EAT AT JOE'S: Irvania!

Look...I'll put it like this.  If you haven't checked out Dave Ferris' Irvania.com, what with its free wargames, wacky fictional nation and copious images of miniature guys with sticks and robots wearing ties...

...man, you oughtta.  Trust me.  This is some stuff, babies.

A Very Atheist Christmas

May yours be like mine -- Merrily spent with family, with food, with fun and with love. 

See?

Not evil.

I Am About To Live One.

[[[Sound 360]]]

"And here's a poster of the Landmaster from Damnation Alley."

Troy Allen had seen a lot of SF that I had never heard of.  He was older than me, and sometimes it seemed like his past had taken place in a long-gone neverwhen lost to me through time.

"I'm not familiar with that.  Was it a TV ser--"

"Aw, maaaaan!  You haven't seen Damnation Alley?"  Alan Rice, too, seemed to know of this distant wonderland; he was the one who introduced me to Troy, after all.  Maybe that's where he found him.

Troy smiled, a big-ass goofy smile.  He may have squinted with delight to have another shiny memory to share.  "It was a post-apocalyptic movie.  They had these vans, see, with the wheels...."

He and Alan went on with this little bit of my nerd education (nerducation?), there in Troy's grey-lit room in a little house somewhere in Harrodsburg, IN.  I couldn't tell you where it was, now.

Troy, man.  Troy knew a lot of stuff, and when he told me about stuff like this the gleam in his eyes and the glee in his voice made me want to fall in love with them, too--these ephemeral things that I knew I'd never see, these obscure and unknown tidbits of my geek heritage.  I'd written them off, though, as things of another world, never to be seen by me.

Standing in Troy's room on a cold winter day ca. 1990, I would never have dreamed that, when babies born that week would finally be able to get legally blasted at a bar, I would be idly browsing the DVD selection on the Monroe County Public Library's Bookmobile and that there, in orange and yellow, those words would stare back at me, plastic monolith of mystery revealed.

Troy doesn't read this blog.  But if he did, I'd say to him:  "HA, HA HA HA HA -- LOOK AT WHAT I FOUND!"

Almost Perfect

It's missing the header and footer images, and the NPC illustration was usually a cameo inside the frame, but I think it came out pretty OK.  Illustration totally swiped from the Star Wars Artists' Guild website, and modified a bit by me.  No offense, Blooburd.

ATTENTION ALL INTERNET

FREE CHARACTERS

Here are the PCs from of one of our (my wife's and my) Annual Halloween Games.  This particular one was inspired by those awful SyFy Original Pictures that we never watch, and it was about college students in the Australian Outback who met up with a lycanthropy victim who turned into a native wild dog.

The game was titled "Mandingo".

It was diceless, and the characters were described like this:

Facepalm²

First -- NaNoWriMo.  No go.  That's the fact, and I don't wanna talk about it.

Okay!  Now!  That outta the way, let me tell you about how FUCK CHANGELING.

This is Red Five. I'm going in.

You know...I've put this off far too long.

I've known about NaNoWriMo for a few years now.  I even have the book, "No Plot?  No Problem!".  I know that I can write, and should do so more often.

I also know that I am a perfectionist, and that I try too hard and shoot too high most of the time.

I need to stop doing that, and this blog has always been about that.   I need to step it up, though--I need to give myself that deadline, that freedom, that push.

I just learned to type a few months ago.  You know, home-row touch-typing?  Since our first family computer in 1989 and up until this Summer, I had always been a (very very fast) hunt-and-peck typist.  It was fun and it was funny, but touch-typing is a hell of a lot cooler.

I'm putting it to use.

I don't have a plot, but I have a theme.  Well, something like it, anyway; what I have is a loose concept, kind of a feel, kind of a...vibe.  I thought of it the other day, driving home from work.  I like it.  It's comfortable.  It makes little sense and that's how I like it.

I'm gonna write something funny, weird, bitter-sweet and rambunctious.  I'm going to play absurd fantasy games with my late childhood, the end of my teens; I will be following the same path that Walter Hill followed when writing Streets of Fire, as told to us by Wikipedia:

According to Hill, the film's origins came out of a desire to make what he thought was a perfect film when he was a teenager and put in all of the things that he thought were "great then and which I still have great affection for[.]"

