We now have a Gamer+ chat room at Tenkar's Tavern on Discord. In fact there are two of them, a voice chat and a text chat. It works best if you're in both so you can talk and share pics and links at the same time.
Inspired Unreality is our twice a month chat event, 1st and 3rd Saturdays at 11:00 AM CT. 1st Saturday the topic is fantasy and science fiction. 3rd Saturday is open game chat or adventuring with Ari and Caper in Tobbins Shire.
We will have other events including Actual Play and Podcasting. But the chat room is always open. If you're working with someone on Gamer+, in chat or in comment threads, it's cool to take it to Tenkar's Tavern and actually talk about it.
Saturday March 11 at 11:00 AM Central join us for Inspired Unreality open game chat. The topic will be Fantasy and Science Fiction including some Science Fiction coming to life, AI Art.
Inspired Unreality is held on the 2nd and 4th Saturdays in the gamerplus chat rooms at Tenkar’s Tavern on Discord.
Saturday, February 25, join us for Inspired Unreality Open Game
Chat. Starting topic will be AI Art. Bring your own topic. All gaming is
on topic.
Inspired Unreality is held at 11:00 AM Central on the 2nd and 4th
Saturdays of the month in the gamerplus chat rooms at Tenkar’s Tavern on
Discord. For more info and a link go here.
You can’t really follow the controversy without some skin in the
game so I’ve been doing some AI Art generation while I continue to read
about issues. I even discussed AI music composition at my last lesson
and have more to cover next week.
The science fiction short story magazine Clarkesworld is now temporarily closed to submissions after a deluge of AI-generated stories.
ALT
(Neil Clarke’s blog post mentions that the February numbers are only for the first 20 days of the month, when they paused submissions.)
The problem, Clarke explains, is not that the AI-generated stories are as good as human-written ones. The problem is that lazy grifters think they are.
I’ve made another dungeon map for any ttrpg needs. I’m experimenting with the outer details Abit cause hatching is a pain. But I’m also unsure about this one tbh
Gamer+ News June 9, 2023 - Inspired Unreality - Fantasy and Science Fiction
Join us for Inspired Unreality open game chat on Saturday, June 10 at 11:00 AM Central. This week the topic is Fantasy and Science Fiction. We are planning on starting some actual play again on a Science Fiction game so that fits right in. If you're interested in playing online be sure to join us.
I'm reading the Legendborn series by Tracy Deonn. It's a coming of age story based on the Arthurain legends cleverly brought into modern time.
Come to Inspired Unreality to share what you've been reading/watching/playing. All fantasy and science fiction is on topic.
Inspired Unreality is held on the second and fourth Saturdays at 11:00 AM Central in the gamerplus chatroom at Tenkar's Tavern on discord. There's more info and a link here.
I am moving Gamer+ to a new server and installing a more modern software, Calckey. Calckey is federated so you will be able to share and read content across the Fediverse with people using Mastodon, Friendica, Peertube, etc.
The current Gamer+ site will remain available at archive.gamerplus.org so we won't lose any content. During the transition there will be occasional downtime with a plain text screen or even errors.
I will send another email when the new Gamer+ is ready.
For your public domain AI Art fix I've got Tavern Row for your next game.
We're moving to a new server and a new interface. All of the content here will be archived and available exactly like it is right now. After the transition all new content will be posted on the new interface.
There will be intermittent service during the transfer. I will try to keep it to a minimum.
No Inspired Unreality open game chat today. We had a great time last week discussing many things including restarting If You Play You Win actual play in the near future.
Today I'm playing with Bebop Beatniks at Beatles Park in Walnut Ridge. The show starts at noon and will be livestreamed on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/hairylarry
I'm really looking forward to this.
Gamer+ News May 20, 2023 - Inspired Unreality - Fantasy and Science Fiction
Join us for Inspired Unreality open game chat Saturday, May 20, at 11:00 AM Central. We will be discussing Fantasy and Science Fiction and we will also have actual play on the table with the return of If You Play You Win online gaming.
Inspired Unreality open game chat is held in Tenkar's Tavern on Discord. There's more info and a link here.
Three of my kids, two in-laws, and three grandkids, along with a few friends, have gone to St. Louis for Geekway. Family togetherness at a board game convention. Ain't that cool?
Next Saturday, May 27, my band, Bebop Beatniks, will be playing at Beatles Park in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. We start at noon and we will be livestreaming on Youtube.
Three of my kids, two in-laws, and three grandkids, along with a few friends, have gone to St. Louis for Geekway. Family togetherness at a board game convention.
We're moving to a new server and a new interface. All of the content here will be archived and available exactly like it is right now. After the transition all new content will be posted on the new interface.
There will be intermittent service during the transfer. I will try to keep it to a minimum.
No Inspired Unreality open game chat today. Because Eclectic Geekery is going to Geekway next weekend we have moved Chronicles Of Ember forward. So we will have Inspired Unreality - Fantasy and Science Fiction a week late.
It's an exercise in unusual narrative. All three books take some orientation.
Not a ton of exposition (I hate exposition) so like much great science fiction it's a learning curve. Add this to the unusual narrative techniques. You can feel lost. This does resolve.
I like Gideon The Ninth better than Harrow The Ninth but so far Nona The Ninth is the best. Which is the way it should be. I have all hopes of a good ending.
It's an amazing trilogy with one more, Alecto The Ninth, still to come.
A Cute Cthulhu - Made on NightCafe with the prompt, "The Thing of the idols, the green, sticky spawn of the stars, had awaked to claim his own" from "Call Of Cthulhu" by H.P. Lovecraft.
More recently, the Office reviewed a registration for a work containing human-authored elements combined with AI-generated images. In February 2023, the Office concluded that a graphic novel 9 comprised of human-authored text combined with images generated by the AI service Midjourney constituted a copyrightable work, but that the individual images themselves could not be protected by copyright.
--- from Copyright Registration Guidance: Works Containing Material Generated by Artificial Intelligence
We had a great chat on Inspired Unreality today. Thanks to Alan, Duca and Datum for joining Vivian and myself in a wide ranging discussion including game rules, AI Art, Intellectual Property, and firearms in RPGs.
Wow, seems like forever. After cancelling two weeks ago for a family Easter visit it seems like it's been a month. Wait ...
Inspired Unreality open game chat will be held Saturday, April 22, at 11:00 AM Central in the gamerplus chat rooms at Tenkar's Tavern on Discord. This week is bring your own topic. Opening topic AI Fantasy Art. Plus I have a few secrets to share from the Milyagon Confidiential Files. (Just a joke, FBI, you know, humor.)
All of my AI Fantasy Art on Gamer+ is public domain. Do what you want with it. Crop it. Edit it. Evolve it. Attribution not required but always appreciated.
I also have to include The Egg Of Coot (Deep DnD Lore).
Who knows what I'm talking about here? Carl and I did this AI Art project during our Easter visit two weeks ago. His kids also submitted some prompts. AI Art is great group entertainment.
We have been playing Chronicles Of Ember on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of the month at Eclectic Geekery. Alan, who wrote the system, is our DM! The game is going great. We're just about to freeze to death.
Artists have always struggled to protect their creative works from being copied by other artists or technology. But now that AI has begun infiltrating the art world, artists struggle even more. The question of whether or not AI can create art is still up for debate, but we do know that it can copy art pretty well.
I got a free download of the Dragonbane_Quickstart_Guide_v1.pdf at DriveThruRPG. Looks interesting. More similar to OSR than my own ruleset, Just Quest.
Since I started Gamer+ I have been running the Oxwall social network software. Unfortunately the most recent version of Oxwall was written in 2016 which in internet years means it's an antique.
Not only that it's not working well and I barely got some of the pages working at all after the new sql server update.
So ...
I am going to archive the existing Gamer+ site. All posts, photos, etc. will be available to read but there will be no new members or new posts on the Oxwall vesrion of Gamer+.
I am going to install a new Gamer+ social network site using the federated software, friendica. If you are already on mastodon, peertube, funkwhale, or other federated services you will be able to follow and share with Gamer+ users.
And/or you can start an account at the new Gamer+ and continue posting to Gamer+ just ike you have in the past.
Change is hard but change is good. And this sounds right to me. I'm looking forward to it.
Since I started Gamer+ I have been running the Oxwall social network software. Unfortunately the most recent version of Oxwall was written in 2016 whi...
All Gamer+ pages are back. I did some quick and dirty hacking on the codebase to make the pages work so I am not exactly sure what I broke. We shall see.
Our 200th Episode Celebration is live!
This episode Sean and I share a special piece of feedback, each share our top 25 games of all time, announce o...
Simply enter a prompt and let our tool do the rest. From logos and graphics to digital artwork and more, our tool can generate a wide range of images that are perfect for any project.
Saturday March 11 at 11:00 AM Central join us for Inspired Unreality open game chat. The topic will be Fantasy and Science Fiction including some Scie...
New generative AI systems like ChatGPT and Dall-E raise a host of novel questions for a legal system that always imagined people, rather than machines, as the creators of content.
... always imagined people, rather than machines, as the creators of content. The machines aren't making the content! People are running programs written by people.
The Message Rat was good company. Silas had not bothered to undo the Speeke, Rattus Rattus command, and so the talkative rat held forth on any topic that caught his imagination, which ranged from the problem with young rats today to the rat sausage scandal in the Guards' canteen that had upset the entire rat community, not to mention the Guards.
- from Septimus Heap, Book one: Magyk by Angie Sage.
Good to see your blog post. I don't play Diablo but I'm sure some Gamer+ gamers are more familiar with it than I am. Does MMOWTS have a meaning? Is it an acronym? Thank
U.S. Copyright Office Rules A.I. Art Can’t Be Copyrighted - March 24, 2022 - Jane Recker - "The U.S. Copyright Office (USCO) once again rejected a copyright request for an A.I.-generated work of art, the Verge’s Adi Robertson reported last month."
Also - "Other countries put less emphasis on the necessity of human authorship for protection. A judge in Australia ruled last year A.I.-created inventions can qualify for patent protection. And South Africa allowed Thaler to patent one of his products last year, noting that “the invention was autonomously generated by an artificial intelligence.” While Thaler owns the patent, the A.I. is listed as the inventor."
