Berttheduck

No that’s about right. My initial pre campaign prep was read the book and understand the factions, session zero to see what themes my players wanted to explore and what factions they were interested in interacting with.

Between sessions I only needed about 10 minutes to think about the next game, who was the job against, who’s upset or happy with the crew currently, what factions plans are the players ignoring so are progressing unopposed and what does that look like. Was there any fallout from their last job. The way the city is set up every time your crew gets ahead it will please someone and upset someone else I found that made prepping super easy. Then all I needed was a list of random names for NPC’s and I was happy making stuff up on the fly for the most part.

Some of them bigger things needed more thinking and prep like when they broke into the ghost hunters headquarters (I can’t remember the name, guys follow the death crows and wear masks), that needed a little more time. Or when they accidentally summoned a demon I needed to work out what it wanted and how it worked. Side note demons are excellent fun and should be terrifying forces of nature in blades.

My longest running campaign was Blades (once weekly for over a year). It’s still my favourite system.

The core mechanics are really easy, GM sets the narrative scene and the player says how they respond then builds a dice pool and adjust for difficult actions or ineffective approach (position and effect - how good it will be if you succeed and how bad it will be if you fail).

The game is built to play on the fly with very minimal prep, the scenario in the book is a totally fine place to start and lead into my game. If you run through all the steps of the meta game (updating faction relations and you’ll have a good idea which group now has beef with the players crew and as such likely happenings for your next session.

Get used to skipping the boring bits, blades works best when the PCs are doing crazy stuff and using the flashback mechanics to get into or out of trouble. Do any essential prep the crew wants to do for a job but then skip to the engagement roll and just get started, don’t let them spend ages planning all the little details.

Don’t be scared to throw really challenging scenarios at them (especially after they level up a bit), the PCs have loads of ways to get out of trouble and trauma is beneficial to them initially as it lets them gain more xp. Also death is always a narrative choice so don’t worry about killing them by accident.

The setting is amazing, haunted steampunk Victorian Venice so you can lean into the spooky as much as you want. Remember it’s always dark and life is pretty terrible for everyone who isn’t super rich.

I’m happy to answer questions or bounce ideas with you.

Hope your game goes well.

Most universities in the UK have a careers officer where you can talk to people with lots of experience helping students with these types of questions. If your institute has the same then my advice would be to talk to them about your options, what you could use your degree for or how to look at other non related options.

I get mine done about every 1-2 months. Usually when it starts poking me in the ears and getting annoying.

My mate at work who’s very fashion conscious gets his done every 3 weeks or so.

You know you can block users right? If you don’t like someone’s content just block them and move on rather than complain on their post.

Or make another post to ask the community and involve the mods.

Sign up for a first aid for children course. The best way to manage these feelings and fears is to be prepared to manage them directly. If you learn some first aid then you’ll be able to manage a lot of problems yourself and know when you can’t and need help.

No but that’s what anxiety makes you think.

That one is social anxiety and is because in the past if you got excluded from your group of humans you’d starve or freeze to death. We aren’t evolved to deal with the hundreds and hundreds of people that the modern world requires. More used to like extended family groups and small communities.

It depends what your anxiety is driven by. Social anxiety is mostly the fear of being driven out of the group, which would evolutionarily lead to death. You’d be better with social interaction games or multiplayer ones to connect with more people in a safe environment.

Generalised anxiety where you’re hyper aware of every risk and on edge all the time expecting something bad to happen, horror games might work with desensitisation though often in horror the bad things do happen and you just happen to survive by running away or fighting back which is probably not the most helpful thing for anxiety.

Specific fears around ghosts - play FEAR and shoot ghosts. Specific fears around zombies play resident evil, probably the remake of 4, and shoot zombies. Existential dread about what makes you human and the existence of consciousness and souls, play SOMA (has a mode where the enemies don’t insta death you now so you can experience the story and the incredible locations), probably won’t make it less scary but is a great game.

Eugenics?

The problem with this point relating to dementia is that dementia specifically makes forming new memories harder. So they are unlikely to remember any specifics including their diagnosis. Also for the patient saying dementia or memory problems will be more than enough to tell everyone who’s not a doctor.