In other words, I'm going to write my late teens the way they should have been, with robots and alien gods and ridiculous misadventures and all the crazy stuff that never really happened, couldn't happen and would probably break the cosmos in some way or another if it did happen.

Done rambling.  See ya in 30.

Dear Shatterzone,

What the hell is wrong with you?!

Seriously, dude.  Seriously.

So...you're talking about the card system, and how you determine initiative with said cards, and that, for such purposes, "S" stands for "Standard Scene" and "D" stands for "Dramatic Scene".  Okay, so what's that mean?  Well, you also say that Chapter 3 of the Rule Book explains the difference...but then Chapter 3 of the Rule Book plainly states that it's only going to concern itself with Rounds.

Wha.....?

Look...dude.  I'm not stupid.  I can suss things out, okay?  I sort of do that kind of thing for fun.  So I'm kind of up to the challenge of, you know, trying to figure you out, but then I look at how damage gets listed like "3 Wounds 7K" and --

--

-- I really don't feel like it's worth the effort.

I'll keep your cards; I can use those with D6 if I want to.  The rest of you?

Dr Rotwang! is very disappointed with you, Shatterzone.

The Cross and the Character Sheet: More on Religion and D&D

I considered that this kind of discussion really belongs on my other blog, but interested parties are likelier to be aware of this one and not that one, so for the nonce, here it stays.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to comment on yesterday's post.  Allow me to address some of them.

Ryan Shelton sez...

Sorry Doc, I honestly don't get what you  don't get ;-)
Christianity, or any religious faith for that matter, is not the same as belonging to a fraternal club. Yeah, we both both rites and funny hats and codes of behavior, but religious faith is a way of life (or ought to be) not just getting together on Sunday for singing and fried chicken.

Right away, dude?  Thanks for having a sense of humor about this biz.  And I agree with you, in a way -- any day is good for singing and fried chicken.

When I do something I ought to be examining whether or not that fits within my way of life. If my way of life is one informed by Christianity, then why wouldn't I examine the activity to see if it fits?

Okay; I get that.  What I don't get is what's in D&D--or any RPG, for that matter--that might conflict with that way of life.  Why wouldn't it fit?  I ask this not rhetorically, but because I really don't know.


After making these statements, Ryan was aked by Kelvin Green,

Out of interest, would you also examine paddling a canoe or drawing a picture -- to use the Doctor's examples -- in the same way? That's the bit that I find most interesting; why is D&D singled out for scrutiny when it's just another hobby? Is it just a holdover from the Satanic Panic of the 80's?

Ryan replied,

Yes, of course. Perhaps I would not consider paddling a canoe with quite the same scrutiny, because it involves no real moral dimension, but yes.

Aha!  A moral dimension.  This helps things make a little more sense.

So if it's a morality thing, how is it a morality thing?  Is there moral dimension to pretending to be a...a space-dude, or a fighter, or an elf or whatever?   I'd consider it immoral--or at least unethical and, frankly, dickish--to break into someone's house and steal their stuff, but is it immoral to participate in an imaginary version of same?  If so, how?


Then along comes Stuart Robertson, apparently with a blue donut on his face, to express the following:

Most people want the option (although they might not always take it) of playing a character in an RPG that is "like them" but with a Fantasy / Sci-Fi paint job. It's why female gamers want to see strong female characters, non-white gamers want to see non-white characters, gay/lesbian gamers or players with physical disabilities want to see etc. etc. etc. I think it's the same thing for someone for whom religion is a more central part of their life. They want to see that the game includes characters like them.

OKAY.  THIS I can grok.  But then I gotta wonder, is it the game designers' responsibility to put that into the game?

You could say that, yes indeed, it is.  Or at least, they'll be more successful if there's room for all those characters.  Better yet if they never give a reason why not to include those characters.

I loved Mage: The Ascension, even though I was sometimes annoyed by its SCIENCE BAD stance.  But even then the designers threw me a bone--even though some of the villains (indeed, the major ones) evilbadwrong science dudes, there was not only room for good guy science dudes.  More than room, there were established good-science-guy groups.

But even without them, I was able to enjoy the game; most of the time I played a Hermetic mage, in fact.  The SCIENCE BAD nonsense was annoying but not an impediment; and anyway, when I was playing, it was MY GAME, and I made it into what I WANTED.  Again, that was sort of the point of gaming, for me.