I think I'm safe in releasing my AI artwork into the public domain. I believe AI artwork is in the public domain. As the article referenced states "The risks associated with using models like DALL·E to generate art are still largely unknown as they have not been contested or substantially tested in any courts.".
Vivian and I did some story telling plus a little bit about the John Gwynne series I'm reading. Inspired Unreality! Has it's own causality. A virtual principality. With it's own duality.
What have you been reading? What have you been watching? What have you been playing? That's the topic for Inspired Unreality open game chat at 11:00 A...
"The birth of the ORC license was driven by OGL 1.1" - Paizo’s Jim Butler discusses ORC, OGL 1.1, and more
...
Q. On the topic of the ORC, what is Paizo's philosophy on open-source gaming, and what do you feel the strengths and weaknesses of the model are?
Jim Butler: There is a much lower barrier of entry for fans to become publishers. Intellectual property laws can be complicated, and the Open RPG Creative (ORC) license will allow fans to become publishers without worrying about whether a particular entry in a book is considered open content or not. Since each publisher in the license provides their own SRD, new publishers can use that material in their work to create something that’s greater than the original.
...
Jim Butler, president of Paizo, has been at the center of a major topic of discussion within the tabletop gaming community for the last two weeks. With Wizards of the Coast’s OGL 1.
I began playing RPGs back in 1977 when the Holmes Blue Box Basic came out. We played many other TSR RPGs that existed & new ones as they came out.
We also dabbled at least once in several other non-TSR RPGs.
I've played even more since 2014 when I attended cons regularly.
Since D&D was my first RPG, it sort of defined what an RPG was and hit harder than all the others. I was more of a science fiction fan back then, but still played more AD&D than any other RPG.
I still run and play older versions of D&D. However, I will run more non-WOTC games in the future.
I've invented the supernatural 20 spell that can only be used once between long rests. On an important roll you can instead cast your Supernatural 20 spell and automatically roll a nat 20.
It's also a meta spell in that the spell affects the game mechanics. So maybe it should be thought of as a perfect attack spell but I love the name Supernatural 20.
So when you cast the Supernatural 20 spell the attack affected automatically results in a perfect attack exactly as if the atteacker had rolled a nat 20.
Inspired Unreality open game chat will resume tomorrow, Saturday, January 28, at 11:00 AM Central. Inspired Unreality is held in the gamerplus chatroo...
Inspired Unreality open game chat will resume tomorrow, Saturday, January 28, at 11:00 AM Central. Inspired Unreality is held in the gamerplus chatrooms at Tenkar's Tavern on discord.
Thanks to Greg Hills on Mastodon. He says, "You can see the staircase winding up to Agia Triada (Holy Trinity) in the lower middle of the picture. ... There's a cable car for use by monks and officials. Pilgrims and tourists have to toil up the steps :)"
Solemn as a golem.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/botosynthetic/5837348219
by smokeghost
Golem (deactivated). Do not put parchment in the hole in his head, lest he come to life...
CC BY-NC
I like this idea. It's a great way to do a lot of work over a period of time. I imagine that it would keep the brain churning with new ideas all day long, not just when working on it.
Next year we return to cozy adventuring in Tobbins Shire, held on the internet and around a table at Eclectic Geekery. Also guest DMs running 2 hr one shots.
The last Inspired Unreality of the year is on Saturday, December 3, at 11:00 AM Central. We will be discussing Fantasy and Science Fiction. We've got ...
Readers are the best people because they see the world through many sets of eyes. They know both that their experiences are not unique and that no one sees the world in quite the same way as them.
We started with Milyagon, a rural village that used to be a military fort. I drew a map for the fort and the town. Wilken Woods is on the map and it became a magic forest across the river from Milyagon. Now through the woods and across another river and we're adventuring in Tobbins Shire. So definitely bottom up for our world building. And I just build as we play.
This page collects games released under an open license. Generally speaking, if something is available under an open license it is free for use and re-use as long as the terms of its license are respected, without any explicit contact or negotiation between original author and licensee. Requirements vary from offering no restriction whatsoever to requiring that you credit the authors or that you also allow others to use your own derivative work freely.
On Sunday I played in my granddaughter's 5e game at Eclectic Geekery. With six of us around the table it stayed entertaining. Mostly I tell Dad jokes and let the younger adventurers lead the party. Hat Tip to DM Lizard. She is SearchingForGryphons on Gamer+.
There's a tradition of doing Druid characters in northern European groves surrounded by bears and wolves, BUT CONSIDER:
> Shoreline druid who dances in sea-foam & spends time looking after barnacles
> Antisocial desert druid whose familiar is a golden mole and who buries themselves in sand during the day
> Pallid cave druid, pale and wide-eyed, surrounded by olms and swimming through narrow passageways
> Wetland druid who summons saw-sedge barriers on their enemies and has a bittern with a magically enhanced boom-noise
> Confused tundra druid with lemmings in every pocket who can't get over how people manage without hibernation
> Fast-running steppe druid who whistles to herds of Saiga antelope and helps lead them to water in bad years
> Portly Antarctic druid whose existence philosophy is Be A Penguin and who collects pretty rocks to give their friends
> Cloud forest treetop druid who grows a bromeliad on their shoulder & has a small cloud of hummingbirds around them
Join us for Inspired Unreality open game chat on Saturday, November 19, at 11:00 AM Central. All gaming is on topic and the opening topic will be Fant...
... all four cavaliers were gone, back into the River. Harrow found herself imagining them in her mind's eye:rising out of those turbid waters before the Saint of Duty with his spear and his sword, something looming behind him, bigger than the eye could comprehend. Bluer than death; unimaginable, advancing to greet the four dead swordsmen and the Lyctor.
She had not said goodbye. Harrow so rarely got to say goodbye.
Hi. How have you been? I've been adventuring in Tobbins Shire. Hope to get back to it early next year. Lately, I've been playing in my granddaughters 5e game.
"A Treasury of Verse for Little Children was compiled by Madalen Edgar, and published by Harrap in 1908. The illustrations and page layouts are close enough to the children’s books being produced at this time by Charles Robinson that I wonder whether the similarity was deliberate on Pogány’s part."
Bound into three exquisitely colored volumes, *Fungi* features hundreds of species, collected across 42 years by a female mycologist named M. F. Lewis.
Well ... Caper has a sketchbook. Full of mushrooms from the shire. Some of the sketches are annotated in an arcane language called English Script. Joi...
Inspired Unreality, now on a twice a month schedule, will be held at 11:00 AM Central, on Saturday, October 1. Since it's the first Saturday of the mo...
All right!!! Hope you are doing well. We've been through the grinder but I can see a distant light at the end of a long tunnel. Always good to hear from you.
Hello! I am in the middle of my annual re-listen of the Calendar of Tales (the September and October chapters of which remain two of my favorite short stories) and I was wondering if the original website still exists anywhere or if the audio recordings are all that remain? The original website url currently links to a "money management" website which seems ironically unfortunate. I loved the artwork and collaborative nature of the site and just wanted to see if it had been preserved. Thanks!
Neil replied:
No. It's sad. So much glorious art was made and posted. Some of it might remain in the Internet Archive though.
Well ... we missed last week. Our water heater broke and our daughter and son in law were here helping us put in a new one and by the time we were don...
Doug Butler works at Craighead Forest Park and he's a musician. When I went to Guerilla Livestream Craighead Forest Lake he talked to me about restart...
Saturday morning. Inspired Unreality. 11:00 Central. It's the first Saturday so our topic is fantasy and science fiction. Games, movies, books, televi...
Here Lies The Hatchet. Vivian said the words that inspired this meme. I found the public domain photo by Linnaea Mallette at publicdomainpictures.net. Megan created the engraved effect in GIMP. It was a family effort.
Here I am Guerilla Livestreaming Beatles Park in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas on the 4th of July.
https://youtu.be/q2n6n5y1y9M
I got my picture in the paper.
Then we enjoyed family game day at Eclectic Geekery.
It was a good 4th for us.
Episode 202 - Bits & Bobs - This & That
I'm starting a new intermittent series: "Bits & Bobs - This & That." The idea is a miscellaneous mish mash of call ins, ideas, and thoughts that haven't evolved enough for a full episode.
Vivian, Alan and I had a nice discussion at Inspired Unreality. Mostly gaming, for a change. Alan posted some of his spell books. Then we started discussing Dungeon magazine and Dragon magazine and we found this.
Dungeon Adventures, or simply Dungeon, was a magazine targeting consumers of role-playing games, particularly Dungeons & Dragons. It was first published by TSR, Inc. in 1986 as a bimonthly periodical. It went monthly in May 2003 and ceased print publication altogether in September 2007 with...
For some reason the see more link doesn't work above. Click on the timestamp in the lower right to go to the item's page. The see more link works there.
It came to me in a flash this morning. I will run Gamer+ on my home server. That way this instance can continue running until I have the new Gamer+ install stable. And this instance can remain up as a read only archive of everything posted. I will blog the project here.
Continuing in The Thirty-Six, based on Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations, today's situation is "vengeance of a crime" in which an "av...
Like Hamlet, "I must avenge my father's death." A ghost story with vengeance as a dramatic situation. Definitely medieval and it ends in a TPK as a dramatic resolution.
Continuing in the series I'm calling The Thirty-Six, based on Georges Polti's The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations (original version and a modernized ta...
Sometimes the DM has to send a rescuer to avert a TPK. This can seem like the hand of God tweaking the PC's nose. So, best if the rescuer fits into the narrative, somehow, and it's also best if the rescuer helps the party survive rather than single handedly waltz in and save the day.
Very nice. I enjoyed the read. Reminded me of Jack Vance. So Jack Vance will be our opening topic tonight on Inspired Unreality. We will be discussing fantasy and science fiction.
Vance won the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement in 1984.
The Dying Earth features one of the greatest fantasy antiheroes of all time, Cugel the Clever. The Dying Earth setting also hosts other stories full of other antiheroes.
