Gamesmaster: Tails of Equestria – The Fountain of Youth (DIY)

My Little Pony: Tails of Equestria – The Fountain of Youth

DIY roleplaying game adventure

Our* pony characters were approaching the double-figure level milestone of conventional retirement when we'd be too amazing for there to ever be any jeopardy in our adventures any more (although, with the ability to summon angels from the start and re-roll bad throws by recycling basically unlimited friendship tokens, it hasn't been an especially challenging journey), so I wrote a reflective and safe-action-packed story as a possible send-off.

Incorporating a totally original gimmick that hasn't been used in loads of things before, it let us put the junior standees and character sheets from the Starter Set to more use and gave the young player the explicit choice at the end of whether to start over with these same characters or return them to normal while we set off for adventure with brand new, hopefully less indestructible characters.

She chose a bit of both.

* I know I'm not supposed to have a character as GM, but it would feel lonely with just one. She has two herself! See those rules? You see 'em? [Karate chop!]

The Saga of Bubblegum & Angel Rose (& Firebrand, Who Joined After a While, But Never Did Get a Pony Sheet)

• Level 0: A Dragon's Bounty (we can probably retcon that it was them, since we unimaginatively used the stock character standees thereafter)
• Level 1: The Gift Horse (mini) / The Pet Predicament (first bit; didn't like it) / The Curse of the Statuettes (abridged; still figuring it out)
• Level 2: Sky Arrow's Big Flight (Bubblegum achieves a place at the prestigious Wonderbolt Academy; never bothers to show up)
• Level 3: The Cutie Mark Mystery
• Level 4: Judge Not By the Cover (introducing recurring frenemy Discord)
• Level 5: The Sister Springs (mini; Bubblegum achieves magic ice breath, completely forgotten after this escapade) / The Secret of Starfall
• Level 6: The Haunting of Equestria (Firebrand joins the gang; player count remains the same)
• Level 7: Dungeon of the Diabolical Draconequus (inconsequential because it wasn't real) / The Festival of Lights (first bit; seemed bored) / One Good Turn Deserves Another (mini) / Melody of the Waves (introducing Captain Rosella)
• Level 8: The Beasts of Black Skull Island (the gang strikes it rich!)
• Level 9: The Fountain of Youth (the seasoned adventurers decide to rest on their laurels)
• Level 10: Bubblegum Has a Choice (a junior Gamesmaster has other ideas...)

Story: Nostos

This fusion of various sci-fi elements (but mainly Red Dwarf's 'Timeslides' and Farscape) spontaneously combusted in my mind when making morning coffee, so I thought I'd better get it down.

The Abyss: Halloween Nightmare Creepypasta

I've never seen The Abyss, and probably never will. It sometimes rears its head on lists of classic sci-fi films, but not at enthusiastic enough placings to seem worth my time. It's probably about underwater, not space. Boring.

But its vague presence still wormed its way into my mind somehow, forming the basis of a rare adult nightmare about struggling to escape The Scariest Scene of All Time.

Dodecahedron of Doom

12 "stories" x 12 words

'No! Don't look into its eyes!' Mr Vernon implored the year fives.

'Are you Lazarus Rook, the occult detective?' the bloody cleric gasped.

'No.'

'You're too late!' Stevens cackled over Judy's exsanguinated husk.

'Never mind then.'

Once upon a time, they lived happily ever after, until he exploded.

Fear gripped her, as did the rubber glove without a hand inside.

Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated; there were only two hellhounds.

He briefly reflected on the irony that he was now literally heartless.

'This is the mask,' the child demonstrated. 'See? My face goes here.'

'I said we should have made air holes,' the eyeless clown lamented.

On the bright side, you don't have to worry about headaches now.

'Abortion toasties again?' Jimmy grumbled.

'It's dark. Get it down,' Dad blubbed.

'Remember,' the professor unnecessarily reminded his protégé, 'we can't waste–'

'Too late.'

Chicken tale

Our neighbours raise fighting cocks, at least that's what I deduce from the fragments of virile-looking feed packets that occasionally blow into our garden. It's one of many wholesome pastimes that make them fine examples of the species.

The cocks' raucous dawn chorus wakes me up earlier than would be ideal most mornings, but when I look out over the unkempt field and see them crying out from solitary confinement in enclosures that amount to little more than rooster cosies, I can't feel anger towards them. It's directed elsewhere.

Time for another of my uplifting stories.

Spooky tale

This is a tale I call...

Bleak tale

I've been contemplating mortality recently. Can't imagine why. And I've spotted a flaw (add it to the pile) in the way people traditionally think about souls, spirits and the like, which they sometimes decide are bound by the laws of physics (those who mistake Nigel Kneale's classic drama The Stone Tape for a serious documentary), but other times decide are exempt. Where do you draw the line?

