Monday Musings #141
Musings on Haunts, High Tables, and second attempts.
Good Monday, Gamer!
“Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” — Samuel Beckett
As a dad, I’ve tried hard not to put my kids on my path. I don’t need them to love the same games, tech, or obsessions. I just try to expose them to a wide field and see what sticks.
This weekend, Maxwell asked if it would be cool to move his Windows 11 laptop over to Linux Mint. That felt like a small rite of passage. He grabbed a flash drive, built the installer, and by Saturday afternoon had Mint up and running. Clean desktop. Fast boot. Big dad grin.
However, not all of his favorite Steam games played nicely. Proton helps, but compatibility charts are not the same thing as lived experience. So he spent most of Sunday on the long adventure back to Mordor Windows 11.
And he made it back!
What I loved about the whole thing was the agency. He wanted to try something. He did the work. It broke expectations. He rolled it back, cranky, frustrated, and on his own terms, with small advice from Dad at our Waffle House brunch. That’s a better lesson than “Dad says Linux is cool.” It’s also how I’ve learned most of what matters: curiosity, friction, iteration.
Curiosity, friction, iteration.
This week, we watched John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum. I continue to enjoy how the High Table mythos unfolds across the series. There’s rich, rich lore there. Across three sequels, no desperate callbacks, no recreating earlier beats. The world just keeps widening...over a dog and a car!
The part that fascinates me most is the gold coin economy. It’s not just currency. It’s a social signal. A ranking system. A measure of where you stand in the ecosystem. I’m hacking En Garde! right now, and those coins feel like the “score” for where an assassin sits on the ladder. Not XP. Not levels. Reputation crystallized into metal... until you’re excommunicado.
It makes me think a lot about alternative economies in games—what actually tracks status, leverage, power? Not just mechanically, but fictionally... Burning Wheel’s Resource stat comes to mind.
Occulted KC
On Sunday, my Occulted KC crew chose the Hauntbusters Team playbook from Monster of the Week. Think Ghostbusters, but I’m making it Midwest weird!
I’m genuinely excited about it because I’ve been weak in my use of location mechanics. Haunts as active spaces—with moods, rules, and escalating manifestations—force me to practice that muscle.
I also noticed we routinely miss the XP trigger for learning something new about a hunter. It gets skipped a bit too often in the end-of-session rhythm. I’m considering soft prompts at the table as we play:
“How’d you learn to do that?”
“Where did that gear come from?”
“What’s your connection with X?”
Those details are worth more than the XP mark.
Missed Magicks
I’m also looking seriously at reviving my old Ars Magica campaign set in The Contested Isle: The Hibernian Tribunal as an open table. The covenant-as-home-base structure. Rotating magi. Seasonal projects. Tribunal politics simmering in the background. We got a good 3 sessions of play in IIRC online before schedules collided. I needs it back!
7-9…
On the publishing front: Play Fearless: Greatest Crits didn’t fund. It came up short on cash, but it performed decently on data. That matters. I’ve got two game designers onboard as contributing authors. The article list is culled to twenty pieces. I’ll still do a small print run, aiming for mid–late spring 2026.
That seems to be the theme right now. Try the distro. Watch the sequel. Run the haunt. Launch the book.
Learn. Adjust. Keep going.
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