The Lyonesse Trilogy, Suldrun's Garden, The Green Pearl, and Madouc. Madouc won the World Fantasy Award in 1990 and contains the most delightful fey adventure ever written.
"The Dungeons & Dragons role-playing game and associated literature used a magic system inspired in part by Jack Vance's Dying Earth series, notably the fact that magic users in the game forget spells they have learned immediately upon casting them, and must re-study them in order to cast them again. The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld are featured in the "Appendix E: Inspirational Reading" section of the 1st edition of the Dungeon Masters Guide and the 5th edition of the Player's Handbook."
"A Song of Ice and Fire by George R.R. Martin. In the series, Martin includes a minor character, "Lord Vance of Wayfarer's Rest". In further reference to Jack Vance, the character's daughters are named Liane, Rhialta, and Emphyria for Liane the Wayfarer, Rhialto the Marvellous, and Emphyrio, respectively."
Vance won Hugo Awards for "The Dragon Masters" and "The Last Castle". Both of these novels are science fiction in spite of their fantasy sounding titles and both feature the competent hero, a staple throughout Vance's work.
I read a lot of Fantasy and Science Fiction when I was young by a lot of authors from the Golden Age through New Wave. Reading as an adult with a lifetime of honing my skills appreciating literature Jack Vance holds up the best. I still read and reread Jack Vance on a regular basis.
And the tradition lives on.
After Tais Teng explored new Alastor worlds in Phaedra: Alastor 824, and Michael Shea followed Cugel the Clever into the demon realms of the Dying Earth with A Quest for Simbilis, we are pleased to announce that renowned genre author Matthew Hughes has penned a dashing adventure among the worlds of the Gaean Reach, which has been released as the third installment on our Paladins of Vance label.
Please add your Jack Vance thoughts in the comments and join us tonight on Inspired Unreality first Monday Fantasy and Science Fiction discussion where our opening topic will be Jack Vance.
This page has a free link to the pdf which is distributed freely. The booklet itself is fantastic not only as a guide to medieval demographics but also as an example of how to put together a fantasy supplement that is useful and entertaining.
Thanksgiving is in the past. I got to play in two D&D games with DM Carl and my grandkids playing. Friday and Saturday! In the same room! Around a table!
Carcassonne is a tile-laying game where you try to place limited meeples to control resources that are revealed as the tiles are laid out. You have to balance playing the long game (risking losing access to meeples) against the short game (getting sparse resources but keeping meeple flexibility).
I've only ever played the base game or used "The River" expansion. Both are good, though I actually think the river does a good job of keeping things localised.
I added our aggregated feed to the right column on the Main page. So when you post it hits Gamer+. If you have a gaming blog, vlog, channel, etc. with an RSS feed let me know and I'll add your feed.
I wrote this at Robert S. Conley's blog - I did play war games in the sixties but then it wasn't until the early nineties that I got into D&D. So that transition always fascinated me. Possibly war gaming led to fantasy war gaming which invited role playing which is the actual quantum shift between war gaming and D&D. Nobody was thinking about character motivation at Gettysburg but then in D&D it arrives as a full blown central feature because, of course, players are going to think about why their elf did this or their dwarf did that.
Thanks to Robert S. Conley for joining us tonight on Inspired Unreality. We got a quick tour of his very creative career and then launched right into some rollicking roll playing reminisces. I hope to chat with him again.
Inspired Unreality is held every Monday night at 9:00 Central in the gamerplus chat rooms at Tenkar's Tavern on Discord. Are you new to Tenkar's Tavern? We have an invitation for you here.
My wife played a Fantasy RPG game in the early 70s at Beebe, Arkansas. Carl and I found a fantasy rule set in a war gaming magazine printed for a convention in New England about that time and I thought that could have possibly been the rule set they used in Arkansas. Or ... maybe they used the fantasy appendix from this book. Is the fantasy appendix playable without the entire book? Just curious.
When I enrolled into college many decades ago I had never heard anything about roll playing games. It never occurred to me that it might be a thing. Well other than drama students working hard to play their rolls in front of an audience. I was amazed when I saw my first play there and I was impressed by how hard the students worked to make it as believable as they could.
It takes a lot of courage to play a character with completely different ideas and interests than you have. Imagine standing on the stage and arguing with another actor as to whether you're up to it. Our director overhearing us said there was no time to hunt up replacements and to make the best of it.
We had a good chat Monday night at Inspired Unreality with both Alan and Datum joining Vivian and myself. As happens with those two we drifted off of games and into philosophy.
Ari and Caper started work on Caper's song of reckless spending. It will be a story song featuring Wee Will and will have a singalong chorus that goes down the scale with the words, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold, gold. Then we were joined by Bruce Lombardo and the conversation wandered from painting miniatures to Bard's Tale, now back on Steam. We had a great time and thanks to Bruce for joining us.
Here is the crux of running a game in one quote. "The creativity of the referee comes by not forcing his players to follow a predetermined story, but to develop new and interesting consequences based on the players’ actions. Use the NPC’s motivations and personalities to decide which consequences are the most likely and pick the most interesting. " - Blackmarsh
I love the idea of Garage Con especially for the ventilation. I don't think a personal con like this has to be 12 hours. 8 - 10 hrs could work fine and lower the exhaustion factor.
No game tonight so I'm going to have to work on something. First backup/media/intraweb server. Second Setting Up A Twitch Studio series about technical creative endeavors.
We had a good chat last night about Science Fiction and Fantasy literature starting with a discussion about Science Fiction as a late nineteenth and twentieth century phenomenon where Fantasy literature encompasses all of literature going back to the earliest written words. Now they are often indistinguishable. Then we discussed the dystopian trend in Science Fiction. The Golden Age (thirties and forties) saw mostly optimistic science fiction stories but in the second half of the twentieth century starting with the New Wave through today there has been a darker trend with many dystopian and post apocalyptic stories. Then closing the chat we each discussed our first experiences in Science Fiction. Viv and I both started reading SF in the fifties. I mentioned A.E. Van Vogt and Robert Heinlein and Viv mentioned Clifford D. Simak, Andre Norton, and Ursula K. Leguinn. Megan started Science Fiction with the TV series Farscape. What a difference 40 years makes. Please post your introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy in the comments.
The Star Trek (original) TV series was my introduction to SF. Then I kind of spread forward and backward from that: the New Wave stuff in one direction (as it was published) and the Golden Age stuff in the other, chiefly Asimov, Heinlein, etc. for that bunch.
Yeah, I was books first and when there was science fiction television I thought, "Oh, wow!" but it rarely lived up to expectations. Except for "The Trouble With Tribbles". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Trouble_with_Tribbles
I was books first in general, but my parents weren't much for SF so I didn't have SF books until after I got exposed to the very notion of it via Star Trek.
I worked at the library shelving books and after I read through all the SF in the children's area I started checking out the Science Fiction they had upstairs. Now I read on my Kindle using Overdrive so still a library patron.
Books have always enthralled me. When I was approaching my teen years A well written story would keep me reading till I fell asleep with the book in my hand. Mother complained about it but she never denied me access to books. We lost my father when I was in 7th grade. It was a traumatic time for us but we survived. When I reached Jr.High School I volunteered to help with the school library. It was a great way to learn just how libraries operate and why books have to be shelved in the right place for things to run smoothly.
I still read at night until I fall asleep. Sometimes I have to reread a page or two in the morning. And what am I reading now? The new N.K. Jemisin Hugo nominee, "The City We Became".
Next Monday night on Inspired Unreality our opening topic will be Science Fiction and Fantasy literature. If you have favorites or opinions please comment here and I will use this thread as a resource for the discussion.
An alarming trend I noticed over my life—though I haven't read much recent SF or fantasy so I don't know if it's continued—is the inexorable change of speculative fiction from being largely optimistic to largely pessimistic, at least in western specfic.
Old-timey SF in particular was, even if branded as "horror", still pretty positive at least in terms of the setting. Sure THESE PEOPLE may have died horribly, but the world at large was doing fine, and the reason these people could die horribly was because the world was doing well and humanity was spreading out to the stars!
Slowly, but surely, across the '70s and into the '80s and '90s that positivity faded. The world was going to be obliterated in nuclear suicide. The world was going to be an unremitting corporate-driven Hellhole of crime and corruption. We were all doomed and the protagonists of stories were the unlucky ones who'd survived.
Like I said I haven't kept up, so maybe this trend eventually reversed itself (though the popularity of shows like Rick & Morty suggest to me that existential dread and straight-up nihilism still rule the roost). But if it has, that's still nigh-on 50 years of social depression so serious it mimics clinical depression in its feel and its impact.
N. K. Jemison just won three Hugos in a row for her Broken Earth trilogy which was deeply dystopian. So the trend hasn't reversed. I do think there is more variety today then at any time in the past but mostly post apocalytic and totalitarian corporacratacies rule.
In our superheroes we've moved to anti-heroes and psychopaths (I consider post-Dark Knight Returns Batman as a psychopath). In our visions of the future we only seem to be able to picture dystopias.
There doesn't appear to be hope for anything in popular entertainment. It reminds me of the endlessly depressing post-holocaust fiction of the '80s.
I'm not sure "realism" is a net good in this genre. SF used to be a vision of hope. Unrealistic hope, yes, but it gave ideals to strive for. When (not "if"!), in the process of striving for said ideals you fell short, you still made the world a better place in the process.
We've lot ideals. We're wallowing in cynicism and self-pity. And it reflects in the world around us: people are more self-involved, nihilistic, and short-term focused.
Yes, Megan brought this up in the discussion. This isn't just happening in Science Fiction. Comedys used to be funny or they wouldn't last. Now cringeworthy is a goal that somehow is supposed to have humor embedded in it.
Without going into a lot of the detail. OD&D was written for the miniature wargaming community of the early 1970s. This was a community used to running sophiscated multi-session campaign. As there was almost no commercial rulesets, people made their system cobbled together from existing games like Diplomacy, miniature wargames, and above all their own experience in coming up with rules for a specific scenario based on historical or in case fiction.
What rules were written were usually typed and mimeographed. Mostly used as a reference (charts, tables, etc) relying on the referee or players of the campaign for the explanations of how to use them.
