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An ICRPG Hard Suit campaign - Session 0 Prep
So for the last few years I’ve been doing a Dungeon Crawl Classics, DCC, game in my dining room while the kids play their own game upstairs. But schedules being what they are, it has been increasingly difficult to find a time slot that worked for everyone. So playing once every six to eight weeks was common and now that their characters have gone up several levels in DCC… The amount of flipping through books to find rules or even just remember character abilities takes up a lot of our play time.
Thankfully we found time on Saturday to play. The only catch was that most of the kids couldn’t make it. So I floated the idea of trying a new system with a one-shot game and have my son and his friend join us.
I geeked out all last week trying to figure out what systems were out there and what sounded fun and easy to prep and teach. I thought of Index Card RPG which us a rules-light system that I explored when I was tinkering with a solo hex-flower dungeon. They have a hex-crawl world that looked interesting and bonus! You don’t need to prep characters beforehand. You discover them as you play. Sold! It’s called Hard Suit. Absolute blast. Now I’m going to show pictures of some of the prep I did, which will contain spoilers to the discovery nature of the play. If you think you might play this system as a player I suggest you enjoy the cute picture of my cat Fuzzyboots being a Game Master and then stop reading.
Prepping the game
I love the discovery aspect of character creation. You play as characters that have been in suspended animation and upon awakening they have no memories of what is going on. One part of discovering themselves is catching a reflection in a mirror, glancing at their hands, and recovering a small fragment of a memory. There are helpful tables in the PDF to roll… but I didn’t want the rolling to slow down the game. So I wrote all the pieces of information out on little index cards and grabbed a cute pouch so they could draw one at random when the time was right. This was a big hit.
You might have noticed the “fortune cookie” looking paper. The players discover lockers with their name on them and inside they have four items. Things like clothing, weapons, utilities and something personal. Four things to roll on the random table and six players? No thank you. As I said I wanted easy and fast. So I whipped up a random “personal locker” generator and cut out the results. It was so much faster during play time. Plus a couple of the players liked that they could be secretive about what they found instead of me announcing everything. It made for some interesting role-playing.
Next they discovered these strange hard suits. And… there is a lot to roll to generate them. Which needed to be done beforehand so I could describe them when they were discovered. Guess what? I made a generator đ€Ł
Here you go: A personal locker and hard suit generator of Hard Suit ICRPG
I also created a little book, by pasting an image from the pdf on a dollar store kraft notebook, so they could keep track of any suits they managed to find (and keep đ). The bottom slip of paper is an included character sheet for the hard suits, I just resized it.
Tracking Things
Another interesting part of discovery play is that you don’t roll character stats or look through the book for abilities and classes. Those things are all granted by me, as the GM, as play happens. But there is no easy way in the PDF to track them. [dramatic voice]…Oh no… I’ll need to make something in my GM notebook [end dramatic voice].
There is also a large table in the PDF for abilities that the characters can discover they have. They’re listed in alphabetical order, with fun names, which makes sense but I thought it might make it hard during play to note who was role-playing something I could assign an ability to. So I grouped them by “category”, simplified the names and put it into my GM notebook.
Battlemaps versus Art Cards
Battlemaps? No thank you. Maybe I’m just a bit exhausted but the idea of finding the perfect tiles or sketching out several large dry erase maps for the game. It just seemed like too much work.
I really love the art cards that were created for Index Card RPG. So I downloaded the bundle of all four sets, printed them out to approximately playing card size and got paper cutting. Then I tossed them into some clear sleeves to make them a bit more durable. It was fun and the cats loved making a mess of the paper clippings đ»
This is the first scene my players find themselves.
For movement, I think I’m going to take inspiration from this reddit thread: A complete guide for zone based index cards.
