D20 Old School

Last night when I went to play D&D with some good local friends, I actually scrounged together a sack full of dice and brought it along. This seemed like a big step, for some reason.

When I got there I searched for D20s and I only found two. They were both the old-fashioned "0-9 twice" D20s. One of them (the oldest) had one set of 0-9 inked in in green, and one set in red -- green indicated 11 through 20, of course. The other had 0-9 twice with a tiny plus mark engraved next to one of the sets of 0-9.

I rolled the latter and got a 1+, or 11. I was like "OK, 1, with the plus, that's eleven..." and I got a bunch of hootin and hollerin' about these crazy fancy new age dice with a plus on 'em like a fudge die or something. (I've got a bit of a rep as a Forge nerd among these guys.) I tried to explain about the old 0-9 twice dice, which serve equally well as percentile and twenty-sided, and which were de rigeur before ten sided dice came out and usurped the role (roll?) of percentile dice from the icosahedrons.

They were all "yeah whatever" and the conversation went to other things, but -- is it really that old school to use 0-9 twice dice? I mean, I remember when ten-sideds first came out. Is it so unheard of to use the old kinda dice anymore?

Do these kids today know *nothing* about how "back in my day we used icosahedrons as percentiles, ten-siders, AND twenty-siders, and we LOVED it dammit! Uphill, both ways!"?

hoo boy.

Liz at the Forge

Liz Danforth, my favorite fantasy artist EVAR since I was like TEN YEARS OLD, shows up on the Forge, and her first post is a reply to one of mine. How cool is that? (Joe pointed this out to me.)

Of course, she'd posted to a really really old thread, and woke it up, and people started replying, so Ron had to come in and put the smack down on the various posters. It's kinda funny cause he's simultaneously Mr Stern Moderator, and a google-eyed Danforth fanboy like myself.

Fun Photoshop Contest

Check it out.

A few faves...

Good gravy, I'm kind of amazed I actually get the Tubeways one.

Pardon my way clumsy use of images in a blogspot blog. I'm just pressing buttons here and hoping.

EDIT: Joe here. Sorry Ed, I had to kill those images. They were driving me crazy!

More UncleBear Linkage

Apparently somebody's going to be publishing RuneQuest again? How does this relate to the existing Hero Wars/HeroQuest thing? And they're doing Lankhmar too? Just in time for the comics and movies and republished books? Huh. I'm not sure how to react to that. I thought HeroQuest was Glorantha now.

Drama At Palladium Greatly Exaggerated (By Palladium)

Why do I care about this? I don't know. Palladium's in Michigan, and I've lived here in Michigan most of my life. I have a soft spot for some of the old Palladium games, freakish as they are (Ninjas & Superspies, TMNT, maybe Beyond The Supernatural, and the original tiny Mechanoids booklet). Also I am a sucker for tabloid scandal. If the blog hadn't already made that clear.

Anyway, Uncle Bear has more on the Palladium crisis. Turns out (unsuprisingly) that this wasn't actually that recent, that at least as far as the Law is convinced, he was off by a couple orders of magnitude on how much was stolen from him (5 figures instead of 6 or 7).

I wonder if he was thinking of Mega-Financial-Damage-Capacity instead of plain old Financial-Damage-Capacity?

Go read if you care about this stuff. Uncle Bear's always a good place to go for mainstream game news.

Empires

I don't know much about Iron Empires; Burning Empires looks cool to me because there aren't enough good sci-fi or even space opera type games out there; but the thing I can't get over about it is that in addition to the glorious painting type illustrations, there is this awesomely cool sketch on the PDF of the Table of Contents.

I don't know why that geeks me the heck out, but it does.

Spoken Like A True Benevolent Dictator

Ron writes:

This is where I lay down the law for participating at the booth. By signing up (that is, by paying Luke), you are agreeing to all of the points listed below, plus whatever I forgot but remember or decide later.

Awesome. I laughed.

K.O.

How do people get knocked out from a punch? The Straight Dope answers.

If you want to knock somebody out, apparently, you have to get some fast rotational motion in there -- a really swift blow to the jaw is the thing, not something heavy dropping on your head.

If you're writing simulation-y rules for pugilism, take note!

A Highly Unfortunate Distinction

There is site called "Perverted Justice" which performs the admirable service of exposing sexual predators who hit on children in regional chatrooms. Reading it is a combination of fascinating and completely nauseating, with a side order of righteous indignation and schadenfreude at their being caught and exposed.

Anyway, the character who has been voted #1 slimiest predator ever is 34 year old Paul from Chicago, aka "fleet_captain_jaime_wolf" on yahoo. His transcript is a nasty glimpse into the universe of a pedophile into dominance/submission stuff.