So if you're a muslim or a christian or whatever and you want to play D&D, why not just say, "My dude's Jewish, so he doesn't eat the pork the merchant offers us.  But he'll eat the beef!  I bought him two plates."

I mean, after all, we're just pretending, for fun.

Apparently Oddyssey AKA Natalie Bennet is of the same mind as I (in this matter at least), as she chimes in:

I think some of the issue here is, "Is D&D compatible with Christianity" is a totally legitimate question, but the stuff that people look at when they're deciding is kind of nuts. Like I think there are some legitimate questions from a Christian perspective (caveat being that I am not a Christian myself. Mostly. I dunno what I am right now.) as to -- The big one being, Is this something that doing it is going to take me away from God and the people around me? 

If a game can take you away form your god, is your god that powerful after all?  It seems like a snarky question, but it arises at this point.  As for the people around you, do you mean will they judge you?  I thought only God could judge.

There's also, I think, some legitimate questions to be asked and considered about the way the game generates and handles moral content. Do I need to always run my character according to Christian ethics in order to be a good Christian? Or is it better to use the game to explore other ethical systems (or the lack thereof), or at least to mess around with them however I want because it's a game and it's for relaxation and the moral content isn't a big deal because it's not real people? Those are maybe questions with fairly obvious answers, but they're also, I think, questions that deserve asking if you're a person who has a strong moral/ethical worldview and wants to make sure that all your actions, every day, are in line with that moral/ethical worldview.

Fair enough.  I agree, the answers are obvious ones.  As for the matter of the ethical worldview, well...I get that, I really do.  I just think that, when the point of the game is to do whatever you want with it, then the question is far less important than "Do we have enough Mountain Dew for everybody?"

Lastly I will address rsteve76's comment, and I leave it for last because -- really, dude?

You were born an atheist? Really? If anything, you were born an agnostic. Atheism literally means "no God," vs. Agnosticism, which means "no knowledge." Unless your first words were "there is no God," I'm guessing you were an agnostic, if that.

Semantics.  You wanna argue semantics.  I accept -- I am a fan of trying hard to say what I mean.
 


I maintain that I was born an atheist because I was born not believing in any gods. Sure, I had no knowledge of any, either; in fact I had knowledge of very little at all, except for "HUNGRY" and "MUST WAIT A FEW YEARS FOR NEW WAVE MUSIC".
 

Okay so not that last one.

"Atheism" means "without a god".  Atheists are called that because they've arrived at the conclusion that there probably isn't a god, because the lace of strong evidence makes it a strong likelihood.  "Agnostic" means "without knowledge", and I argue that all atheists are also agnostic by strict definition because, hey -- we don't know.

But you don't have to be an expert in invisible textiles to clue in that the emperor is naked.

Both now and throughout recorded history, the majority of people have had some sort of religious belief. Inact, finds of prehistoric man suggest they had some form of belief in the supernatural and possibly an afterlife.

Just as we have long exhibited tendencies toward aggression, tribalism, artistic expression, curiosity, critical thinking, gluttony, genius, mob mentality, bad taste in clothes, prejudice, creativity...


"True atheism," as we know it today, is actually a relatively recent phenomenon. So all of the evidence suggests that mankind, by nature, is a religious creature, and that for one to be a true atheist, he must have it taught out of him.

Please provide that "all the" evidence.

So your assertion that atheism is the natural human state is a fantasy that goes against all of the evidence. But then, that's atheism for ya. ;^) 

Nice.  That's -- that's brilliant, man.  Smack-talk.  Good one.

I really hope you're being sarcastic.

Religion, D&D and Crash Helmets for Snails

Over at Blood of Prokopius, fellow gamer nerd, blogger and human being FrDave wrote a post entitled "Is Christianity Compatible With D&D??

Therein, he muses about whether, you know, Christianity is compatible with D&D.  It's an interesting post to be sure, and one that provokes thought.

In me, it provoked a thought as follows:

"Uh...why...does it have to?"

Seriously.  It makes no sense to me.  I...I just don't get that.

If I, as a teenager, had read that bit in Greyhawk/Supplement 1 and/or Holmes that says--

All vampires, regardless of religious background, are affected by the cross which is sovereign against them.