End Notes
And that’s it for prep. Instead of character sheets, I’m giving out dollar store notebooks. Instead of prepping every detail in the scenario I’m going to let an oracle decide most things. I want a more collaborative role-playing experience this time around :)
P.S. The first session was an absolute blast đ„°
Blaugust 2025
I think I might try and post more this month and so are some others with Blaugust 2025. This is a collection post to gather up any posts I make this month. I have a personal goal of 15 posts this month across the normal things I post about: life, coding projects, and homeschooling. Let’s see what happens đ€Ł
đČ Seventh Grade for 2024/2025
- Writing, Spelling, Grammar, and Literature
- Science and Mathematics
- Interdisciplinary Studies
- Art, Physical Education, and Health
So last year and this year so far have been intense. And not in a good way. Which is why it’s taken me so long to write down what my kids have been doing for homeschooling. But better late than never đ
I did make some micro posts about the school year. You can check them out if you’d like
My child decided that they would not set foot back in public school until high school. So unlike other years where I approached homeschooling with a (mostly) rosy attitude, this year I felt I was between a rock and a hard place. Nevertheless, after weighing the options I decided homeschooling, at least for now, was the better option. They had a strong and fond memories of a twice-a-week homeschooling group they could attend and I knew that group would be supportive. Plus academics suffered last year and I felt that taking time to re-solidify the material (especially in math) was important.
Course of Study
Writing, Spelling, Grammar and Literature
Writing, Spelling and Grammar
Writing and grammar this year were covered by a fun set of books I found that I thought were right up my child’s alley. They are the type of kid who memorizes Edgar Allen Poe poetry in their free time. This was a hit. I never had any issues with getting them to complete their lessons using Melancholy Grammar. They loved listening to the recommended podcasts and crafting stories from random prompts.
They also had writing sprinkled in from their Falcons class (more on that below) and for the last half of the school year I found a creative writing class on Outschool from a published young adult author who taught about structuring fiction stories and gave one-on-one feedback. Spelling was more, grit your teeth and get it done… We used Spelling You See this year because I was hoping a more visual approach would help. By the end of this year I think the issue is less with the mechanics of spelling and more with the lack of attention for spelling. Sigh. I’ve also noticed they tend to spell things correctly if someone other than me is going to be reading it. So, I might let this subject go next year and reassess mid-year.
Literature
I just let them pick a bunch of books to read in the first half of the year to get the joy back. Then for the second half of the year I found a cool Outschool class on banned books. This class assigned a book to read without letting the kids know why it was banned. Then they’d meet and discuss it over zoom and see if they could figure it out. Having to puzzle out the “why” kept my kid really engaged in the book.
Science and Mathematics
Microbiology and Genetics
Anything with a microscope tends to be a hit with this kid. So once again I pulled out the Science Mom Microbiology and Genetics course. Both my kids have loved these courses. And I find it charming that while doing art projects my kid just re-listens to the lectures. She must have listened to the one on smallpox a dozen times by now.
Astronomy
Science mom also released a course on Astronomy during the spring and my kids love joining the classes while they are “live” so they can answer polls and ask questions and might get a shout-out. So even though it doubled up the science my kid was 100% game.
Pre-algebra
Math…. yikes…. math. Okay so this was soooo rusty.
The goal was to get them caught back up so they could do Algebra I next year. Now this was a personal goal of theirs. They have many talents and loves and one of those is science. And they know science builds upon math and in high school they want to be on the STEM track.Guys… math almost killed me this year (and them I assume đ). We started with Derek Owens which has worked perfectly for my other child. This one, not so much. So then we tried Math Mammoth. Utter disaster. Then I tried Understanding Pre-algebra. I got nowhere. Finally I got an adaptive math program, ALEKS, online, because I could not figure out what else to do and just made them do an hour a day (jumping in to help when they didn’t understand a topic).
Somehow they aced the math portion of the end of the year standardized test I give them. And I also found some potential Algebra classes for next year, contacted the teachers, and had them give her a readiness assessment. Not stellar, but they did indicate readiness for Algebra next year.
Whew…
And I learned an important lesson. When my kids become pre-teens I need to back off teaching math. It hasn’t worked for either of them. đ€Ł
Interdisciplinary Studies
Back to the online Falcon’s group with the occasional in person meet-up.
They contributed pieces to the weekly newsletter/paper and performed in the annual Halloween play. Once again they covered a wide variety of topics (that I’m not doing justice) that included:
- the People’s Puppet Parade and Purim
- Nationalism and World Wars
- Ledgers and formatting financial transactions
- Repercussions of extended space visits on Astronauts bodies
- Endangered species, adaptations, and neoteny
- Persian new year, Nowruz
- The crafting of Roman coins and the history of money
- Symbolism in the book âSpinning Silverâ by Naomi Novik
- Holi the festival of color
- How molds were made before 3d printing, metal casting
- Samoa and fa’afafine, studying history through the lens of different cosmologies, gender stereotypes of different cultures.
- Cultural stereotypes around gendered clothing and hair.
