#12Monkeys Monkey Musings #3 - On changing time but not changing emotional fallout

They did it! They managed to change time! Cole will never have to stand in 2017 and watch Cassie die in his arms because the virus doesn't happen till 2018 now! But that means he remembers it and it drives him, but she'll never get to that point--if she does, it'll be a different point now, with a different set of circumstances leading up to it.

And that's what a time travel show is about.

See, to have that scene from Cassie's point of view, they'd have to fail so spectacularly that time resets and the plague goes back to 2017, but now, the plague isn't even the point. Whatever the Messengers are doing is, and it looks an awful lot like they're changing time, too--or making it so there is no time to change?

We still have the issue of the space between 2016 and 2044 that got shifted. There's enough more people in the future now that there's music and radio broadcasts, but our four mains don't remember any of that because they were protected from being rewritten by the serum--how long before Dr Eklund and a restored Lasky aren't the only major personal difference that they stumble across? Because Cassie and Cole and Ramse and Jones are working on the assumption that things have only changed a little and their own perceptions of the future are close enough...but what if they aren't? What if they're now missing vital pieces of information? Things that matter to whatever else is out there--or now out there--that hasn't come to the front of their attentions yet, because they don't know to look for it?

Old!Jennifer probably saw time changing because that's what she does. But Team Splinter doesn't notice a difference. Deacon doesn't. He still hates Ramse and has a rivalry with Cole, but what if there are slight differences in his history that make him different--like, if Ramse wasn't trying to get himself killed last episode, what if he didn't know not to push that button because OldTimeline!Deacon wouldn't have had it, and NewTimeline!Deacon does?

And regardless of all that, Cole and Cassie didn't change, and everything that has piled up between them since she didn't save him from Chechnya last season, all that stuff they haven't dealt with at all, is still there and came with them into the new timeline. Everything that softened Cole since then--learning to dance, eating good food he didn't have to fight for, seeing what sort of world he was saving, meeting Cassie and being impressed by her compassion and her competence--had the flip side of making her hard. It stopped him from killing and taught her how to kill, and did both after she was already mad that he'd let her former fiancee get killed horribly. She thinks Aaron died protecting her from Cole, and seems to have forgotten that he'd sold them out to do it. Cole saved her instead of letting her die, but he did it by stranding her in the exact world that happens because everything she stands for fails--as of this moment, they manage to push the plague back, to delay the apocalypse, but she still fails to save the world, and that's the mission she's given herself since Cole first showed up in 2013 and changed her life.

And they haven't dealt with any of that. 

There's piles of guilt and resentment and crossed wires between them, and while Cole was in 2016 hoping and learning lessons and remembering Cassie fondly, Cassie was in the apocalypse learning how to kill people, seeing what failure costs, and getting trained by the man Cole specifically didn't want to be like. 

And it looks like all that is starting to fall out now. It's blocking Cole and Cassie from making up. It's stopping them from even being as good a team as they were, because she's convinced now that she can't trust him, which hurts him, and makes them both wary and questioning when they need to be able to depend on each other.

Cassie tore Cole's picture in half. That was sort of mean, but it makes a point: they're not together, and the picture isn't how things are. She tore it right down the middle between the two of them. But she didn't shred it or toss it--she gave the two pieces back, and they could be mended, and that's symbolic, too. Maybe on some level, she didn't want to completely burn that bridge. She just wants to keep poking at Cole until she gets the reaction that she wants--and guilty sweetness doesn't seem to be it.

It hurts, watching them with this wedge between them. But it's also wonderfully well done--and it's perfect continuity. How often have people on TV really just needed to talk something out and never gotten around to it? Never even gotten around to admitting that there should be emotional continuity? But 12 Monkeys is a bigger and more thoughtful show than that, and it's taking the rocky road that means characters get what they deserve, and it's amazing.

Paula for Paranormal Day!

 Editor's Note: Paranormal Day is May 3rd! Share your weird stories with us!

The Paranormal is a topic that i consider fun. Either you believe the paranormal is indeed real, a fairy tail or you haven’t taken the time to even think about it. Either millions of people have encountered circumstances they could not explain or millions of people were all seeing swamp gas while intoxicated at a nut bar convention. Of course there are cases where people created hoaxes, yet does that mean all of the cases are now hoaxes as a side effect? Some people enjoy stories so they look towards the paranormal to entertain them, while other people are fascinated by such stories and they decide to take the subject as truth. 

  Weather you enjoy a tall tale or really believe that the truth is out there, my view of the paranormal is a personal view point that in no way is scientific proof that the paranormal is real.
Yet if you fancy a bit of reading that makes you think “What if ”, then you’re in the right place. My thoughts on the Paranormal range from, “oh i can see that happening” to “what kind of drugs is this person on?” So hold on tight, this is going to be a bumpy ride. 