 --I would have been very put off by it.  I would have bristled at it, resented it, been outright angry about it.  It would not have wanted that intrusion of real-world faith and religion in my fantasy world; that's what gaming was sort of about.  Not a retreat from reality, you understand, but a place where I could exercise my creativity, where I could arrange the furniture to taste, so to speak.  I already had enough of Christians pushing into me in everyday life¹; why did they follow me into my hobby?

These days I wouldn't react as strongly, mostly because I can look at it and say, "Yeah, not in my game" and move on.  But even that's not the point.

The point is that I simply cannot fathom why it needs to be worried about in the first place.  What does one have to do with the other?  Gaming, as an activity, is that -- an activity.  It's like paddling  a canoe or drawing a picture or doing something else that brings you joy.  It's not life-or-death, damnation-or-salvation (it may be fun-or-boredom, though).  Why does a snail have to get fitted for a racing helmet?

Maybe I just don't understand the religious mind.  I get that some religious folks (and I'm not singling out FrDave here, 'cause I don't roll that way; if I had beef with him, which I most unquestionably do not,  I'd take it to him personally, privately and in the spirit of convivial discussion) have to check everything they do against their religious beliefs.  "Is it OK for me, as a Jew/Christian/Muslim/Zoroastrian/Etc., to undertake action x?", where x may be reading a given book, eating a given food, going to a given place or what-have-you.

But I do not get WHY.  And I especially don't get why gaming has to go before the review board. 

Look -- I understand that the "Satanic Panic" was a very real thing, and that some people really believed that D&D and other RPGs were somehow evil, or gateways to devil-worship, or whatever type of woo.  I saw a bit of it first-hand.  Once, in high school, a very pretty girl who was actually talking to me on a regular basis and who had me crushing on her totally torpedoed the whole thing by warning me not to play D&D because, in her words, if I cast a spell in the game then my spirit was actually casting the spell and thus defying God.  I...still don't get that. 

On another occasion, when a Christian schoolmate was attempting to make a point about D&D's evils, I invited him to examine my 2nd Ed. PHB. He was welcome to show me what he thought was evil about it.  He shrank back away from the book, as though I were holding up a dead rat.  I asked him, "What's the matter?"

His reply:  "I don't want to touch it."

"Why?"

"Because I'm afraid I'd get involved with it."

Man...I knew where my fantasy life ended, but these guys...?  

So, yeah, it was a thing.  I guess it still is.  But I suppose that, because I am an atheist (which, incidentally, is how I was born, in much the same way as I was born a human male), this stuff will never make sense to me.

It's a game; you play it.  It's a hobby; you indulge your fancy through it.  It's an interest; you read about it.  You can say the same for chess, for scrapbooking, for the history of the American Civil War.  Does Christianity have to be compatible with those, too?

I...man. It just-- huh?!

Seriously. I am bamboozled.

---

1 I will listen to opposite points of view up until it's clear that the speaker or content is a) full of baloney; or b) being pushy. When I get an earful of both, I get cranky.^↩

The Wizard is Undeterred!

You saw this, right?

NO?!


SEE IT NOW!

This Is What A 1-Mile Hex Has In It

...whew.

Over at The Hydra's Grotto, Steamtunnel (dude who writes the blog) asked, "How Much Adventure In One 6 Mile Hex?"  He remarks upon how large a 6-mile hex really is, and wondered about the utility of a 1-mile hex for purposes of sandboxery.  I subsequently commented upon how mind-bogglingly bad bad bad bad BAD I am at judging distances.

So.

After a few hours (I think) of GIMP, Inkscape, Google Maps and learning some basic math (!), I can show you this image:

Click for 5.24MB of way too much time on my hands.

This is a 1-mile hex (from side to side) drawn around my house.


You don/t have to live in this area to see what all is there, but I'll clue you up:  There's part of a marina, a load of condos,  couple ponds, a goodly chunk of a 10,750 acre lake (biggest in the state, as it turns out), some tennis c- no, a lot of tennis courts, bunches a'trees and some undeveloped land.

Just outside of that hex are an elementary school, a house secluded amongst trees and more lake.

So.

How much adventure can you fit inside of a one-mile hex?  Well...assuming that your PCs are tennis aficionados, I'd say "plenty".

