Being Creative with online session Discord Calendar Invites

  

In the face-to-face days we just used emails for our game scheduling and reminders. In the mid to late 90's we only played a couples times a month at best (though we played far longer sessions then. An entire day into the evening usually), but also saw and talked to each other since we were mostly friends outside the games. But going into the 2000's and running for groups who were just "gaming friends" emails and/or Yahoo groups or whatever helped. 

But with the advent of my Roll20 online gaming several years ago, and my use of Discord for voice and text, I got the advantage of actual dedicated calendar reminders to remind the humanoids that we had a game. 

Needed? I dunno. Since going online with my campaigns the schedule is pretty set. This year since around February have done DnD every week on Saturday nights, And for a few months now have run my "Haven" campaign with Marvel Multiverse on Friday night. Dedicated regulars. So they know full well we have weekly sessions. 

But the things is, I found out early in my Discord usage that I could be kind of creative with the calendar invites/reminders. 

I mean, it's kind of what it's all about, right? Making a little magic. So any creative element you can stick in there is important to me. And for years now in campaigns, I have done what I can with the invites.

Besides indicating which voice channel you are using and the day, time and date, you can add an image and a title for the session. That alone stirred my imagination. Originally I was digging that players could "like" the calendar invite, as it would indicate to me who was planning to attend. Not always reliable though. In the latest campaigns you can count on 3 or 4 players to like it, but not everybody always does. 

But I loved that I could use an image and a title to maybe sort of foreshadow the session. Not give it all away, but maybe sort of rile up some interest in what was going to happen. Sometimes mysterious or sometimes not. 

Some things from my generation may inspire me on this. I remember on old TV shows you would get an establishing shot, and "on tonight's episode of Mannix - lonely is the hunter" or something like that. 

I have sometimes made them as simple as an image of a country road and a title like "the road goes ever every on" for DnD travel. And sometimes I made them more meaningful. To me, anyway. Sometimes a private joke. 

Since Discord does not archive past invites, here are the couple for this week's games. In my DnD campaign, I am once again using the old Pawnshop adventure from Apple Lane for Runequest. This week we are heading into part two of the Pawnshop attack. This invite was pretty easy. Just put an image of one of the foes the party is now facing in the shop, and a "part 2" indicator.   

Nothing super creative, but it gives the players a little something to maybe pique their interest in the next session. An image of the monsters they have seen but not gotten into full steam battle with yet. They know it starts right from the jump next session. 

For the Marvel rpg sessions, things are getting a little harder to figure what will happen next. I have 5 steady players, but since it's the weekend and there are not quite as many players in the pool as my DnD, a player or two might have to miss a session. I have been sort of planning out two session arcs, but honestly, we only play for two hours or so on Friday. And the players might sandbox a bit. "Can I go patrol for a few minutes?" And I have been giving players 20 minutes or so here and there to do their own thing from time to time (against my general better judgment. I mean, we are not doing very long sessions). And as of last week I am deciding kind of last minute what might be best depending on what players we have for the night. If I plan a little couple of session encounter arc, somebody I need for it might not be able to make it that night. Or maybe last session is going to bleed into the next a bit, and I might want to wait a week or two to start that for whatever reason. 

Like last week, I decided a half hour before the session that I just wanted to have a little low-combat encounter. I dreamed up a couple of floors of an office building being set ablaze by a professional arsonist. In that half hour I found a couple of office building floors to use as maps, and went into Demiplane to whip up an arsonist dude. Found an image that worked for it. And decided this would be an architectural firm being targeted by a rival. 

I will maybe briefly touch on that in the next post, but for the following session how will I start things off? Since we had to wrap it up right after the victims were rescued and the fire put out, I figured this might be the first real interaction with the characters and emergency response, and maybe reporters as well. "hmm.." I thought. Maybe I could expand on that. What if a character took the time to answer a reporter's questions? Or maybe I could have an "on the scene" start-up streamer crew looking for cred and popularity actually ask a character if they could be their "dedicated news team" (an idea I got from a card in the King of Tokyo card game). Promise them positive coverage if they give them tips on things that might go down they can report on. Since all this was on my mind, and at the very least the first few minutes of the next session being them at least being approached by reporters and later seeing a news report on the encounter, it was enough to include it in the invite for the next session. Easy peasy. 