My love of the Paranormal began at an early age. Listening to ghost stories my mother told me and other tales of wonder. Since then I wanted to know more about the unknown. Finding out about the paranormal was a favorite book topic of mine since then. Growing up i used to watch The X-Files on tv, what an awesome show. It made me curious. I grabbed any book i could get my hands on on the subject. I watched documentaries and listened to radio broadcasts. It seemed the topic was on many people’s minds. So why were there so many people who believed it all to be a lie? Why were so many people risking their jobs, family’s safety and relationships by speaking about the topic if it was all a lie? Was it merely a world of fancy or was there truth to be found?

paranormal topics include:

Ufo          Faeries           Chupacabras   Mermaids      Witches
Ghosts     Sea Monsters Aliens             Knomes         Zombies
Bigfoot     Vampires        Angels            Werewolves    Unicorns


Most cultures believe in the paranormal in one form or another since ancient times. Ghosts seems to be the most common in all cultures around the world. The belief that a persons soul roams around in the afterlife, or haunts a location is very old. The ancient Egyptians prepared mummies for the  journey of the afterlife. People today pray for family members to cross over to be with Jesus in heaven. So why is it so hard to believe someone when they say they saw a ghost? What is the determining factor that says it’s okay to believe here in church but not here listening to a person who says witnessed an apparition? The belief that a person lives on in spirit after they die has been around for a while. There is also the belief that a person can reincarnate and be born again as someone new somewhere in the world. I’ve pondered what if my grandma was reborn and was celebrating her 3rd birthday somewhere in the world? That would make a lot of people happy and disturbed at the same time. Happy because their loved ones aren’t gone and are okay, yet disturbed because if you have a child it could be someone who just recently died! (have i reached the what kind of drugs is this person on yet? don’t worry it gets worse.) What if there is life on other planets and when they die they reincarnate here or on another planet? So your living with a possible alien and you didn't even know it (told you it gets worse.) All of this is mere speculation and random thoughts yet there are weirder stories out there.

How is a investigator supposed to rationally try and understand a person who comes out with stories like these? My belief is they are not supposed to. An investigators job is not to Judge a person and say you are lying or telling the truth. An investigators job is to find all the information about a case they can get their hands on and present it to the public. Who knows there might be a case just like that one in some other part of the world that could unravel the meaning of what said investigator is researching. Believe me even paranormal researchers say “oh my god this person is bonkers!” Yet the nature of the job is not to judge others and pigeon hole them or the case into a forgotten corner. That would never solve the issue, but rather suppress temporarily the research. As always everyone makes up their own mind about if what they encounter is real or not. If the paranormal is real or not is not the issue, the important part is to enjoy the journey. 

Now that we’ve gotten past the is it real is it fake question let’s get to some weird cases!


1. Reincarnation: Bridey Murphy, Virginia 1952

There are many theories which surround reincarnation - the notion that the soul of a dead person can re-establish itself within the body of another living being. However, the case of Bridey Murphy is used by many as an example of a verified case of paranormal reincarnation. In 1952 Colorado housewife Virginia Tighe began to talk about her past life whilst under hypnosis claiming that she was once an Irish woman called Bridey Murphy, born 1806. Under hypnosis, Virginia spoke with an Irish accent, used Irish language and supplied details of obscure place names, many of which were checked and verified at a later date. Research uncovered that Bridey Murphy did actually exist and Virginia's vivid tales were authentically accurate.

2.  Visions at Fatima; Fatima - Portugal

How much do you need for something to be considered an event that changed history? How about the blessing of the Roman Catholic Church? With some cajoling, The Miracle Of The Sun was finally recognized as an actual, Biblical miracle on on 13 October 1930, a good twenty years after the event itself. And it was a doozy.

At around lunchtime on Sunday 13 October 1917, in the town of Fátima, Portugal, thousands of gathered beneath storm clouds which were interrupted by an an opaque, spinning disk in the sky, which then blasted a dazzling ray of light down upon the on-lookers, many of whom claimed to see an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary in it.

Right? This was a thing that really happened, was viewed by between 30,000-100,000 people of varying ages, and has since been confirmed as a miracle by the Roman Catholic church. Despite some theories about space dust and tricks of the light, though, science has been unable to explain exactly what all those people saw.

3. Mermaid: May 2013 – Kiryat Yam, Israel

Kiryat Yam is the only place in the world where a $1 million reward is up for grabs for the first person who can provide conclusive footage capturing a real mermaid. The local government has offered this reward in response to the numerous mermaid sightings there.

Allegedly there is a mermaid that appears sometimes at sunset. One of the first people to see the mermaid was Shlomo Cohen: “I was with friends when suddenly we saw a woman laying on the sand in a weird way. At first I thought she was just another sunbather, but when we approached she jumped into the water and disappeared. We were all in shock because we saw she had a tail,” Cohen was quoted as saying by Israel National News.

4. April 1st 2014 Caithness, Scotland

A man, who wishes to remain anonymous, has spoken out about seeing a unicorn roaming the highland area near to Wick in Caithness, Scotland. It is not the first time such claims have been made, although it is a first for northern Scotland and comes in the wake of a Unicorn Lair being proclaimed to exist within North Korea that was backed up by spurious photographic evidence last year. The man was out hiking near to the Castle of Old Wick when he spied what he described as a unicorn, saying it was "basically a horse with a horn, I could nae believe it". He did not manage to get a photograph but locals say that his sighting is the talk of the town, indeed it seems that it was all anyone was talking about when we visited the Crown Bar on Wick's High Street yesterday evening.

