The wonderful thing about the Open Gaming Licence and other such open licenses is that it has allowed a plethora of retro, alternate and innovative games derived from Open Content and the core System Reference Documents, such as the 3.5 SRD, the RuneQuest SRD, the Traveller SRD and others. Up until now the RuneQuest SRD has generated the GORE game system, which looks to be rooted in gothic horror games, and now is joined by OpenQuest.

OpenQuest uses the classic D100 rules mechanic, which uses percentages to express the chance of success or failure. It is a complete and easy to play Fantasy Roleplaying game, with monsters, magic and exotic locales. Open Quest is based on the Mongoose RuneQuest SRD (MRQ SRD), with ideas from previous editions of Chaosium’s RuneQuest and Stormbringer 5th, mixed in with some common sense house rulings from the author’s twenty years of experience with the D100 system. Everything in the core OpenQuest rule book, except the illustrations by Simon Bray, is open gaming content under the Open Gaming Licence. This means that you can use all or part of the book to produce your own games, rules, adventures even for commercial release as long as you include the Open Gaming Licence included in the back of the book.

Why another d100 game when we have Mongoose publishing RuneQuest and Basic Roleplaying from Chaosium? The answer has to be that OpenQuest is both a modern lean game system and also a game that recreates the retro feel of the older versions of RuneQuest, specifically RuneQuest 1 and 2 from Chaosium. OpenQuest has cleaned the Mongoose SRD of not just many of the new systems that Mongoose added, but has gone further and removed many of the older BRP stalwarts. The skill list has been pared down and rather than the tendency in Mongoose books to add new skills, this takes a rules 'lighter' approach. The religions and magic hark back to the Chaosium RuneQuest days, so spirit magic, divine magic and sorcery behave far more in a RQ2 style, maybe a little more cinematically. Strike ranks, hit locations, hit points for weapons, are all gone leaving the first genuinely light d100 game. On the other hand some parts of the Mongoose additons to RQ are there. Hero points, which I am never totally sure about, are here; as is a view of experience rolls that frankly sits uneasy with me. I have never seen the 'tick chasing' that people talk of in the usual Chaosium d100 experience systems, and if it happens below my notice then it's never danaged the game. I shall go back to the RQ3 experience rules which are simple, clean and elegant.

OpenQuest was released for a few months as a wholly free pdf, an act of massive generosity by the publisher D101 games. Thousands of copies were downloaded before the full version reverted to a (very inexpensive) paid offering, and the print copy is very reasonably priced in line with other 'retro' games such as Labyrinth Lord or OSRIC. The OpenQuest Developers Kit is a free SRD from which others can build their own games, and the OpenQuest Companion wiki is growing with ideas and additions to the game. The exciting news is that a new 'Hyborian style' setting for OpenQuest: The Savage North will be with us soon, written by the talented John Ossoway. Othe developers are known to be working on 'powered by OpenQuest' games even now.

OpenQuest is not a pale imitation, it carves a distinctly simple and cinematic path between the complicated route that Mongoose takes and the encyclopaedic vagueness of the current BRP from Chaosium. However it still shares such a core with both that any previously published product from any other d100 game is easily utilised with OpenQuest and vice-versa if you wish. I shall port some of my favourite rules from RQ3 and Stormbringer back into OQ, and I could easily see a ref porting a lot of the rules from OQ into BRP or a Mongoose based game.

Too busy man.. too busy.. but not longer ill, hoorah!

I've been getting worse and not better for the last 4 days. I must have got a secondary chest infecton, as our friend did.

Very low, but it'll not beat me.

Ah well.. it was bound to happen and yet for me at the least convenient time. I got the 'swine flu' or the H1N1 virus which is a type of swine influenza mixed with some avian and human ancestry. I knew this was coming, and at first I kinda worried that this would be another 'Spanish flu' that killed 20-100 million worldwide 1918-19. But there is little point in worrying and I did think that the years of preparation for avian flu would have made the WHO and the major governments as best placed as possible to interdict it. Some people sadly died, but despite the alarmist headlines it started to look as though it might be quite mild in reality, unless you had underlying health issues. I watched a few programmes on BBC Four, started to understand the subject, realised the 'second wave' would be the testing outbreak and decided to not fret.

