Tom's Corner

Various

2009-12-08T15:21:22Z

As one left wing journo once said, the most irritating thing about the Daily Mail after it's rabid right wing nonsense, is that it is a very well made newspaper. Ah well, I read the money and health sections on the flight over and they were very good. I then read Newsweek which also has surprised me over the last year by being quite urbane and liberal and readable. I am now in Vilnius in Lithuania and my luggage is still in Germany.. ah well..

Oh, and the Queen looked very smart and pretty glam at the Royal Variety Performance, which I was pleased to see was in Blackpool. It's time that Blackpool reinvented itself. Not so worried about the Queen.

Very pleased to see that Dom has posted his 'vox pop' of Furnace 2009, some great short face clips from all sorts of people. Love the last one, my dear friend Simon.. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXbcK_N1Lyw

Time for a snooze..

OpenQuest

2009-11-20T17:21:11Z

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.

tzunder @ 2009-10-23T08:48:00

2009-10-23T07:48:58Z

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

Worse, not better..

2009-09-13T17:01:55Z

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.

We all have curly tails now..

2009-09-05T10:47:08Z

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

Old skool D&D fan discovers RuneQuest

2009-08-29T15:11:16Z

I am most amused by one of the lead old skool D&D bloggers discovering RuneQuest and going WOW! http://bit.ly/THHq7

Makes me wonder how many people slogging along with D&D, any version, could so easily pick up a different system and go 'WOW', even people I assume have been around, know the options and have chosen D&D..

What am I running?

2009-08-24T17:58:48Z

What am I running?
Originally uploaded by tzunder.

So, what am I running on my PC?

How to make Opera font rendering not suck

2009-08-03T09:29:52Z

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

Restore GRUB

2009-07-30T17:27:56Z

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 :)

Selecting default word list in Ubuntu

2009-07-09T14:04:04Z

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

Gardening

2009-07-05T17:19:01Z

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..

mad tom

2009-07-02T11:54:01Z

mad tom
Originally uploaded by tzunder.

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..

tzunder @ 2009-06-29T13:49:00

2009-06-29T12:52:01Z

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..

Add PPA key to Ubuntu KeyRing

2009-05-15T12:44:07Z

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.

Hellfrost Adventure: N1 - Lair of the Vermin Lord

2009-04-20T15:28:01Z

With the snow already falling, the key to thwarting disaster is the village of Dunross, for here are stored the winter supplies of many surrounding villages. Fresh faced and eager, the heroes are hired by a local merchant to collect sacks of flour from Dunross and deliver them to a bakery.

But things are never that simple.

I ran this Savage Worlds adventure about 66% on Sunday with Matt, Alaa, Louis and Declan. We spent a LONG time on character gen so i am going to have to estimate, but I'd say there are about 8 hours of gameplay in the adventure with middling roleplaying and midding adventuring. It's a classically laid out and developed adventure, with the story and plot first and foremost and the setting second. It is NOT the curiously fashionable [i]old school retro[/i] minimalist 'map and some stats'. This is a pleasantly told tale of food, famine and conspiracy in the somewhat Anglo-Saxon lands of Rassilon. The adventure reminded me of a WFRP setup, but that's partly due to the rats, WFRP always seems to have cornered the market in rat based plots!

The adventure is designed for 4 Novice characters and the lads (with their finely tuned minimaxing skills) have trounced all opposition easily so far. With a group of [i]novice[/i] players as well as [i]Novice[/i] PCs then I'd say it is not going to lead to too many player fatalities. The opportunities for interactive roleplaying abound, much can be made of it by players who like to chat and investigate, bit the plot is not overly complex.. no-one is going to be befuddled by this tale.

That all sounds a tad pedestrian, but that would be the wrong impression. I'd say the adventure is a well crafted starter adventure that conveys the themes of the setting well and both allows and encourages new characters and players to stretch their legs.

Plus we really enjoyed playing it.

tripleacegames.com/store/index.php

Life, Liberty and Gaming

2009-04-11T12:28:30Z

We're having a busy and yet good bank holiday weekend. We are doing a lot of clearance work getting ready for resanding the wooden floor downstairs, decorating the study and having new office furniture built. I am also clearing the garage and moving my work PC and stuff into a temporary home in the dining room. Somewhere in the weekend I have about a metre high pile of roleplaying books and stuff to put on ebay. Lot's of Glorantha and the like, which should raise money to buy a new, slightly smaller pile of new rpgs and books!