It didn't stay in sight for long and was last described as cantering off in the direction of Loch Hempriggs to the south of the town. It is expected that this sighting will lure many to Wick to try and sight the magical creature of lore, with some saying that they hoped Wick would benefit from those wanting to come and try their hand at spotting the unicorn, in a similar way that Loch Ness has become a haven for fanatics to try and spot the as yet unfound but much sought after Loch Ness Monster.

So here we have four cases ranging from very documented and being blessed by the catholic church no less, to a man said he saw a unicorn and wishes to remain anonymous. Indeed the paranormal has About 37,800,000 results (0.54 seconds) on google yet the topic itself is fascinating and ranges from many topics and types. 

Please feel free to share your weird stories, tall tales or even stories you heard from a person who heard it from another for Paranormal day! Believe me i won’t judge you for a second :)

If you are interested into looking more into the unknown one of the best places to start is just browsing videos on youtube or searching on google for stories of the unknown. As always the truth is out there.

Letter from the Editor - May 2016

Whoo, Fangirls! It's almost summer here in the Southern US and starting to actually behave like spring in some of the more northerly places we all come from! Personally, I hate the heat, but I LOVE summer movie season--it's what always kept having a Memorial Day-adjacent birthday from being horrible, and it means I always get a blockbuster to go to every year! This year, it's X-Men: Apocalypse, third and last of this particular trilogy, though I hope they're not done all together. I like the X-Men movies (XM were always my favs since I was a 12 year old scrounging change to go buy comics), and with Deadpool and another attempt at Fantastic Four coming to that world, it'd be cool to see what the new-timeline team is doing now, you know? Other than Colossus and Negasonic Teenage Warhead hanging out in an empty mansion...

We here at PFg are continuing to make everything more awesome for our readers, and there's lots to talk about this month! If you have anything you want us to talk about, or if you're a lady (or identify as one) and would like to offer a guest post, contact us and we'll see what we can do!

Here's what's happening in geekery this month:

• Spring shows are all wrapping up! There'll be at least a few season-ender discussions on them!
• Returning shows: Penny Dreadful (tonight / 1st), Person of Interest (last season, 3rd)
• New Shows: Houdini & Doyle (2nd), Preacher (22nd)
• Events: 
• 3rd - Paranormal Day
• 4th - Star Wars Day / May the Fourth Be With You and then Revenge of the Sixth!
• Captain America 3 (6th in the US)
• Free Comic Book Day (7th)
• Limerick Day on the (12th)
• George Lucas Day (14th)
• Drawing Day (16th)
• Pizza Party Day (20th)
• Alan Turing Day (23rd)
• Geek Pride Day / Towel Day (25th)
• National Paper Airplane Day (26th)
• X-Men: Apocalypse (27th)
• My birthday (28th)*

What're you guys up to this month?

April's most popular post happened yesterday and comes from Kaelyn!

A Beginner's Guide to Tabletop Games

*My birthday is totally an event because I'm the fearless leader, yall.

Working with Player Choice, Catalyzing Chaos

In the mind of the game master, the world they created is a glorious clockwork machine filled with carefully constructed intrigue, adventure and drama.

Players, by their nature, want to play! They want to explore new worlds through the medium of the tabletop experience. Through all five of the player senses: touch, taste, sight, smell, and hitting things with medieval cutlery, players want to interact with everything. They are also people, as such they act about as predictably as the dice they wield.

Players may completely ignore the city the game master created, after having spent many sleepless nights researching civic infrastructure, and instead insist on setting sail upon the nearby sea. By some small slight or misspoken word, the players may just slay that all important NPC with a backstory that took up several three ring binders! They generally don’t do this maliciously it is simply in their nature to act in a way most exciting for them.

Some game masters might be utterly demoralized by this, harboring animosity for derailing what they had felt was a truly majestic story. This might come out as petty cruelties.  Or perhaps as despondent acquiescence to whatever the players feel like doing leading to a meandering adventure that eventually leads no where.

Myself however, I invite it. For me there is no greater pleasure than a collaborative story.

Being a game master is essentially a combination of author and actor, one must gain proficiency in both to run a successful game. This includes improvisation, in fact I would hazard to say that improvisation is key to the success of a game. Your players are essentially improvising every step of the way so it only seems polite to meet them in this.

Allow me to recount an example from my most recent game, a Halloween session of Call of Cthulhu. The players were all engaged in tea and desserts aboard the orient express. Seated at their table were two NPCs, an occult minded dilettante and a land owning hunter. The players felt they had reason to be suspicious of both of these characters and tailed both in their own ways.

Unknown to the players, the hunter was a restless spirit, given unnatural life by way of a boon of the underworld. This semblance of life had a time limit which I was keeping track of by way of an hour glass. The players of course had no idea what the hourglass was measuring, simply that I had turned it over when play began. I had intended the hunter to return to his cabin on the train and perform the rite that would keep him enfleshed. Having done this, he would participate with the players in the fight that would happen soon after against a monstrous creature assaulting the train. In this way, I hoped to keep the players somewhat more loyal to someone they had fought alongside as a greater reveal later when he turned on them.

What I had not counted on was a series of terribly good rolls as the players silently stalked the hunter and then jumped him in his room. They knocked the hunter unconscious and forced him to waste what time he had left to his spell. Upon waking they had intended to question him, which is when he transmogrified to his true, putrid, inhuman form.