OD&D was written as a set of guidelines to explain to miniature wargamers how they could run similar campaigns to what they heard was happening in the Twin Cities and Lake Geneva. It was not intended to be for novices picking up a game for the first time off of a bookshelf.
It subsequent popularity outside of this wargaming community caught Gygax off guard and he and later TSR recognized the issue and started correcting it once they had the resources to do so. For example the Holmes Basic Rules.
I recommend reading books like Playing at the World, Hawk & Moor, and the Elusive Shift to get a sense of what was happened and why OD&D was what it was.
This is also important why there are big fans of OD&D. It not because of nostalgia or because it was first. It because it represents that early mindset of the hobby. When people understood that there was great fun to be had with gaming but because of the lack of commercial products* had to come up with their own to play.
OD&D is represent that for tabletop roleplaying. A set of guidelines to be used as foundation for one own campaign. It was understood by its initial buyer in 1974 and 1975 as a starting point for their own campaign. Hobbyists like that idea and build on it for themselves and love how OD&D enables this.
For example how one weaves a basket in a campaign? In a more recent edition or currently published RPG, likely there is an answer in the system. In OD&D, you would have to come up with your own take. Decide which factor the system already has that is important, attributes? class? level? Or perhaps come up something new for characters like a skill system or my own ability system for the Majestic Fantasy RPG.
OD&D by its nature forces the referee and players to come up with their own answers. Gygax when writing used his experience running wargames campaign to put in what he felt would be the most useful material. Most of which are lists of stuff (monsters, items, etc.), tables, and charts.
The characters mechanics were bare bones because wargame campaigns relied heavily on either how reality worked or how it was described in fiction. So if somebody wanted know how far they could jump, then they would look at sports statistics and knowing that a 10 Strength was average figure out what a 15 strength character could do from there. This can be seen in the attitude that Gygax, Arneson, and other referees of the era have about the trend of ever more complex system. One of common answer "Why don't you just look it up in a book or encyclopedia?" Which reflects what they did back in the day.
Overall my view that this is a style of play, not THE style nor a worse style. Some folks don't have the time to the research like they had to circa 1970. They don't have the leisure time and appreciate authors that take the time to do the work and lay it out nicely in a rulebook. Bonus points if it also straightforward and quick to use and find.
It helpful to have a through rulebook when the players and referees are novices as well.
But it doesn't change the fact that for many OD&D does work 'as is'. But it helps to understands the early 70s wargaming mindset to better understand what OD&D does and does not do as a system. In that context OD&D is fine 'as is'.
*One of the few commercially available ruleset for wargaming was Chainmail. Because of that it will well-known among the small wargaming community of the early 70s. Because it focus on medieval combat, along with the fantasy addenum, and also because Gygax was one of the author. It was mention for use with OD&D as a resource to use.
"I have played at tables running B/X or Holmes and, like always if the DM was good the game was good."
There is an element of truth to this that, however, obfuscates an important fact. I'll illustrate by way of analogy.
I know a person here who does magical things with wood to the point I call him "the wood whisperer". I have seen him create wonderful works of art with a pen knife and a repurposed screwdriver. So obviously that's all you need for woodworking, right? Because in the right hands a pen knife and a screwdriver are great woodworking tools!
Wrong.
He wouldn't even agree with that. His workshop has about, conservatively guessing, 50 gazillion chisels alone: not one of which is a repurposed screwdriver.
The fact that a good craftsman *can* make miracles with subpar tools doesn't mean that a) they should, or b) they'd want to.
Yes, some truly great campaigns have been run with Gary Gygax's dross, whether that was OD&D, AD&D, or even ... I don't know ... Cyborg Commando. But every time I hear of these, I wonder inside (and sometimes vocally) how much better they could have been had the GM been using tools that aided him in success instead of gaining success despite the tools at hand.
You're a musician. Imagine being told "a good enough musician can get by with a penny whistle" and as a result being forced to only ever do music with a penny whistle. That penny whistle is the OSR as it presents itself in my eyes.
Core takeaway. " I think there is room for the OSR concept: simple, fun-focused, hack-and-slash or exploration-oriented, pick-up-and-play games that also have room for depth and soul but that don't have a need for the millions of pages of rules for every contingency." My OSR experience starts with Rules Cyclopedia. I have earlier rulesets but only to collect and browse. I have played at tables running B/X or Holmes and, like always if the DM was good the game was good.
I think part of the thought process behind love of OSR is players remembering their early experiences and how much they loved the game when they started playing. The problem is that each of these players is remembering the game as it was played at their table and it was played differently at every table.
I've never actually used the full Cyclopedia, but I did follow the Basic/Expert/whatever the next level was called stack up to that point and found it pretty decent. It was a bit limiting and had some things that really grated on me (like "elf" being a class, or "dwarf") but the information presentation was good and the system was mostly clean, if limited in scope.
It did lack, however, things that other games had (like elves who weren't 100% fighter/magic-users!:D), like that coherent framework for governing situations not specified in the rules. I understand that was finally added on much later, but by then I was already tearing through dozens of other games and really had left D&D behind entirely.
What I really want from an "Old School Revolution" is something that has that simple, pick-up-quick vibe of the Basic/Expert/whatever chain but informed by nearly half a century of subsequent game design. Something with a single core mechanism, say, that covers combat, social situations (like hiring henchmen, or bargaining), physical feats, etc. in a single unifying mechanism.
Like, say, the Cepheus line of rules. Those are looking pretty nice these days.
@ZDL
1) My overall thesis is that the initial release of OD&D was sufficiently coherent for its audience. And unlike 15 years ago, we have folks like Jon Peterson who done the research and documented what was going on. Which is often at odds with what people remember.
The problem with OD&D is that it quickly escaped the confines of that audience. Gygax and TSR played catch up throughout the 70s as a result.
2) I am not sure how you read "Rules for everything" in my comments on what good for novices. But I think we can agree that if you want to write a book that teaches people who never gamed how to play tabletop roleplaying, then you have to more than just be a concise reference for a system however simple or complex it may be.
Original OD&D was not written for novices to the miniature wargaming hobby at the time.
@ZDL
As for the format of OD&D, of course it could be better. We are fifty years in and as a hobby and industry we learned a lot about how to explain and present OD&D.
THE issue of OD&D is that it assume the reader is part of the miniature wargaming community of the early 70s. If the reader wasn't then it a lot of important context was lost.
For that audience, OD&D was a superior presentation compared to what was currently available. It far more coherent than the other rulebooks for miniature wargaming that I read from that time period.
To say that Gygax should have done better assume that he had knew or planned for his game to spread beyond the miniature wargaming community.
Nor is comparing it to publishing standards outside of the wargaming community valid. The wargaming community of the time was it own world and publisher did what they could with the time and budget they had.
And today in 2021, we know so much more about what happening and what was being done. Thanks to collectors zines, games, and other material from the era has been found and documented.
As a result OD&D wasn't some poor first attempt but an important step and revolutionary in its own right. And because we have things better documented we can fill in the missing context and enjoy the game 'as is'.
And to clear there is no "lost' manuscript of missing rules out there. No additional rules. What documented that referee of the time used the rules as a framework and added their own research.
Prepare to be disappointed if you are looking for rules. The pre-D&D manuscript are pretty much what in the 3 LBBs of OD&D but specific details added or omitted as Gygax tried out things in his Greyhawk campaign.
Or in some cases some enterprising playtester got a copy and make their own take.
Don't get me wrong it is interesting and worthwhile to read and discuss about. But in the end in my opinion it all amount to what I outlined before. They thought of something to play, did the research, assembled or wrote some rules, played, tweaked and played again. Then repeat for something else.
Because of that most of what there are references, charts, and tables that supported this stuff. Everything else was word of mouth or ad-hoc inspiration.
"It helpful to have a through rulebook when the players and referees are novices as well."
More helpful is a coherent core system upon which people can hang consistent decisions.
I mean I EXPLICITLY SAID that "having a rule for everything" was insanity.
There is a huge difference between "having a rule for everything" and "having a rules framework that can cover everything".
Perhaps it might be best to read what you're replying to before you churn out two responses almost as long each as the original piece? You might not then feel the need to 'splain history I mentioned I was there for most of. Or to answer issues already addressed in the piece.
(I note also that you utterly failed to address another key point: that even within the milieu of the time, OD&D's writing was INCOHERENT ROT. It was crap writing just from straight information presentation perspectives.)
Specifically for ZDL. I started on Rules Cyclopedia and a mix of that with AD&D. Do you think that Rules Cyclopedia, the whole game in one book, accomplished it's task? By the time it was published everyone knew there was mass market potential.
robertsconley - I played Gettysburg and other war games in the sixties but I was never in a club. Then I skipped forward to Rules Cyclopedia and AD&D because, life. Vivian aka sound played fantasy role playing with miniatures in the early seventies from some of the mimeograph sheets you mentioned. This was in Beebe, Arkansas. Carl helped us research on the internet and we found a war gaming club with a zine that had three or four pages about fantasy role playing. This was pre D&D. Do you have any handle on pre D&D rules sets, scans or text files? Thanks.
@robertsconley "Thanks to collectors zines, games, and other material from the era has been found and documented." This is what interests me. Do you have links, book titles, ...?
Playing at the World by Peterson.
Warning: Very Academic and very through.
Hawk and Moor by Kelly
Gets more into the personalities not as academically rigorous as Playing at the World but far more readable and approachable.
The Elusive Shift by Peterson
Documents what happened to the hobby after the introduction of Dungeons and Dragons. It charts the emerging concept of tabletop roleplaying as something distinct from wargaming.
Also more relevant to how the hobby is today than the pre-D&D era because of the fact that D&D was written with an audience of miniature wargamers in mind. As a result everybody outside of that like hex and counter wargamers and science fiction fandom developed their own interpretation of what the game meant. And the consequences of these interpretations remain to us this day.
And it documents those who have some of the exact same objection about OD&D that that ZDL's article has. As well responses to those objections.