- Liminal Space
- Late We’wha from the Zuni tribe
- Why do the money systems of different countries have different values?
- Spreading information or disinformation
- What it means to be open minded and the difference between how people think, versus what they think.
- The Black Death, rats, and leftover resources leading to cheap paper
- Currency, counterfeiting and prevention.
- Developing a money system for use in class and hosting a makers fairs with a base 5 money system, ledger, taxes, and paying civic âemployeesâ
- Decomposition, death, and cultural burial traditions.
- Ellis island and immigration
- Factories, products, and planned obsolescence. Environmental and economical impacts
Art, Physical Education, and Health
Art was a free for all. They would tell me what they were interested in and I’d get them supplies and find teachers on Outschool. The top mediums were clay, painting, and digital animation.
P.E. was the swim team at the local YMCA. Besides swimming six hours a week and then attending multiple swim meets a month, the coaches reviewed healthy eating and how to take care of the body as an athlete. They even won “Most Improved Swimmer” at the end of the year banquet đ„°
For health we attended the chat form Stanford Medicine
Whew. This year was a lot. And even now in August I’m not recovered from it.
Mini Coding Adventure: a personal web desktop
So last night when I was sitting down and watching an episode of “The Mole” on Netflix, inspiration struck and dusted off one of my old web projects that I had kicking around. At one point in time, my blog had a desktop theme. I really enjoyed it but then I went back to my old standby of an RPG look. It’s been in the back of my mind to revive the desktop theme, but I’m not sure it’s suited for a blog. When I found 7.css I had some fun envisioning the desktop look as a Micro.blog client but then set it aside.
What I’m thinking is to build a personal web desktop, for all the various services I use online that offer API’s I can play with. I’ll start with Micro.blog since I’ve got quite a bit of experience building little side projects with it and using it’s private notes as data storage.
As you can see from the screenshot, it’s the windowing I’m most enamored with.
I’m thinking it could be a good project for small web July.
My rules:
- No CSS framework outside of 7.css.
- No JavaScript frameworks. I’ll write it all from scratch using plain old JavaScript.
- No build step. Just a single HTML page.
- A little Deno server for API calls
I’ll probably do quick little updates instead of waiting around to finish and then doing a larger writeup.
Here’s where I’m at after two episodes. I’ve cleaned up the UI around the notebook list and added in the buttons/radios for the actions I want to do. But I haven’t actually coded the interactions yet.
Today I fixed the window resize function. Before I was using getComputedStyle to find the width and height and then using the mouse coordinates to calculate the resize from the top-left of the window. Now I’m doing the calculations from the center of the window.
(I’m not sure why the cursor is so big when I did the screen record đ)
Upcoming for this week (hopefully, no promises):
- Table sort when clicking on column header
- Radio select to enable edit, delete, import, export
- Add new notebook
- Help modal
- Refresh table
- Search the table
A Small Web July
A Small Web July is a challenge started by SmallCypress that inspires a break from big social media to work on personal projects. I really resonated with the “Replace scrolling with building” goal being set. I’m not one for big social media in general, preferring to spend my time on Micro.blog… which i can typically get through my entire timeline in about 15 minutes with taking some extra time to dive into interesting links that were shared.
I have gotten into some bad idle game habits on my phone leaving my potential project list to grow and grow. So that’s what I’m going to focus on replacing.
In Loura fashion, I whipped up an index card to track my progress. This list is meant more to inspire me and not a “must do” list. I hope to get a little progress on some if them if I can.
I have some tai chi competitions coming up that I need to prep for, so that will be my disconnect from electronics goal. I have a couple of blog posts I’ve been meaning to get around to. And as always a bunch of ideas of things to code and play around with.
Micro.blog Photo Challenge June 2025
I did it! I completed all 30 prompts for the Micro.blog Photo Challenge June 2025 and I almost did it daily.
đŻ Ninth Grade for 2024/2025
So last year and this year so far have been intense. And not in a good way. Which is why it’s taken me so long to write down what my kids have been doing for homeschooling. But better late than never đ
I did make some micro posts about the year. You can check them out if you’d like
So last year I sat down with my son and looked at some of the high school requirements of various colleges and universities near us. Since he was little he’s been adamant that he wanted to study science so we focused on those that had strong science programs. Then with that list of requirements we made a rough plan for the next four years.