In the first half hour of the game one of the major antagonists had been revealed and his method of disguising himself, the pips of a magically enchanted pomegranate, were stolen from him.

I hadn’t planned on this by any means, I had assumed the hunter would be found out far later in the adventure after some pre-arranged slip up or by way of deduction. His scenes and short narrative arc involving his villa had to be scrapped and needed to be filled in immediately as this was meant to be a one session game.

But I was so immensely pleased, because it meant I could start the game out in a far stronger way than I had intended. The players put themselves in occult danger immediately, facing down the hunter in his undead, cervine form in the tight confines of the sleeper car. Without knowing it the players had created a far more exciting scenario for their first scene than I would have written! Now they would be injured and rattled from the experience of seeing a man twist and decay before tearing through the window into the dwindling light of dusk.

I’ve had so many incidents like this, such as a dungeons and dragons session where my players were exploring a swamp and the random monster table demanded I send frogmen to attack them. My players were charmed by my descriptions of the beasts and decided to befriend them instead of kill them. They made good rolls so I let it happen. I felt like the frogmen needed a good reason to have attacked the players and reasoned that perhaps there was some clan war going on. The players had inadvertently stumbled into the middle of it and the frogmen that attacked them were starving and desperate.

What followed was a team of adventurers sharing their food with the beleaguered frogmen and giving them assistance in their war. On the fly I assigned two other major clans to be antagonists and gave the players the benefit of their surrogate clan being very amenable to trade and goodwill with the nearby city. The war wrapped up by the end of the session and now the players had some treasure, experience, contacts in the fledgling frogmen settlement and even a frogmen hireling!

In the games I’ve run there are some fundamentals I’ve always stuck to:

• Learn what your individual players think is fun or cool then make that happen.

• Every critical success should yield something exciting. Player wants to woo the red dragon with his charisma to try and get out of being fried? He rolled a 20? Well now that player has to deal with the intimate interests of an ancient red dragon, I certainly hope he keeps scrolls of fire resistance handy.

• Avoid saying no whenever possible, this tends to make players feel stifled and slowly will breed resentment.

• Use redirection whenever possible in the place of just saying no. Tell the players what they can do rather than what they can’t do.

• Be ready for your players to be creative, to ask weird questions, to do weird things. Try to practice your improvisation with writing exercises, read as much as possible in the genre you want your game to exemplify.

• Also be ready for your players to obsess over incredibly inconsequential stuff and immediately write off vitally important details. If necessary, just switch them around, they will never know the difference and you don't need to waste time having heart palpitations over it.

• Understand what you think is fun, what you really want to get out of the adventure, let that be your guide for how you run the game rather than the specific crunchy details.

• Make any detour your characters drag themselves into feed your story. Try to imagine the threads of your story, your villains or your heroes, how far out do they spread?

• Never feel like the fantastic set pieces you create are wasted if the players don’t get to them. You can always adjust the details and fit it in somewhere so don’t worry about losing that gorgeous prose you prepared or that really exciting character you’ve been rehearsing for days.

You are the game master, the storyteller, the dungeon master and ultimately the host. The only way for the players to have fun and ultimately to experience your story is through you. Your players have to contend with the challenges you lay before them, but for you the challenge is to engage with your players and create a fun experience with them. It can be a little more difficult than rolling to hit armor class zero but for me the rewards have always been incredibly satisfying. 

The Beginner's Tabletop Game Guide

Tabletop gaming is a beloved pastime for gamers and roleplaying enthusiasts – an outlet for creative problem-solving, character development, and old fashioned monster bashing. But for someone looking to either join a tabletop party for the first time, or start a game of their own, the endeavor is overwhelming.

I remember my first foray into the possibility of playing Dungeons and Dragons. It was a late night after a cast party – a character sheet covered in a hideous spill of math and statistics, and not enough brain cells to process it from lack of sleep and sugar high. Stat after stat we tried to render, having to stop and desperately search a slim packet of rules for something we understood. In the end, we admitted defeat and went to play video games instead, and I learned a valuable lesson: tabletop is a difficult hobby to get into, or enjoy, without experienced players to take your hand and show you the way.

And so I became Professional Fangirl.

Nine years after that unfortunate evening, now with years of successful campaigns and friendships forged around the dungeon map, I have the opportunity to give back what was offered to me: the know-how to make the beginning of a tabletop adventure manageable and fun.

The first thing that any aspiring tabletop player should know about this hobby is that it is not something you can get away with doing on-the-fly. As much of the rules of tabletop gaming are ALWAYS secondary to enjoying yourselves, they exist to maintain balance, and, in many ways, enhance the challenge and storytelling possibilities of a campaign. Even the best players need to consult rule books from time to time, and even the best storytellers can continue to find inspiration in mechanics and obscure skills and feats that will challenge players and make the campaign engaging. To avoid frustration and overwhelming everyone involved, please allocate time generously to letting the rules of character creation, combat, and role-playing sink in. While this is not always the case, I usually plan to have a first session (about four hours) dedicated purely to character crafting. That way, everyone involved has access to rule books and time to iron out any kinks before the game truly begins.

