Artist Dining, Bloody Matlab, Important Gaming News :-)

[tcpip]

I love my artist friends, I really do. Thus it was a great delight to recently join severina_242 with a small inner circle of friends at After The Tears. We were fed free vodkas all night as our table ensured that the entrance door remained closed. Knowing that said birthday girl is fond of such objects, I ponder whether she'd be able to create Homer's Snowglobe (hat-tip to talheres. Earlier this week also held a dinner with my dear artist friend of some twenty years, Khat Kerr who is a recent arrival from Perth and has just finished a long stint working as the stage manager for the Australian Opera. Also in attendence was comrade Jenne Perlstein, who has videos of her recent fiftieth birthday bash. Jenne is a doctor, social worker, a reform ger tzedek, practising witch and professional tarot reader (yes, they have a professional guild), an active member of ANTaR and has been President of the ALP's Aboriginal and Torres St. Islander Affairs policy committee, taking over from me at the end of 2002.

The bane of my working life over the past few days has been the installation of the parallel version of Matlab. It is only very recently that this proprietary software has even been allowed to be installed on clusters (pure licensing idiocy) and following a successful test early this year, work decided to purchase (at a very hefty fee) a distributed cluster server, 32 worker nodes and a parallel computing toolbox for a client. My esteemed systems manager (who incidentally has this excellent link to street photographers rights) and I battled our way through it to stupid o'clock yesterday and frankly it's (mentally) exhausting us. It's a damn shame, because the actual program itself is very useful for high end mathematics and engineering and, like many other examples of commercial software, its first incarnations were the results of public funding. After this experience I am tempted to become a GNU Octave evangelist as revenge.

In my last post I promised a major gaming announcement (no, not D&D 4th ed). I'm starting an free online rpg games journal, RPG Review. It'll be a modest publication aiming for 1,000 subscribers or so for its first issue, and has already found some interested parties including the delightful synabetic who is offering an "Ask Orcus" advice column. Most of the first issue has already been written. A extremely low-volume announce list for subscribers is also available; sign up! Tonight - most appropriately for Friday 13th - I'm doing a playtest of phasmaphobic's Cannibal Contagian and I've signed up to do the same with mtdesing's game Mythweaver. I must also take this opportunity to apologise to tzunder for the lateness of my comments on his labour of love, Gwenthia - they are coming, I swear!

Comments

[synabetic.livejournal.com]

Delightful?




LIES.



Sounds like fun, though... I never got around to pitching you the idea of having me dance around dressed as a dragon-born paladin with a lemur fetish, and asking people questions regarding their respective life insurance policies.

No?

Damn.

[synabetic.livejournal.com]

Also: Cannibal Contagion: Samurai Slaughterfest?


WIN. Seriously.

It reminds me of this OGN I reviewed like a year or so back called Zombee. Let me see if I can find it...
Here we go: http://www.comicsbulletin.com/reviews/116303069023551.htm

Well, the samurai thing, anyway.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

You're not a friend of jayfurr are you? He knows a lot about lemurs. Even more than I do and that's saying something.

Actually I know a bit about Paladins as well. And with nicked_metal's knowledge of dragons we might just be able to do this..

Or not.

Let's just start with "Ask Aunty Orcus", shall we?


PS: Great issue today. Oh god, "issue", hahaha.

[charisma.livejournal.com]

I signed up!

[synabetic.livejournal.com]

Hey man, Orcusville is HARDfrickinCORE.
(And thanks! I'll tell Josh-- today was his strip)

Hmmm... now I'm tempted. No, no, you're right. Best to start with the Ask Orcus thing. It's not exactly an original idea, but we already have stock art for the pieces (for flavour) and it should be a real hoot... now all we need are questions for My Dread Lord to respond to! :D

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Excellent! So the world-wide transformation of the hobby begins.. Bwahahahaha.. ahem

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

It's not exactly an original idea, but we already have stock art for the pieces (for flavour) and it should be a real hoot... now all we need are questions for My Dread Lord to respond to! :D


Oh, I'm sure they'll come a-plenty... I mean who wouldn't have a question for Orcus if given the opportunity?

Hmmm... I think I'll brew on a couple this afternoon..

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Great review and seems like an very appropriate setting as well...

[phasmaphobic.livejournal.com]

Woot!

Keep me posted on how the test goes. Also, the latest playtest rules are here.

[synabetic.livejournal.com]

Nice! I, er, ORCUS looks forward to them.

And no, I don't know jayfurr, by the way. But it seems like we already have great things in common... lemurs, tacos? This person must be divine!

[synabetic.livejournal.com]

Wow, it looks really cool. I'll have to see if I can take it out for a playtest spin (I'll earnestly try). Is it okay if I link to it in my lj?

[taavi.livejournal.com]

so you still want that article on CoC magic then? give me a deadline I can miss.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Yep, I sure do... You have until the spring solstice, i.e., months away.

That should be long enough, eh? :-)

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

An RPG journal? Colour me interested. I'll bookmark it.

Initial thoughts..

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

OK, a couple of us went through the rules tonight. It was more familiar with 'narrativist'-style scene-based rather than turn-based play, but the other guy grokked it pretty quickly.