Course of Study
History, Writing, and Literature
History
For history my son wanted to begin with his World History requirement. I found several strong choices and we went through each option, looking at the syllabus and the topics offered. He chose World History: Africa and Asia with Aim Academy.
This class centered viewing history through the lens of Africa and Asia versus other courses that had a more European centric view. He met with the class once a week online where they discussed as a group that week’s topic. Then he had a full week of assignments, including map practice to memorize all the countries and major land features in Africa and Asia, literature to read, multiple videos to watch, and finally a dozen questions or so to answer and submit for grading. Throughout the year he had essays to write, book reviews, and papers on current topics in the news. The teacher was wonderful and met with my son to help him get back on track when the first few lessons through him for a loop.
Take a look at the book list for the class:
And here are the films they had to watch (most were very intense for him)
- The Woman King (2022)
- Cry, Freedom (1987)
- Hotel Rwanda (2004)
- Wadjda (2012)
- Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001)
- First They Killed My Father (2017)
Writing
For writing he kept working with his tutor from last year. They worked on a variety of different writing tasks and he had daily free writing time. He covered filling out applications, how to write an email, editing essays, creating outlines, works cited, and how to prepare a presentation and then present it. It was a well rounded year that he enjoyed.
Literature
For the literature portion of his ELA class we sourced a variety of books for him to read and discuss. He also practiced summarizing books and writing reviews.
One other aspect for literature was through a class I found on outschool. It’s called Visual Lit High School: Draw Your Way Through High School English Language Arts. Here he covered poetry and short stories learning oral expression, visual interpretation, and fundamental grammar skills.
Just a few of the poems, short stories, and podcasts he analyzed:
- âA White Heronâ Sarah Orne Jewett and Emily Dickinsonâs âHope is the thing with feathersâ
- âNonfiction Sketchnoting Activity Part 1. Podcast: âColorsâ by Radiolab
- âBefore I Got My Eye Put Outâ (336) by Emily Dickinson
- âJoyâ by Anton Chekhov and âI am Nobodyâ “I heard a Fly buzz” by Emily Dickinson
- âAn Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridgeâ by Ambrose Bierce
- âWarâ by Luigi Pirandello
- âThis Is What It Means To Say Phoenix, AZâ by Sherman Alexie
- âA Ghost Story" by Mark Twain
- âHow To Become a Writerâ by Lorrie Moore
- âThe Interpreter of Maladiesâ by Jhumpa Lahiri
Science and Mathematics
Honors Biology with a Lab
Honors Biology from taylormadescience.com covers the typical topics of cells, genetics, microbiology, plants, animals, human anatomy and physiology, and the environment.
This is the third class my son has done with this teacher and he gets a lot out of it. Every week he reads a chapter from the textbook and takes notes, watches a pre-recorded lesson and then takes a quiz, and then performs the lab with the teacher and other students and then writes up a lab report. In total there were twenty five labs including a frog dissection.
Understanding our Universe through Astronomy
Astronomy from g3 was one of his electives for the spring semester that was a high school level astronomy course adapted from college-level material. He had weekly webinars and textbook readings to cover as well as articles to read and a forum with other students to post responses to questions and prompts.
- Motions of the Earth and Moon and the Laws of Motion
- Light and Telescopes
- The Formation of Stars and Planets
- The Planets and other Bodies in the Solar System
- The Stars and Their Evolutions (Low Mass and High Mass)
- Galaxies and the Milky Way
- The Evolution of the Universe
- Formation and Structure of the Universe
- Life in the Universe
His favorite part was making trading cards that looked like Magic the Gathering Cards that covered the planets, the moons, and other bodies in the solar system. His final paper for the semester was on Carl Sagan and his life as an astronomer.
Contributing to Scientific Understanding
Contributing to Scientific Understanding from Athena’s Academy was his elective for the fall semester. This online class had weekly webinars covering how to contribute to scientific understanding in a variety of ways as a high school student. My son chose to add to Wikipedia with additional information about invasive plant species in Massachusetts and conducted a survey of several local sites to quantify the types he found and identify them. Then he learned how Wikipedia works and how to format and submit his findings for inclusion.
Honors Geometry
I think we finally found a math that my son isn’t a fan of đ
He muddled through it though. Once again we used Derek Owens. It is a solid math program that includes short videos, a textbook, and grading services. My son thinks the textbook is personally out to get him. My son had to email Mr. Owens many different times when ideas weren’t clicking and he always got back promptly with recorded videos that help my son tackle the concept.
