich and full life outside of their scenarios. Not doing so, for me, takes away some of my ability to understand and as such act the role of the character I’m representing. To see someone else so easily slip into roles without that sort of deeper understanding of the character’s life is simply foreign to me. So it got me curious about the various ways in which we breathe life into our characters. Sometimes we are simply able to have the character spring forth at a moment’s notice, othertimes it’s a struggle to get in the headspace of the character. For some it’s easier to keep track of the daily life of the character between sessions, for others it’s easier to simply pretend that stuff does not exist. Adventurers, my question then is how do you breathe life into your characters? What’s your process?

[gamenightswith-blog]

Characters You May Not Know: Kailius Cantilleon

Hello Adventurers! Time for another Characters You May NOT Know! This one has been a character near and dear to my heart and is one of my first roleplaying characters ever! Excitement!  Recently he's gotten a new name, a new look and has officially become a Legacy Character as I've updated him for a new setting. So here I would like to share with you the origins of Kailius Cantilleon or "Experiment 001".

Officially this demi-human has no name, only a designation marking him as the sole creation of a failed bioengineering company. SAL Laboratories was funded and founded by trillionaire Samuel Augustus Lattimore who was himself not a scientist. Unlike other corporations of the era which were searching for paramilitary weapons or to change human understanding of the world, SAL Labs. was interested in only one thing: Immortality. Mr. Lattimore wasn’t old by any stretch of the imagination, but he knew that those days would soon slip away until he was nothing but a feeble old man.

Samuel was eager to  test this new technology and develop a way to keep himself not only alive, but young and vibrant forever. After his projects were turned down by both EGO and TAB, Mr. Lattimore took it upon himself to start his own research company.

He bribed those he could away from the leading companies and assembled his own team of scientists. SAL Labs. Had state-of-the-art technology and experiments were conducted with Lattimore’s own genetic samples. After all, his goal was to obtain immortality but he never said about sharing with anyone else.

The first and only living experiment was 001. Not given a name and isolated from all but the scientists who did the experiment. None of whom believed in demi-human rights. Lattimore himself had no love of the creature, in fact he had nothing but rage. While he knew he was giving the scientists his own samples, he was unaware that thing was going to look like him. As such, Lattimore himself never came to see his demi-human progeny.

Tests on the experiment had progressed for many years and over the years there was no sign that he experiment was aging. He was as young and hail as he ever had been, and indeed, even somewhat stronger than before.  Everything seemed to be going according to plan.

Until the night Samuel Augustus Lattimore was ready to receive his first injection of the Immortality serum. The scientists had created a breakthrough with 001. All evidence suggested that if Lattimore received carefully measured injections of 001’s Demi-Lifeblood, the substance that drives all demi-humans,  it would bond with his own cellular structure and he would halt the aging process.  As long as Experiment 001 was alive to give blood “donations” every month, so too would Samuel be alive. Of course Mr. Lattimore had every intention of having his scientists continue the experiments and remove the need for 001 to exist at all.

No one truly knows what happened that night, as the only witnesses are now deceased. Police reports detailed a gruesome scene . In the laboratory there was hardly a foot that wasn’t dripping with the blood of the slain scientists who were at first unrecognizable as each was savaged as though by some wild beast.

The worst of it, however, was in Mr. Lattimore’s bedchamber. Samuel himself was found, torn literally to pieces with fragments scattered around haphazardly, except for one deliberate piece. Mr. Lattimore’s head was impaled on a broken post of the bedframe. The words “Never Apart Again, Father” were written in blood upon the wall above the bed. The police never found the culprit behind the gruesome murders that day but have long suspected it was some Demi-human experiment gone awry. Conditions reported from the laboratory caused outrage for demi-human rights activists the world over who demanded accountability for the crimes of the remaining corporations. The outcry was fueled as much by fear as it was compassion. Demi-humans were beginning to outclass humans in every respect except for civil liberties, and the last thing the populace wanted was angry vengeful demi-humans vowing to kill all humans. Despite this, however, Experiment 001 was never seen to attack other humans. Before the police lost the trail early tracking reports did align demi-human killings in 001’s wake. Authorities has refused to comment on the matter and soon the investigation ran cold.

Whether Experiment 001 is still out in the world or whether he has expired is still a mystery.