Disclaimer aside, it is also important to mention that there are a wide variety of tabletop games with unique and vivid settings. If traditional fantasy ala D&D does not appeal to you, you might enjoy the cyberpunk universe known as Shadowrun. If a modern setting with a magical twist is more up your alley, try White Wolf’s Mage: The Awakening, or perhaps Werewolf, or Vampire: The Masquerade. The world of Celtic mythos opens with Changeling, and the steampunk realm of Tephra also offers options for people who are squeamish at the thought of the quintessential fantasy with dragons. These settings come with their own sets of rules, materials, and varying degrees of difficulty in learning, but, with a little doing, all offer endless options for adventures to suit anyone's tastes. This small list has only a few of the many games you could explore, but they all have a few things in common: dice, rule books, and character sheets.

When Borders was going out of business in my hometown, I took a gift card and plunged into the sales frenzy. My curiosity piqued once more as I saw a pile of D&D manuals on sale. The urge to try my hand at tabletop had emerged again since that fateful night of confusion, and as I rifled through the good nine or ten volumes, all with different titles, I had the sinking realization that, once again, I had no idea what I was looking at. Monster Manual, Players Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, all these titles meant nothing to me. Which did I need to start a game? Which were optional? They were expensive – even on sale – so once again, I gave up. I used my gift card on chocolate and manga.

So here we go. You ready?

The comprehensive guide for what a fledgling tabletop game needs, doesn't need, and where to get them!

Dice:

Whatever game you have chosen to take your group into, most have different systems – which means a different set of rules and tools you use to play. Many of these systems are defined by what kind of dice they use. The more infamous system is called d20, which means, in short, it is a system that mainly utilizes a twenty-sided die. White Wolf games utilize a d10 system – 10 sided dice. Shadowrun uses a d6 system. Naturally, the first thing you want to procure will be your dice.

The average person has probably seen a d6 in their lives, whether in games of Yahtzee or Monopoly, but it is not common to run across, say, a d4, d8, or that elusive d20. You won't find them at Walmart. It's one of those little mysteries that people who are outside of the hobby run up against.

The answer: the internet.

Chessex is the largest producer of officially-weighted tabletop dice. They sell what is referred to as the “basic set,” which is the collection of 7 dice that covers most of your tabletop needs. Inside will be a d4, d6, d8, d10, percentile die, d12, and a d20. This set is designed for any d20 system, like Dungeons and Dragons, GURPS, Pathfinder, and others similar. Aside from being rather beautiful, these dice are the backbone of your campaign.

Keep in mind that, more often than not, you may need multiples of the same dice – especially if you're playing a White Wolf game. These d6 or d10 systems tend to rely solely on one kind of die. If your first game is Werewolf or Shadowrun, buy many d10 or d6. The d20 systems tend to be more conservative when it comes to how many dice are needed for each player.

While it is not necessary for every player to own their own dice, its speeds combat up, and it is more fun to have a personal set all your own rather than constantly trading around a communal pool. The most cost-effective way to get a whole party the dice they need is to buy a Chessex “Pound o’ Dice,” which will have many of each denomination in various colors, and is only $20 on Amazon. For those fortunate enough to have a comic or gaming store in their area, dice, as well as many other supplies, can be purchased (at full, painful price) there.

Rule Books:

No matter what system you're interested in, all will have a core set of rules that dictate character creation, lore, combat, and other facets of gameplay that players and storytellers alike should adhere to.

This is your table top bible: the Player’s Handbook, or PHB. It is the first book you will want to buy, and is really the only one that is necessary to run a game. Yes, there are an overwhelming number of books for alternate settings, special monsters, and even premade adventures, but these books will not have the necessary information to run the actual meat and bones of your campaign.

Now, when buying rules books, it is very important to find out what version of the game you are buying. Everyone likes to save money, and so finding rule books used online or at used book stores is easy, but if you have never purchased a tabletop manual before, you can easily buy books and supplements that do not match each other.

Tabletop has been around for a long time, and old systems have been revamped. Rules have been changed. New content has been added. Dungeons and Dragons is the best example of this. It has been through many incarnations: the original, advanced D&D, 2.0, 3.0, 3.5, Pathfinder, 4.0, and the most recent incarnation: 5.0. Picking up a rule book from 2.0, a setting from 3.5, and a monster manual from 4.0, will be not only be a headache, but downright impossible for you to use together.

So which system should you use? Well, in my experience with D&D, at least, there is a general consensus: 3.5 is beloved for not only its breadth of materials, but also its very in-depth rules. The drawback is it is complicated and has a huge amount of information to learn. It also requires many additional books and supplements if you want to get to experience that depth.

The system that shows a great deal of promise in simplification of the system, as well as incorporating unique customization in your starting books, is 5.0, the most current edition. Because it is a new addition, you are unlikely to find reasonably priced used versions of the 5.0 PHB. 3.5 has been out for years, and is much cheaper and easier to get a hold of.

In the end, which edition you choose to play is purely a matter of taste. Just keep in mind that whatever game you play, whatever edition you play, all the supplements you use must match the version that your rule book is.

Character Sheets:

The last essential for a table top game is the character sheet. Rolling a character, aka creating them with all of their statistics and gear, is a process – a long one if you haven't done it often. Having an organized place to record stats and be able to find them mid-game is essential. Most PHB’s in any system will have a character sheet in the back of them. Making copies of it for yourself and for your fellow party members is a good idea.