I played MagBlast and Drakon with Alaa, Louis and Matt the other night. MagBlast is a card game of screaming space battles, you have to provide sound effects when launching an attack or the attack fails, and it seems a great beer and pretzels game. Drakon has a very cute premise, which is that you the players are adventurers captured by a dragon in her lair. She decides to have some fun and says the first to collect 5 gold coins can leave alive, the rest will be eaten.. It's a very simple tile laying game, and at first it seems overly simplistic until you start to appreciate the tactics of how the tiles, which have limited placement, exit and laying rules, can produce quite intriguing looping effects. Then you start to see how you can thwart your fellow players as you rotate tiles, destroy tiles or replace them. Perhaps the lesser of the 2 games and not as rewarding as Cave Troll which is also a Fantasy Flight Games production, but also a short fast beer and pretezels game. I must dig out Citadels for the next ad hoc session. I have not had time to open Wizard Kings yet, but I am hoping for some block game fun with it.

I'm thinking over the Chinese TomCon on May 9-10th? There'll be two game, one will be Newt's Monkey game and the other Qin run by Graham. I am torn between the 2. There will be a full day of jollity on the 9th ending in watching Warlords and Monkey Magic. [Looking for Chinese boardgame/wargame for the daytime.]

I enoyed Dom's Singularities game, which was good and IMHO a much better version of new transhuman/britSF/Culture SF than Sufficiently Advanced. On Monday I run Machine Tractor Station Kharkov-37 for Matt and his friends. I am sure Alaa and Ben will rise to the challenge, but it'll be interesting to see if they can cope with what is a very typically Lovecraftian adventure. [I'll not spoil it since you may yet play it one day, it's a CoC monograph.]

Anyway, back to cables, printers, monitors and a copy of the new Savage Worlds setting: HellFrost which is winking at me from the corner of the room, just waiting to suck my time away..

BSG Finale

2009-03-31T10:37:27Z

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.

Campaigns for Roleplaying

2009-03-16T19:14:01Z

Image via Wikipedia

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..

Casual Gaming

2009-03-10T14:33:00Z

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?

Gaming Plan 2009

2009-02-04T15:30:50Z

Image via Wikipedia

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:

with cults like RQ3;
with simple Elric! level rules;
3 2-3 sessions, not necessarily with the same players.

Run Vikings using either Savage or Wordplay;

use RQ Vikings as source;
use Beowulf (various versions);
Create a short (3-4 page) players pack for playing Vikings (non system specific),

Culture,

Mythology,
Gazeteer,
Scan and collect lots of images and flavour;
Collect suitable music;
Write a 3 session arc, 1 of which is suitable for a con game, not necessarily the same players.

Renuwal Survival Horror using AFMBE:

3 part Trilogy of single games,
underground lab,
escape from the town,
post zombie apocalypse;
Strongly influenced by Resident Evil but with some twists;
Collect music and images;
Use the AFMBE pregen characters from sourcebooks,
Age the characters from game to game,
Not necessarily the same players;
Suited to cons.

Noir - Mean Streets - A Dirty World:

Prepare to run noir style games as one offs using the scenarios in Mean Streets book;
Consider using 'A Dirty World' or GUMSHOE, but probably stay with genrediversion from MS book;
Lots of photos, images, maybe some music;
Suited to cons.

Deadlands one off:

Mix up Deadlands and Coyote Trail and GURPS Wild West sources;
Use the Coffin sourcebook;
Be able and ready to run at short notice.

B5 Traveller:

Probably not going to happen in 2009, but read, prepare, evaluate.

Battlestar Galactica rpg:

Probably also not going to happen in 2009 but read, prepare, evaluate.

Talislanta:

Probably not going to happen in 2009, retire to shelves and allow to ferment.

Freeport:

Not going to happen in 2009, read if time and life allows.

Gwenthia:

Not going to happen in 2009. Need to resolve system and just how well I can get on with MRQ. Need to play some more MRQ.

