Ask Me Anything: Harrigan

Ah, SS, you seem to have mistaken my liking to eat good food, vs. make it. :)

I'm a terrible cook, but I have my moments. I can grill a mean steak, whip up some pretty awesome salads, make delicious burgers and have honed my chili recipe over about 30+ years. I can also make sandwiches better than most sandwich shops (ahem), and stock the right breads, cheeses, meats and condiments for that purpose. Oh, and I do like making breakfast. Nothing crazy -- eggs, bacon, toast, fresh fruit salad.

(The foods I like the most are the ones I'm hopeless at making: Thai and Indian curries, Korean bibimbap. Nam Tok / Yum Nua beef salads, etc.)

When people visit, I usually order out. ;)

When cooking for myself, it's usually a sandwich I'm making... or something off the grill.

Guilty Pleasure: Hands down a donair, which is a bastardization of a Greek gyro really only available in Atlantic Canada. So bad for you. So freaking delicious. When I return to Halifax I invariably eat about three of them over the period of about a week. It ain't good.

I will also admit to digging In N Out, Freddys, Five Guys and other slightly higher grade fast food burgers. And fries. I love fries. Have I mentioned fish and chips? Because I love fish and chips too...

Arcade Game: Star Wars (1983), honorable mentions to Bosconian, Tempest, and Galaga.

Cereal: I don't love cereal. I'll eat most non-sugary cereals, but I will admit to liking Crunchy Nut, which I discovered in New Zealand and have found in various places around the world at random times.

Trademark: "Coke" when people mean soda or pop? Maybe. Not too fussed about these, really.

Sigh. Not you, bowl!

More later, maybe after the many con games I'm about to dive into this weekend...

Yeah Cape Split is a good one!

I should point out that döner is actually Turkish and gyros is just a rip-off different take of that recipe. I should know, I'm Greek :P

Also, this doubles as your reminder to provide puppy pics.

Well then I'll ask the follow-up question, what con are attending and what do you think makes a good game for a con?

Oh, I didn't realize that donair is just an attempt to spell Döner in English. That's an extremely popular dish in central Europe as well. In my city there's a street with, I swear I'm not joking, 8 (!) Döner stores on a stretch of 200 meters, that's literally a 3 minute walk. And they've been there for a while too so they can't be doing too badly.

Sounds like a döner debonair kind of place...

I'll show myself out

Let's talk gateway drugs: what was the game(s) that got you into the hobby? Your first gaming memory.

You keep mentioning this Black Hack. When are you running a game and where do I sign up?

Here's Al. Holiday themed!

And Trudy...

And here's the big guy recovering from his surgery with my wife. They are... "close."

That's funny. When I saw the music question I said to myself, I can answer that one!

Hiking: I like that style of exercise -- more about endurance and such, and quite enjoy trails that are difficult without getting into full-on rock climbing and such. Mostly though, I like the wilderness, seeing new places, coming across things that surprise you on the trail.

Travel: Really enjoy different peoples, cultures, foods, ways of living. Though I will admit more as an observer than a participant, in some cases. It's the anthropologist in me. =]

Favorite Dog Game: I don't have one, no. Prefer the real animals over their digital or imaginary counterparts.

Dog Sledding Nope! I've spent quite a bit of time in the north (Anchorage, Fairbanks, Yellowknife), but have never been or seen dogsledding. That's a whoooole different thing.

RPG Pitch: Well, different games are good at different things, so it depends on the group, what everyone wants out of it, etc. I'm polygamerous in the extreme, but I'll pitch a current favorite, Rangers of the Midden Vale. It's an OSR-adjacent game based on Ben Milton's Knave, so it has boiled-down d20 mechanics that should be familiar or at least easy to pick up for a lot of gamers. It's about PCs who are heroes in a dark and wild land that needs them to light the darkness. It's about exploration, about keeping lurking horrors at bay, about uncovering the secrets of the past, and about the bonds forged between the rangers tasks with all this. The mechanics are lean but modern -- resource and gear management is important, but handled by slick procedures such as usage dice from The Black Hack and generic "gear" in your pack that can turn into whatever it needs to be at the time, a la Dungeon World. Then it borrows from Fighting Fantasy to make combat faster, more furious, and way less whiffy than most d20 games. All rolls are contested in melee, meaning if you fail, you take damage back in the moment. Really increases the tension of each roll. GM-wise, the game is a breeze as there's a framework to follow for the adventures, and the book is loaded with random tables that allow for a low-prep, seat-of-the-pants style that I enjoy.

So yeah. It's a cool game and everyone should get and play it! ;)

True, but the Halifax-invented donair is tied directly to the (large) Greek population in the city. Check this out for deets.

BSer Con. Basically the Gaming & BS podcast's first shot at running a small virtual con. Probably fifty games or so running over the weekend, but there are about 35 different systems represented. Very cool community I count myself lucky to be part of. Highly recommend the podcast, their Discord, and hopefully, after this weekend, the con. :)

Running Rangers of the Midden Vale, playing in SWADE's Fuhgeddaboudit, Agon, The Mecha Hack, DCC, and Freebooters on the Frontier.

And finally, Dr. B and Jabes...

Gateway Drug / Memory: The game that got me into the hobby was AD&D, in the fall of 1983. I played Fonkin Hoddypeak, one of the famed pregen characters in G1-2-3, Against the Giants. I don't remember a ton of the specifics other than having my mind blown that this thing was a game and I could play and run it with no board, no fancy table top pieces, etc. And that the GM was killer and adversarial and troubled... so after about two sessions I asked for the DMG, PHB and MM for Christmas, got them, then became a forever GM for quite a few decades. Taught myself by reading and internalizing High Gygaxian, so that may explain a few things.

I'm better now. Many games, healthy balance of play on both sides of the screen.

The Black Hack: I deeply love this game (own two physical copies, etc.), but I'll admit most of my interest these days is in some of its more recent derivatives. I can run a bog-standard TBH game on GP, if there's interest.

You know there is.

Daaaaang, I feel like you just said the quiet part out loud! :P (Good on ya for it.)

I've always felt like there's not much about OSR that's actually OS... just pastiche.