| Cursed World: Is it soup yet? |
[Jul. 1st, 2009|08:57 pm] |
I've mentioned it in passing several times, but I don't think I've devoted a whole post to Cursed World. It's starting to resemble something playable.
Please take a look at it, and tell me what you think. Could you make a character with just what's on the site now? What parts need more explanation?
http://cursedworld.wikidot.com/ |
|
|
| Doctor Who RPG coming this October |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|03:44 pm] |
The long-awaited Doctor Who RPG from Cubicle 7 will be released in October. Cubicle’s Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space (MSRP $59.95) is the third licensed Doctor Who RPG. FASA published one in the 1980s, which was followed by a Virgin Publishing release in 1991. Cubicle’s new Doctor Who RPG is based on the current iteration of the popular BBC TV series, and features lots of full color pictures from the show.
Cubicle’s Doctor Who RPG, which was created to appeal to both the experienced and first time gamer, comes in a deluxe box set that contains a 144-page Gamemaster’s Guide, an 86-page Player’s Guide, a 30-page Adventures Book, 4-page Quick Start Guide, Pre-Generated Character Sheets, Blank Character Sheets, Gadget Sheets, tokens and dice.
Oh hells yeah.
http://cubicle-7.com/
http://www.icv2.com/articles/news/15219.html |
|
|
| Five things that made me smile (since the last time I did this) |
[Jun. 21st, 2009|12:32 pm] |
1. I finally got STCC to cough up my grade for Intro to Graphic Arts, and I got an A. Woot!
2. I helped make a computer. See earlier entry for the whole story on that.
3. Blackout + fully charged MP3 player = one man rave! This is either the most awesome or most pathetic thing I've ever done. I vote awesome.
4. Homemade strawberry smoothies! Give me a blender, some yogurt, and some frozen fruit, and I'll give you the best stuff you've ever tasted.
5. A Dwarf Fortress review linked to a page I made. I created the Stupid Dwarf Tricks page a long time ago. (Everything from the top down to "vomitorium" is mine.) Seeing it linked to from a professional (-looking) gaming site warms the cockles of my heart.
Wow. I got though a five-things post without mentioning a web comic. Hey, I forgot to plug Cursed World! Let me add a bonus 6th item:
6. I finally finished "Unwelcome Guests," the introductory short story for Cursed World. It came out better than I thought it would. It hits on all the major themes of the games, and introduced the catch phrase I wanted. It's an honest-to-god short story -- more than 1000 words long, and has something like a plot. |
|
|
| Chicago Coyotes |
[Jun. 20th, 2009|05:56 pm] |
Remember the Quizno's Coyote from two years ago? It turns our that wasn't as freakishly improbable as it seemed.
"At first we discovered there were many more coyotes living in the city than we had ever guessed." Gehrt estimates that more than 2,000 coyotes thrive in the Windy City, which is about 2,000 more than you might expect.
Chicago is full of coyotes. Someone call Harry Dresden.
Full article here:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105385196&sc=fb&cc=fp
EDIT: Be sure to see the photo gallery there. Coyotes in airports and office buildings! Cool stuff. |
|
|
| How I Spent My Blackout |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|08:07 pm] |
The power was out, and I was busy trying not to go crazy with no AC and no Internet, when I got a call from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) caffeine_bunny. He'd found yet another video card, this one better than the last one he got me. (I don't know how he finds these things.) The only catch was, he needed my old one, since he had a plan that called for an AGP video card.
The plan was to build a new computer for midnightneko85. She is about to move out of her parent's house, and the parents want to hang onto the family computer. Coincidentally, rubixfox had scored a pile of computer parts from his school, ITT. After swapping out parts from his old computer to the new secondhand system, he should have almost enough parts left over for a whole computer.
I thought this was a great idea, and wanted to contribute to this Frankensteinian creation. A few phone calls later, we had a plan for all four of us to meet at Rubix's parents' house, where the power had not got out, and thus had AC and Internet. So this was a good plan.