For the people who purchased a used book, or are playing a system that has no unique character sheet, once again the internet saves the day. There are many fans sites and source pages that have free downloads of character sheets and spell lists. Fill them up, mark them silly, and update them often. Years later, I occasionally pull out my old character sheets and enjoy the memories that come with them.

Welcome to tabletop, and to Professional Fangirl. In coming installments, I will expand upon my guide for new players, breakdown character creation, party compositions, storyteller tips, and much, much more. Happy International Tabletop Day, and may you find adventures worthy of you wherever you go.

#TabletopDay - My fav tabletop games

 Do you like freaking enormous games that take all day to play, an hour to set up, and that you'll probably play wrong for a while but you'll still love?? The Arkham Horror is for you! The base game is already big--so big that I wound up buying more dice to play it regularly*. But now there are several expansions that make it even more epically huge (which I haven't gotten to play yet, much to my woe), and it's easily and all-day thing if you want it to be.

But it's so cool, you guys. Even though the last time I played I wound up mostly Lost In Time And Space.

Here's what I most love about it:

• It's a whole story--there's so many things to track and follow and work around
• It's not competitive, it's collaborative--there's no point in being mean to the people you're playing with because it's all of you against the board, and the board will probably win anyway, so work together
• It's got lots of little tokens and bits and stuff to mess with and read and move around
• Dice!
• It's freaking gorgeous, dudes.

If you're in the mood for a faster game that involves jokes about sheep and wood, this is the one for you! It's not complicated, how it goes is mostly about how well you pick your original placement, but it's super satisfying collecting resources, trading with neighbors, and building things up. There's a number of expansions, too, so you can get bigger and fancier stuff going on, and it's easy to learn.

Also, it's all modular--the board changes every time you play!

Back when we were kids, we lived overseas in places where there wasn't often TV and where cable hadn't been invented yet. We read books, or we played games--all those classic family games like Monopoly, Candy Land, Life, Trivial Persuit. But my fav was always Parcheesi.

It's cooler than Sorry, though basically the same sort of game. It's less likely to be missing pieces than Chinese Checkers. Our copy had really nice wooden pieces that felt nice in our little-kid hands and looked like candy. It's easy enough for kids to play, but fancy enough that adults can play, too, without feeling dumb. It just always felt really classy to me, and I still love it.

What're your favorite games? Share in the comments and I'll start a list of games I need to check out!

 *Well, my friend bought them for me. They have my name on them. I love them.

#TabletopDay - The meanest game of Uno you will ever play

Uno is one of those games you learn when you're a kid because it's easy and it's fun and it's not too fussed about how many people play it. It's also mean. Like, seriously, the only physical fight I've ever gotten into was over a three-person hand of Uno--the other two, my best friends, teamed up to skip or reverse on me for twenty minutes straight and the only time I got a go was when I had to pick up cards, so I kicked one of them. She hit me, so I hit her back, and then she bit me and tore my nightgown with her steel-enforced teeth. 

Good times.

Anyway, Uno is also one of those games where you have lots of house rules* AND one where there's lots of variation-decks so you can mix it up.

My brother and I recently created the meanest house rule ever, and it will murder your game and make all your friends hate you, and it's awesome.

It's this:

• If someone drops any Draw card on you, you can avoid having to draw those cards by playing ANOTHER draw card that matches, and the next person has to draw the cards listed on BOTH cards. 

The best part of this rule? There's no limit to it. When we were playing, we had a hand that circled twelve times and the last person had to draw more cards then there were in the draw deck, and we wound up adding a second deck to the game!

It's hilarious, you guys, everyone waiting for the time when there's no more Draw cards and someone has to pick up the whole deck. Everyone holding so many cards that they can't find the ones they're looking for because their hands are too small to fan them out properly. The wails of the lost as they take forever to get through all the cards they're holding.

It's the best house rule ever.

What're your best house rules?

*Ours are: You keep drawing when you don't have a match until you find one you can play, no matter how many you have to draw. If you go out of turn, you have to draw five. Sometimes we have random stupid things you have to say every time someone plays a certain card; depends on how dunk we are.

10 things a show needs to produce an awesome fandom

1. Good content that the fans can't get anywhere else
A show that doesn't have it's own clear identity isn't going to inspire that much caring or feedback from viewers to make them into fans. If it's a knockoff, it'll just get written off as "not as good as __", and people will be able to tell if it's happening just because something else was popular elsewhere. That's pandering and it's pointless. People have so many choices in TV now, there's no reason to have two shows that are the same.

2. The idea that the fans are smart enough to keep up and figure stuff out
You've got to trust your audience, not talk down to them, not tell them how to feel about things. One of the biggest things Sleepy Hollow did in it's finale this year (other than pointlessly killing a main character who happened to be a woman AND a poc) was spend a whole act trying to convince us that the stupid thing they'd done was okay. No. Let your fans feel what they feel. And give them stories that are worth keeping up on.

3. A certain "openness"--space for the fans and their ideas inside and around it
Openness in the story for people to fill in gaps themselves. Openness in the show for different points of view. Openness to fan theories and opinions (though not slaves to that). Openness to fanworks and meta. Accessibility of story points, moral stances, and character motivations. You want the fans to feel like they're part of it, not passive consumers with no right to think or say anything

4. Good social media presence
It's great when the actors and writers, creators and producers live-tweet a show with the fans. It's more great when the show's official accounts support fans, answer questions, provide sneak peeks and behind the scenes info, and basically are useful and not just places to sell things. Being on multiple social media accounts at once helps, too!