It's the same fundamental flaw I spotted in time travel a while ago. I could have gone with either time travel or death for this fictionalised demonstration, but since the former would have turned into the latter pretty sharpish anyway, I plumped for the macabre option.

I hope this unsettles you as much as it does me. Winking out of existence is surely preferable to this horrific eternity you've created.

Penelope: A confessional memoir

The following is a true story that I have to get off my chest.

It's up to you whether you think it's an actual experience from my life or the authentic transcript of a dream I just had, fuelled by reading some messed-up horror stories, listening to a radio discussion about dreams and an undigested bit of beef fajita.

Gareth Shinks' Absolutely Boring, Normal Day (demo)

I was putting together a blog post of synopses for things I'm clearly never going to write – story concepts anarchically bashed out on Notepad between cryptic password reminders and dream notes, older ideas languishing sadly in the '2011 Stuff' folder – when I was astonished to see that I had actually got round to writing this one.

Or at least made a determined start on it before getting visibly ground down by the tedious task and spoiling it before quitting. I wrote this a few years ago while stranded in a Malaysian city for several weeks, for reasons that I won't bore you with because you're about to be bored out of your goddamned mind as it is.

A weird tale

I may have given up on the dream of writing creatively for a living as soon as I left university and entered the real world (not going back there again), but I can only consume so much of other people's works before I feel guilty and need to give something back, however paltry. Maybe I'll write a story a month? Not going to happen.

I wanted to call this 'Gob of Death,' but feared that might compromise the tone somewhat. Then I resorted to silliness anyway, never mind.


Octopus photo credit, before I forget: Alexander Semenov.

Closure

Whether you read a lot of books, pore over a newspaper or magazine every day, or you just waste a lot of time reading websites of no nutritional value such as this one, there's no doubt you will have read more open brackets in your life (and other types of punctuation marks than closed ones, due to the illiteracy or forgetfulness of the authors or copy editors involved.

As long as spelling and grammar checks remain passive rather than enforced, this is a problem that doesn't seem to be going away (if anything, advances in technology have made it worse. But I can at least reduce the burden of your open bracket debt by presenting a selection of closed brackets for you to read through at your leisure.

I haven't done any research or got any kind of reliable estimate of the type of figures involved, but here's a round 500 in a neat enough square sort of shape that should at least go some way towards helping:

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If you have the nagging feeling that that wasn't enough, feel free to read through it again as many times as needed until that feeling goes away.

Don't worry if you think you might have accidentally read it too many times and have now read more closed brackets in your life than open ones, as that just means you'll have a handy stockpile to be getting on with. The open brackets will sort themselves out.

Fiction therapy

When I graduated with a creative writing degree seven years ago, I had to make the decision whether I was going to follow my calling and walk in the footsteps of all the people I admired by living the frustrating life of the struggling artist, or sell out to The Man and use my 'skill' of being able to rewrite the same page 50 times in slightly different ways to convince you to book overpriced flights.

If I was bolder, less concerned with financial security and had more interest in writing things people would actually be interested in reading, I could be writing this from a grotty squat above a cafe that reluctantly tolerated my open mic short stories once a Thursday in exchange for helping out in the kitchen. Instead, I'm writing this on a terrible Wi-Fi connection in an inexpensive condo in the Philippines surrounded by a cultural desert but with plenty of money in the bank. I'm not confident I made the right decision.

I've been writing corporate propaganda for a living for five years now, and it's safe to say it's completely sapped my creative spirit. Since I stopped travelling and settled down a bit, I've been taking on so much work that even when I've had an idea bubbling away, I haven't had the hours free to write it. Today was my first free day in weeks, so when no urgent work requests had showed up in my inbox by lunchtime, I eagerly bashed out my latest abomination. It felt great.

This is the sort of story I would normally spend a few days meticulously planning, with diagrams following through on every small detail (like I did for this one). Since I don't have the time to perfect it and become too disillusioned to bother writing it any more (that happens most of the time), here's the raw creative explosion, complete with overlong sentences, needlessly confusing diversions and inevitable plot holes. It doesn't much matter whether you like it, I had a good time.

If I don't have any work tomorrow either, I might even venture out of the flat and do something. Wouldn't that be a novelty!

Singapore tale

The final leg of our skewed quadropedal journey across continental South-East Asia before heading back to the Philippines (which is the closest place I have to a home now, though the type of unwelcoming home that only lets you stay 21 days before kicking you out again) was five days in $ingapore. Oh hang on, I accidentally pressed shift and 4 then instead of S, I meant $؋₪Gsa₱oR€. I'm implying they like money.

Another former Asian 'home,' I came to-and-fro a few times and got to know this slightly insane island city-state in the summer of 2011 (it's always summer when you're 85 miles from the equator) and had mostly fond memories. Indeed, after Vietnam traffic, Singapore's tyrannical laws made walking along the pavement a much less death-defying experience, and because the solarphobic population tends to lurk beneath the streets in the air conditioned sewer of shopping malls, I don't even have to share these pavements with anyone else.