( Read more... ) |
|
|
| Erdős number |
[Jun. 19th, 2009|09:02 am] |
Today's xkcd riffs on Erdős numbers, the mathematicians' equivalent of the Kevin Bacon game. I didn't get the joke, but fortunately, someone linked to the Wikipedia article in the comments. From there, I found an interesting factoid.
"As of June 2007, the University of Memphis mathematical sciences faculty has the most faculty members with Erdős number 1 of any mathematics department. The Erdős-1 mathematicians are Béla Bollobás, Ralph Faudree, Jeno Lehel, Cecil C. Rousseau, and Richard Schelp. Three of these faculty members are among the top ten most frequent co-authors with Erdős."
Go home team. |
|
|
| More Internet Toys |
[Jun. 9th, 2009|06:20 pm] |
Yet another curious feature in a Google product. Google Reader, my RSS reader of choice, lets you favorite items from any feed you read. Here's my favorites, if anyone cares:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/06962767827557320217
It's mostly a best of Scans Daily collection, with occasional links to one of the 24 web comics I read.
Naturally, a favorites list gets a feed of its own, so anyone can follow this with their own reader, even if it's not Google's. |
|
|
| Furry Gay Republican Diaper Fetish Sex Scandal |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|12:15 am] |
I am not making this up. The Pittsburgh Post Gazette has the story.
Orie aide accused of soliciting teen for 'furry' sex
An aide to a McCandless state senator known for her tough stance on sex crimes was arrested late Thursday on accusations he propositioned a 15-year-old over the Internet.
In a series of instant messages and online chats, Alan David Berlin, 40, of Carlisle, discussed dressing up in animal costumes and engaging in various sex acts with the boy, the state attorney general's office said yesterday.
Furryne.ws has their own take on it. Someone there did a little digging with Google Cache, and found the creep's Pounced profile. That's where the diaper part comes out.
I hardly know where to begin. The "Republican Sex Scandal" part is familiar ground, and the "Diaper Furry" part isn't even weird to me. It's like a car crash that you can't look away from. Somehow this guy has managed to sully the reputations of three different disreputable groups all at once. I kinda hope this story doesn't spread very far. The guy is just an aide to a state senator, but the story is such a perfect storm of perversity that it's already popping up on snarky political sites. |
|
|
| Five things that made Strangething smile this week |
[Jun. 1st, 2009|11:47 am] |
Time for another five things list. It's becoming a habit to include two web comics every time I do one of these, but what ya gonna do?
1. Up Go see it. It's every bit as good as I've come to expect from Pixar. Don't miss it.
2. Digger I think I'm in love with Ursula Vernon now. This one used to be on a subscription model, but now it's free. Brilliant stuff.
3. Girl Genius I finally got caught up with this one. That is one convoluted plot. Add it to the list of web comics I want to make into games.
4. "The Next Doctor," the Doctor Who special that aired in the UK last December. BBC America will air it at the end of this month, but the torrent has been around for months. Take that, law-abiding Americans!
5. The Evolution of Dance Funny! |
|
|
| My Luck with Computers, pt 2 |
[May. 28th, 2009|08:39 am] |
My weird luck continues. The Thinkpad lives again. I opened an access panel, and found a fan inside. As far as I can tell, this is the only fan in the computer. I cleaned it out with a q-tip, and now the computer is working fine. There are "Warranty void if removed" stickers over that hatch, but I'm pretty sure that it's already out of warranty.
In other news, Cursed World is making progress. There's a forum attached to the wiki now. Go leave a comment! I'm almost ready to tackle character creation. There's a magic system on the Evil Hat wiki that is very much worth stealing. |
|
|
| My Luck With Computers |
[May. 22nd, 2009|12:30 pm] |
I have the weirdest luck. After the Happy Fun-puter burned out its second video card, I gave up on fixing it. Not long after that, Dad gave me his old HP laptop. So I wasn't without a computer for long, and I could navigate the scrambled graphics well enough to copy my essential files over.
Then the laptop's battery wore out. Not too much trouble, I could still surf the web on the recliner, or even the back porch. Until I tripped over the cord, and knocked the thing off the the table. It landed right on the point where the power cord plugs in. Now the connector doesn't stay in place. Even a little jiggle breaks the connection, and since there's no battery, it just goes dark.