Well my son Matt and his friends Ben and Alaa and Louis and others all went to Leedfest this year, and from the accounts coming in it sounds like the 'second wave' has gone right through the festivalgoers. They've all got it. I saw Matt on Monday and Tuesday but still felt fine when I boarded the train to London to catch the Eurostar to Brussels for some very important meetings. I started to feel 'off' on that first train and I wish I'd had the gumption to turn back, but these are very important meetings that dictate if I have an income for years to come so I pressed on. On the Eurostar I started to have very 'viral' symptoms.. headache, hot breath, some limb ache.

By that night I was laid pretty low, fever, headache, aching limbs. My colleague Frank was going to the meeting on Thursday so after having spent a bad night I couldn't make the meeting, hoping to regroup for 'my' meeting Friday. I started to make plans, asking good colleagues from Banverket to chair if I was missing and using the lulls when I felt normal to ensure that all documentation was printed by our hosts at UNIFE. Another terrible delirious night. But I woke feeling a little better and decided to have a light breakfast (I had avoided food since Matt had consistently been unable to hold down food) and make the very short walk to the UNIFE offices. What a mistake.

I spent the meeting shaking, shivering, barely able to concentrate, and eventually went to the loo and upchucked everything that I had eaten. It was game over and rather than catching the train home which was my plan, I could do nothing but take a taxi to the hotel and book myself back in for what turned out to be the worst night of all. Eventually the fever broke at about 3am and today, Saturday, I am not well at all, but better than I was.

So.. how is the dreaded 'swine flu' of 2009 (and I bet 2010)? Well it's not mild, it's a full on bastard of an influenza that knocks you up pretty bad. It cripples your weak spots, which for me is usually headaches, for Matt it's his upset stomach, and I'd want to keep a very close eye on it if you had an underlying respiratory illness, like any flu. It may not be the killer it was headlined as, and even now we don't know that for sure, but you don't want it and when they have that vaccine I'd take it if it was offered (subject to your belief system regarding vaccines). In the UK you can also get access to anti-virals which I couldn't take since I was umpteen hundred miles away from them, but consider them too. Add it into the mix in the winter months with seasonal flu and it's gonna cause a lot of disruption, and everything the medical people can do to limit it will be well worthwhile. UK health advice is here. US health advice here. EU overview of all Member States here.

As for me.. I'm stuck in a hotel room in Brussels too ill to leave the room, not sure if I will be up to travelling tomorrow, and wishing I was home. My colleagues coped, I should have stayed at home, and my final advice is: "If you feel flu coming on.. go back to bed.. take paracetomol.. and hope it's not too bad."

But we do all have cute curly tails now..

Tom

So, what am I running on my PC?

Original Post



The problem has been that certain fonts used by certain websites show up looking somewhat pixelated or granular-looking, unlike the smooth fonts other browsers will display for the same text. See the top headlines in the screenshot below to see what the problem looks like.



The problem seems to be that core X fonts are enabled in Linux Opera by default, and the solution is as easy as disabling them through opera:config#UserPrefs|EnableCoreXFonts (the "Save" button is at the very bottom of the page). Restart Opera, and you're good to go.


Posted by Dynaflow

1. Pop in the Live CD, boot from it until you reach the desktop.
2. Open a terminal window or switch to a tty.
3. Type "grub"
4. Type "root (hd0,6)", or whatever your harddisk + boot partition numbers are (my /boot is at /dev/sda7, which translates to hd0,6 for grub).
5. Type "setup (hd0)", ot whatever your harddisk nr is.
6. Quit grub by typing "quit".
7. Reboot.

I may be missing your point though, if so, please forgive me :)

If you keep getting the wrong language for the dictionaries in OpenOffice and other Ubuntu/Debian apps then sun synaptic and install the correct dictionaries: search for 'myspell' and 'ispell'.
Then run the following as root:

