Ask Me Anything: Harrigan

Name some of the best hiking spots you found in your travels, I'm very interested.

How often, when walking in nature or traveling in general, you stop yourself to picture what type of rpg adventure you could GM taking place in such a place? Name a place that inspired you an adventure or character, and why!

Would you rather quit RPGs altogether if you had to make a pun every third post?

Which countries have you visited? Any local food that you liked? Any that you hated?

What's the thing that you like the most about osr systems?

Can you give us one opinion that you hold about RPGs or PbP, that you think might be controversial?

What's your biggest PbP mistake?

If you could change, add or remove one thing on the GP site, what would it be?

What are some of your favorite board games?

What's your favorite Free League game?

How did you find out about Gamers Plane and what made you join?

What kind of dogs do you have (if any)?

What are your favorite genres of music? Any albums you think are perfect from start to finish?

Good food?? Now you're talking my language!

What's your favorite recipe to make for people when they visit? What about your favorite when cooking for yourself?

What's your guilty pleasure food, one that's either terrible junk food or is objectively bad/low quality but you love it anyway?

Just to clarify, the answer *must* include photos of said dogs.

Barrage of questions! I will get to these, but the next couple of days are pretty hairy. Plus I need to think about some of these answers!

Just gonna add some more frivolous questions to your list:
Favorite arcade game? Favorite breakfast cereal? Favorite Saturday morning cartoon? Least favorite genericized trademark?

Extra few to the pile, whoop-whoop!
- Do you like hiking for the process or the result, or both? How about travelling?
- Do you have a favorite video/board game about dogs, or including dogs? (Do you know that there are Zelda: BoTW speedruns to pet all of the in-game dogs? XD)
- Dog sledding! Did you ever do it? Or maybe watched it? I can't help but associate Canada with it.
- I don't know any of the TTRPG systems you like, so if you had to offer a short sales pitch for one of them, which would it be for? :D

Oh dear. I'd have to think hard about that one, and my memory is terrible for place names. I have some favorite hikes in Nova Scotia (Cape Split comes to mind) and Colorado has too many to even mention, though one of them, Marshall Mesa Trail, was very close to the terrible fires in CO last month. The area around Red Rocks is gorgeous, and I really liked both Arches (hiking) and Moab (mountain biking) in Utah. The US southwest in general I just adore, especially in and around Santa Fe, Taos, Bandolier National Park.

Elsewhere, there's cool hiking on the big island in Hawaii and also on Kauai -- especially the Alaka’i Swamp, which is (we were told) the highest bog in the world, right in the middle of the island. I've also had great hikes in Australia and New Zealand, and now that I think about it -- one in Ketch Harbour, where I used to live, right along the coast of the Atlantic. I'll admit as much as I love hiking in the mountains, my heart belongs to the coast and sea:


(That's Duncan's Cove, very close to where I used to live.)

More may occur to me as I answer these questions...
It sort of depends. If I'm with my wife or family -- not as much, or at least not in the moment. It will usually occur to me later, when I'm thinking about the trip. If I'm alone, my RPG brain is -=never=- off. I am always thinking about ways to incorporate what I experience into my games.

I don't know about a specific thing I can point to in a game that I dragged directly from a trip, but... actually, I can. Having living in Maine allows me to paint the New England countryside in my CoC games. Visiting Doha allows me to pull both gleaming skyscrapers and very noisy souks into games where the PCs visit the Middle East, visiting castles in the UK, ruins in the Yucatán, historical fortifications in Nova Scotia... all these things really embed in my imagination, and I try to draw on them later. Special mentions: York, in the UK, with the old wall, narrow streets and the nearly thousand-year-old medieval guild hall. So cool! And it wasn't while traveling, but I worked on a remote island one summer where a colleague and I got to explore a lot of underground tunnels beneath some old fortifications. I draw on those damp, dark experiences all the time in dungeon delves.

Cool questions!

Puns
I'd make the puns. I can make the puns now. I just choose not to.