Fortunately, this was only a few weeks before jaime_sama and garybart were visiting, and as it happened, they had an old Thinkpad they didn't need. It also had no battery, and a quirk where it wouldn't boot up properly at random, but it was a lot better than what we had.
The boot up problem wasn't so bad. It alway booted on the second try. (It did sometimes set the clock back to 1990, that I could deal with.) This surprised jaime_sama, since it was worse when she was using it.
Then caffiene_bunny, who had heard about my string of downgrades, lucked into this bargain computer I blogged about a few days ago. That one had its problems, but it inspired me to transplant some parts, and see it the Happy Fun-puter could live again.
It works! It's alive! We can do it, we have the technology, we can make it stronger, faster, better. Ahem. Pardon me. So nice to have a badass computer again.
So then I tried to boot the laptops, to copy my old files over. Nothing. Niether one booted up. The HP doesn't come on at all, and the Thinkpad beeps and stops every time, just like my sister said happened to her.
It's crazy, my luck. I don't know if it's a blessing or a curse. I sure enjoy having a good computer again. While it lasts. |
|
|
| Player's Handbook 3 |
[May. 21st, 2009|12:52 pm] |
I called it! Minotaurs in the player's handbook.
And Githyanki, apparently. Or maybe Githzerai. Probably both. |
|
|
| Computer update |
[May. 20th, 2009|12:41 pm] |
Good news on the computer front. caffeine_bunny saved a computer from the trash, and hooked me up. So now I'm rolling with a new video card, hard drive, and a big whack of memory to boot. I owe the bunny big time.
Actually sitting at a desk to do computer stuff seems to have a positive effect on my computing habits. I feel industrious. Even if most of that energy is being funneled into Cursed World. On the other hand, I can play Civ IV again, and that can eat time like nothing else. So it evens out, I guess.
I'm still looking for work, by the way. If anyone needs some web design work done, let me know. |
|
|
| Fate SRD |
[May. 12th, 2009|06:30 pm] |
I told citizen_pogo that I'd post a link to the Fate SRD. There is a very nice version specific to Spirit of the Century which should work fine. Just remember the skill and stunt lists will be different, to match the setting. There's also a generic nutshell guide on the Evil Hat wiki.
I am going to need my own private wiki at some point. My Fate projects are diverging from SotC too much. |
|
|
| Game design bug bites agan |
[May. 10th, 2009|02:15 pm] |
Why am I compelled to combine Fate with D&D4e? I suppose there are a few similarities. Neither system is what you would call "rules light," and both have a refreshing disdain for "realism." But the way two games use that crunch could not be further apart. D&D revels in its wargame roots more than ever before. Fate is cutting edge in the way it actively encourages role playing.
Now I have two pet projects I'm playing with, and both of them use Fate. One is my ongoing, ever-changing D&D tribute. I called it Evil Empire, then Orc Power for a while, and now Cursed World. (Not sure I like the name "cursed world.") I'm taking bits and pieces from any edition of D&D I can lay hands on. Like I said in my review, there are some excellent innovations there.
My other project is The Gift, a superhero game, with an original setting. I had this one mostly on the back burner, until Fred Hicks (Fate co-designer; drivingblind) made a blog post about supers RPGs. He suggested that supers need crunchier combat, more like D&D4's rocking, wargamish combat system. This makes all kind of sense, re-ignited my interest in The Gift.
There are bits of D&D4 that can be transfered directly to a supers game. The at-will, encounter, daily division would work nicely in a super milieu. More importantly, nearly all 4e powers have a side effect in addition to dealing damage. This would work nicely nicely with the damage system I was pondering for Gift. The system didn't distinguish much between big hits and little ones, so the idea of varying side effects would make combat more interesting.
I don't need these distractions. I have a web page to design, and I promised to run Ironclaw for some of my furry friends. But the game design bug will not be ignored. |
|
|
| navigation |
| [ |
viewing |
| |
most recent entries |
] |
| [ |
go |
| |
earlier |
] |
| |
|
|
