Gaming

(Boston, MA) August 28th, 2003 — Innocence Games announced today that it has acquired the license to publish tabletop roleplaying games based on the classic pulp works of William S. Burroughs. The license encompasses both the Warlord of Mars series and the popular Naked Jungle series, starring Tarzan. Innocence Games will release their first Burroughs game in Q4 2004: Tarzan, Lord of the Interzone, based on the first of the Naked Jungle books. Later supplements will incorporate Burroughs’ complex Mars mythology into the world of the Interzone and its street-raised King. ...

Perhaps reaching new depths of geekiness here, but I added a relationship mapping feature (original) to my local gaming Wiki. It shows how nodes link to one another; here’s Reese Beulay (original) as a collection of boxes and lines. This is actually pretty useful for visualizing how characters relate to one another. I’m going to play around with using it to do relationship maps for new campaigns, too. There’s probably some clever way to use this to visualize blog connections, but I’m not sure that it wouldn’t just degrade into a black hole. Maybe I’ll play with it sometime.

Absolutely awesome campaign concept, plus a bonus first session writeup. Man, I am beginning to yearn for some good pulp. Here’s the most brilliant gem out of all the brilliant gems: The characters were all previous associates who had been in Paris just before the bombs were dropped. They don’t talk about what happened there, but as a result of it they all swore an oath — an oath which takes preference over loyalties, family and faith. Each of them can call on the others to help them with any situation once and once only. For the first time, one of them has invoked the oath. ...

I’m still braindead, despite any appearances to the contrary, but Jonathan Walton writes a mean campaign prospectus (original). I am not sure I’d want to play in it, but the prospectus makes me want to want to play in it, if you see what I mean. Also, it has the best tag line ever, which I won’t ruin for you. Read to the bottom.

Since my Typepad beta account will vanish sooner or later, I moved my Gen Con photos to a local gallery. If you saw them then, you’ve seen them now — nothing new there.

“Couple of days of light posting there, huh?” Yeah, a lot of my creative energies got sidetracked over here (original). It’s a wiki for the Unknown Armies game I’m in. I kind of blame John (original) for reminding me what a cool medium wikis can be. They’re basically Web notebooks — anyone can edit a page, and it’s very easy to create a new page. Active wikis grow like ivy, twining in odd and unexpected directions, creating a hedge maze of hypertext. ...

I’m not the only one writing IC UA journals. The Moody Reviews is by Tim Toner, and it is pretty darned good reading, cause that Tim Toner guy can write. My name is Darryl (*HI, DARRYL!*), and I used to be a doctor. See, I was finishing my residency, when I ran afoul of a little bureaucratic bullshit. I was kicked to the curb, and just like that, I ended a glorious career as a surgeon before I even began it. Now I’m a telemarketer, but that’s not really relevant to what happened. What’s relevant is that I’m living with a drug dealer. ...

One of my first posts here was about the High Line, an abandoned elevated railway in Manhattan. As such, I would be remiss not to note the continued efforts to save it. (Came here from Steven Den Beste’s page? He meant to link here.)

This time, it’s stuff I did at Gen Con. Showed up Thursday afternoon. It’s really nice to have Gen Con within a reasonable distance from where I live; much better than when I lived in California. Not losing two days to travel greatly increases the chances that I’ll go back next year. The cab from the airport to the hotel was quick, checkin was easy, etc. I hit the dealer’s room first. Assume that filled in a lot of the excess time throughout the con, and you’ll be right. Much hellos, hiyas, good to meet you face to face, and so on. The dealer’s room was enormous, but poorly laid out. Upper Deck had a huge chunk of the room, in which they erected some kind of a mini-mountain. Absolutely nobody visited it and they cut off a third of the room, dramatically reducing traffic in that neck of the woods. Ooops. ...

I always spend too much money at Gen Con. Dark Inheritance totally tweaked my fondness for Christian mythos modern fantasy. It’s also a very nice piece of work; I concur with the reviews linked to on the Mythic Dreams Studios site. Probably useful for all kinds of D20 Modern games. I think the coolest aspect of the game is that it’s a D20 Modern fantasy game that blows off the D&D tropes. It goes way beyond the suddenly limited-seeming settings that come with D20 Modern. ...