5. Reliability
Which leads to trust. Trust that the characters will be clearly defined and respected, not bent and deformed for whatever whim the writers or the network wants to follow. Trust that promises made in the story will be paid off, and it's not any sort of 'baiting or intentionally misleading. Trust that there will be good continuity, and not random storylines that are introduced and left dangling forever. Trust that the people making the show know what they're doing!

6. A feeling of collaboration, not competition
A competitive fandom is a fandom that will tear itself apart, so it's better to bring a sense of togetherness and inclusion, and that comes from both the show (or movie or whatever) itself, and from how the official powers handle the people watching.

A feeling of safety around fanworks would be cool, too--no big lawsuits, no weird behavior about them. Either leave them alone, or be respectful.

7. Some sort of positive feels--funniness, joy, playfulness, shippiness, etc--regardless of how the rest of the show goes
A show that is 100% serious all the time is a) exhausting to watch, and b) unrealistic. People crack jokes and snark at other people and say funny things for any number of not-funny reasons. A show that slogs through it's own story like it's a trial will not inspire fans to love it, nor will one that insists on denying it's own best parts as being awesome. Characters who never laugh are no fun. Characters who never fall in love--or at least have the opportunity to-- will be hard to make emotional connections to for a lot of people.

There has to be a break from the heaviness of reality or serious story or dire circumstances for everyone to get a break and get to know the characters.

8. Awareness of the genre-history it comes from, and respect for it
Shows don't happen in a vacuum. Everything had something else before it that either inspired it or gave it something to react to. You have to know your history to do it right, because the fans will definitely know it.

To go back and poke at S2 of Sleepy Hollow: It was insulting because the writers a) didn't seem to be taking any of the things that were the backbone of the show seriously, and b) were directly ripping off shows like Buffy without any understanding of the context or the appeal of the things they were blatantly stealing. Contrast that with Supernatural, which usually respects the stories it's building on and also makes them their own.

It's the difference between acting like your viewers are idiots who won't notice, and respecting that they will and giving them a new take on it.

9. Respect for the fans as actual people and not pawns or product
It's people who carry a show, not numbers on a graph. Treating people like promo-slaves is what bit The 100 in the butt when they killed off Lexa; don't do that. Interact with them one on one, not like a giant media conglomerate telling people what to think and do.

10. Network support
Advertising, so that people know you're there and when to find you. Good media events--especially at cons and related things where the people who make the show can interact directly with the people who watch it. Trust from the producers and network people that the creators and writers know what they're doing and can get it done, so they don't have to try to get it done while navigating interference and meddling. A willingness to let a show find it's feet before dropping the ax on it--XFiles, one of the biggest hits Fox ever had, wouldn't have lasted one season now, with how rough that first season is. A minimum of preemption and no schedule-rearranging without a really good reason and a lot of thought put into it--like NOT putting it up against much bigger shows. No snap decisions!


What do you think creates a good fandom?

10 things you're missing out on if you're not watching #12Monkeys

1. An amazing story that's totally Binge-able
As of this moment, there are fifteen episodes. Thirteen for the first season, and two so far in the second. That means that you can watch all of them in one day, if you're really dedicated, and get the full extent of the series without ads or breaks or waiting on anything! It's immensely re-watchable; these writers have put in all sorts of hints and clues and foreshadowing that you pick up more and more of when you rewatch, but the benefit of watching all at once is that you can track all the storylines without gaps between them. It's basically one big story pretending to be episodic, and though jumping in the middle could be confusing, there's so much story crammed into so few episodes, you can start from the beginning and be caught up in a week. (Watch on Hulu or on the Syfy site for the views to count!)

2. Complexity that works
We're two episodes into season two, and there's no signs that it'll be anything less than mindboggling. Terry Matalas and Travis Fickett took the framework of the movie--scavenger from a dying future goes back in time to stop a plague--and blew it up to epic proportions successfully.

There's story happening in our time, in the future, in various points in the past. There's characters who exist in more than one time-frame, even if they're not time travelers, and there's time travelers on both sides of the good-bad divide. There's moral ambiguity starting with "if I kill this one guy, I save billions" and upping the ante through "if I save this one person, it's worth the whole world dying" vs "can I let this one person die if it means saving the world" and onward. There's a lot of character development in just about every character shown on screen, both in real time and in flashbacks--and even, occasionally, in alternate realities. There's time loops, and imposed cycles, and conspiracies, and multi-generational plans in play--and there's Cole, smashing through it like a bull in a china shop, hoping to make things right.

And the world itself! The present day world we know is stranger than we think. The future is a near-perfect apocalypse that's still happening, which feels innovative to me. When was the last time any apocalypse wasn't a postapocalypse? All points they visit are carefully made as real as each other, so that no matter where in time they are, no matter how strange it gets, everything has the same level of clear reality.

And it works. It's like a symphony, it works so well. Or one of those puzzle boxes that's so well made it feels like a gift.

3. The best use of time travel in, like, ever
The best thing: time travel has a cost--it makes you sick and you have to weigh every time you do it against risk and reward, and the only cure so far is literally creating paradoxes inside your own body, which is dangerous, to say the least.

