The Song of Shear and Torsion

First post, here goes...

It's been awhile now that I've been meaning to do more writing that isn't just social media posting, but going into a new year seems like a good time to start new habits. So I got back into using Obsidian and actually went through with setting up a published space.

The content here is going to be a little scattershot, but the main motivation is to have a tabletop game design blog/journal, so expect to see a lot of that. That could mean small ideas I need to jot down, scenario ideas, opinions on game stuff, on up to full projects designed live.

Turbulence Down on Me

Mostly, I picked the name because it's a cool-sounding lyric from Warren Zevon's Transverse City: a song and album I've been thinking a lot about lately.

The idea of a Warren Zevon cyberpunk album is confusing to some people, which I guess is possible if you either don't get cyberpunk or don't get Warren's music. His lyrics and Gibson's fiction flowed from the same source, so the chaos of this album is like a turbulent reintegration of two parallel branches of the same river.

The vibe those two branches share is something I keep coming back to in most of the fiction I enjoy and all the fiction I create.

Beyond the lyrical twist, shear and torsion are engineering terms. Two effects of opposing forces at work on the same object. They're what happens when an idea hits the real world: wind shoving against a skyscraper, a helicopter spiraling to the ground when its tail rotor goes out.

That's another thing I keep coming back to in my games: start with a concept. Apply stress, let it reach equilibrium. Change the stress, see where it groans, how it deforms, when it breaks. My ideal method for preparing a scenario is to set up a status quo that's just recently had one little force out of balance, then giving my players a way to exploit that force. Everything and everyone is a little bit broken, a little patchwork.

If I have more time, I think into the history of that status quo and all the other equilibrium points it might have held at in its past, then about what could still be lingering around from those historical points. If I have less time, I reverse the process: look at how things are broken and patched up today, think of what kinds of stress could have produced that situation and allude to it in the narrative.

So, that's the name of the site, the reason for the site and a mini-review of an album from like 35 years ago, which I think is enough for a blog post. I have a few more things in mind to write about, so we'll see which one of them comes out first.