Let's see how it goes

Life, games, loss and new gamers

2009-01-26T21:28:46Z

Image via Wikipedia

I am in Newcastle for 2 days of lecturing, which frankly seems to take up far more time and energy than it is worth, but I agreed to do it so I had better. On the way to the Uni I popped into Travelling Man and Forbidden Planet and picked up the "Battlestar Galactica" rpg quick start rules, the "Coyote Trail" Western rpg and another copy of the "Pirates Guide to Freeport" all for a song. The latter one I shall pop on to Amazon Marketplace to make a few quid from, the rest I shall enjoy. Interestingly the Western rpg is from Precis Intermedia and is one of ther simple "genre driversion" games. I have just finished reading "A Dirty World" a Noir rpg from Greg Stolze, using the One Roll Engine. It's a fascinating game system, interstingly implemented to bring out the themes of the genre. However before Xmas I ran "Mean Streets", a genre diversion Noir game, a very simple old skool rpg. Having read both I have this feeling that if I ran a Noir game with ADW we'd spend all our time being dazzled by the system, it's cleverness and 'modern riffs on themes' and we'd forget to play a good roleplaying game set in the genre.. Now I could be wrong, but a lot of new games put the system right up front and I have started to wonder if that actually might impede the roleplaying, rather than enhance it..

Blogging Online

2009-01-13T12:16:30Z

I have always blogged offline when I could, using a client and editing and uploading or in the case of my work blogger accounts (http://freightandlogisticsnews.blogspot.com/) using email to directly feed multiple blogs and sites for dissemination.

Recently I have become far more aware of how ephemeral my computers are. Even with stable operating systems and software that I enjoy using, my tendency to tinker means that my home PCs are an ever evolving and changing series of platforms. Eventually I screw up, and when that happens life is so much safer when data is either on my new Buffalo NAS fileserver or, in the case of less important data such as bookmarks or blogs, online. Thus this.. my dalliance with online blogging using Firefox add-ons to try and support and improve the richness of my blogs.

Gaming Plans 2009

2009-01-12T15:15:39Z

I have managed to review my gaming in 2008, which was quite successful given how often I travel and how ill I was in the early half of the year. Planning for 2009 is quite difficult.

Part of the problem is that we have had regular monthly TomCons at ours once a month and my friends and I have sampled a wide range of roleplaying games and a smaller set of boardgames. We had the first TomCon of 2009 this weekend past and had a great game of Britannia followed by a fun game of Serenity rpg, spoiled only by my being in rather a silly mood. The weekends are great, they fulfill all the key needs, meeting good friends, eating, some drinking, playing games you've never tried and running some of the rpgs we all have on our shelves and which we look at with guilt everytime we walk past them..

I am very happy with TomCons.

But I also need to run something over a slightly longer period of time. Now I am not unaware that my work life (40% away from home) means that I am very unreliable for ongoing weekly games, but it has been possible before to start a series of games (usually with my son and his friends or my mate Martin) and stagger through 5-6 sessions without too many interruptions. Indeed I ran D&D like that for over 2 years when I first moved back to Sheffield. About 50% of Tuesdays I am at Martin's and we are currently playing our way through a Pathfinder/D&D game. Only problem is that we never seem to get more than 2 players and ref on Tuesdays and that's almost too close to zero sometimes. My son and his friends are too busy playing World of Warcraft to play trad rpgs these days, altho' maybe I could drag them together for a one-off sometime.

There are cons. Due to my issues with Gwenthia, or possibly a broader rush of anxiety, I haven't run any scenarios at cons for some years. I got in a real tizzy about it all, which is very odd and quite embarassing. I have some confidence that I may have faced that bugbear and won, providing I use published material and stay away from commitments with or to others, but simply turn up, post up and play. We'll see.. I shall certainly do 2 cons this year, probably Conpulsion (but watch how work stacks up), Furnace (better turn up to that one) and maybe 1-2 others. That means that quietly and without too much fuss I could run 2-4 games at cons.

I could play/run at our local hobby shop: Patriot Games on Monday nights. Now this is a seemingly sensible idea. There is a shop, it is full of roleplayers, the games are often over subscribed. But oddly getting players is difficult. I sat with 2 players running Savage Worlds 50fathoms for some weeks next to a d20 game that was massively overfull, and yet despite a nice poster and making it clear (I think) that we'd happily take onboard 2 more players, we never got another one. Perhaps a game of something mainstream might attract more players, or perhaps I need to ask the owner to use his pull and drag in some players to make a full group? I'd be happy with a five week run if I could pull it off.