No problem, I don't expect folks to always agree with me but folks should be aware of the wealth of documented history we now have. That it is there for folks to read and draw their own conclusions if interested.
> Original OD&D was not written for novices to the miniature wargaming hobby at the time.
Again, *I KNOW THIS*. This is why OD&D is *NOT* a good thing to fall back on for "simplicity". It is literally a set of guidelines written for a very small group of people in a very narrow area who'd been presumed to know certain things already (like Arneson's long-running proto-RPG campaigns), who had access to specific rulesets (Chainmail, chiefly), and thus knew what Gygax was talking about once you got through his absolutely terrible writing.
My thesis wasn't "OD&D was a bad thing for its time and place". It wasn't (Gygax's writing notwithstanding). It's a bad thing for *NOW*.
The goals of the OSR are laudable. Their weird worship of an incoherent mass of lore is not one of those laudable things. That is the point.
Folks talked to folks who ran successful OD&D campaign from back in the day and the few that continued to present.
It not 1995, when people only had the 3 LBB to go by and scratched their head at what looked like a incoherent mass of lore. By 2005 those who didn't dismiss OD&D found out there was more to its story, including myself.
By 2015 that story had become well known enough that folks figured out and expanded on the different ways to approach OD&D and it had regained some popularity and was supported again. Largely because OD&D did not turned out as incoherent as people thought.
So unless what had happened for past 20 years is addressed I don't see how a thesis that OD&D is a bad fit for *NOW* can be supported.
I think I'm going to just start replying by quoting things already said that you apparently didn't bother reading.
===========
I know a person here who does magical things with wood to the point I call him "the wood whisperer". I have seen him create wonderful works of art with a pen knife and a repurposed screwdriver. So obviously that's all you need for woodworking, right? Because in the right hands a pen knife and a screwdriver are great woodworking tools!
Wrong.
He wouldn't even agree with that. His workshop has about, conservatively guessing, 50 gazillion chisels alone: not one of which is a repurposed screwdriver.
The fact that a good craftsman *can* make miracles with subpar tools doesn't mean that a) they should, or b) they'd want to.
One of the interesting things that has been brought up is "aulde skoole" gaming and its fond veneration in some memories. It's my opinion (as someone who started in 1977 with the "blue book" edition) that a lot of people are using seriously pink-tinted lenses when thinking back to those early days.
Which sounds to me like a new kind of blog entry: a historical deep dive.
D&D games today tend to have parties where all the PCs are at the same level. Often the whole party takes an evening to level up.
In earlier times parties were often mixed. Leveling up was done per person based on XP and XP was doled out by the DM at the end of the evening based on PC performance. Players took notes to remind the DM, I killed that troll or I cast that spell trying to maximize XP earned. Also different classes leveled up at different XP so there was almost never an entire party leveling up at the same time. This took a lot of bookkeeping but that's the kind of geeks we were.
Also when a PC was killed the player would roll a new character at level 1. So a party of four could have a level 3 thief, a level 4 fighter, a level 2 wizard, and a level 1 cleric. (Who used to be the best fighter until he died.)
I like this. It adds a certain grittiness to the game and it certainly affects battle tactics. But when I wrote Just Quest as a minimal rules OSR I wrote, "The characters level up on successful completion of a quest". A simple rule for a game designed to be easy to play.
Where do you stand on this? Do you enjoy playing in mixed parties? If you're a DM do you try to keep your parties at about the same level or do you embrace the idea of mixed parties?
We may discuss this on Inspired Unreality Monday night or we may just drink some tea with the Milyagon witch and see what happens next.
I think this is a cool aspect of old school games that isn't common anymore. I love the grittiness of it, and the mixed levels never bothered me when I played. I remember even having some guest players over who brought over their level 9 character to our 5th level campaign. It never bothered us.
That said, for a dungeon master it's much easier to do milestone leveling and have all the players be the same level. It's a lot less to keep up with, and certainly for writing adventures I think it takes a load off the DM if they only have to worry about writing it for 4-6 players of 3rd level, than 4-6 players of 2nd-5th level.
There are several aspects of old school games I like, most notably the increased diversity that randomness tended to cause.
The wildly divergent capabilities of characters, however, was not one of them. In the presence of most GMs, having the weakest character meant a) dying, or b) not having anything to do. Neither of these is really conducive to enjoyment.
There are a handful of GMs I've met in my life who could give equal "screen time" to characters of wildly divergent capabilities, but those are few and far between.
Mixing levels amplifies this already-existing problem tenfold in my books. (Never mind that levels measure nothing meaningful in D&D; that's a rant for another day.) If you're the first level magic user in a group of 3-5th level other things, your entire gaming session consists of cowering in the corner and hoping you don't get noticed. You have nothing you can do that helps anybody (unless you're lucky enough to have gotten Sleep -- in which case you got to do one thing that might have slightly contributed), and this will also very badly impact your ability to level up to a point where you can be useful.
Points well taken. (and I really want to hear your rant for another day, that levels measure nothing meaningful in D&D.) Some things a DM can do to address your points are to start the new character at second or third level but still in the bottom ranks of the party. Level the character up quickly by adjudicating extra XP for doing well in spite of the low level disadvantage. Help the low level character out with found spells or magic armor/weapons.
And then there's the whole non combat side. The role playing, puzzle solving, exploration part where characters of all levels are more equal and the results depend more on the player than on PC stats. And DMs can award XP for good performance in non combat situations.
There is a built in premise in OSR games. PCs need XP to level up. You get XP by killing monsters. So, let's go kill some monsters. At a lot of tables that is the game. To me, it's a side show and as I get older I run more games that are all exploration and role play without any combat at all.
Liz wrote: "Just wanted to add something since I'm not sure i can even make it Monday. Mom at one point started a drop-in drop-out/open play DCC campaign (it didn't last very long due to where we lived) so I have a little experience.
What she did was give each player that was there their 4 level 0 characters for the funnel. After that, we all picked a character to level to level 1. The idea would be that it took 1 game to get to level 1, 2 additional games to get to level 2, 3 games for level 3, etc.
If a player was to have their character die, they'd start again with either 4 level 0s or a level 1.
So figuring out when you level is easy, since you only have to count the number of games you were able to play in. But you would still eventuality get level differences, as players die or miss games (again, this was supposed to be for open play)"
I'd like to add that in the oldest of old school most of your XP came from earning treasure not killing monsters. Which means two things 1. You don't have to fight that big bad monster if there was a way around it to get the treasure behind it. and 2. Your lower level character would level very rapidly because of the amount of gold the higher level party was able to procure.
I appreciate the comments about mixed level parties being difficult to adjudicate for. But one thing that is different for old school (unless I am mistaken they changed this in later editions) is that any magic user could use any scroll. Even if they are not high enough level to cast that spell. So if you have a low level wizard among your 5th level parties dropping a few scrolls changes the whole dynamic.
I didn't know that. When I mentioned scrolls I was thinking of more spells per day not stronger spells. Also when I was first playing D&D we got almost all our hit points from killing monsters just because the game wasn't treasure oriented. Generally speaking group XP is always the lion's share and will help low level characters level up fast.
Provided you don't get instakilled by the first creature larger than a kitten that takes a swipe at you.
Provided you don't get BORED being relegated to the sideline for multiple grueling hours of watching OTHER PEOPLE have fun.
I mean my calculus is simple: I play games for fun. If I'm not having fun, I don't go to that game anymore. I don't plan fun on spec. It's fun out the door or I move on.
The non-combat things that hairylarry mentioned can ameliorate this, but in my experience those tended to be few and far between in most campaigns. You'd have a short time in the village talking to the villagers and then it's the next fifteen sessions in the dungeon.
There are a great many things to praise in the old school. The way mixed-level parties worked was not one of them. Some GMs could figure it out. Most couldn't, leaving the low-levelled character's player bored and/or frustrated and, very likely, absent next week.
I checked on Discord. The ingredients for the second tea blend are lavender, rose hips, rose buds, and mint. Maybe it's a mood elevator and maybe it's a love potion.
Everyone wants to buy equipment but nobody wants to think about workflow. Yet, without a well defined idea about anticipated workflow it's difficult t...
With the recent buzz over the release of some videos of various sensor date of Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon, the new term for UFO, I decided to explore "What if...." and apply it to the realm of RPGs.
Wow, just realized that this month marks 38 years since I graduated high school....
I started playing D&D 6 years before that, so 44 years of D&D and I still can't get enough.
I started roll playing in the early 70s which was very different than Gary Gygax's D&D. We convened in the Arkansas State Beebe Student Union when we had the time and picked miniatures from whatever was available. The rules were typed on letter paper and were mimeograph or Xerox copies.
We've discussed solo play here before. I guess I'll have to try it to get it. I am definitely into 1 DM and 1 player. Viv and I did that for an Ari and Caper adventure. Ari, the PC, had a smart wild cat, Tude, for a pet. Her sidekick, Caper, was an NPC so I ran the game and 1 NPC in the party and Viv ran Ari and Tude. That really worked well.
My twitch experience is broadening. Mostly technically. I got a newer tablet and two lights for the studio. I've also put into place post production work flow and backups. I ordered 2 4TB drives cause I'm gonna need them.
The game is a prettier version of the game Gobblet, it turns out. (https://www.boardspace.net/gobblet/english/gobblet_rules.pdf) Each player has three stacks of nesting cylinders (12 pieces total) and the board is 4×4. In alternating turns each player may choose one of:
1. Take the TOP piece of an off-board stack (i.e. the largest) and place it on a blank space.
2. As #1, but place it over (any, regardless of colour) SMALLER piece already on the board.
3. Move any showing piece of that player's colour to a blank space on the board.
4. As #3, but place it over a smaller piece.
The goal is to get four in a row of your own colour: horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. If you touch any piece in play that you can play (on the board, not in your stacks), you *must* play it. If lifting up a piece reveals a line of four of the opposing colour, and your move doesn't stop that line of four from completing, you lose. (In other words there's a memory component to the game.)
It's fast (a long game is 15 minutes) and it's simple to learn. It may be a perfect "we've got a few spare minutes, let's play!" game.