Just a generic reporter image (who I am going to use for an NPC) and a title "More New at 11" (just happens to be one of my favorite Public Enemy songs)

This invite was not exactly high art. None of them are. Really, if anything they are a more personal thing for me. But in the case of this invite for the Marvel game, it's kind of a mystery box. The players will have no idea what it means. And the meaning will not be deep. But it lets me tap into maybe the barest of the plot for the next session, and since I have no idea yet how the majority of the session will pan out, this at least connects to it in a minor way. And if the characters kind of go with the Dedicated News Team idea, it could have greater ramifications. 

But yeah, the invite is a minor thing, but its fun for me to decide on a title and an image at the very least. And we GM's gotta get our jollies any little way we can, eh?

Cheers

Marvel RPG - "What Price Three Souls to Save?"

 

So, this couple of session arc would be of the supernatural variety. When I give people a quick description of my setting and what I like to do with it, I call it "Supers/Cyberpunk/Future Noir/Future Supernatural." The Pacific island nation of Haven was not just historically a "weirdness magnet" but the post WW3 refugee crisis brought folk from all over the globe here, along with whatever folklore and myth they brought with them. So especially in the older, lower income parts of the city, I like to imagine there are lots of supernatural goings on. Western Euro, Pacific Islander, Caribbean, etc.

And in my old Champions games, specifically for the then street level Justice Incorporated characters, I created Sister Mary Alice, or "Malice." Sister Mary Alice was a nun at the big catholic church downtown, "Our Lady of Constant Sorrow," made in part of brick and stained glass imported from an old European cathedral in the 1950's. In stands still smack dab in the Eastern District of City Center, with much of the city built around it.

Some decades before, Sister Mary was assaulted and killed by violent gang members and entombed at the church. But Sister Mary's spirit was taken over by a spirit of vengeance, turning the soul of Mary Alice into a Revenant. Every some odd years the possessed spirit of Sister Mary would invade the body of a fit, mostly random, young woman to take on the vigilante mantle and go out seeking violent men to kill. 

Mary Alice could bestow upon her vessel the ability to levitate, pass through objects and produce ancient weaponry (favoring swords, axes, and maces). The possessed woman's body would be imbued with extra strength and stamina (of the max human potential variety). She was perfect for those running battles on rainy nighttime rooftops and alleyways. 

For this recent Rank 3 Justice Inc games, I needed to upgrade her a bit, mostly adding the ability to teleport and also a level of Mighty and Sturdy for the mortal form. Made her Rank 4 as well, which makes her more than a match for any of the characters individually. 

I also brought in a bit of a protege for Sister Mary, a young Latina girl in Day of the Dead makeup who was using her grandfather's heirloom military pistols to go out and blast violent gang members at night in the form of "Devota." The urban legend of Malice and the new, mortal vigilante were out at night taking care of business. Sister Mary Alice mostly being near to help her if she got in trouble and let her do most of the killing. Still, dead criminals were being found with both sword and gunshot wounds. 

Several sessions ago I had decided to start having a 15- or 20-minute encounter a character could face solo every session or two, just so they can have their own moments. The character "Ghost" was on patrol and ran into Devota taking on a gang on a rooftop, with Malice on hand to make sure it went well. You can read the sad tale about how all that went down for me here. I will probably not be mentioning it again in the foreseeable future. 

But this encounter would finish up this little dangling plotline. I won't go into deep detail, but the two-session arc would take place essentially on two maps, the ground floor of an enclosed parking lot, and a section of the roof of Our Lady of Sorrow.

I would bring in one of the members of the group "The Redeemers" who have been around since the very first session of the campaign (the runners up for a job with Justice Incorporated) and also appeared in the "Bar Wars" arc. 

Pretty much like most of the Redeemers characters I came up with Count Carl on the spot when I was practicing creating characters in Demiplane for my hoped for eventual Marvel Multiverse campaign. I really didn't have him all that fleshed out. He was going to be a non-evil vampire who hunts evil vampires. In his first appearance I meant for him to be German or Romanian, but I somehow just started doing a Cockney accent for him when he appeared in game. By his second appearance I decided, based in large part of the image, that he became a vampire in 1960's swinging London and I would basically just do an Austin Powers impression. That stuck. Vampire hunter, monster hunter, and most of all a detective of all things supernatural. He was a chain smoker and before he appears the smell of smoke would proceed him. 