So, where does that leave me?

Well. It says that I have about 5-6 one-offs that I can run this year. That's good fine gaming as long as I have cured the con jinx, but even if not I can probably do 3. It says that as long as I am ok with 2 players I can run maybe 8 sessions on a Tuesday in a spread over 4 months.. and that can be almost any kind of gaming, as long as it's not Middle Earth (unless they play uruk-hai hunting hobbits). It says that if I get my local shop owner to help I could do a 5-6 week run on Mondays at the shop.

You know, that's not at all bad. I think I can move forward and plan.. 3-6 one-offs and 2 5-6 week story arcs..

Games Games Games: 2008 Retrospective

2008-12-29T19:14:14Z

So time has come to try and write a plan for gaming in 2009 which I can then fail to achieve, but which is fun in a kind of speculative daydreaming way. To do that I need to first mull over 2008 and see where I am coming from before I know where I am going to..

I tried in 2008 to focus on setting and not system, I am not so sure how well I succeeded.

In terms of purchases I tried to resist or at least go second hand. I bought quite a bit of Earthdawn second hand or very very cheap (when the USD-GBP rate was almost 2:1) since I loved the setting way back when but never ran it. I have sold a lot of Glorantha stuff and will continue to do so. I bought an AFMBE book, and I rather fell in love with the Paizo Pathfinder Chronicles and bought and read the first three even though they are D&D [I'd probably Savage them]. I avoided buying the new Basic Roleplaying book from Chaosium, which is fortunate since last week I saw a copy and realised that as a credited playtester I was entitled to a free copy.. it arrived today. I resisted the Battlestar Galactica rpg, but will succumb in 2009, I faced down the nostalgic pull of Dragon Warriors and despite resisting Trail of Cthulhu I did buy a few GUMSHOE games (same system) and enjoyed reading them. My ongoing love for the City of Freeport setting went wild as the setting went system free, but I haven't fully read or played there. My purchase of the Blue Rose rpg must be put down to gspearing geeing me up, although it's a very interesting setting.

Gwenthia, our shared world fantasy setting, has been getting me down all year. I can't keep up the leadership role and the creative tensions have driven me away from the setting and all d100 game systems. My angst about this drove me into a cycle that meant I couldn't face running any games at cons in 2007 or 2008, and as such I have done nothing with it all year.My

I ran Talislanta several times, which was a huge buzz for me since I've loved the setting for years, but somehow thought it was too big and weird for my friends. What nonense! It's like Glorantha or The Forgotten Realms; you take a small area and just game away like it was 1976 and the idea of a huge game world didn't exist yet.. I was delighted by how simple and smooth the system ran, and I think that all the games have been great successes, especially the one at a TomCon.

I don't think I ran anything else this year until December when I ran Mean Streets, a noir rpg set in 1943 New York. Very much a settings led choice, since the system is very light and the setting/adventures very generously provided in the cheap pdfs.

My rpg BBS, The Tavern, has pootled along ok this year with only one php insertion attack and one migration between servers which my friend Simon managed well. The migration threw everyone's cookies bonkers and I am still not sure everyone who wants auto login has it. We hosted the chat forum for the Continuum and Furnace cons, and people seem to enjoy hanging out there in a small cosy environment. I am grateful that when things get sticky Simon helps.

So, did I achieve much? Well for a year when I have been really quite unwell I have played a lot of great games, but not run many. So be it. I have greatly enjoyed playing Wordplay, lots of Savage Worlds, Traveller, Sufficiently Advanced, SCION, Atlantis, D&D 4e (!), Pathfinder Beta, SimpleQuest and many others so I think 2008 turned out to be the year of playing, and in fact it was great fun with great friends!

Next year.. or in a few days.. my 2009 plans!

.

Gaming Style

2008-12-08T15:58:13Z

You Scored as Method Actor

You think that gaming is a form of creative expression. You may view rules as, at best, a necessary evil, preferring sessions where the dice never come out of the bag. You enjoy situations that test or deepen your character's personality traits.

Method Actor

92%

Storyteller

83%

Butt-Kicker

50%

Specialist

50%

Tactician

33%

Power Gamer

25%

Casual Gamer