we are kind of in need of some distraction, does anyone have anything cool they want to talk about or something
-F

@Felthry we GMed a session of a game a while ago and we thought it went really well and we were really proud of what we did - we could talk about that if that sounds good?

@packbat sure! i don't know if i'lll have much to say back about it but if you feel like talking it'd be nice to read <3
-F

@Felthry 👍🏽 🎒 ( 🐲 ?)

so, like, one of the folks in our GM-practice group showed us this system called Freeform Universal, which we've been using the core of for this

the premise is that the protagonist is an ambiguously-anthro snow leopard who is a long-distance trucker, but who ends up in various weird situations that they then have to resolve

we wanted to aim very deliberately for mystery-of-the-week self-contained sessions

(1/?)

@Felthry like, we'd had a few sessions so far, and they'd been fun, but we'd done very little prep - basically just "what would be something weird to be going on?" - and especially in the next-to-last session, we felt like we didn't have any good way to wrap up the plot

so, for this session, we decided to use some random generation to help, and drew three cards to create prompts for:
- the situation,
- the problem, and
- a character the protagonist meets

@Felthry because we kinda knew it already, we using this system we made up for a 52-card playing cards deck

our three cards were:
- Situation: 10 of Diamonds = teaching + beating challenges/getting money
- Problem: Queen of Diamonds = second-highest in a hierarchy + beating challenges/getting money
- Character: 10 of Spades = teaching + exploring the world

so what we came up with was a delivery to a university with a rivalry between colleges over who brings in more money

@Felthry ...and from there, we decided that:

- the delivery was to the chemistry department, which was the most profitable
- their rival, the business school, decided to do a curse to divert money from the chemistry department to the business school
- the curse decided that the cat trucker's shipment of chemicals was valuable and therefore should be diverted

...which fits our "something weird is happening here and you have to fix it" mold, but has a natural resolution

@Felthry (brb)

@Felthry (back)

so, the cat trucker found themself in an impossible geometry situation: wherever they tried to go on campus with their truck, it would always end up being warped to travel out on some other road and wind up at the H.W. Chapman School for Business and Finance

which, like, hopefully wasn't just funny to us, because we had so much fun saying that entire name every time they wound up at this dark-brick blacked-out-windows cube of a building

@Felthry After a while, they ended up going full text adventure and drawing a map of landmarks on campus and which roads lead where within the curse they were dealing with

they also got some aid from a student who had a four-hour wait between classes and was wondering why the same truck pulled into the parking lot five times, who was able to lead them /on foot/ to the chemistry department, but not to fix the problem with the truck

he did end up streaming the weird, tho

@Felthry Anyway, the next thing they ended up trying was getting the professor who'd been waiting for the chemicals to drive over to the business school and lead them to the chemistry school

which did not work, but meant that they had the professor to help them when they noticed a commotion within the business school

a group of people in the lobby having some kind of discussion, who then ran deeper into the building to hide when they saw the trucker and student looking

@Felthry After informing the professor, she and the trucker and the (still livestreaming) student went up to the building to investigate ... when the dean of the business school, inside the building, ran out to lock the door so they couldn't get in

...so the party went around to the next door, which the dean locked

and the next door, which the dean locked

and the next door, which the dean tripped trying to lock and accidentally opened, tumbling out at their feet.

@Felthry Ultimately, the dean tried to flee, the professor tackled them, and then the trucker pulled them apart and was like, "I'd love to see which one of you wins in a fight, but I have a truck full of goods to deliver and I need to be able to do that"

and the dean sagged in defeat...

...before perking up and exclaiming, triumphantly, "Breach of contract! One moment, I need to make a call"

And called their contractor to get the situation resolved so everyone could go

@Felthry we felt really happy with it

there was a lot of weirdness and silliness for the player character to react to, and the Juicero-level business fool was defeated, and we had a whole story in a session with, like, a satisfactory ending

- 🎒

@packbat so what was the commotion happening and why did the dean saying breach of contract resolve things? I feel like I missed something here
-F