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. ...
Patchworky commentary ahoy. Um, I guess I’ll talk about indie gaming at Gen Con now. The Forge folks had a shared booth, which looked very busy every time I dropped by. Yay them! I bought some stuff and talked to some people and generally had a good time there. I met Scott Knipe (original) (who wrote Wyrd and Charnel Gods), and he is just about the nicest guy in the world. He insisted in pressing a printed copy of Charnel Gods on me, so I made him autograph it. We had a nice chat about fan sites and upcoming stuff and so on, and he was one of the people I met at Gen Con who I’d love to have a beer with sometime. Stupid busy schedule. Maybe next year. ...
Best trick for finding NPC pictures ever: [google://party+pictures](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=party pictures&btnG=Google Search)
Not enough gaming today? I have more! See now the UPC Bar Code Character Generator (original), which informs me that the Johnny Cash album sitting next to my computer is a female elf with Str 14 and no other notable stats. Star Wars Galaxies is a fairly wise, cute halfling with special military training. Via One Hit At A Time. So much gaming talk. It must be Gencon coming on.
hypocorisma (original) is a weblog dedicated to naming. Just naming. Not names for gaming, not choosing names for your kid — those are aspects of naming, and S. V. Affolee is into the process of naming itself. There’s a domain expert for everything out there. Via Perverse Access Memory (original).
I’m overwhelmed. The Library of Congress put its Prints & Photographs Catalog online. Look, it’s turn of the century Boston!
Rick Jones wrote up some rules for Wushu Falkenstein (original) over on RPGnet, which should interest at least a few of my readers. His magic rules are excellent. Also on the topic of Wushu (original), the author turns out to be a regular poster on RPGnet. And here’s a post on running Exalted with Wushu rules. I’m still trying to figure out the over the top problem. Here’s another take on it: Embellishments don’t have to be flashy. “I slip through the night, varying the rhythm of my footsteps irregularly, my black suit blending with the shadows, avoiding leaves and other noisy footing.” As a GM, nothing is forcing me to present the players with obstacles which invite flashy solutions — what if the fight takes place next to a sleeping giant?
Justin Achilli has spilled a few beans about his new fantasy setting. Elsewhere, he said simply “Frostholm. First quarter 2005.” In a way I sort of miss hanging out in the kind of crowd that picks up on news like this within seconds and savages it to within an inch of its life, but in a lot of ways I don’t. Regardless, the setting looks like the kind of thing that I might well like a lot. On the other hand, I’ll continue to bet that the market for grim campaign settings is not all that huge, and Midnight might have locked it up by then. But we’ll see.