So I Hear There's An Arthurian RPG

I never really felt any heat for Pendragon.  It's not that I disparaged it, or had a low opinion of it -- I just didn't, you know, want some.  Just like sometimes you feel like a nut, sometimes you don't.

I just finished reading Lyonesse, and have Madouc and The Green Pearl coming on the Bookmobile tomorrow.  So my Pendragon temperature is changing.

I don't have the game, but I have BRP and I have GKP's The Book Of Knights.  So I can probably get into some Pendragon-y trouble if so I desire.  Plus, nothing stops me from running some C&C in an Elder Isles-inspired setting, upon which I have already decided.

Hmmm...




...hmm.

Thinkin' Trekkie Thoughts: Who Plays the Captain?

If you didn't know that Fenway5 aka C. R. Brandon, author of Rogue Space and other games, has released the beta of Far Trek, then you should know that Fenway5 aka C. R. Brandon, author of Rogue Space and other games, has released the beta of Far Trek.

I'm reading it right now 'cause I finished Lyonesse (which was THE BUSINESS by the way), and I'm pretty happy with it.  I was thinking related thoughts as I took my coffee mug to the sink just now and had this idea (which may not be knew and in fact may have been published before, but it's on my mind at the moment):


Q: Who gets to play the Captain?
A: Everybody.

'Fact, the Captain is not only played by everyone but CREATED by everyone, together.  All the players collaborate on creating the Captain's personality and so on.  That way everyone has a handle on him or her, which is good because of this next paragraph.

During play, control of the Captain, and all the decisions that he or she makes, is shared by the players.  It can either be communal, such that whoever wants to be the Captain can do so at any time, or it can be by turns.  Everyone gets to speak for their Commanding Officer, and so on.

Okay, back to reading.

This Was Fun To Make!

I dunno what it'll ever get used for (probably nothing, 'cause I'm so @#*&% lazy), but it looks cool, huh?

Yeah, I ripped off exactly what you think I ripped off.

Double-You. Oh. Arr, Dee. Up.

You need this today.  You need it.

See?

I told you.

I'm Reading Lyonesse and --

It's all, like -- DAAAAAAMN...!

-- it is BAD.  ASS.

Not in a...you know, like a Leon/The Professional kind of way, or in a "The Golden Age of Wireless" kind of way.  No, no.  The best way I can parse it out it is thus:

It's bad-ass in a "Bob Ross Totally Schools That Canvas With Some Phthalo Blue" kind of way.

Look -- the plot is dense, but so engaging as to be astonishingly navigable.  The characters are interesting and compelling.  The setting is misted with a sense of history, permeated with substance and depth.  And even though (or perhaps, because) there's no real action in the, you know, KA-BOOOOSH! sense of kinetic action, the plot unravels with a genuinely seductive pace.

It's all in the pacing.

The plot develops at a pace that seems slow...until you realize that you've been reading non-stop, and watching the world and its people and its details and its travails and its history and its everything being peeeeeeeeeeled open and revealed to you in --

-- Bob Ross.  All mellow, he'd take his trowel and kinda drag it over the canvas, and BAMMO HAPPY LITTLE TREES?

Just.

Like.

That.

I just want to keep reading so I can find out what happens next.  In fact, why the hell am I sitting here typing this when I could be reading the next cha--

Dr Rotwang! Presents THE FINAL WORD ON HOW TO BE A BETTERER GM GOT-DANGIT

Take off your pants and run in the opposite direction, 'cause that way lies madness.

One Cool Thing From The 1990s

Look, don't get me wrong -- I like FATE 3.0 juuuuuust fine.  It's a great use of FUDGE, and some might say an improvement upon its progenitor.

I will not argue, because I agree, really.

But still...

FUDGE, in its most basic form (like it was when I downloaded it from ftp.soda.berkeley.edu on that late Spring afternoon in 1994, on a NeXT computer at the IU Student Union) is --

-- look.  There's something to be said about a game that gives you a fully-playable character with no more effort and paperwork than this:

Name:		Sequinus Bwappfelshire
Occupation:		Wizard	FATE POINTS:		5
SKILLS
Conjuring		Good				+1
Knowledge (Planes)		Good				+1
Abjuration		Fair				0
Research		Fair				0
Tailoring		Fair				0
GIFTS & FAULTS
+	Wizardry			Can cast spells
+	Amulet of Planes-walking			User can cross planar thresholds 2 times per day
-	Perfectionist			Has a hard time accepting when a task is done, and keeps fiddling with it; Good (+1) or better Willpower roll to move on

Honest, man, it took me longer to figure out how to make OpenOffice Writer do the cool split-cells thing than it did for me to write this character up.

