miscast

TMM 019: Arcane Ugly Healing, Podcasts & Kitbash Prompts

Added 2022-02-16 12:49:58 +0000 UTC

Hello! Welcome to TMM019!

My focus at the moment is updating Arcane Ugly. I’m experimenting with repurposing unused art into big hand painted collages, which I’m hoping will end up as layers upon layers of all the odds and ends of Arcane Ugly that don’t fit anywhere else, or don’t have enough substance on their own. These will occupy the new Interesting Things chapter. I'm also experimenting with filming in this new space as well (once used to film news reports).

New Healing Rules!
It’s been revealed through play testing that healing is an essential part of an enjoyable Arcane Ugly experience and I’m trying to find the balance between making it an interesting and engaging mechanic, while not making it a pain in the ass. I’m picturing Resting, Medicines, Healing Potions & Healing Spells being the four pillars of the healing system.

Resting: Adventurers will recover 3 + Strength Hit Points after sleeping comfortably for 5 hours and eating a hearty meal. Comfortable may be a relative word for some Adventurers so at minimum an Adventurer should be free from immediate danger and take all precautions to avoid potential surprises.

Unless otherwise specified Adventurers always recover at least 1 Hit Point regardless of their Strength.

Designer Notes: This means Adventurers get weaker and take more risks as they explore further and further into the unknown. They must also make choices as to what they fill their backpack with. This is reason to get in and out of dungeons and motivation to pursue development outside of dungeon delving. Getting Adventurers into hub areas at the end of sessions makes cross-group play more friendly.

Medicines: Adventurers may use an Apothecary Kit (4 Slots) to recover 1 + Intelligence Hit Points over the course of 5 minutes.

A maximum of 5 Hit Points per Adventurer may be recovered with an Apothecary kit per day. There is only so much medicine can do, healing beyond this requires time or magical intervention.

Apothecary Kits have 10 uses before needing to be restocked. Restocking an Apothecary Kit costs 200 Koppa in most populated areas with access to an apothecary. Alternatively, Adventurers may choose to restock an Apothecary Kit themselves by collecting ingredients while they adventure.

Much like potion making, the ingredients of an Apothecary Kit are interpretive. To restock an Apothecary Kit a selection of ingredients are randomly generated by the Gamesmaster and must sourced before the Apothecary Kit can be used again. Each time the kit is to be restocked the group of ingredients will change. Each ingredient has a Koppa value associated with it.

Below is a work-in-progress table for Gamesmasters to generate ingredients from, the total should be worth approximately 200 Koppa.

Designer Notes: I’m implementing medicines with 3 goals. This first is to give more utility to Intelligence, a currently underutilized aspect of Arcane Ugly. Secondly create more narrative moments, Adventurer goals, and create questing opportunities. Adventurers with a disinterest of collecting items can circumvent this component of the game by purchasing ingredients instead.

Health Potions: Health Potions are scarce, expensive and have ill-effects when consumed in abundance. Health Potions come in a variety of strengths healing from d4 to d12.

If an Adventurer consumes more than 1 Health Potion between a rest, roll a d6 on the table below after recovering Hit Points.

Designer Notes: I really want to make Health Potions super gross and with maybe some ethical reason to not consume them. Maybe they each contain a fairy creature suspended inside. That instant boost in health has to come from somewhere and investigating that might lead to an adventure.

Healing Spells: All healing spells are an exchange of life force. In order to replenish one’s life force, it must be taken elsewhere.
Here's some new healing spell ideas:

Time Exchange: DR10 - You instantly heal d4+2 Hit Points. In exactly 4 hours, you will loose the same amount of Hit Points.

Healing Winds: DR10 - You may lose up to 10 Hit Points and heal any nearby Adventurers by that amount in total.

Designer Notes: The trade off with healing spells is they come with the chance of Miscast! You also also given a roleplay opportunity knowing healing magic requires some sort of exchange.

My Favourite Podcasts for Creating

Sometimes I have to sort of trick my brain into working, so I use podcasts a lot. It distracts me from the work I’m about to do. All of these podcasts are light and funny, so if I tune out a bit while I’m working, it’s easy to pick back up.

Aunty Donna Podcast. This is an improv comedy podcast with comedy group Aunty Donna. It’s hilarious and the hardest I’ve ever laughed in public by myself, ever (this still haunts me). At this point the whole podcast is running bits and an ever growing narrative of madness, so I recommend you start from the beginning.

