Gaming

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.

I tossed this off in a friend’s comment section, but now I want to save it. Excelsior. It’s Las Vegas. 1960. The Rat Pack is headlining the Sands. And the Angel Pack is patrolling the skies… Jack Diamond: he’s a hard man, the hardest, skin like diamond and quips like knives. You couldn’t scratch him with a .45. (Note: parallel evolution (original).) Angie “Angel” Spencer: team leader, irreverent British heiress, with immense white overarching wings. She flies, and she knows when you’ve been naughty. ...

The 2003 Origins Awards ceremony is over and done with, without too many surprises. I’m quite happy to see Z-Man Games picking up a Vanguard Award for Warchon — nicely done! As happens every year, we demonstrate our fascination with the Origins Awards by talking about how irrelevant they are (original). (Sorry, but Celtic Age was actually pretty good; particularly noteworthy are the experience rules for weapons.)

We played some Trollbabe the other night, and had a tonload of fun. I was kind of expecting it to be a bit turgid, since it’s a highly experimental sort of game, but it moved really quickly and provided as much drama as I could ask for. Without going into heavy detail, it’s a game in which you play trollbabes — half human, half troll, stuck between two worlds. All PCs are trollbabes, and every trollbabe in the world is a PC. The isolation from both the human and the troll worlds is an important part of the game. ...