He appeared in the morning in the Safehouse Paladin is living in. Pally woke up smelling ciggy smoke and hearing the news on. Going into the living space there was Count Carl floating in front of the big wall TV, smoking and waiting for him. 

Their previous encounter having been a brief hand to hand (Paladin handled him then no problem, though Carl's heart was not really into that encounter), the blunt and no-nonsense Paladin told him to go back outside and ring the doorbell. When he reentered, Carl asked that Paladins team members be summoned. When they arrived, he told them of the Revenant influencing the spirit of Mary Alice, possessing and innocent girls' body, and at least to some degree encouraging Yanet "Devota" Inez to be a criminal killer. He said that his friend, the blind elderly Dominican priest of Our Lady of Constant Sorrow, can create an area at the church that he can trap Malice in, and that as an experienced Exorcist (in the real world the Dominican Republic seems to have big history with that) can expunge the Revenant and bring peace to the soul of Mary Alice and free the unknown girl being possessed. 

Carl says that he predicts Mary Alice and Devota will appear the next evening to attack youths who will be doing a violent teen takeover of a parking lot near a theater multiplex. He wants the characters to be there to try and stop any violence they can, but to let Devota escape. The young girl apparently goes to the church after each appearance as the vigilante to pray (and that Carl knows most of this from being in contact with her only close living relative, her grandmother who has been going to the church for decades). The father will have an area of the roof blessed and prepared with candles and incense and will eventually lead young Yanet up to the roof, where Sister Mary Alice will no doubt appear to help her. At that point they can stop Mary Alice and the father will perform the exorcism. 

Part of my philosophy when running games, whatever the genre like DnD or whatever, is to provide different locations to do action in. I think that is especially important for a genre like this, as streets and office building rooftops can get a bit repetitive. So, an indoor parking structure and a cathedral roof section seems to fit the bill of keeping things fresh. 

So once the characters staked the place out, the youths soon arrived to cause a fuss among people going to their cars after a movie or dinner. They were prepared with bats and knives, and as soon as they started fanning out to mug and menace folks, the characters dug in. Paladin and Seraph beating on some of them, Nova trapping some in an energy cage, and Igneous generally menacing them with his giant size pretty much had them in check. But then Sister Mary Alice and Devota appeared. Yanet was hesitant to kill teens, though when a couple of the gang members accidentally knocked down an old couple while fleeing from Paladin she did shoot one of the youths in the leg. But she then took off, as did Mary Alice, but not before producing a mace to smash in the head of one of the teens.

Then off to the church roof, where they met Father Dom who eventually brought up Yanet who had removed her makeup to pray. They disarmed her, and Mary Alice appeared to fight them. I don't have to go into detail, but at rank 4 she could put up a decent fight and dish out some damage with whatever weapon she produced. I even had given her the power to animate a couple of the roof gargoyles to make it more of an interesting fight. But they were finally able to put Malice down, and father Dom freed the possessed body, and Sister Mary's soul from the influence of the revenant spirit. 

Sister Mary Alice's soul was seen rising into a shaft of light, and it seemed like she was finally free. 

The unconscious Yanet was flown by Seraph to the apartment where she lives with her grandmother. With granny being a devout Catholic, she of course thought Seraph was an angel at first. 

Some thoughts: At some point during this 2-session arc, Seraph declared to the others (while on the church roof I think) that this may be the most important thing they ever do. Not sure if they agree, but strong stoic type Paladin seems to be a religious warrior (a session after this he would give an NPC a bible), but he does not advertise it. Also, Igneous' player missed the second part where the roof fight was. Iggy's player misses a session now and again. Since he can grow up to 100 feet tall, he is always conspicuous by his absence.

Anyway, that nicely wrapped up the supernatural vigilante angle. A nice detour from the more science related stuff of previous sessions. But there will be more supernatural based foes in the future. Gotta keep mixing things up. 