sudo /usr/sbin/select-default-wordlist
sudo /usr/sbin/select-default-ispell

Just finished a long weekend's gardening which has been very enjoyable and productive. The Hozelock Aquapod system worked very well watering the greenhouse whilst we were away, admittedly some plants may be a little moister than they needed: tomatoes, and some drier: cucumbers, but overall it worked excellently. The hanging baskets should have probably gone to stay with a neighbour, but after a good trim by Ann and repeated soakings in water they look to be recovering. Most things are growing very well, at last my sweet peas are peering out from behind the lilies I mistakenly planted them behind. The marigolds (dwarf) are blooming in profusion, the petunias are starting to flower, the pansies are resplendent and just next to the house the first California poppies are making a show. The raspberries are beautifully ripe, the apple trees have fruit (which I have thinned a little) and my runner beans and climbing French beans are doing well. The balcony is full of deep red and yellow lilies and the aliums have finished flowering and have become artistic globes of drying seed heads.
In the greenhouse the tomatoes are growing well, maybe I little slower than last year, but flowering well, which is earlier than last, so that's good. I have a sea of green in the pepper department and the two cucumber plants are really going for it. On the raised beds I had a cornucopia of lettuce which I harvested and have shared amongst the neighbours (the cornucopia of cabbage was before the holiday) and I have today sown carrots, peas, lettuce, radish, cress and some basil. My red onions are huge and close to harvesting, so I'll pop some beetroot into their slot, and the new rows of cabbage are already looking deep green and close to being good to eat. The mesh net isn't that great at keeping cabbage white butterlies out but at least once they're in they never get out again.. I harvested 4 potato plants and we've had delicious new potatoes yesterday and today, and my courgettes, dwarf beans and sweetcorn look good. Obviously I mowed the lawn, and did a feed and weed. I could do some more weeding but I've done the veg beds and the worse weeds in the flower beds so that's all for now.
All in all, a great gardening weekend..

Hi, it's me in Spain being zany. Actually I am being quite chilled but this is the kind of face you make when you do that 'top down social networking avatar' self. This has been quite a relaxed if hot holiday, not doing much, reading and sitting by the pool.

Our son Mike has been in the news, well the military news, as the Harriers return from Afghanistan. Whatever you may think of foreign wars, and I support the intervention in Afghanistan whilst disagreeing with the Iraq war, raise a cheer for the servicemen fighting there: Harriers Return. (Mike is a nice newsworthy nugget, having served as an infantry officer and now a pilot, I hope the other pilots who've served far longer don't rib him too much.. I know Mike will be most embarassed to be singled out).

Back to far too much travel and too many meeting next week..

I am most taken with the Dover Thrift Editions which are incredibly cheap editions of vast range of classic books from the collection of Anarchist Writings by Kropotkin that I am reading now, via Joseph Conrad novels, to 19th century books on Architecture. Spend almost nothing and get a great read..

Wilderness Of Mirrors: John Wick.

Review: Wick quotes James Bond and jason Bourne, both solo agents that work improvisationally and off the cuff, and then details and builds a game based on planning and teamplay. In other words he says you're going to watch a Bond movie but when the title sequence ends you discover it's Mission Impossible.. Mind you, it's a cracking little rpg for team based, action filled, opposition overcoming fun. Also well suited to caper movies like Oceans 11. Mechanically elegant and simple, co-operative, playable in an evening, all about narrative control, everyone gets a go in the limelight. Cheap, short, best in pdf.

Other reviews: Uncle Bear; Tim Gray; Game for sale here: http://bit.ly/1gu4C2

I know many of you use Launchpad’s “Personal Package Archive” for updated and beta packages. I have about a half-dozen configured on my machine to give me the latest and greatest of my favorite applications. The one problem with a PPA though is that the packages can’t be verified when downloaded because you don’t have the GPG imported into your Apt Keyring. The following command is a template that you can use to import whatever PPA based keys you have warnings on:

sudo apt-key adv --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com --recv-keys

You can gather the in the output of:

sudo apt-get update

You should see the warnings, along with the key id at the bottom of the output.

For each GPG key that you get a warning on, run the command above, and you’ll stop seeing the warnings. You will have imported that team/project’s GPG key into your keyring, considering them trusted.

I was increasingly worried that BSG would end in some weak and feeble anti-climax but it still offered an enjoyable exercise in conflict, resolution, tragedy, religion and finally a loop back into our own human story. It never shied away from playing it hardball, and I was pleased that at the end the show went out on the same mix of it all.

I know that in our multiply layered world of media and entertainment that many of you may or may not have watched the end.. indeed some of you are probably still watching season 1 or 2 or 3, so I'll not say anymore.. but I was happy.