Sometimes time travel is more of a vehicle, getting people from one place to another, but as season one unfolded and into season two, it's more and more an intrinsic piece of the story's structure. Things happen out of order because people who aren't time traveling are stuck in a straight line, past to present to future, and people who are time traveling can hop all along that line, regardless of the usual order of things. People on both sides are working with time and against time while also working against each other, trying to bend history to their own will--and it sometimes works, but mostly it causes more trouble that they then have to work out. It's the main process for several long-games to happen and to play out.

They give us clear indications of which times we're in and there's always a reason for why we're there, and the show as a whole literally couldn't happen without time travel. It's about time travel, not just featuring it.

4. Awesome female characters as complex as the males
The main villain is a woman.

Cassie is the female lead, and as S2 happens, she has switched places in the moral grey-areas with Cole--which is amazing, letting her be as violent and single-minded as he was, something ladies on TV don't get a lot.

The biggest wild card on the show is Jennifer, who is either insane, or the sanest person on the show, depending on where her story goes, but who exists at both ends of the time-travel and is definitely up to something.

The creator of the Splinter Project is wonderful, semi-sociopathic, damaged, brilliant Jones, who is some sort of post-apocalyptic life goal, since I'd be about her age in 2044.

And the only one of the enemy agents we've seen directly so far is a woman.

It's kind of amazing, having so many women around who aren't only love interests, or arm candy, or bit players. There's love in there, but they're also damaged and striving and have goals of their own. They're not defined by the men around them. They're smart and resourceful and as able to take care of themselves as everyone else.

5. An epic love story--literally
Cole and Cassie--Casserole--is a ship that sails itself, but in between them meeting and any confessions they might have in the future, there's plenty of time for story, and it's Big Story. Cole comes back from the future specifically to meet Cassie, Kyle Reece style. Cassie believes in him so strongly that she goes off script to save him more than once. Now that Cassie is compromised, Cole is staying by her side to make sure she's alright, despite differences in opinion about how the mission should work. In season one, Cole saves Cassie's life three times, because her dying always results in history going bad. Their love is literally what is saving the world in those cases. It's a ship for the ages!

6. Anything can happen
Because of the time travel and the way they can rewrite history, they can do insane things like kill a main character three times and fix it. They can have scenes and episodes in any time period they want. They can interact with each other out of order, and characters can interfere with each others' pasts and futures. The entire world can literally be changed, and it will make perfect sense within the story.

It's brilliant!

7. Kicking a squeamish TV system in the shins with awesomeness
TV as a whole doesn't seem to like things like complexity, male-female equality, gleefully being smart and assuming your fans are too, and taking risks with characters and plot and reality. You know, the stuff that the target audience is specifically looking for, and that critics love. By watching 12 Monkeys and making it more popular all the time, you're poking holes in that dumb idea that lowest-common denominator is the best way to go! By not watching, you're proving that only cheap, stupid shows get views.

So watch the good ones and improve TV as a whole!

8. Stopping the Standard Fate Of TV Scifi in it's tracks
Ask any scifi TV fan about shows they're still mad about, and most of the list will be shows that got messed with, ruined, or cancelled before they could tell their whole stories. That's become a cliche--but also a trap. People want good shows, but they don't trust that regular TV will take care of them, so on channels like Fox, lots of the potential viewership just doesn't bother watching. And that means that the show gets cancelled anyway--a self-fulfilling prophesy. Syfy really should be the exception to that, being specifically for scifi, but it's a channel like any other, and even if ratings are an inaccurate way to judge viewership these days, they still want the ratings.

The only way they can get them is if WE watch the shows we want TV to keep making. The only way we can break the cycle is to give them such good ratings that scifi proves that it can support an audience over many seasons the way a show about doctors or lawyers can, even if the numbers aren't as high as those.

Let's not let 12 Monkeys be the next Firefly; let's make it the next Star Trek--seven years and a slew of movies and books!

9. Some of the best fandom and creator-fan interactions around
The 12 Monkeys fandom is a great one, full of smart, talkative people who understand both the show and the genre it comes from. Better yet, the actors, writers, and creators on the show do their best to be very interactive, answering questions and giving hints and reblogging links. It's (so far--knock on wood) a remarkably adult and drama-free fandom with lots of ideas and thoughts and opinions, and it's a great fandom to belong to.

10. Hope
A lot of scifi drama lately gets mean. The heroes can't actually make any headway. People die for no reason (cough - Walking Dead - cough). Things are needlessly grim and violent. The overall tone is nihilistic and soul-crushing, focusing on how pointless everything is.

12 Monkeys isn't like that. The show itself is aware of how cool all of this stuff is, and while it gets a little dark and very dramatic, it doesn't go down the grim-for-grim-sake path. And at it's core, it's not about how people can't change anything, or how Big Events ruin lives. It's about characters interacting with each other and finding better ways. It's about how mercy and love are better than slavish fate. And that's amazing after BSG showed everyone such a dark version of scifi.

12 Monkeys isn't sappy, it's genuinely emotional. It's not mean, it's about being better than meanness. It takes the story about making the world better and looks at it from all sides and strives to actually do what it says. And the existence of the show can make the genre better, too, if we keep it alive.