He's ready to get into trouble now -- thanks to FUDGE!

What Does A 0-Point GURPS Character Look Like?

In all the time that I played GURPS, which I did with considerable intensity, I never once wondered what a 0-point character would look like.  (And if I ever did, I must not have spent a long time wondering.)

Tonight, I was looking through GURPS IOU and came upon the section that discusses appropriate point levels for characters in that milieu.  Local Citizenry, the book states, would rate 0-100 points.  I began to wonder...then, I popped open GURPS Character Builder and started, uh, buildin'.

So!  Meet Jerry Raymond:

Jerry Raymond
(0 Points)
Age 22; 5'8", 145 lbs; Dude's so average-looking, he may as well be invisible.

ST: 9 [-10]	IQ: 11 [10]	Speed: 5.00
DX: 10 [0]	HT: 10 [0]	Move: 5
Dodge: 5

Advantages

Charisma +2 [10] (Reaction: +2); Common Sense [10]; Voice [10] (Reaction: +2).

Disadvantages

Chummy [-5]; Struggling [-10] (Starting Wealth: $7,500); Duty (Minimum Wage Job at a grocery store) (9 or less) [-5]; Weirdness Magnet [-15].

Quirks

Never wears turtlenecks; Chess player; Quiet; Likes redheads; Sleepy Drinker. [-5]

Skills

Musical Instrument (Keyboard)-10 [2]; Carousing-9 [1]; Driving/TL7-10 [2]; Detect Lies-10 [2]; Chess-11 [1]; Writing-11 [2].

Description

Jerry's an average guy. He likes sports, he's kind of quiet, he's a bit of an artist and likes to hang out with his friends.

But the talking broccoli in his fridge, the time that a Martian princess rear-ended him at the grocery store, and the regular wrong-number calls from Steven Hawking and Eleanor Roosevelt's ghost? THOSE things are obviously NOT normal, and they WEREN'T his idea, and he kinda wishes they wouldn't happen.

But they do.

So...he deals with it...just like everyone else.

So I guess he lives in whatever town IOU is in, and maybe his life and the University intersect a lot.

Hmmm.

How D&D Sounds To Me

kuh-ZAPP!  WHOA!  It's 1989.  Summer.  Hot.  You're Young Doc Rotwang!, aged not-yet-fifteen.  Girls don't seem to like you, and you don't expect that to change, ever.  You've been a gamer for a year but you've not yet played D&D.

On your way to spend the Summer with your Dad in Kansas City, your old family friend Jason Gucinski gives you his own old copy of the D&D Red Box.  Yours, now.

This is it.  You've been in the room a while but you came in from the side.  Now, you have THE KEY THAT OPENS THE FRONT DOOR.

It's Summer 1989!  You're 14!  You got D&D!  WHAT ARE YOU LISTENING TO?  HEAVY METAL, LIKE ALL THE OTHER D&D GUYS, RIGHT?!

Phasic Knights of the Blade and Blaster

Our motto: "To Have Adventures!"

...because it was time.

"Halfling Stew" After-Dinner Mint

Renault, Smartest and Wisest Halfling, got a knife which (functioned as a crappy shortsword), killed a bug, fell in 3" of water, put out a fire at the worst time possible, and then got eaten 'cause I had to take a shower and go to work.

Next time I do some Google Hangouts gaming, I'm hooking up my camcorder to function as a web cam.  That was some stuff, I tell ya.

This Is My Character for Jeff's "Halfling Stew" Game

Hohn-hohn-HO! Bon Temps, mes amis! Jay-Sweeze Mee-sewer Renault Poisson-Fromage le Coq-Petit, from Cul d'un Chien! I like, eh, how-you-say, to be smart-air than you -- non? Wee-wee!

I have l'strongth du 8, l'dex-stair-ee-tee du twell-ve (12), Cohn-stee-too-shown l'9, Intelli-SHAWNCE l'15, oh-hohn-hohn! Et Widdome du 16, et l' char-EEESM-uh d'8! Obviously.