Thinking about these subterranean consumer vampires put me in the mood to write another story. I ended up writing a different one based around Singapore's best and worst attractions, which you might recognise if you've been following my 'adventures' for a long time. Drags on a bit, doesn't it?

Island tale

We had a partly lovely time on Pulau Perhentian Kecil. I went snorkelling and swam in the sea for the first time in ages and magnificently failed to learn from my past experience of this exact island at the same time of the year as the parts of me that are still vampire-white and normally covered by clothes got painfully sunburned.

Thanks to our tiny, reclusive resort, we also got to enjoy/endure trekking across half the island or braving a bumpy water taxi any time we wanted to go anywhere and Jackie got to experience the on/off Wi-Fi annoyance that's plagued me for two years and might have led to a deeper mutual understanding. Now I just have to take her to Cambodia or Vietnam to experience the hassle of taxi drivers and street sellers and she'll never complain about my stress outbursts again.

I could present scattered photos of fond memories tarnished by sarcastic commentary, but instead I'll take the risk of posting a short story vaguely inspired by our tranquil island week, written in pain as I avoided sun, sea and surfaces while waves lapped outside our window, flying foxes tried to scavenge our biscuits and fluorescent fish flitted beneath the brilliant blue. It's a bit bleak.

Shit optimistic Khao San Road salesmen expect tourists to say

The Philippines' non-generous 21-day visa and the impending austerity festival of Passover taking Jackie out of action meant I was back to living the bachelor lifestyle for a couple of weeks and trying desperately to find something new to keep me occupied in this well-travelled part of the planet. As ever, that meant a flight connection in Bangkok with a few days of regeneration and hibernation in its irritatingly convenient tourist district.

Bangkok's Khao San Road area deserves all the criticism it gets, but I have to admit it's a bloody convenient place to spend a night or two before booking a bus to anywhere the hell else in Thailand. Walking around these packed streets and getting hassled by suit salesman and taxi drivers every five seconds is surprisingly non-stressful though, and my theory is that it's so annoying, it stretches annoyance beyond its elastic limit until it snaps and becomes funny instead.

Here are the scenarios I imagine these overly optimistic salesmen are imagining in their heads when they make their cold sales pitches to clearly uninterested passersby.

Another pointless ebook

My second year of travelling and writing about it is now available as a FREE E-BOOK!

That's right, I put myself through this time-wasting ordeal again, despite having work and life to do.

These edited (though mostly not) blogs cover September 2011 to September 2012 in the Philippines, Borneo, Thailand (several times), Cambodia, South Korea (twice), Japan (twice), Sri Lanka (never again), China (not all of it) and Laos (some of it). I saw a petrol station in Brunei too, if you're interested.

That's right, it includes my Laos blogs that haven't been published online yet. So why wait for them to come on TV when you can rent the VHS? PDF rather. Just as redundant a format. I couldn't get the Kindle converter to work.

Download Freelance Flaneur - Year Two

(62 MB)

Go on, what's the worst that can happen? It could have a virus that destroys your computer and accesses your personal information, I guess. I'm not a very good salesman. But I'm not making any money from this vanity project, so who cares?

• 280 PAGES!
• BRAND NEW! lazy introduction
• UNSEEN BLOGS! for a couple of weeks until they go online anyway
• NEEDLESSLY! comprehensive appendices
• STILL NO HYPERTEXT OR LINKS! for difficulty of navigation

Tossers of the world

I don't play by your admittedly sensible and important rules

This might surprise you, but I'm not perfect. I've gone on record describing myself variously as 'a bit of an asshole' and 'a dick,' but I don't think I'd go as far as to call myself 'a tosser.' I'll reserve that privilege for those more self-assured and insufferably cocky men I've encountered on my travels (they are always men) who make modest boasts about what they view as their impressive or unusual achievements that tend to look rather mediocre or even pointless to the objective eye.

These are usually the objective eyes of women who fail to be impressed when being insulted through their association with the lamentable tourists surrounding the tosser, who are probably only here on holiday, doing a bit of sightseeing on the well-trodden path, unquestioningly following their Lonely Planet guidebooks before going back to their humdrum lives. Like there's anything wrong with having something to go back to.

Here are some true examples of modest boasts, failed attempts to impress and general tossiness that I've enjoyed from an impartial vantage point elsewhere in the room, usually when I'm working, writing these blogs or finding other ways to avoid interaction. Most of these are from South Korea the first time around, which was the last time I shared rooms and hung around in communal areas in hostels, so is probably why those are freshest in my memory. I've embellished the events slightly for dramatic purposes, and although most of the featured tossers could conceivably be me, only one of them actually is. But which one?