[gamenightswith-blog]

Sex and Gaming

Last week the w shared his thoughts on crossplaying from a GMs perspective and touched on a subject I’ve been thinking about for a while: sex and sexuality within roleplaying games. There are a surprising few amount of gaming books and systems that deal with sex and sexual situations. 

Sexual interaction can be intimidating to some, others find it distasteful within the game setting, others simply don’t want to engage even in a fictional setting with their friends. But I wonder if there really is no place for sex in gaming, or if it’s simply not handled very often. Perhaps this falls under a broader cultural context where we seem to be far more comfortable with violence and death than we are with sexual acts. Sometimes I wonder if this is actually appropriate.

Sex is a difficult subject to tackle and I would not think any less of those who prefer it not to come up in game or who simply don’t play with these themes. I, however, have always used roleplaying as a way to explore themes and scenarios and I saw no reason to back away from an exploration of sexual themes. Thus the article today.

Now, I’m sure that a lot of folks saw one of the most realistic portrayals of tabletop roleplaying on TV in the episode Advanced Dungeons & Dragons on Community. Many adventurers I’ve talked to adored how everything was portrayed… except for when Abed and Annie had their montage of sexual exploits during the game session. Indeed, the length of the scene and the apparent detail they went in to were certainly played up for comedic effect, but it actually brings a very strong question of why seeing our hobby being portrayed as violent is perfectly okay but when it becomes sexual we distance ourselves from it. One answer I tend to come up on is that no one really plays sex right, even if there is a “fade to black” rule when it comes to the details. Sex tends to be seen as an amusing diversion, a joke or just something to put notches on a character’s belt. I’ve fallen into this issue myself! Especially in new World of Darkness where one can have a Virtue and Vice with Lust as an option for the Vice it seems like sexuality would get more facetime. But often it becomes either a joke or another utility. I wonder though, if this happens because sex is bared from the roleplay experience. Without being able to give it detail and depth, it tends to get played lightly and just touched on, which often pushes it to the realm of comedic relief. I had a character whose vice was lust and made the mistake of the first few times a new character was introduced to ask “Are they pretty!?” and it became a running gag to the rest of the group I couldn’t climb out of. Now, characters treating sex casually isn’t the same as players making it into a joke. I have had characters in open relationships, I’ve had promiscuous characters. How casual your character treats sex does not make the game devolve into sex jokes. There is nothing wrong with a character using their sexuality to their advantage either, in the right circumstances and as long as it fits the rest of the character. But like life, I find that you need to treat the sexual situations with some amount of depth or else they will feel hollow. Perhaps the detail that Annie and Abed went into was a little bit much, but the scenario of the bar wench wanting to be pleased sexually in exchange for [insert plot important thing here] actually isn’t all that bad of a plot direction at times. It gives the players a difficult choice to make in regards to their characters more personal and intimate moments, it forces them to think about what they would be willing to do in order to achieve the goal they are pursuing and, honestly, challenges that aren’t just death traps and epic battles can be a super awesome change of pace.

I find that sexual themes can also enhance the depth between characters (NPCs, and PCs alike). Romance and sex are a big part of the human experience and when that gets cut off for the sake of the game I am often left unfulfilled. Now, not every character I play needs to be enthralled in some grand romance, in fact most of my characters haven’t had sexual partners over the course of the game because they’ve been sort  of busy with the adventure and crisis de jour. However, I don’t remember ever being more committed to keeping an NPC alive as when my character developed a slow romance with the character. When sexual situations sprang up in game, we treated them seriously and as we would a sexual situation in life and just faded to black before the graphic parts. I’ve also had PCs form better ties to other PCs because of their sexual proclivities.

I’ve known others who would have barred that entirely from their games and I understand why they might. Personally though, as with all else, I use gaming as a chance to explore different situations, scenarios and themes across life. As with other elements I cannot personally block of an aspect of life from gaming, but I can tailor the game to the comfort level of fellow players and GMs. So I guess to you Adventurer I’d like to know how your group(s) handle these scenarios and themes. How do you treat sex and sexuality within your games? Do relationships and romance ever play a role in your games? Why do you go towards or shy away from these themes?

[gamenightswith-blog]

I rode a mammoth, your argument is invalid.