Hi ZDL, how are you? Sounds like you have been busy. We have been doing a little rearranging here. Seems like we do it every spring. Makes the house feel enough different that we enjoy the effort. Hope you have some time to enjoy the rest of the week.
I'm looking forward to warmer weather just not hot weather. That being said I cant wait to to see our flowers blooming all over our yard. Spring begins here tomorrow.
Here's four webcomics that I like and some of them even have something to do with gaming.
I don't like rom com movies much. In fact I don't like movi...
I used to read OOTS almost compulsively. It's been around for a looooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong time.
I'll check out the other ones starting with Gunnerkrigg.
Do you have any other favorite webcomics? I love that part where you're going through the archives and it seems like the goodness will never end. But before you notice you're waiting for the next episode and you only get to enjoy one or two episodes at a time.
My last set of literal gem dice. This is my favourite semi-precious stone: bloodstone.
This gives me a full set of unakite (selected because it's basically indestructible, being essentially granite), a full set of bloodstone, and a "mongrel" set of a variety of stones (shown earlier). And a full set of dice made from dichromic prisms.
We just took on the Black Knight in Heroes and Wizards who came out of his tomb to fight us as both a wraith and a zombie skeleton. Needless to say our party of both Heroes and Wizards dispatched both of them and then discovered that in his library were documents proving the King's specious claims to the throne!
Here's my icosahedron. It's part of my recording studio, acoustic room, vocal booth, out of control room. I'm going to make a sign that says Roll To Hit. A double double-entendre.
That's an astrology d12: those are the sun signs or whatever those are called. The stone for that one is "blue sandstone". In person the stone has odd depths. The gold flecks are such that they give the illusion of being layered. Quite nice.
The d4 is a stone I can't find the English term for: it's literal translation is "natural black wood grain gemstone". It *might* be a petrified wood, but if it is it's smoother and more amorphous than any of those I've ever seen.
The d6 is blue turquoise (sintered, obviously: a real chunk that size would cost more than a car!), the d8 is a brown tiger eye, the 0-9 is lapis lazuli, the 00-90 is something that translates as "red sandstone" -- it's gold-flecked like the blue one -- the d12 is opal, and the d20 is green malachite.
The d6 with the weird glyphs in the foreground is something translated as "colourful jade" and that's one half of a pair of Tibetan divination dice. (The other half is still being etched. It will be made of "egg yolk opal".)
After a couple of fun chat sessions we are returning to Ember tonight for some more actual play. The Chronicles Of Ember is set in a unique role playi...
Vivian, Liz, and I were joined by Alan and Dice Master last night on Inspired Unreality. Besides the importance of NPCs we also discussed AI, WOW, and Minecraft. Not surprisingly, everyone had opinions.
Roll20 For The Absolute Beginner No. 23 - Making Links**********************************Roll20: https://roll20.net/Roll20 Tutorial: https://app.roll20.net/ed...
I used to have real trouble with SF as a gaming genre outside of space opera. The solution turned out to be in the very problem statement.
As you identified, there's just so much bewildering *variety* in science fiction in terms of genres, tones, scales, et al that it's almost, but not quite, a useless term.
Once I figured out that the reason I had problems with the genre outside of space opera was precisely because space opera is a very specific subset of science fiction, the rest fell into place: now I don't play science fiction games. I play "space exploration". Or "world settlement". Or "interplanetary trade". The key was always in my hand, without my recognizing it: focus.
Nice article that brings back so many years of frustration and its eventual resolution for me.
I didn't really understand SF gaming until I played in RoboG's game. I went for a computer technician and loved making up all kinds of stuff with cyber jargon. It's like you get to be a hacker without having to do all the work. Essentially every computer, data jack, cable, or robot became a path to more information. I enjoyed that.
Hurray! Not sure what time this happened, but thank you to all you re-tweeted and especially to all who subbed.
I took the day off work, so I'll put out a video later today.
I just uploaded my twenty-first PDF to DriveThruRPG: Dragon Name Generator [Affiliate Link]. It has been almost exactly a year since I released my last new PDF.
I've been running a game of Lords of Olympus for the last 5 months. If anyone here likes Greek Mythology and enjoys the idea of playing Gods and Demigods in an infinite Multiverse I would highly recommend it.
Nope. It has two strikes against it: first it's based on Amber which is really not my cup of tea, second it was made by someone who I would never wish to support financially in any way.
I like Precis Intermedia, the publisher, but one of the authors Brett Bernstein champions leaves me absolutely cold.
So I guess it's the Amber game system you don't like. The Amber books are great. SF/Fantasy adventure narrative. One issue with the book is that the protagonist is actually Hitler or should I say was Hitler since the series starts just after that unfortunate episode (from the point of view of the Amberites). The reason I don't think the magic system is good for RPGs is because walking in shadows and walking the pattern are solitary endeavors so it's diffiucult for a party when every time the magic system is invoked they go their seperate ways. Maybe ok for a single player and a GM.
It's actually somewhat different. The Magic is different, the setting is different and the rules are based more on the unpublished Amber 2e. As to Pundit, I agree with not liking him, like at all. However I really like his games which by and large are divorced from his idiotic nonsense.
I have no opinion on the quality of his games because no money will ever leave my hands to buy them, nor will any of my valuable time be wasted on examining them.
I think I recognise this place out of a book I read. It's an abandoned haunted city with these exact monsters. Now if I could only remember the book. Maybe in Wheel Of Time? I know, that doesn't narrow things down a lot.
Shadar Logoth, (Old Tongue: Place Where the Shadow Waits, or simply The Shadow's Waiting, pronounced: SHAH-dahr LOH-goth), was once Aridhol, a great city which destroyed itself during the Trolloc Wars by becoming as dark and evil as the Shadow against which it fought. Now Mashadar, a shapeless...
I'm working on a master spreadsheet of gear & supplies price list for D&D and other fantasy RPGs.
I copied all the items from most/nearly all of the RPG PDFs I have to get the most common items.
I plan to add links to explain what some of the more obscure items are.
It will have things like the standard name of the item and price, but also size & weight, capacity for containers & wagons, and range and damage for weapons, and AC for armor.
All the things that always come up in play in one spot so players can see it
Availability, how common it is, prices for varying quality are also things I am considering.
The idea is a tool that the players will use to free up GM time, and will be a tool the GM can use in Session Prep.
If there is something you think should be on here, please let me know.
For example, something you've needed to buy in game and the GM had to come up with it.
One thing I just thought of that I should consider, is the price of bulk goods, like grain, flour, lumber, ore, furs/pelts, etc. That would make it useful for planning various forms of treasure/wealth to be gained.
Would you post this as an online reference or maybe a pdf file. Also would be good in spreadsheet format so it's easy to add/modify for a specific game or campaign. If we could only regain all the time we spent at the table paging through books looking for a niggling stat. Or you can just do like me and make up crap on the spot. The most common origin for house rules is making up crap on the spot and then it sticks.
I plan to put up a PDF & spreadsheet on DTRPG when it's "done". A spreadsheet will make it so much more user friendly.
Making stuff up is great, if you can remember it or write it down for later.
I want this to also spur creativity in players and GMs to come up with their own things.
So I have bee roped into running Hollow Earth Expedition. Luckily I really like the game. I just hope that I have a better time running it than that aborted attempt years ago.
That's cool. I got to the second verse and I had to express my pet peeve about the Wheel Of Time books. There is a major city called Tear. But how is it pronounced? How hard world it have been to spell it Teer or Tare? What was Robert Jordon thinking? How can I be nitpicking such a fantasy classic? Well ... I can.
When I was teaching oral English (16 years!) I had a standing challenge: if you could recite The Chaos (reading or memorized, I didn't care!) without a mistake you got an automatic A and didn't have to come back to class ever.
I never, in 16 years, had a student pass that test. :D
This also is so cool I'm trying to derive the origin. Openings to the center of the Earth at the North Pole and the South Pole. The Bermuda Triangle. But what are the two cliff formations?
I love the stonework defenses. Is this a photo or a painting? I see the warriors on guard but then I see a couple of people in modern dress. Do you know the origin?
I'm never sure so I back up all of our home directories. We mainly use Xubuntu Linux so that's all of our personal data. I back up in house to two backup servers. I rsync everything to one server with 11 TB. I am working on my second server using a backup program called Restic. I recommend this approach only if you are a retired computer consultant who builds machines for fun and is always looking for something to do with them. I'm literally surrounded by computers. To my right is the Hairy Larry Rocks server running Yunohost. https://hairylarry.rocks To my left is my HP workstation where I do most of my work and my MixRemix server running a LAMP stack. http://mixremix.cc And in front of me is my proxy server directing web traffic for my server subnet and an extra big UPS to keep things running when the lights go out. If you don't really understand everything I'm talking about here you might want to use an online backup service like Follow Me And Die does. (I'm not just a gaming geek, I'm a computer geek too.) Cheers!
SO has set up something that backs up my personal stuff onto a network thing every hour and that thing itself backs up the critical stuff to Baidu Cloud daily.
He did this the day after he had to spend three weeks painstakingly recovering a decade of pictures from a hard disk that broke... :-/
Yep, the only thing harder than making good backups is not making backups. It's not if you lose your data it's when. I don't know how many times I've preached this. When I would take on a new client the first thing I made them do was put a backup system in place. And then I would check it. I wouldn't do anything until then because I have been known to make mistakes too. The last thing I wanted to happen was them telling people that their new computer guy lost their data.
I had my Great Awakening in the early '80s, and that actually led me away from the D&D family because so many people not only just assumed combat, but assumed combat to the death with no quarter, no fleeing: just grinding down hit points to 0 on one side or the other then moving on to the next hit point grind.
Yes, I know it didn't have to be. :( My "great awakening" was the realization that there was more to life than rolling d20+d<damage> non-stop. But I couldn't find others who thought that way in the AD&D circles I frequented, so I moved on to DragonQuest (where I knew players who did non-combat).
As a DM who got involved in the early days of roll playing I tried to prohibit the idea that if you were in combat it must end with somebody dead. The thought that maybe this situation could be resolved by talking through it rather than hacking and slashing wasn't usually employed. I often docked points from those who just wanted to kill without any other choices made available. Real life sometimes seems to follow that route now and then and I think using it as entertainment is just asking for increasing bad choices in our youth.