Interdisciplinary Studies
This will be my son’s last year with his online Falcon’s group. He’s still planning on being active with some of the online clubs the kids run and join any get-togethers that are geographically feasible.
This counted as an elective that I’m calling “Integrated Humanities.” He contributed pieces to the weekly newsletter/paper and performed in the annual Halloween play. Once again they covered a wide variety of topics (that I’m not doing justice) that included:
- the People’s Puppet Parade and Purim
- Nationalism and World Wars
- Ledgers and formatting financial transactions
- Repercussions of extended space visits on Astronauts bodies
- Endangered species, adaptations, and neoteny
- Persian new year, Nowruz
- The crafting of Roman coins and the history of money
- Symbolism in the book âSpinning Silverâ by Naomi Novik
- Holi the festival of color
- How molds were made before 3d printing, metal casting
- Samoa and fa’afafine, studying history through the lens of different cosmologies, gender stereotypes of different cultures.
- Cultural stereotypes around gendered clothing and hair.
- Liminal Space
- Late We’wha from the Zuni tribe
- Why do the money systems of different countries have different values?
- Spreading information or disinformation
- What it means to be open minded and the difference between how people think, versus what they think.
- The Black Death, rats, and leftover resources leading to cheap paper
- Currency, counterfeiting and prevention.
- Developing a money system for use in class and hosting makers fairs as a base 5 system, ledger, taxes, paying civic âemployeesâ
- Decomposition, death, and cultural burial traditions.
- Ellis island and immigration
- Factories, products, and planned obsolescence. Environmental and economical impacts
European Portuguese
Last up for the year was studying Portuguese. He worked with a tutor and the online program Practice Portuguese. We also worked through sections of the textbook Bom Dia! together.
Whew. This year was a lot and it really stretched my son. The beginning of the year was rough as he adjusted to a much higher workload and writing demands. I am so proud of what he accomplished. Next year is 10th grade and that seems both impossible to me and right around the corner. Yikes.
Backlinks on a Micro.blog hosted website
One of my goals when transforming my website into a digital garden was to include backlinks on my posts. A backlink is a link to a post that refers to the current post that you are viewing. There are several blog posts out there that explain how enable this for Hugo blogs that I used for inspiration. Here are the steps I used to get this functionality on my blog.
You will need to edit your theme for single blog posts which is located at layouts/posts/single.html (or if using a theme that supports Matt Langfordâs microhooks, add/edit one for microhook-after-post.html)
The first thing that needs to happen is to grab the url of the page (in this case the relative permalink) and create a variable to store the matches you come across. Thatâs the {{ $pages := slice }}
You then iterate through all the blog pages⊠{{- range .Site.Pages -}} and store {{ $pages = $pages | append . }} any that contain the text of the relative permalink {{- if strings.Contains .Content $relpermalink -}}
{{ $relpermalink := .RelPermalink }}
{{ $pages := slice }}
{{- range .Site.Pages -}}
{{- if strings.Contains .Content $relpermalink -}}
{{ $pages = $pages | append . }}
{{- end -}}
{{- end -}}
Next youâll want to iterate through those pages and display them. For simplicity of this post Iâm just using a basic HTML list. If the backlinking post has a title, letâs display that, otherwise just take the summary or truncate it.
{{ with $pages }}
{{ range $pages }}
{{- if .Title -}}
-
{{ .Title }}
{{- else -}}
-
{{ .Summary | truncate 150 }}
{{- end -}}
{{ end }}
{{ end }}
Result on my website after some extra styling
You can checkout the full code snippet here:
Updated 4 Apr 2025 based on a comment by Leon Mika to stop backlinks to newsletter pages.
{{ $relpermalink := .RelPermalink }}
{{ $pages := slice }}
{{- range .Site.Pages -}}
{{- if strings.Contains .Content $relpermalink -}}
{{- if not (strings.HasPrefix .RelPermalink "/newsletters") -}}
{{ $pages = $pages | append . }}
{{- end -}}
{{- end -}}
{{- end -}}
{{ with $pages }}
<ul class="backlinks">
{{ range $pages }}
{{- if .Title -}}
<li>
<a class="p-url" href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Title }}</a>
</li>
{{- else -}}
<li>
<a class="p-url" href="{{ .Permalink }}">{{ .Summary | truncate 150 }}</a>
</li>
{{- end -}}
{{ end }}
</ul>
{{ end }}