Pointless e-book

My first year of travelling and writing about it is now available as a FREE E-BOOK!

Covering September 2010 to September 2011 in Italy, Greece, Israel, Egypt, Taiwan, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia and Singapore again (plus 20 minutes in Cambodia).

Download Freelance Flaneur - Year One (PDF)

(46.7MB)

...though I don't know why you'd want to, really. You can already read it all here, with easier navigation. I really did spend far too long on this pointless project over the last few weeks, when I should have been working or just trying to enjoy life rather than getting pissed off by disappearing text boxes. But look what's included:

• 268 PAGES!
• SOME! new photos (but mostly loads taken out)
• LESS! content overall
• ANGRY COMMENTS! left by dicks
• ILLEGAL! third party copyright images used without permission
• LIMITED EDITION! in that it's loads more limited than a website

I'd love to bring out an actual book of this some time, but that would require far too much trimming down. If I only included the decent entries when I visited something interesting, and leave out the rubbish where I'm trying to work out which country to go to next or being unintentionally racist after getting pissed off by bus drivers, you wouldn't be getting an accurate overview of my journey.

I don't have an iPad/Kindle/e-book reader, I'm just working off a 10-inch laptop and it looks okay on that. Please let me know if there's anything seriously wrong, or if you're annoyed by the formatting, image sizes, file size or whatever, because I'll doubtless go through this ludicrously time-consuming project again in September when year two's over.

How is it?

Where dreams come true

After some bad experiences, I don't stay in dorms so much any more - unless I'm in an expensive country like Japan, where even a shelf in what feels (and smells) like a laundry cupboard will set you back a couple of thousand yen. But there is one benefit I've noticed to sleeping in shared rooms and being woken several times each night by someone's unpleasant snoring and other nocturnal emissions - it's really conducive to wacky dreaming and recall.

I don't dream as much as I used to, or at least most of the time there's nothing worth remembering. I long for the nights when I'd wake with excitement after some gothic nightmare of an unseen presence looming in an architecturally impossible castle, animatronic exhibits that became inexplicably horrifying when activated, descending a staircase into darkness and being gripped with terror or being cast out into the unending void of space, to name a few common tropes. I was probably a bit of a weird kid.

Although I don't have nightmares any more, I still occasionally have dreams that make me laugh, and that I'm convinced are genuine comedy gold for about five minutes after waking. Until I look back over my hazily scrawled notes later in the day and realise that not only are they not funny, they actually make no sense whatsoever. Here's an example of a joke somebody told me in a dream that genuinely caused me to laugh myself awake:

Q: What's the heaviest thing in the world?

A: A pterodactyl with a rock.

What does that even mean? When I told this to Oliver, he said it made him laugh, which is either a compliment to the writing skills or my unconscious or an early warning sign of mental illness on his part.

Recently, I've had a few dreams that have stood up in the harsh light of daytime criticism and given me hope that maybe my imagination hasn't been completely pulverised by the corporate adult world. So, like a latter day Lovecraft, Coleridge or de Quincey, I thought I'd appropriate one of these enjoyable dreams near-verbatim and make an almost entirely unembellished short story out of it.

Bare bones

So I came up with this idea for a steampunk/sci-fi story earlier this year, got really excited developing it and carrying out the historical research (my idea of fun is probably a little different to yours), and then felt all my enthusiasm exfoliate away when I tried to actually write the thing and remembered I'm not actually all that good at writing. My optimistic first draft got as far as chapter three.

Then recently, my MP3 player broke which tragically meant I had to spend time actually thinking about stuff, like I was from the 1950s or something, and I finally figured out an ending to the story that worked and (most importantly) could be fun to write. It was pretty irresponsible of me to come up with a comprehensive plot outline so close to National Novel Writing Month, but maybe I need that ridiculous, needlessly stressful 30th November deadline to finally get this out of my brain and onto the page. By which I mean the Microsoft Word 2003 file in Arial 10. Even if it's rubbish, at least I can get it out of my system.

Here's a summary of the situation and plot that I've kept as brief as possible, with minimal aren't-I-clever explanations of my genius ideas. Think of it as the York Notes plot synopsis for extremely lazy English Literature students who've already structured their timetable of minimal lectures and seminars so they only have to go to campus on Mondays and Tuesdays and have the rest of the week free, but still consider it unreasonable that they have to actually read stuff.

While Paradise Lost and Ulysses arguably lose something when stripped down to a 500-word synopsis, in this case it's the ideas I'm happy with and the joining-the-dots exercise of inserting conjunctions, verbs and dialogue that ends up spoiling it. If you fancy reading it and letting me know if you think it's worth writing, that would be great. Alternatively, if you think it's awful, this disillusion will save me lots of wasted hours in November.

Then again, once you know the story, there's no reason for me to actually right it - write?