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Episode 1866: Walkers After Dinner Squints

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Pre-writing your scenery descriptions allows you to casually throw in words like "crepuscular" as though they're just rolling off your tongue with nary a thought.

Another option is to print out a page of thesaurus synonyms for various adjectives that you expect you might need to use during a game session: e.g. dark, smelly, noisy, ominous, scratchy, shadowy, indistinct, etc. Then when you need to describe a location or an encounter, just throw one or two of the coolest sounding synonyms in.

Even better if they're so obscure that your players don't know what you're talking about, because then you can just throw them in no matter what you're describing and ramp up their paranoia level.

Commentary by memnarch (who has not seen the movie)

I think this is just crazy that we've now had two crashed star destroyers and now the remains of a camel droid AT-AT. This really does seem like an outpost that grew up around an old Imperial spacecraft cemetery or ship graveyard. This seems almost extravagently wasteful, especially since Star Wars already had a used feel to a lot of the technology and now there's this used tech not being used. Good place for holing up in though as the AT-ATs had pretty good armor when they were used on Hoth.

I also think that someone struggling with something is not very descriptive. Is it the sound of someone struggling to push a heavy load with the grunts of muscle exertion? Or the sounds of crying as someone struggles to walk with a broken limb of some kind? Or maybe the sound of machinery whining as the Tatooine sand has gotten into various gears, servos, and air intakes? Maybe Pete just didn't roll well enough on the Perception check.

I also also think that this would be another stunning cinematic shot if the camera started close in, then panned out to show the wreckage. It's a bit hard to tell, but it looks like it's pretty close to the same scale for the old stop-motion walkers. Maybe I just like well done scenery shots though; some of my favorite parts of the Planet Earth series are the aerial views of the landscape.

I also also also think that Rey "never gets a good parking spot" probably has the hoverbike parked on the other side of Niima from here. Which seems very silly considering all of the space around this wreck, and possibly inside it too. Though if the bike was moved over here, being inside and easily accessable wouldn't preclude being difficult to leave on in a hurry, so that could also count as a bad parking spot. Even better then that this noise isn't coming from inside the living space if a getaway is needed. It's totally not going to be BB-8 having been semi-lost in the desert coming in to say hello (and who's four comics overdue from my prediction at the moment).

Commentary by Keybounce (who has not seen the movie)

Strip title: "Disadvantages of points and location".

Panel one looks like something was edited out. Can someone confirm that a person or object used to be in that corner, and was covered up? I can't imagine any possible reason for this other than that. (Don't actually tell me what it was, just confirm that they are deliberately covering something up. Go ahead and discuss what they are covering up the spoiler thread.)

And we can see that the sky-borne interference still exists at night. We still have the "don't look at the sky/if you do you'll die" issue with the atmosphere on Tatooine. Decades after the explosion at the database facility.

I'm trying to figure out the last panel. We see what looks like a long abandoned, approximately half-covered Imperial walker. I cannot see how it could possibly be relevant to what is happening now. And no, with that Disadvantage, your hover bike is not parked nearby for a quick getaway. It's not just the one point of Fatigue, it's that you don't have the rapid ability to get away and into whatever is up next.

Transcript

GM: The suns set behind a sand dune.
GM: As you eat, a distant ship ascends through the darkening crepuscular sky.
Rey: I put on a flight helmet to shield my eyes from the twilight.
GM: Suddenly you hear a noise, like someone struggling with something.
Rey: In my shelter?
GM: No, out in the desert.
Rey: My hoverbike is parked nearby for a quick getaway, right?
GM: What do you think?


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Published: Thursday, 16 July, 2020; 03:11:36 PDT.
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