Countries
Canada, US, Mexico, Guatemala, Panama, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Qatar, Ethiopia... maybe some others I'm forgetting, but that's mostly it. I'm missing all of mainland Europe, Asia, South America, Antarctica. Most of the world, really. ;)

OSR Games
I like that, at least for me, they are both nostalgic and also representative of the way I wish I'd played way back when. They are an idealized version of it, with many of the rough edges filed off. Rulings over rules and all that, as well. But you know what? Scratch all that. It's the creativity in that community right now. That's the draw.

Controversial Opinion
I think the entire industry is badly broken, commercially. It's almost impossible to make a living at it, and there's no way to really gauge or measure the value of something. You might work for a year on your magnum opus RPG that exactly three people read, and no one plays. You might pound out a little zine over a weekend that becomes a sensation for thousands of people who each spend hundreds of hours of their leisure time on it. Artists are underpaid, writers are underpaid, mechanics can't be copyrighted, products are generally undervalued and underpriced... and the explosion of content -- all the indie games -- is contributing to this, fracturing an already small community.

But damn if I don't love RPGs anyway.

Biggest PbP Mistake
I keep thinking I can run a dungeon delve and keep it interesting and engaging... and I just can't. Runners up: not ending a game when it's time, not calling out a problem player soon enough.

Change GP
Two ideas. (I'm bad at following instructions.)
1. OOC Flip tiles, just like on Tavern Keeper.
2. Some kind of integrated tracker / stat keeper. Always available, showing the latest in terms of the weather, the round, HP, status effects, etc.

Quirkle. No Thanks. Lost Cities. Machi Koro. Defenders of the Realm. Formula D. King of Tokyo. Codenames. Zombicide: Black Plague (want to run an RPG version of this). Memoir 44. Undaunted. Heroes of Normandie.

Lots more that I don't own and am forgetting.

Fav Free League Game
Super-tough question, as I'm a big, big fan. It's probably Vaesen. But strong showings from Forbidden Lands, Tales from the Loop, and Mork Borg.

Finding GP
In 2018, I decided to focus more seriously on RPGs -- to the inclusion of some other nerd hobbies, like comics, board games, etc. I got into gaming podcasts, and one of them -- I wish I remembered which one -- interviewed Keleth. I was huge into PbP gaming, and didn't know there was this other bespoke site for it out there, in addition to rpol.net and Tavern Keeper. I raced over here, joined, then went radio silent for like two years after forgetting about it again and keeping my PbP play focused elsewhere.

In 2020, I determined that I wanted to have an 'off-ramp' I could offer people on Tavern Keeper in case the site suddenly shut down. (There were some disruptions at that time; things have stabilized over there, but it's still just a matter of time.) So I wrote some requirements and evaluated a bunch of PbP sites... and since I remembered GP, included it in the eval. Funny thing is, it came out on top, but I had no idea at the time just how great the community was. The site / tech's great -- but the community is the glue.

Dogs
We have two. A twelve (or so) year old chocolate lab named Trudy -- she's a tough old bird who only cares about balls and food, but and we love her regardless. And a two year old mastiff / boxer mix named Al. He's a goof, 95lbs of lapdog with some deformities that kept him from being adopted. (We were originally fostering him, but when a $12,000 surgery (paid for by the shelter) didn't fix what ailed him, no one wanted him. So we adopted him.)

Remind me on the pics, @DarK_RaideR. I've got plenty, but it's late and I'm tired. =]

It's okay. You can mention me by name

Music -- I should ask Windy to answer this, as we've been trading music a lot.

Music is really important to me. And when I say I like lots of different genres, styles, artists, approaches, I mean it. Normally, when someone asks me what kind of music I like my answer is simple: "Good music."

It's obnoxious and unhelpful, but it's also honest. There are examples of music in virtually every style you can name that I dig, but I suppose I have my favorites. I like many kinds of rock (esp. alt, classic, sleazy, hard), few kinds of country. Lots of electronica, a bit of rap. Folk yep, zydeco yep, soul yep, classical yep, some metal, punk yep, sea shanties oh yes... I could go on and on.

Perfect albums? Many. How about a band that put out two perfect albums in a row? The Police, with both Outlandos D'Amor and Regetta de Blanc.