I think the problem was that a lot of early role-players stepped into it from the world of war gaming. (I didn't.) I'm positive a lot of the people I gamed with in the early days just viewed the characters as complicated playing pieces to optimize the movements of, not as characters in a setting.
And that's the kind of combat I like to play. Where you use strategy and work as a team to win the combat. If that means they run away or surrender you still win. But I prefer avoiding combat most of all and as a player try to roll dice as least as I can.
Yeah, figuring out how not to use all your resources in one fight so you have enough to accomplish your goal. Less fighting leads to less time wasting healing up and going back to town empty handed.
Especially if there is a time element. You must retrieve the potion before the full moon to keep your friend from turning into a werewolf ... Can't waste time fighting and healing. Let's figure out a way to sneak around those kobolds.
I agree and I build it into my modules when I can. For instance the party was tasked with gathering medicine and with the people in the neighboring village sick they needed it by tomorrow. In my latest quest the party has to get a branch off the ancestor tree in a magic forest with about a bajillion hills and a big old tree at the top of every one. The catch was the ancestor tree glowed with a fey glow when the moon was full. So you know that only happens every 28 days so they had to be in the right place at the right time.
Winter is upon us and it's a good thing to have distractions like Gamer+ to help us keep busy and active. Hope all of you are staying warm and content. ... Sound.
It snowed here last week. But it didn't stick. Anymore we go through a lot of winters without snow. And then there was the ice storm where everybody lost electric for weeks.
Fairy tales have always drawn my interest. They can be so far out there that I just shake my head or on the other hand they can garner not only my interest but my desire to participate in the story.
Fey fantasy has a different feel than medieval fantasy but still the two worlds interface quite well. In the "Lyonesse Trilogy" Jack Vance writes of a medieval civilization with enchanted woods where the fairies live. The heroine, Madouc, is a changling who is half fey by birth.
This group does recreations of ancient works, new works done in ancient styles, modern-style orchestration with ancient instruments, and off-the-wall stuff like one of their orchestral pieces where a didgeridoo is a prominent instrument.
Oriental music often wings off into interesting combinations of instruments and self expression. I believe this is a good thing and a way to add form to sound.
As Winter approaches I think about how I can best use my time. I am house bound and if it weren't for the Internet expanding my walls I think it might become even more tedious. I miss getting to visit with my kids and grand kids and with friends far and near. Thanks to phones and other communication devices I have managed to stay in touch. Hoping Covid becomes a thing of the past soon and we can enjoy the company of family and friends once again.
Wow! Powerful writing. I experienced similar things. Vivian fell and broke her leg and knee in December, 2019. Just when she was in therapy covid hit. We went immediately into voluntary quarantine. Our Friday night family game run by my son Kier turned into a Friday night virtaul game. Then we started a Tuesday afternoon game run by my son Carl. This probably wouldn't have happened without the quarantine. When your only chance to interact with your grandkids is by playing D&D on Discord then you play D&D on Discord. For a long time we didn't know anyone who got covid. Then I heard about friends of friends and then a girl that used to play drums and sing in my band. Megan has been locked down a couple of times, this last time because a child at the shelter where she works tested positive. One of my grandsons got it and that family was quarantined. They're all ok now, we had a Zoom gift exchange today. Earlier in the year Megan took over the food pantry at the church. Little did she know how needed that service would become. So everybody's experience with 2020 is different but all the echoes are the same. Reading your post brought my year back to me. Thanks so much.
Since 2020 was the year of disappointment, I'm not bothered by missing my goal of 1,000 YouTube subscribers.
I made it to 969, and today it is 970.
I think I can manage 30 subs in 12 months.
Building a world for RPGs (Role Playing Games) has several steps to consider and two general approaches for how to implement those steps. The general methods are top down and bottom up.
Inspired Unreality open game chat, tonight at 9:00 Central in the gamerplus chatrooms at Tenkar's Tavern on Discord. Our opening topic will be "And Wh...
Well we brought the past into the present and pushed the present a little bit into the future but we still can't wait for that screen door to hit 2020 on the ass.
I made a Worldbuilding cheatsheet on Cheatography. I didn't realize that a draft was visible until I started getting emails that it was seen 50, 100, and now 200 times.
Let me know what you think.
I've got edits in mind, but the Cheatography interface is counterintuitive
Building a world for RPGs (Role Playing Games) has several steps to consider and two general approaches for how to implement those steps. The general methods are top down and bottom up.
We played Microscope on a Related to Geeks video. It is a world building RPG where you play out scenarios to build the world. Surprisingly it is top down and bottom up at the same time. And fun to play too.
Ok, Dirty Santa is a new tradition in our family that we weren't able to give up so we had to play it virtually. Horsengoggle is another favorite Christmas game that I learned first divvying out extra desserts at summer camp. We ended up talking about the Girl Scout camp where Vivian helped when she was at ASU. So, good times all around.
We played Virtual Dirty Santa on Discord yesterday. We all passed the wrapped gifts around on a gameboard and then we opened them in order.
Here are ...
We had a good time last night discussing our recent family game weekend and what worked best for us. The highlights for me were the Dirty Santa game and the DCC game. Vivian like the Saturday morning chat. She's really old school.
So yesterday I posed a "wrong answers only" challenge (https://archive.gamerplus.org/newsfeed/3068?ft=site) on a picture. I said that there was a gaming-related point that I'd explore later.
Later is now.
That is something that is pitched as an "eternal pen" (or sometimes "eternal pencil"). It writes like a pencil, but is about as difficult to erase as an ink pen, hence the inconsistency in names. And while not "eternal", it will outlast me. If I wrote a lot daily using only that pen, in a decade's time I might start noticing a bit of wear at the tip. If I rotate the tip as I use it—say between pages—I may not ever notice wear over the rest of my lifespan.
So how is this potentially gaming-related? This "new invention" that got a lot of press a while back (like ... 2015 or so?) is really just the latest rendition of something called "silverpoint" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silverpoint) What's old is new.
Before pencils existed, metalpoint did. The metal used could be lead (hence "pencil leads" – the first pencils used lead for the core), copper, brass, or, as the name suggests, silver. The technology and tooling fell by the wayside over the years as pens that carried their own ink (instead of requiring inkwells) and erasable pencils showed up. The former were more flexible than metalpoint while the latter had the advantage, from the seller's standpoint, of constantly requiring updates. You didn't buy one and use it for decades. You bought one and used it for a few weeks and bought another. And another. And another. Also metalpoint required tough papers and was rough on the hands. (Writer's cramp is a very real problem with silverpoint...)
But now, with newer alloys, the writer's cramp angle is going away and with a cultural shift away from environmentally-hostile disposable culture, silverpoint, or a close kissing cousin, is making a comeback.
Past technologies are a gorgeous ideas mine. A lot of amazing things were made in the past that fell by the wayside for a variety of reasons, not all of them having fallen to superior alternatives. (I'd argue that silverpoint is one of these: I like my metalpoint devices like this one better than pencils. Erasure is a non-starter for me. I don't make mistakes…) As a GM, part of doing good world-building is to look at alternative courses of technological evolution. What would the world look like if metalpoint were kept as the foundational writing/drawing form? What would the world look like if shipping had expanded from junks instead of caravels? There's a huge mine of ideas in history just waiting for someone to go spelunking through it.
Open game chat tonight in the gamerplus chatrooms at Tenkar's Tavern on Discord. Opening topic Family Game. Bring your own topic. All gaming is on topic.
This is my second day leading my horse Tango who has injured his leg. I am hoping this next town will have a blacksmith that can fix his shoe and hopefully knows what needs to be done about his hoof. It's been a tedious journey so far and we're both tired and hungry.
I'm heading to some place called Birkenstock. Not real sure where it is exactly. The guy that gave me directions told me to get on this trail and follow it till I got to the town and then to ask for the local blacksmith. Tango stepped into a hole and fell. I was sure his leg was broken but after I examined it I decided he had just injured his hoof.
Since I read the book and then over 40 years later I saw the movie some of the stuff in the movie replaced the book in my memory. Now that I'm rereading it I notice those things. The movies are a visual joy but the book tells a much better story.
I need some zippity dodaday, but it hasn't shown up yet. Maybe it's dragging it's appearance in the hope I will miraculously come up with some without help.
Brief article using a lot of illustrations of Dave Trampier.
I had the thought, what if your next campaign only used monsters illustrated by DAT? Or build an adventure around those monsters. Something similar could be done for creatures by other artists. https://www.heavymetal.com/...anual-dave-trampier/
Take your inspiration from where it comes. Although it seems like a limitation to take ideas from a single artist it actually frees the DM from having to pick from everything. And during the quest your art will have consistency which is as important in a game as it is in a book.
Ari, curious as usual, walked over to the bed and began poking around with a walking cane she uses for many purposes including prodding things she doesn't want to touch with her hands. When she lifted the pillow at one end it puffed out a cloud of mist that had Ari jumping back quickly.
Locks, Vaults, and Hiding Places - A collection of information and random tables to help Game Masters create more unique locks and other means of securing
Probably not as bad as you say. Most people don't read most of the rule books anyway. And they're going to page forward to character generation. I agree. They shouldn't have to. And given the book I would likely give up before I found character generation. But that's me.
In the '70s and '80s there would have been a HUGE fandom based on the popularity of the TTA books. Those books were DYNAMITE and probably helped set the feel of SF gaming despite never being directly used. (You can see a lot of TTA look and feel in Traveller...)
By 2006 there was no demand for this book and, as their attempt to rejuvenate the series would have shown them, there was no way to make demand. Anybody who wanted to game in the TTA universe was already doing so with other games--a task rendered simple by virtue of the fact that the books were almost ruthlessly focused on SPACESHIPS and installations, not people. You could fit almost any game system and it would work. Add in the terrible editing on the new book, plus the terrible information design of the game itself, and, well, there's a reason why this is a fringe game.