I have been listening to some podcasts about roleplaying games and in particular listened to the deisgners and writers of three relatively new games: Houses of the Blooded by John Wick, Hellas by Michael L. Fiegel and Jerry D. Grayson as well as A Song of Ice and Fire RPG by Robert J. Schwalb. All three sound utterly great games, and I'd love to play in all of them. Now, we're doing really well with the monthly gaming weekend at my place, and we are getting a lot of good value one-off games that way. But none of these games are one-offs. Hellas and Houses of the Blooded are generational games where you play lineages of characters, and A Song.. has all the PCs play as part of a noble House, and if characters die then another steps forward from the organisation. All of this sounds wonderful, and just the sort of game that one dreams of playing in when you first picked up a rpg at the age of 15 and then read your first epic fantasy series. How can I refit my awfully complicated and complex work life into a nice shape which has a linear slot where I can either play or run just such a long running campaign, and who is going to run it? BTW this does not in any way suggest I am tired of TomCons which are utterly wonderful and great.. just that man cannot live by fastfood alone..

I love computer games, always have since I first fell in love with an Apple ][e in my Mum's college and spent a whole day writing a very simple text based dungeon exploration game in BASIC. Ever since I saw Sonic on a Sega Megadrive in a branch of Tandy in Newark we have had at least one console in the house, and we've gone through handhelds from the Atari Lynx, Gameboy, Gameboy Advance and Nintendo DS. A Megadrive, Playstation, Dreamcast, Gamecube and Wii have all shared our TVs, and I am proud to say that my kids have all grown up game savvy and scarily adept with a joypad.. Which is odd.. 'cos I'm rubbish at computer games.

Hand and eye co-ordination is not my area of skill. My butterfly mind means that the only adventure game I have ever completed took me 18 months [Lord of the Rings: Third Age on the Cube]. I can also throw in a busy and active work and private life, family, friends and lots of other hobbies.. but basically I am a casual gamer. If it's simple, fun and I can get 10-30 minutes of fun from it before moving on then it's probably best for me. Now sometimes I can invest an hour or two in Battle for Wesnoth or Age of Empires on my Nintendo DS, but best for me is short sweet and easy.

Over the last week I have supplemented quite a high degree of productivity on work with some great new casual games (well new to me) and I'd like to show them with you. All three are available for Windows, Mac and Linux and are either open source or free or available as a demo.


Monsterz: Monsterz is a little arcade puzzle game, similar to the famous Bejeweled or Zookeeper.The goal of the game is to create rows of similar monsters, either horizontally or vertically. The only allowed move is the swap of two adjacent monsters, on the condition that it creates a row of three or more. When alignments are cleared, pieces fall from the top of the screen to fill the board again. Chain reactions earn you even more points. This game is mostly about luck, but it remains highly addictive. You have been warned.


GridWars: A wonderfully vector graphic pschedelic game which I believe is a clone of Geometry Wars (which I have on my DS), and reminds me so very much of Jeff Minter's epic vector based games. Essentially it's a modern Asteroids with endless waves of geometric shapes trying to blow your little ship to pieces, all played on a grid that warps and twists like a first year lecture on space-time. I can sit down to play this for 10 minutes and an hour goes by, so it score very highly on the 'one more time' factor.


World of Goo: You may well have heard of this. It's Worms meets Lemmings meets Goo. Relentlessly cute, not too hard but hard enough, it explains nothing and yet is amazingly simple to play and enjoy. Essentially, build matrices of goo balls to reach a pipe and save the remaining goo balls. Simple. Download the demo and then buy the full version. I must go and rescue some right now.. Also available on Nintendo Wiiware.

So that's my 3, what are yours?

Well it's taken a month but here is my draft gaming plan for 2009. Ambitious, probably unachievable, but a plan:

General

• Tidy up Omniverse.net adventure and spells.
• Sell WHFRP books.
• Sell TORG.
• Read Jorune.
• Read Earthdawn and evaluate for 2010 gaming.
• Read Gwenthia and re-evaluate and update Cromaigne changes in main pdf.
• Buy and play more Star Wars miniatures with Kieran.
• Write up Savage Showdown stats for my SF Near Future minatures and play some skirmish games
• Play Tannhauser boardgame.
• Play Stonehenge boardgame.
• Play World at War boardgame.

Games I want to play

• Play Qin
• Play a One Roll Engine game
• Play MRQ
• Play GUMSHOE
• Play StarBlazers
• Play Cold Crusade
• Play I-War
• Play HELLAS

Games I'd like to run

Run Pathfinder Chronicles using BRP:

Run Vikings using either Savage or Wordplay;
Renuwal Survival Horror using AFMBE:Noir - Mean Streets - A Dirty World:
Deadlands one off:
B5 Traveller:Battlestar Galactica rpg:Talislanta:Freeport:Gwenthia:
Let's see how it goes

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