Re: Dogs that suit the owner's personality
 

This or a Golden Retriever sounds good, an odd choice might be a Standard Poodle, they are hunting dogs.

For some reason this guy sounds like he owns a Newfoundland.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newfoundland_(dog)

Re: Dogs that suit the owner's personality
 

I'm concerned that it might not send an ambigious message of powerful ally or scary threat, for Willette, anymore. Newfoundlands seem friendly and goofy, rather than scary. At least to me. But, then again, St. Bernards seem goofy and friendly to me too, and yet Cujo was a thing...

Would a Newfoundland be more or less imposing than an Irish wolfhound?

Of course, Phil's dog will most likely not be a registered purebred of any kind, it will be a homebred mutt, but it will probably resemble some breed which contributed heavily to its genetic make-up.

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

I'd give him a Rottweiler. Big dog with a scary reputation, a good working breed, yet a lovable lap dog for those that treat them right. :)

Maybe a German Shepherd for that same feel if you think a Rottie is sending too much of a "Big Bad Wolf" vibe.

Re: Musical Instruments
 

Harmonica to sheng? Well, keeping in mind that I play neither, I can't really see that they're much alike. Sure, they're both free reed instruments, but that's just a classification based on technically how they make sound. It would be like saying a violin (pizzicato) and harp are the same thing. The sheng doesn't have the position, or blocking holes with your tongue or lips; the harmonica doesn't have fingering. On the positive side, learning breath support will help with any wind instrument, but they're probably not really any closer than a horn and a woodwind. LTC puts the Bagpipe default at -6, so that seems about right.

That's correct. Sounds reasonable to me. (Lots of musicians, especially composers, directors, and teachers, will pick up a bit of a lot of different instruments, so it wouldn't really be bizarre to have some skill in several.)

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

I had a neighbor with a Newfoundland, I would never think of it as friendly, or goofy, but that could be that specific dog, and not typical of the breed.

Wolfhounds could work, Russian Wolfhounds had a bout of popularity in the 1970's, another breed might be a Mastiff.

Rottweilers were still somewhat rare in the late 1970's early 1980's, at least in Southern California and Ozark regions I lived in then, he might not know enough about the breed to trust it, a Doberman or German Shepard would be more common for a "security" type dog. That said, a Rottweiler could work very well.

Re: 1980s American Cars, Guns, Gadgets and Consumer Goods [Atmosphere, look, minutiae
 

The standard substance used to cut cocaine was "baby laxative", mannitol IIRC.

Re: Musical Instruments
 

Just Musical Instrument (Harmonica) to any skill, really. How much of a default would it give to any other Musical Instrument skill?

LTC makes Musical Instrument (Single Reed) one skill and Musical Instrument (Double Reed) another. Musical Instrument (Sheng) is another and Musical Instrument (Flute), (Horn), (Panpipes), (Recorder), (Serpent) and (Trombone) are yet others. And that's just some of the aerophones.

Re: Musical Instruments
 

The Musical Instrument skill and defaults seem to be entirely focused on actually playing the instruments. The rules don't talk about style, or general musical background, or the sorts of parts that you usually have (melodies, ornamental bits, harmony, bass, rhythm, etc) as the basis for similarity.

This is a bit different from the Hornbostel-Sachs classification scheme (aerophones, chordophones, etc), which is about the low-level physical mechanism that produces sound. A guitar (chordophone) and an electric guitar (electrophone) are in entirely different categories, but are played essentially the same way. (I hedge because of things like distortion knobs and external boxes operated by foot pedals that you often see with the electric guitar, but rarely used with the acoustic ones.)

And I'm having a hard time thinking of an instrument that you play like a harmonica. All those little holes produce individual pitches, sometimes different when you inhale and exhale (or "blow" and "draw", as Agent Ledoux would probably say, assuming that's the New Orleans Cajun that we were talking about). You need lip and tongue motion to cover up holes that you don't want to use, or sometimes deliberately leave multiple holes uncovered to produce chords.

The sheng is fingered, but not like a flute or clarinet. The holes in a sheng don't adjust the length of the resonant air column, and thus its pitch. The pitches come from the reeds in those tubes, and leaving the holes uncovered means the tube doesn't resonate and so no volume of sound is produced at that pitch. Close multiple tubes and you get a chord, rather than a different pitch. It's actually somewhat more like the mechanism of an accordion, though it doesn't have the bellows to push air over the reeds. Looking at a few YouTube videos, embouchure doesn't seem to be a thing for producing a sound, though I'd guess that's how the musicians are doing vibrato. At any rate, that and a harmonica are both free-reed aerophones, but I'd expect minimal skill transference between them. LTC mentions the harmonic in the sheng skill description just as an example of a "free reed" more hopefully familiar to its Western audience.

I'd completely agree with LTC's classification of "horns" as being all the same. With Trumpet skill (modest though that was), I had little trouble playing a French horn, baritone, or tuba, though there were some noticable differences in producing and maintaining a decent tone on the different instruments (having to do with breath control). Trombone is played exactly the same way, but it has the factor that it has the slide for pitch, rather than three valves to select different pipe lenghts. LTC gives those a -2 default, so that's our mark for "different fingering".

The other end of the scale is "pretty much completely different", at -6. The one step further than that is just "no default". We have -6s between Flute and Single/Double Reed, even though the fingering between the two is the same. The differences in embouchure and even the way you hold it (note the -3 between Single Reed and Recorder) seem to be considered more important than the fingering.

So, at great length, I'm still stuck on not being able to think of anything you hold and move and blow like a harmonica, or "finger" ("tongue"?) the same way. "No default" seems pretty reasonable to me, or possibly a -6 to other free reeds (sheng, bagpipes (at least the drones; the chanter is a single or double reed), accordion, concertina, melodica) if you think the HS categorization is important. Harmonica wouldn't default to piano or guitar or horns or sax at all. The only commonality I can come up with there is just breath control, and even there the harmonica has both blow and draw, unlike the horns and single/double reeds.

Re: Cocaine poisoning in the 1980s
 

According to this link, amphetamines and lactose: http://eightiesclub.tripod.com/id332.htm

Also period appropriate, so may be useful context.

Anyway lactose, not so much. Amphetamines are kind of back to the same problem in that aside from the drug itself, it's more the impurities and/or cutting agents that are a concern.

Re: Cocaine poisoning in the 1980s
 

It's probably too late to help, but cocaine has a pretty strong link to heart attacks, and I've heard stories (unverified) of people who had a heart attack shortly after (within an hour) their first time using the substance. So you don't really need anything special, just someone with a possibly higher-than-normal risk of heart attack to maybe take a bit more than he should and, boom, dead of cardiac arrest.

Irish wolfhound seems too appropriate for the character to go with much else - according to Wikipedia at least, they were originally bred from war hounds, and are used for hunting and guarding. For someone who was a soldier at war and now is either hunting people ("Big Bad Wolf") or is a source of protection from those that are ("dog who keeps the wolves from the door"), that's just too close of a match to not go with. Shame they have nearly as good of a reputation as Newfoundlands, although there have been some pretty nasty attacks in New Zealand I ran across trying to find an imposing picture of one (I failed).