Cheers

Cat People Scientists and The Backrooms Rescue Squad

 

So after the big encounter at the Metroplex Mall with the York Industries sponsored supergroup "Safeguard,' it was time for another two-session arc that would intro the group to an elderly version of an old character of mine and take them on a wild ride into my version of the backrooms, the "Liminal Zones."

So a couple of days after the events at the mall, the group met at the office for a video meeting with Ms. Kyono to go over the encounter. She explains that in the past York Industries, much like she does, tended to occasionally sponsor meta humans (often created by them) to cause all kinds of problems for characters and other NPC's alike. It seems that Safeguard is the latest version of that. 

Seraph, Paladin, Igneous, and Nova, the new member.

During the meeting, a surprise visitor showed up at the office. It was the diminutive Yuri Heisen, also known as "Heisenbrain."

They now knew Heisen as the scientist leader of the "Redeemers," a team made up of runners up to the original Justice Incorporated auditions and the "battle of the bars" sessions. He was there to tell them that the shield and Vita-Ray empowerment projection ability of the weapons used by the mall "terrorists" (prior to Safeguard showing up) had the energy signature of technology he invented (and used on himself and some of his group during the nightclub encounter with Justice Inc a couple of arcs back) and that he already believed was formerly stolen by York Industries. And he told them that the ranged teleportation tech that whisked away the supposed terrorists as they got defeated was NOT his, but they might want to reach out to McAllister Scientific, quantum science specialists who are the foremost experts in teleport and portal tech. 

Kyono, from the wall screen, said that Manx McAllister, founder of McAllister Scientific (despite the unassuming name, it has worldwide fame, at least in the scientific community, as some of the greatest minds of our time) and an accidental cat-human hybrid, was a friend of her grandfather decades ago, but that she does know Manx's granddaughters, 25 years old twins Maxine and Tabitha, and actually saw them at an event just a few days before and even has pictures with them. 

A pair of "whooo!| girls, but also two of the 
greatest scientific minds on the planet. 

So a quick phone call and the group were on their way to "The City of Industry." an area of industry and research compounds some miles south of the city along the Southern Highway.

Sim City eat your heart out

The McAllister campus was made up of a large admin building, and several blocky research bunkers with underground portions spread throughout...

The group were led to the teleportation and portal research building, and within met Manx McAllister's granddaughters, the twins Maxine and Tabitha. See my last post for some info on cat hybrids. 

When first met, the twins were in lab coats in a high ceiling room and playing tag by popping in and out of mini portals projected from units that look like those overhead track lighting things, to the delight of a small crowd of research assistants.

I planned it out like this to show both the playfulness of the cat-human hybrids, at the same time leaving no doubt that these were also brilliant scientists. As it would turn out, though the sisters' great grandparents were pioneering teleport tech in the 1960's, they were sort of activists against pure teleportation tech. Not just because an accident involving it fused their grandpa with his pet cat as a child, but the theory that teleporters actually kill you and recreate a copy at the other end. 

Though the twins don't really seem to have
complaints about being legacy hybrids.

The twins consult with the group and do believe that York Industries in the past has tried to poach their tech, and the teleport technology used in the encounter at the Metroplex Mall may well have been their older tech they are not using much since they personally have been studying quantum portal tech as an alternative to classic teleportation. 

Just an aside, but I base some of these concepts on stuff  from the old Handbooks of the Marvel Universe issues I read way back (and still have actually...they are part of my "Box of Keepers" collection I have refrained from posting on Ebay over the years). I remember the Nightcrawler entry talking about his teleportation ability, and how it essentially is Kurt swiftly hopping in and out of a pocket dimension. Portal, right?  That feels righter than a teleporter just breaking down his being and reassembling it again and again. 

During the visit the girls got a call from the Liminal Zones research building. Apparently grampy Manx and a handful of researchers who were on a standard research hike in level zero (the endless maze of yellow wallpaper) and went off the rails to go down a few levels to the "Red City" where they heard from previously found lost folk in the mazes that a small community of Backrooms victims were holed up. This is known because one of the researchers, "Jenkins." showed up near the gateway into the zones in a near state of exhaustion and stress and said that they made it to the Red City, were chased by creatures including living art dummies (and found the way they came in blocked), and he ducked into a white doorway that sent him to appear near the research vestibule. 