Note from Rach: It’s an acquired sense of humour to enjoy this podcast and you might think Trent’s insane if you listen.

Safety Third. It’s a podcast, with a bunch of science-ish YouTubers like William Osman, The Backyard Scientist and NileRed, and a whole bunch of awesome guests. The podcast is not at all science related, but sheds some light on the YouTuber lifestyle and it brings me comfort to know that everyone on YouTube endures the same trials and tribulations.

F**k Face. This also a bit of an obscure comedy podcast featuring Geoff and Gavin from Rooster Teeth. The podcast is incredibly hard to describe but is my favourite podcast of all time because of the sheer ridiculousness of it, even though it’s just friends recounting their everyday lives and how difficult they make it for themselves. This is another you should start from episode 1.

The Last Podcast on the Left. This is a true crime/supernatural/conspiracy theory/comedy podcast. I’ve got lots of really cool ideas for Arcane Ugly and DnD games from the stories told on it.

Problem Solving

The first opening shot is of a whole bunch of wood elves that I had just re-painted. These models were once my brothers and also my first miniatures (handed down to me when he got out of the hobby). That treeman figure is from Mantic Games I bought much later because it had some oldschool style to it that fit the older models.

The wood elf waystone I mention in the video was inspired by an old Games Workshop tutorial on their website. That website was a goldmine, but is now lost to time (that not even the wayback machine can recover now). If anyone has an archive hit me up!

The electric carving knife I use in the video is actually the exact one from the story I’m telling, I had to dig it out of my parents shed to make the video. I also got the foam I’d use later from there too. The lessons learned from the story from the video like using an electric carving knife to cut foam would be then applied to my Tyranid terrain video many years later.

I mention Miniwargamer Dave (MWG Studios https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zN6PMBLBNH8) and his style of YouTube video is the reason I wanted to make YouTube videos and as a kid. I maybe watched every video he made like four or five times. I really understated his impact on me in this video. Dave hasn't seen this video to my knowledge but he's mentioned my channel several times on streams now which is nice.

The big conclusion of this video was I made 10 brick walls using a new technique for every wall. I just remember how much hard work it was making those 10 brick walls. Each one took no time to make, but the mental task of coming up with a new idea was the hard part. I never put enough value on mental tasks, I feel so confident I can achieve so much in my day, every day, but now I know I’m only capable of making so many decisions or solving so many problems. It’s a good lesson to learn when taking on big projects. This is why scripts take days to write, and why Arcane Ugly development can feel so slow. Tasks feel easy at first, but by the end even simple tasks become harder and harder.

The brick walls that I mould and cast at the end of the video, I was so proud of and I still really am, but in all honesty they’ve never been used for anything. They are just too rigid to fit my organic building style and I ended up giving them all away in hopes someone might use them. But. I learned really good skills from the experience none the less and I think thats okay too. The techniques that I learned making those walls I then used on my wizard tower https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_jJCojpdrPo to make the castle wall molds.

This video obviously really meant a lot to me to make. But it’s also around when my dad started watching my videos and really supported me as well, so I think it was very special for him to watch. He was pretty proud of that video, he didn’t really say much about it when he first saw it, so I knew it meant a lot (I know that doesn’t make much sense, but it does in a weird way that I understand).

At the end, I talk about potentially using the things I learnt in the future, and I think from that project, two skills were born. The first one was experimenting with silicone molds which really shaped the channel's future. The second was using EVA craft foam for brick detailing, which is a technique I used for making medieval houses later on.

It might be my favourite video I’ve ever made and my most important video I've ever made, and still makes me choke up every time I watch it again haha. This is video I get the most emails and kind messages about and I love hearing how it resonates with other people.

This video is my Miscast Memories because my next series (hinted in a previous MM) is going to be called Problem Solving and is the dream series I've wanted to make for the longest time.

(Ignore my bootleg title I made, Rachel hasn't had time to accommodate my impromptu topic ideas yet) The idea of the Creative Challenge is to prompt you to start making things and a way to showcase your work (if you want).

Creative Challenge #1: Close your eyes and grab three random things from your bits box and try to make something combining them.

If you don’t have a bits box then randomly select a line up of 20 materials/bits (cardboard, clay, beads, paints, an old toy etc) to use. Maybe use a dice to randomly pick 3 to work with.

(Another bootleg title card from me) This is a new topic to track my developments learning new skills (my major goal for 2022)
Here's the results of some CAD work and learning laser cutting and pressing recycled plastics. All with the assistance of some great young makers as well.