And believe me, it is as bad as I say. Stuff players need to make characters and actually play is mixed in with setting information and fluff in ways that makes it difficult to find. And, indeed, so difficult to find that even if you do use the ToC to get to character generation, you'll still need information in the info dumps to proceed ... with no cross-referencing nor easy stand-out way to spot it.
Wow! My latest episode where I explain the origins of "Follow Me, And Die!" reached 134 total listens. It's now my 4th most listened to episode. My first three episodes are my 1st, 2nd, and 3rd most listened to respectively.
Tomorrow night, Monday, September 21, at 9:00 Central, we will be playing Milyagon Treasure Hunt on Inspired Unreality. If You Play You Win, actual play open table.
Also, we had our Searching For Destiny stream today. Not that we are great thespians, but I think this link could be added in and maybe you’ll like our game. https://youtu.be/T88_2rdisKM
Anyone can add links. I already have your youtube feed on our list. Thanks for all you do. Always let me know about any projects you are working on and we will promote them at Gamer+.
Also, there are times where I probably upload a video where I’m ranting about non-game related items. It may be best where my whole YT channel isn’t echoed here.
Same with some of my RSS feeds. Not entirely game related. And some of the others. So no problem with that. If it's important to you you can add all your game vlogs to a playlist and we can follow that. But it doesn't matter to us. Everyone has more interests than just gaming.
Yeah, I've been reading some of your posts. And they're not all about horror which is great because I'm not really into horror. Now my kids, they love horror. But they mostly play D&D.
Thank you. We have so many creators here. The only way to keep up is by aggregating an RSS feed made up of all their feeds. Be sure you checkout the View Last 60 Items here link. It is the hidden gem of Gamer+.
Frustration is when you sign up to run a scenario at two online conventions in the coming weeks, & you can't find your notes from the first time you ran it....
I KNOW that I saved it. I keep almost everything. At least my RPG stuff will be organized in the process of finding it....
Well, I found my notes, but not all my pre-gens..... I have a stable of AD&D pregens on PDF at various levels and the 5th level ones are not to be found on my PC, nor the hard copies.
It's an online game, so hard copies is not the issue, I just don't want to have to level up my pregens again....
Now to type up my handwritten notes so I can find them faster next time....
Everything is imperfect. Sounds interesting. The only similar game I have played is Microscope which is world building a scene at a time. I enjoyed that a lot. I also find the dice pool interesting. You get curves and you get to roll a lot of dice at once which is always fun.
The dice pool mechanism in *Engine* (not *Bones*) with its aspects and rolling ones thing is actually very nice. It's quick. It's easy to explain and understand. The "auto ones" thing for skills is a clever way of having skills make you more reliable at certain jobs instead of playing the escalation of difficulties and penalties game.
Heya there, everyone! I'm SethmoThePoet, and this is my little Group based around games made by Palladium Books. Since TheEvilDM's reviews on Palladiu...
So I take it that this is your green screen at work and you're not actually out in front of a desert village. I'm into zines. Let me know what you think of Hunters In Death.
Correct. I didn't quite have the lighting right, so I couldn't just delete the greenscreen. I used a photo editing app to put the ruins in the background on a new layer. I used my webcam in photo mode. It works better in video mode using OBS since it masks out the greenscreen.
Interesting. I don't know about dramatist but i am more interested in role playing a story with character development than I am in fighting. This is still a minority position. Most games I play in seem to be one combat encounter after another which I can enjoy even though it's not my preferred play style. Thanks again for sharing this history with us.
There's a lot of little gems in the early days of RP (1974-1984, call it) that didn't survive not because they were bad but because they were ahead of their times: the public wasn't ready for the ideas, and of course they were breaking new ground and made mis-steps.
Finally have my new LEDs up, plus a hook for my headphones.
Next to run a wire to easily set up my green screen.
I hope to have the oomph to do a video tonight.
The third picture shows how out of square my nearly 100 year old house is.
The last picture is me testing the setup before getting cleaned up to do a new video.
So are you using this for livestreams? Screencasts with picture in picture? What are you using for a green screen? I am very interested in this type of video production. I am planning on setting up for something like this in the Icosahedron.
I use it to record YouTube videos, and also for livestreams. I bought a greenscreen that hooks on the back of a chair, but it leans, so I ran a wire to hang it from.
I use OBS to control the camera and the stuff I show. I can do any kind of video production that my computer can handle.
Yeah, I use OBS to record podcasts on Discord so I'm set up for that. I do a lot of video production but lately it's all been audio so I'm looking forward to getting set up kind of like you so I can make videos without having to do a bunch of post production.
Yeah, a good setup with the right conditions and remembering to turn on the microphone, and speaking clearly and to the point makes it a lot easier to edit with fewer takes.
Had to do a picture for something at work to show a bit about us.
Promoting GaryCon and showing off a print of my brother's art should be good.
Yes that is all stipple.
Anything I'd post online would be tagged with my brother's name and copyright, plus, I'd need his permission. I wish he'd sell prints of some of his stuff online, but he doesn't do art for the money.
Only if I'm the DM. And when I'm the DM I hate to have the NPCs lead the PCs. I have played in games where the DM just said it outloud. I can't answer questions you don't ask. Worst come to worst the NPC can just blurt out the important info for no reason but I don't like that either.
Stattys, the company that owns Noteboard is closing their US branch. They have a 20% off sale using the code
“we-wish-you-well”
I have one and just in case, bought another using this code.
I am not affiliated with the company.
These were all the rage in the G+ days. If you don't get one now, you'll be paying European shipping prices to get one.
It has a grid on one side and blank on the other. Use a wet or dry erase marker and you've got a portable flip map for minis or just drawing a map to show players. Great for use at convention games.
I really think awarding XP at the end of the session is great. It helps keep the players on top of what they've done and take a few notes so they can claim xp. And after being "in game" you get a nice meta break to talk about "the game".
I read FollowMeAndDie's blog about Session Summaries and I decided to do as he suggested on our If You Play You Win actual play campaign. So here goes.
Week one - August 31, 2020
Ari, Caper, and Tude (Ari's wildcat) got a message from Kendricks to go see the witch at Milyagon. The witch gave them their quest, to bring back an owl's tail feather, some squamish mushrooms, and a branch from the ancestor tree in the Wilkin Woods. She also mentioned that no one knew more about Wilken Woods than the woodcutter.
The party went and talked to the woodcutter who drew them a map and gave them sage advice about the fairies.
They entered Wilkin Woods and traveled nearly all the way across it on Woods Way. About halfway across they ventured south and found the first marked owl's eyrie. Returning to Woods Way by traveling due north they found a landmark, a tree with a burl on it that looked a little bit like a face with knotholes for eyes.
Continuing along Woods Way they realize they must have passed the second marked eyrie. Caper leads the party back, leaving the road to the west of the eyrie which they also find. It is now evening so they eat supper and prepare to camp hoping for more luck with these owls in the night.
XP
---
group XP for surviving a day in Wilken Woods - 200
for getting the quest from the witch - 50
for getting the map and advice from the woodcutter - 50
Ari - finding the first eyrie - 50
Caper - finding the second eyrie - 50
- climbed two trees successfully - 20 + 20
Thanks! I honestly expected to be in more pain. I've only had one dose of acetaminophen today. Most pain is just fleeting, like if I move wrong or bump my abdomen.
Hey, Josh. Was that you who logged in at the end of our podcast? We start every Monday night at 9:00 Central and usually run 60 - 90 minutes. We use both the gamerplus text chat and voice chat so you can participate even if you don't have a microphone. It is always open game chat. Everyone is welcome.
Yep, that was me, tried messaging you all to say I couldn't unmute my mic but could only listen in but you all didn't see it, I didn't know you all use the chat here.
No, we use the chat on Discord. We use both the gamerplus text chat and audio chat at the same time so we can share pics and links while we talk. Please come again to our Monday night open game chats. It's fine to not use your mic. We always have both available.
Today is my brother Robert's birthday. He's the one who got me started with Holmes Blue Box. I had money from mowing lawns, so I bought it. He was the first GM. He is my favorite GM. I emulate many of his methods as GM.
It's also the 55th anniversary of me becoming a big brother.
I don't know if this is the place to do this, but if I'm wrong Larry will delete/move it and give me a stern talking-to.
The Chronicles of Ember Starter Set launches in THREE DAYS (That's Aug. 1st, 2020 for the non-calendar minded)! Check my profile for more information on this EXCITING and NEW product! It's... cool. :D
The first picture is my dice tower/dice tray combo. The second is these things stacked for storage (held together by magnets top and bottom). The third picture is the trays deployed for use (held in whatever configuration you arranged them in by magnet again).
They do. They magnetize into a stack for storage and deploy into magnetically-arranged layouts at need. It's a pretty nifty thing. I'm getting a set. :D
Hi, I saw you promoting Gamer+ at mastodon.social. Thanks. I don't get over there as often as I used to. I started a free culture Friendica site and I followed you from there. https://curators.mixremix.cc
Since the great G+ diaspora, there's been a fragmentation of gaming communities, and I just wanted to make sure that people knew where some of these great places were. I'm actually on Friendica more than Masto - chuckdee@rpg.pbem.online.
I like Mastodon esp. because it weaned me off of facebook. I chose Friendica because it fit my server better than the other options, Apache, php, mysql.
Deep. Change is good but change is hard. The Drow are evil but the most celebrated adventure hero of all time, Drizzzt, is Drow. When you have an evil species or type the most interesting character among them is the one who fights nature and does good. As in "Good Omens" by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.
This is the kind of comment I like to see. YouTube sent me this in email and as a notification when I'm on YouTube, but now I don't see the comment.
YT being YT, or did the user delete it?
Either way, glad I got a screenshot.
Me either. My son, Kier (Draklorx), is DM. We just go online and play, I guess. So far we made characters. We played a 5e campaign in person for about a year (which I prefer) but now we're going to play online so we can all stay home.
Hey, thanks for joining the Book Club. The next book is a fun read. Brandon Sanderson "Warbreaker". He wrote it like a serial on his website so it's licensed Creative Commons. Our next book club discussion is July 20 at 9:00 PM Central. Do you use Discord?