We both thought the organising of the rules could do with a little work. Everything that's on the character sheet should be explained in the first chapter, for example or at least highly references. cf., those very hand charts that the various Chaosium games use which point out where in the rulebook you'll find part 'x' of the sheet.

The section on 'gear' should probably be elaborated and clarified. The "Who's The Boss" advantage can be misused as it can be used to successfully win a scene and the narration can include, for example, the acquisition of a new piece of gear, which can then be sacrificed in the next scene .. and so the cycle continues.

I also thought that a a fully fledged sample scenario would be a good idea, along with CiC notes on the importance of balance in a scenario along with narrative flow. As it stands it's a very finely balanced game and the CiC will probably have to be quite attentive to the Threat value of opponents or the various goodies that the heroic survivors discover.

(We played a pair of medieval member of the Japanese court sent off into a zombie village where the best koi lived in a particular pond...)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh, I should also mention in addition to all those comments it was great! :-)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

I first encountered him in the early 90s on USENET when he looked after the alt.fan.lemurs newsgroup. He also did some awesome t-shirts concerning a certain Serdar Argic, an ancient Internet kook. Now there's so many of them... someone like Serdar Argic would be unnoticeable today..

Re: Initial thoughts..

[phasmaphobic.livejournal.com]

Awesome, thanks for the feedback! Some questions:

"The section on 'gear' should probably be elaborated and clarified. The "Who's The Boss" advantage can be misused as it can be used to successfully win a scene and the narration can include, for example, the acquisition of a new piece of gear, which can then be sacrificed in the next scene .. and so the cycle continues.

I'm not picturing this, but then again I just woke up. Could you give me some examples?


We both thought the organising of the rules could do with a little work. Everything that's on the character sheet should be explained in the first chapter, for example or at least highly references. cf., those very hand charts that the various Chaosium games use which point out where in the rulebook you'll find part 'x' of the sheet.

I'm unfamiliar with those Chaosium charts. Do you think a quick image of the character sheet, with numbers next to each little section, with a key for those numbers afterwards, would be useful?

Any other layout suggestions?

[phasmaphobic.livejournal.com]

Absolutely! Go right ahead, and please let me know how it turns out. I posted the updated link above, so you can find all the rules and extra sheets there.

[phasmaphobic.livejournal.com]

Yay! I'm glad you had fun. That excites me =)

Can you email me the first and last names of the people involved? I'd like to add them to my playtester credits.

[tau-iota-mu-c.livejournal.com]

Hey at least it's not IDL. And the free alternative to that is apparently a never ending stream of "oh, you need the foo module. That hasn't been written yet. Wait til the next version".

[zenicurean.livejournal.com]

I just realised the Spider Jerusalem thing with the icon. Awesome.

[phasmaphobic.livejournal.com]

He's my hero =)

[gunslingerelite.livejournal.com]

Subscribed.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh, I know that critter, yeah, that one wasn't much fun either. But eventually we managed to get it up and running.

Re: Initial thoughts..

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Re: Gear and narration. In a Showdown, characters get cards equal to their Characteristic and Gear. With the "Teach Who's Boss" Mojo, you get an extra 5 cards if you sacrifice some Gear. However, through winning a play in a Showdown you can add a Fact - including the acquisition of more Gear. Indeed, it's even given as an example: "As I punch him, I grab his gun and wrestle it from his grasp".

Do you think a quick image of the character sheet, with numbers next to each little section, with a key for those numbers afterwards, would be useful?

Very!

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Share the good news far and wide :-)

[aurickandrien.livejournal.com]

I still have my student version of Matlab installed on my computer. I can't remember how to use it at all, but I assume that since I was good at maths one day I'll get back into it. :)

If I had one question for Orcus it'd be about how he felt when we defeated him in the battle for The Lost City and kicked him out of our world. Nice to know that you're not letting all that editorial experience with Phantas go to waste. ;)

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh, getting Matlab to work on the desktop is fine. Getting to work on a cluster with a simple submit is fine. Getting it work on the cluster in parallel is proving to be a right-proper pain.

Although Mathworks swear they have a solution for us.

The Lost City? Isn't that module B4?

[(Anonymous)]

Yeah, that's the one. It formed the major cornerstone of a 2nd Ed campaign I was in three or four years ago. :)

[aurickandrien.livejournal.com]

Sorry thought I was logged on.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

'Tis OK, done it a couple of times myself.

It's been a very long time since I've read B4. I must have another look. I don't remember Orcus appearing in it. Although he does, with his good mate Demogorgon, in one of the IM series modules :-)

[aurickandrien.livejournal.com]

Actually he doesn't appear in it. It's just that the lost city itself went beyond being just a module and was a major location in the campaign, and Orcus was a major feature of the campaign. We had an epic battle against his forces at the lost city to stop the summoning of his avatar. :)

I believe the main villain in the B4 module was a one-horned tentacled demon name Zygon... but don't quote me on that.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll quote you on it all right - because what you say is true!

Zargon was indeed the ultimate villian in B4 - encounter #100 (!) of the module. Mind you, he's in the "expanded" section, which PCs of the module's level really shouldn't go anywhere near - it's for levels 1-3 and getting to Zargon (with his 12 HD, involves getting past.. oh a blue dragon, a vampire, a chimera ...)

(This said I do remember a 1st level AD&D that I played some 25 years ago where we had to defeat a vampire... and we did).