Drinks Post - Runoff

For all the recipes that were either too simple or not good enough to make it into the main drinks post series.

Dutch Russian

This is a stock photo from Wikipedia.

Availability: Tricky. I had to go to a megastore to find genever, and they only had one kind.

This is a White Russian with genever instead of vodka. It tastes like a malted milkshake. Delicious, but nothing to run home about.

Manor of the Giant Arminius at A Weekend With Good Friends 2021

Another Jackson Elias Server Virtual Convention, another run of the Manor of the Giant Arminius using the latest revision of Begone, FOE, my personal D20 dungeon crawler.

 

 

By Arthur Rackham

 

We had four players.

• Gideon the Rogue
• Elbekh the Cleric
• Douglas the Fighter/Mechanical Engineer
• Aric the Magic User

The players left their mule and cart in the forest and marched up the wedge shaped hill, on which the Manor of the Giant Arminius was sat. The hill was 100 feet high, and the manor stood a preposterous 100 feet higher. The area was patrolled by rebels, but by staying off the path and keeping to the brush, they were able to avoid being spotted - even with most of the trees chopped down. They noticed corpses of soldiers hanging from a couple of the giant statues on the way up, the ones the rebels hadn't toppled.

The group stopped before they got too close to the structure, and sent Gideon the Rogue to scout ahead.

Manor of the Giant Arminius - Music Post

I've been diverted from work on new dungeons (Oops, All Hags! and The Salt Pan) by Tormsen's superb upcoming UA3 splat Special Orders. But I did a rerun of The Manor of the Giant Arminius the other day for the latest Good Friends of Jackson Elias virtual convention, and came up with this updated music list.

There's some overlap with the Fallin' Down music posts, because I recycled a lot of the same ideas for that.

 

mellonbread's Favorite Drinks to Make at Home - Part 2

Building on the wild success of the first drinks post, let's have another!

APEROL SOUR

Availability: Easy. Aperol isn't hard to find, though I don't actually like it for anything besides this drink.

I doubt I invented this drink, but I can't find any mention of it anywhere else. I find the Aperol Spritz is too sweet for my taste. This recipe tames the sweetness and lets the rest of the flavors express themselves better.

• 2 oz Aperol
• 4 oz Prosecco (can use a drier sparkling wine if you want the drink to be even less sweet)
• Juice of one lemon
• Carbonated water

Shake the Aperol and lemon juice with ice, strain into glass with ice, add prosecco and top with carbonated water to taste. Garnish with lemon wheel and cocktail cherry of choice.

Consider also: just a splash of absinthe or Pernod to turn it into a Death in the Aperol Sour.

mellonbread's Favorite Drinks to Make at Home - Part 1

Mixing drinks is not difficult. Getting all the ingredients and utensils together can be an expensive chore. But once you have them, making the drinks is rarely more difficult than squeezing, stirring, shaking and pouring.

 

These are my favorite drinks - mostly small variations on established recipes. I'm going to list how I make them, which isn't always going to be the proper recipe. Sometimes I substitute things. I'll list the overall level of availability so you can gauge how difficult it might be for you to find the ingredients.

ACID SPIT 

Availability: Easy. If your grocery store has liquor you can pick up everything you need in one trip.

 

This is the first real cocktail I ever made, a simple gin and tonic variation. It's sweet, sour, boozy, and you can customize as you drink it until it's exactly the way you like it.

• 2 oz of a gin with a strong flavor. Delicate, artisinal gins will get lost against the background. Something cheap or mid shelf is ideal.
• Juice of half a lemon
• Juice of half a lime
• Cracked ice
• Tonic water to taste (I use Fever Tree. I know the pros prefer Q, but I find the sweetness of the tree offsets the harshness of the gin and sourness of the citrus perfectly)

Combine in a glass and take a sip. If it's too sweet, add more citrus. If it's too sour, add more tonic. If you can't taste the gin, add more gin. 

Unknown Armies NPC - Yoshida

An Unknown Armies NPC, based on my character from David Tormsen's playtest game for ¥0, a Japanese Mak Attax successor conspiracy from his upcoming Special Orders sourcebook.

Portable version here.

In uniform.

Yoshida (just Yoshida) is a cleaner from a long line of cleaners. From the Tokyo Subway all the way back to the Koreans speared to death in the ruins of the Great Kanto Quake, Yoshida’s family has bagged the bodies and mopped up the blood, piss and liquified fat. Today, he cleans up after people who kill themselves using trains. Japan averages one a day, so he travels a lot.

You might have guessed that Yoshida is one of the burakumin, the village people. Yes, he also wears a hard hat at work, and has been known to hang out at the YMCA. His brother Yoshioka went into the trash business with a local chivalrous organization. One of the outfits that settles their disputes with grenades. That isn’t Yoshida’s scene.

Yoshida was cleaning up after a jumper when her hand followed him home. Climbed into his pocket and hid. He didn’t find it until he was back at Rose’s, the tachinomi outside the Nagoya station. Crawled up onto the counter and tried to climb into his little bowl of pickled things. Everyone else freaked out. Only he could see the person attached to it. She seemed sad.

Yoshida takes care of dead people. He sorts their bones and scoops their skulls into plastic bags. It doesn’t get more intimate than that, so he wasn’t surprised when they started to talk back to him. The head lost in the storm drain, yelling at him to pull it out. The salaryman wedged under the bogey, who forgot to let his cat out before he stepped off the platform.

¥0 was the logical next step for Yoshida. He can’t serve food - nobody would willingly eat anything his hands had touched. But he can clean up a crime scene, speak to dead people, and go unnoticed where a cabal of twitchy mages would make a scene. He pledged himself to the memory of Betty Kimura because he wanted to help people. Maybe if things weren’t so fucked up, he wouldn’t meet so many of them on the other side.

Unknown Armies NPC - Joel

Another character from LISA the Pointless, this time adapted for Unknown Armies. Portable version here.

By Edvinas Kandrotas

Joel is a fulminaturge with a Major Charge burning a hole in his pocket. He’s got a custom pistol and a single custom .476 caliber bullet, both of which he forged with his own hands from materials scavenged out of the trash. He doesn’t know what he’s going to spend it on, just that it needs to be something… big.

Joel could make good money with a square job as a machinist, or spend his Major Charge on something that would make him a powerful underworld figure. Truth is, he’s addicted to life as a vagabond. Rolling into town, getting stuck in the nightlife, making friends and enemies, then moving on to his next adventure. The unspent magick potential flowing through him makes him a magnet for weird shit.

Joel has never personally killed anyone, but has helped his friends do so. He has never fired a shot in anger, and a couple times he has paid the price for not doing so.