The Twins declare they will be going in to save Manx and the scientists, and the Justice inc gang volunteers as the rescue squad. And since researcher Jenkins left his fiancée as part of the lost group, he insists on going in as well after getting some protein bars and energy drinks. So Maxine, Jenkins (both armed with pulse rifles), and the characters enter the Zones, while sister Tabitha maintains radio contact in the command center for as long as she can. So into the Backrooms they go. 

(note: I refrained from using the term "Backrooms" and stuck mostly to "Liminal Zones." The movie had just come out, and since this was my version of the creepy pasta I did not want to stress the name it is known of in our media. Urban myth enthusiasts in the Haven setting might refer to the Backrooms, but to the McAllister's its Liminal Zones and that's that)

Aw, the Backrooms. That moist carpet. That 
moldy smell. Those odd sounds in the distance. 

The first encounter with local Fauna is "Still Life." Mockeries of humanity. If you saw the backrooms film, the creatures in that, including giant Captain Carl, are basically Still life. I gave them not much else other than Mighty 1 for a little oomph in combat. Tabitha detected them on remote cameras set up in level zero and were able to warn the group of them incoming on mass. 

One problem the party experienced in the Zones was my oddly lucky rolls for the foe attacks. Not just here, but all the way to the end of the scenario. Still life was not really all that tough, but they got a bit of damage in. 

A large, old staircase led away from the level and down towards the next territory. The Mall. 

In a narrow hall in the mall the party encountered the "Mall Maven." Basically a 10-foot-tall creature similar to Still Life, but with Mighty 2 and some Sturdy. And big claws.

This ended up being their toughest battle so far in the campaign. At one point Mall Maven was able to hit all three heroes in front of her with a single claw swipe. I got an "ultimate success" which meant a ton of damage but also put the "bleed conditions" on them. Meaning take 5 health damage per round until healed or spend a turn treating the wound. We had to end the session there with them destroying her on the next round, which gave us all time to soak in the encounter for a week. 

(just a note on "health," which is the hit points in this, you have to take double your max amount in order to be killed. But if you have a couple points above zero, and your round goes by without removing the bleed condition, I think that can kill you outright as well. 

When we returned the next week it was no big deal. Looking at the rules (yes we are all still learning as we go) it turned out that having levels of Sturdy countered bleed condition. That and being able to use focus points for some on the spot healing (especially if you have the power "I can do this all day") can save you in a pinch. So, shake it off and onwards down to the Red City

Seems big, but in reality, I had my version of the place be just a few city blocks. So with fliers like Seraph and Nova in the party, they were able to see Manx McAllister and the scientists out on the street, fighting off living, wooden art mannequins. Kind of another form of still life, and though their flame throwers and pulse rifles were pretty much depleted, they were swinging them as clubs while old man Manx was using his claws. 

He's old, but he can still claw you up.

The characters helped Manx and the researchers clean up the mannequins pretty quick, but as the gave a sigh of relief, a giant spider creature with laser eyes climbed over a building towards them.

Reseacher Jenkings knew the White Door was near and pointed it out for the others to head towards. As the team engaged the laser spider, Igneous grew to giant size to carry the exhausted scientists to the doorway.  

Paladin and Seraph engaged the big spider, but it was Nova, the newest member of Justice Inc, who flew up and tapped into his energy powers, beefing them up by basically using all of his Focus (the score you use for energy related powers) to super-blast the bug. He did a huge amount of damage, close to a couple hundred (that is a lot. Average damages for energy stuff is around 40) and blasting its head off. Everybody made it through the White Door and appeared in the level zero vestibule near the gateway. 

Everybody got medical treatment, protein bars, and coffee. The twins alternated between shaking and yelling at grampa Manx (for going off the rails in their research hike in the Zones) and showering him with kisses for being alive, then all the characters got a storm of face smooches from the grateful girls for helping save everybody. 

We can only dream.

This won't be the last time we hear from the McAllister's.  Its Manx's 86th birthday party the following week, and you just know the characters are going to get invited. With a big party thrown by quantum scientists, you just know there are going to be surprises! Stay tooned.

Cheers

Do I have a thing for anime Cat Girls lately?