Ah have-uh les deux hit p-waaaints. Aaaaaaaaand everyone hates me already.

 

How I Spent My Saturday Afternoon

With a hex grid, a copy of TSR's World Builder's Guidebook, a portable drawing board, Troll Lord Games' Book of Extraordinary Names, a set of Prismacolor pens, an Ames lettering guide, a T-square, some dice, a drafting triangle, pencils and some masking tape.  Oh, and five hours.

All of which I used to make this:

Of course I'm not satisfied with it!!

Respite via Microscope

To you, O brethren and cistern, who came to me with words of commiseration and hope in my day of pain -- thank you one and all, you princes and princessesses of the blogomosphere.  You guys rock.

So last Tuesday (last week) my buddy Art brought over Microscope again, along with his 7-year-old daughter.  We unleashed his kid and my kid unto the wilderlands of her bedroom; while those two played, Art, my wife, Art's buddy Russel and I set about an exercise I've long yearned to do:

Re-writing the Star Wars prequel-era history, and cleaning up George's mess.

So how'd we do?  You tell me.  I tried typing up a summary but screw that, here are the notes.

Click for jaw-dropping abreaction.

 Man, this was some fun.  It was cathartic in a variety of ways -- it gave me the gamer interaction that I craved, it let me mix it up creatively, and I got to slap the prequels right in their ugly mouth and say, "THIS is how you do it, ya dumb bastards!"

...

...

...aaaaahh.  MORE GAME!!!!!!!!

Rotwang! Is An Angry, Embittered Man (WARNING: INCLUDES PATHOS)

Yesterday while washing dishes, I listened to an episode of The D6 Generation Podcast (which is not about the D6 System, as it turns out).  It was interesting enough, and kind of informative too.

Mostly, I found it depressing.

It's not because of anything that's wrong about the podcast itself, but rather because of what I heard in it -- and the questions it made me ask myself.

I heard these guys talking about all the games they've been playing --tabletop RPGs, minis games, board games...talkin' about the minis they're painting, the games going on at their FLGS, the cons they've been to or are going to, the terrain they're building...

...and first, I thought:   Where do they find the time?  Don't they have jobs, families?  Of COURSE they have jobs and families.  So where do they find the time?!

That was not what bugged me.  What bugged me was the very next thought that followed it:


Why don't I have that?!  Why can't I have that luxury? 

Yes, a luxury. To me, such a thing is a luxury.  I don't have a fancy car; I don't care.  I don't have a huge paycheck every week; I'd like it if it were bigger, so I could pay off some bills and have some walking-around money, but I'm doing OK.  I don't have a yacht, a mistress, a race horse,  a big HDTV, a...freaking...I dunno, a solid gold burro.  I don't want those things.  Those aren't things that would make me happy (not even the mistress OR the burro).  I actually want very little in life -- I'm remarkably easy to keep happy, and at that, with very few and comparatively small things.

I can't find the time or opportunity for gaming.  Oh, I have some friends coming over on Tuesday to play Microscope, but that's a rarity.  It's hard to get my friends together for gaming, what with people's schedules and such.  I'm about 15 minutes away from the games store, but I don't feel comfortable there -- and gas is expensive.  I live in a fairly populous area; I'm not in the middle of nowhere, in fact I live in a golf resort/condominium kind of place, with about 33,600 people living in it -- but I'll be damned if I have any way of finding any gamers in the place.  Life is commute, work, commute, come home.  

If I get to game for more than a few hours every two months or so, it's a bonanza.

I try to vent this stuff by making it kinda funny, like this.  But the truth is that it's seriously dragging down my quality of life.

Is this adulthood?  Really?

I Got A New Scanner Today.

Actually it's a printer/scanner/copier.  I installed it and started checking it out -- you know, how do ya load paper for printing a double-sided character sheet, like that.

Then, of course, I had to check its scanner interface, so I grabbed something to scan.  Dig it:

They're eating her shirt.

I don't think I've ever read this comic.  I'm not even sure how I got it!  Anyway, there ya go.  Bit o' history.

Dungeon as Diagram

Hats off to Flynn, who wrote this and got me thinking about doing stuff like this:

CLICK FOR BIG

Have fun!