- Dinah Blake [Pomegranate Seed]

[gamenightswith-blog]

Crossplay Confusions and Commentaries

Sorry everyone for the lack of consistency in the schedule lately. This is mostly my fault, to be honest, as I’ve just been rolling botches on my organization rolls lately on top of having a reduced dice pool. Urg, my player really needs to get new dice. So, let’s dive right in to the long awaited part 2 for Crossplay Confusions! Last time, I talked about my experiences with being discouraged to crossplay and my problems with how these and similar situations were handled. This article I alluded to there being some solutions to the crossplay issue. The thing is, if people in your group want to crossplay? The easiest thing to do is to let them crossplay. As mentioned last time, if you can imagine your player as a six foot seven werebear, or a three foot gnomish sorcerer, you shouldn’t have a problem imagining them without (or with!) breasts. Now, I understand that as far as representation goes, this may make an unbalanced party as far as gender representation. The problem, of course, isn’t a single party having more men than women that’s the problem inherently for a single campaign. As mentioned last week, there is a problem with the male domination of the hobby and how the stories being told often focus on male protagonists primarily and this can create unwelcoming or even unsafe spaces for women in the gaming communities. These are larger issues that are not so easily tackled. However, I think it’s counterproductive to force people to play someone the same as their biological sex. I do not begrudge GMs making some restrictions on character creation, after all, for games and stories to work and for party cohesion one usually must make characters that will at least mesh well with the party. Disruptive concepts should, indeed, be banned from certain games. However, I do take offense when there are needless bans for arbitrary reasons. After all, if there is worry there will not be enough focus on women’s representation in your game it is not going to solve anything by simply having more women be party members. The GM must put forth the effort to give positive portrayals of women in their campaigns, both as allied NPCs, generic NPCs and villain NPCs. One can add focus to women and women’s issues in a game without forcing a player to play a woman. Now, I have heard of the problem where GMs simply ban crossplay because when their male players crossplay the woman they play tends to be a stereotype, becomes hyper sexualized, exists solely as the butt of jokes or as sexual objects to both PC and players alike. This is a problem that doesn’t simply go away by banning crossplay. If they cannot take playing a woman seriously and with respect, then perhaps one should look at how women are being treated in the campaigns in general. Simply removing the possibility to explore what it is to be a woman is not going to solve the problem of your players being unable to respect women characters or women as people. It would then be a time to take a look at your game and how you are representing women in the game and how your players react to this. If you’re always saving the damsel, or using strong confident women as sexy enticement for your players to do something, or if you just play shells of people when you put an NPC woman in then this can only serve to reinforce the impressions and the “otherness” and objectification of women that can help create these crossplay problems. What I would personally do, is I would allow the crossplay and I would simply call the person and party on their behaviour. I would teach by example with varied female NPCs (not just Strong Female Characters). I would research the problems that the players are partaking in and I would use the game to educate them on the implications of the actions. As I mentioned in Part 1, these games allow us the unique experience of exploring another person’s experiences. It allows us to move through a story and process themes we otherwise wouldn’t in our lives. Narrative and storytelling are such powerful tools of change. I don’t think that it’s a requirement of every game to be something progressive and I don’t believe that you NEED to learn anything from them inherently. These are leisure activities and I recognize it first and foremost as such. I just feel it can be a waste to simply shy away from a topic because it’s difficult. It’s hard to talk about these subjects without also turning it into a bit of a discussion of women in gaming as well because when the discussion comes up it ultimately comes down to how women are treated by the games and while trying to engage in the hobby.

  While I admit I have stayed away from certain topics when I didn’t know enough about them to treat them fairly in my games. I am certain that I have treated certain matters over the years with a lack of respect. But again, that’s the beauty of this hobby. We research, we explore, we learn. Not just about these fantasy worlds we retreat to but about our lives, our experiences and our world mirrored through them. Gender and sex representation in gaming is a tricky subject for a lot of people and it’s a difficult one in GENERAL to tackle, much less incorporate and fix problems in a social group. Though it seems to me if no effort is made, no changes will be made either.  As a female bodied person and as a trans* person I am in a position where I cannot ignore these issues as they directly affect me and how the community can perceive me. So while gaming need not be a tool to encourage growth and social change… it seems in such a unique position to do so.