 

I grew up with dogs. My family always had dogs. One or two at most. But cats were not something we had as kids. I think it might be a Scottish thing. My dad, and my uncles, all seemed to hate cats. I did have a cat when I was around 18. A black tailless Manx. I don't remember how I got him. Maybe a relative (they are originally from Scotland). I named him Salem, after Sabrina the Teenage Witches cat in the comics. I got him right after a bad breakup with my high school sweetheart. Salem barely made it out of kittenhood when I got home from a weekend trip and got told by my parents he got smooshed by a car. Knowing my parents, there was probably a 50/50 chance they just didn't want a cat around the house. Or since they were Scottish, I should say "hoose."  It was a period in my life I thought the world was trying to get me to off myself. And since I was raised by European immigrant Catholics, I thought God was too. Man, we sure had it easy as teens, eh? But anyway, I never had another cat. 

I did like cat things though. I remember using Cat Lord for one campaign or another back in the day. I think as some tie in with Lovecraft's Cats of Ulthar or whatever it was. Of all the cool things in MM2 he might have been my favorite entry at one time. 

Dogs had a superpower or two, but to me cats were off the charts. The flexibility, the agility. When they got stuck in a tree I was all like "you're Spider-Man. Just climb down!"

Yeah, for most of my life I occasionally had cat things pretty much just in games. In the 80's I played in some sessions on and off of the supers rpg "Supergame" over a couple of years, being a part of initial play testing at Aero Hobbies in Santa Monica as a kid, and a couple or three years after that a few times at the home of some friends of Aero owner Gary Switzer. (look here for some tidbits on my youthful Aero days). It used Supergame as the system, since they were all friends with the creators. I remember almost nothing. Well, two things. One, when I scribbled a pic of my character (I am no artist), one of the "ladies" declared that Aimee, the co-creator and artist of the game had "nothing to worry about." 

Her work was so groundbreaking,
everybody should have worried

The other thing I remember is my character Manx. I don't think I had an origin, he was simply a young cat human hybrid. A year or two later, when we were doing V and V or Champs, one of my buddies tried his hand at some sessions, and I used Manx for them. That would be it for Manx for several decades. He left my gaming zeitgeist. 

Until summer last year, that is. I was getting in on a handful of games to learn the system. One of them was set in Marvel 1980 (two guys from this would form the beginning of my current group). It was an eager effort by the GM, who was new to it as well but giving it a go. The games were OK, but the three or so session we had only occurred every month or so. The guy had young kids and school or something. Also it was based on stuff going on in the comics, and our characters to me felt like sidekicks to existing ones. 

But what came out of it was me using Manx again after all these many years. I gave him a last name: McAllister. And a full origin. Manx had a Scottish Father and a German mother. The dad was a physicist, and she a bio-chemist. World renown, and pioneers in Quantum science. They had built prototype teleport pods in the late 1960's. As a kid Manx and his pet cat went inside a pod and it got activated. Boom, catman. 

Yep. 

At 21 years old Manx McAllister was a child of rich and famous scientists, and going to college in New York, himself a brilliant scientist. I reconsidered his look, which back in the day was a black manx (like my old cat Salem) covered in fur. For this I considered a look akin to Fritz the Cat.

Yeah. No. 

I settled on a far more human look. I yoinked the appearance of Manx from a character from another pornographic source, an old funny animal comic Omaha The Cat Dancer. 

I will post deets about those Manx related sessions of the current campaign next, but during the games last year I was already planning to use Manx, and his family, for this campaign. But its 2046, so Manx McAllister is 86 years old. 

Got a little more human looking in old age.

For me the fun was not just revisiting Manx, but was in creating his family. Manx was CEO of McAllister Scientific, a research compound that are pioneers in Quantum engineering. I conceived of his son Manx jr, who I decided would be a biologist like his grandmother. He only appeared on a view screen in the sessions at Manx's birthday party, as I had him doing research in The Savage Land (hopefully to be a place visited in future sessions), but I imagined him as a bit of a hedonist and ladies man.

"Hello, laaaaadies..."

But now we get to the Cat Girls thing I promised in the post title. I needed Manx to have grandkids. I looked back and remembered two of my first cat girl crushes from way back. The were named Una Puma and Ana Puma, from an anime called "Tank Police".