The frontotemporal bit won’t mean anything to the general public unless they remember more human anatomy than most, but everyone has heard of dementia that one is in common parlance anyway I think.

This is a big problem with medicine in general. Medicine is unfortunately very much an old white man’s club, it’s getting better slowly, but all the knowledge and the way it is taught comes from that old white guy standard.

Medical terminology is complex because medicine is complex. There is definitely an element of being part of an exclusive club but there is also communicating lots of information quickly and efficiently.

Frontotemporal dementia describes a specific set of symptoms and if you are medically trained tells you most everything you need to know about what is happening. As opposed to the patient is a bit confused or sees things sometimes which could be many different things.

The language and how diagnoses are communicated are really important, a good medic should tell the patient their diagnosis with the medical words but should explain what those mean in as much detail as the patient wants.

Most patients are able to understand dementia even if the frontotemporal bit doesn’t make sense to them.

Blades is far and away my favourite game system so far.

It does a bit of everything you mentioned.

So the set up included in the book is good, basically:

Here’s a few factions and you are on a job for one of them to steal something from the other (change based on your players crew, ie kill someone or purchase drugs). After they finish the job you do a couple steps for:

Heat - how much fallout they get from the law. Has consequences like allies getting locked up or interrogated. Or the popo kicking down the door to your hideout.

Downtime - where players pursue goals and recover. Leads to crazy projects like making flamethrowers or summoning demons.

Faction - decide as GM which factions are affected and adjust relations with the crew appropriately. Leads to reactions from factions, favours and retribution. Job offers or threats.

As every action the players take is working against at least 1 faction and likely benefits at least 1 more the game really easily writes itself. With like 5-15 minutes of thinking pre session about likely next steps and a few random names I could improv everything I needed.

The GM advice included is great and the world building is fab, the steampunk haunted setting is awesome.

I’ve also said far too much without mentioning the flashback mechanic - you skip the whole prep stage of jobs and go straight into the opening scene, then at any point the players can spend stress to flashback and set up a cool move: hide some useful gear, arrange the servant to leave the window open, Etc. The possibilities are endless and it keeps the game moving really well.

Check out Blades in the Dark and Spire the City must fall.

I’m blades you pay an upcoming gang of criminals in a haunted Victorian steampunk city where every inch is owned/claimed by another gang so everything you do either pleases or upsets somebody. Definitely has the struggle to survive in a hostile world feel. Blades is one of my favourite game systems to run. It’s soo easy for the GM I basically never needed to prep.

In Spire you play a group of rebel or terrorist dark elves fighting against the oppressive high elf regimen. The world building is really detailed maybe a bit too much in some places. I really enjoyed running it though.

You could install a little hook by the door and use that. The effort to put the hook up might encourage you to use it.

Rhythm helps your two hips move. I have to say it to myself every time.

You could look at fire safe boxes for document storage. Those are usually pretty solid. You would want to bag up the drive inside an anti static bag and probably put a couple of those little water absorbing silicone packets in there as well. If access isn’t an issue then maybe some sealant around the seams to keep it more water tight.

Magnetic tape would be better for long term storage as well I think. Those have longer storage stability. I don’t know how long an unplugged hard drive will reliably store information.

Animals could dig it up but probably wouldn’t as it wouldn’t smell like food. Depth wise I’d go for at least a couple feet deep, the traditional 6 is a surprisingly deep hole and temperature gets more consistent the deeper you go (at least with readily available tools, it eventually starts to get hot again).

Please note totally random opinion with very little experience with long term data storage. Thanks for the fun thought experiment, I hope things get better and you don’t need your backup data.

I know where you’re coming from. My answer these days is always surviving.

Honestly it’s the best I can say most days.

Universities are a stepping stone to teach students how to be independent adults so getting them used to normal working hours gently is a good thing. Most courses aren’t a solid 9-5 so there’s plenty of opportunity for a lay in at least some days (depending on the course)

Universities are also research institutions and that all runs on normal working hours, the lecturers are often researchers first and teaching staff second so fitting classes around the research makes sense.

I suspect the main reason is the inertia of the 9-5 that most of the world revolves around. You’d struggle to recruit staff to teach, techs to maintain buildings and stock required if they had to work permanently on late shifts.