Their most iconic scene was this (NOT work safe):

They were murderous criminals. My McAllister twins would be brilliant quantum scientist outside of party-happy "woo girls" the world's foremost physicists, and actual good girls. 

Party time.

Science time. 

I just wanted interesting relatives of Manx, was not necessarily going for the sexy. But this may have been when I started realizing, though no furry I, that I might like cat chicks. 

And as the fates would have it, weeks later I discovered Chainsmoker Cat. 

She's not the sexy one on the show. 

from the Wiki:

Set in a modern-day world where cat-people, known as "beastfolks", co-exist with humans, the series follows the daily misadventures of Yaniko, a catgirl who lives in a small apartment building in Nyagamihara (based on Sagamihara), Japan, and is addicted to smoking, regardless of the damage to her environment, her psyche, or her family. As the series progresses, Yaniko's friends and other troubled catgirls with their own issues are introduced, along with their human landlord, who tolerates their antics.

That's it. I watched a ton of youtube clips before watching a couple episodes (its on Netflix, but I watched elsewhere). But the opening titles I saw on youtube had me hooked right off the jump.

Despite being about addiction, poverty, and opression, the show is funny as hell. Yaniko cares about nothing but smoking ciggies. As the title would suggest. She cannot go more than a few minutes without lighting up. It is her one true joy. 

The addiction: Yani's entire life is cigarettes. I have never seen a ciggy addict like her. Heavy smokers have stinky house from the smoke, but otherwise normal people with a life and job etc. But I think Yaniko is also chronically lazy. And very Gen Z. She gets anxious to the point of being sick from the thought of having to clean her place and take a bath so her sister can visit (which young, put together sis does. While wearing a hazmat suit). 

The poverty: Yani can't keep a job because she can't go very long without a smoke. "When I smoke I forget my worries" she says. Most of the other cat girls, addicts or now, can keep themselves together. But none of them make much money when they do work because...

Opression: Maybe the most interesting thing about the setting, a normal Japanese working class neighborhood, but apparently in this Japan there are "Beastfolk," and they are an underclass. They can have jobs, but only menial labor. They go to school with humans, live with humans, go to bars with humans, but in one scene where Yani plays soccer with some kinds (these scenes happen on the way home from a ciggy run), and a couple of cops put an end to it. And there are rules about cross marriage. 

So the beastmen, or "Anthros" which I think is the in setting scientific name for them, often dress well and try to fit in. I'm only like three sessions in, so not sure if their are different drinking fountains, bus and train sections, and race specific diners. But I don't think so. It's just sort of a part of life. The cat girls are second class like its just the nature of things. I have yet to see human on anthro violence. But there was a mention that the cats can jump 8 meters. They have fangs. So maybe the humans are just keeping them down enough to not get killed by them.

Over episodes new cat friends appear, some living in Yani's building. Most have their own addictions going on. Alcohol, drugs, video games. I assume later episodes have sex and other addictions. 

The show is super controversial right now. In Japan for sure. "Freeters" are looked down upon like the cat girls in that world, and there is fear it is glorifying a "nothing" lifestyle. In the US Netflix is getting hit by complaints about the show. Can you imagine? All the shit Netflix gets up to. 

OK, I don't think I have a cat lady thing. No more than other things. I mean, a cat girl is better than a dog girl, I love dogs, but. Sort of unclean. A couple of cat girls in an old anime, Maxine and Tabetha McAllister in the game, then discovering this show is a coinkydink. I like a lot of anime girls. Female images in real life or in art are appealing to me. Nothing wrong with that. And the thing is, looking at aime versions is where its OK to stare. 

I grew up in Los Angeles. Downtown. Hollywood. My native Venice Beach. So I have seen and know people like on this show. Folk with demons. Maybe like us.  If you live in a big town or a city then you know. I can handle it and think its funny to see how Yani fails. You prob can too. But farts, poops, vomit (oddly always rainbow colored) are the order of the day. But Ren and Stimpy prepared us for that stuff, eh?

Next post will be about the session where I introduce the group to the McAllister Family and the scientist shenanigans they get up to. My version of "The Backrooms" is involved. Its where the first real bloody combats goes down, with some characters getting severely injured. They got tested hard. Stay tooned.

Cheers