Why do I bring it up here? Check this shit out. (At this point he has gotten what he thinks is a 13 year old girl to refer to him as "master.")

fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:29:15 PM): Do you play role playing games?
sadlilgrrl (6:29:24 PM): i used to play a mud master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:29:36 PM): I see... What else?
sadlilgrrl (6:29:55 PM): i try to write some master but im not very good
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:30:10 PM): Youwill get better... I write for RPGs...
sadlilgrrl (6:30:34 PM): like dungeons and dragoons master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:30:40 PM): Yes, like D&D...
sadlilgrrl (6:30:47 PM): thats a really cool game master
sadlilgrrl (6:30:52 PM): i get confused by the dice tho master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:30:53 PM): Do you play it?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:31:00 PM): I will explain the dice...
sadlilgrrl (6:31:02 PM): i try to master
sadlilgrrl (6:31:15 PM): i had a book on a vampire type game like that master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:31:27 PM): Oh? Good... Vampire the Maskerade?
sadlilgrrl (6:31:33 PM): yes master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:31:42 PM): I used to work for White Wolfe...
sadlilgrrl (6:31:56 PM): is that the publisher master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:32:03 PM): Yeppers, it is.
sadlilgrrl (6:32:32 PM): thats really cool master
sadlilgrrl (6:32:38 PM): you must be really really creative master

I'm not even going to quote where the conversation goes immediately after that, but eventually, after we find out that Paul prefers Macross to Gundam, we get this:

fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:58:40 PM): Have you seen the movie "Underworld", yet?
sadlilgrrl (6:58:42 PM): my friend hillary left it at my house master
sadlilgrrl (6:58:43 PM): no master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:58:50 PM): Oh? You should, when you can.
sadlilgrrl (6:59:11 PM): okay master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (6:59:37 PM): Did you know that "Underworld" stole some of my ideas? (*blinks*)
sadlilgrrl (6:59:44 PM): no master
sadlilgrrl (7:00:06 PM): what did they do master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:00:23 PM): Well, in Vampire the Mascerade, you know how Vampires & Werewolves are enemies, right?
sadlilgrrl (7:00:42 PM): yes master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:01:10 PM): But, I had to idea to base an adventure around a Vampire who falls in love with a Werewolfe...
sadlilgrrl (7:01:36 PM): even though they hated each other master?
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:01:50 PM): Even though their people did....
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:01:55 PM): Look at Romeo & Juliet...
sadlilgrrl (7:02:01 PM): oh okay master
fleet_captain_jaime_wolfe (7:02:34 PM): THink about it, doomed love is the best form of love. (This comment scares me.)

(Italicized bits are the reaction of the Peej volunteer playing the part of the 13 year old.)

So anyway, he's apparently a former writer for White Wolf, and wants his new massively underage sex slave to play RPGs with him. Eeeeeewwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.

Anyway, he got busted and is now immortalized both on PeeJ and the Illinois sex offenders page.

There's no particular point to this post, I just was goggle-eyed seeing the juxtaposition of nerdy gamer and predator. Had to share.

Palladium Calls for Help

Palladium's financially hosed for some reason they can't talk about except to describe it as "skullduggery from within" to the tune of about a million bucks. So they're asking their fans to buy an as-yet-undrawn signed illustration for $50.

Trippy. I've enjoyed me some palladium games -- Ninjas and Superspies most of all -- but I'm not a "buy a $50 print to save the company" level fan.

Mostly I'm curious what the deal is with the "skullduggery."

Link

Heads Up From Ed

Hey y'all. Ed (as opposed to Joe) here. I thought I'd give a quick personal Heads Up to the world. 2006 has been a pretty rough year so far -- a series of medical and automobile issues and family difficulties have been sucking the life out of me, making creative work and keeping up on everybody's blog-and-Forge-life pretty difficult. My regular blog at goesping.org has become a "link from reddit.com and a few words of commentary" aggregator. My little online comic "bring it," which I'd been updating almost daily for a while, petered out. Couldn't think of anything funny anymore. I couldn't make the Forge Midwest Gathering, because I thought I needed to go on a work trip, and then when I realized my mistake about the work trip, well, I lost my mother in law that weekend instead, so it's a damn good thing I was in town.

Anyway I'm going to kindly call this a "fallow period" for myself and see how/if it continues. Apologies to Joe for using the blog he started as if it were a livejournal for the purposes of this post. :)

Websnark on Traveller

Eric Burns gets misty eyed and Traveller for a few pages. I'm approximately his age, I think, and I discovered Traveller as a young sprout myself, and yeah, he really sums up what's outstandingly cool about it.

One thing that struck me that he didn't mention is naming in Traveller. In Traveller, exotic things always, always, always have very plain names. Names so plain they highlight the exoticism of the setting by contrast.

An antigravity-powered landing and exploration vehicle was called an "air/raft". (OK, the slash is a little sparkly, but you don't pronounce it or anything.) Space suits are "vacc suits." Faster-than-life travel happens via a "jump drive." Slower-than-light space travel happens via a "maneuver drive." A drug which speeds up your perception of time and ability to act, so that other people seem to be going in slow motion, is called "slow." Shiny armor that deflects lasers is called "reflec." Armor that ablates away the energy from a laser is called "ablat."

Long before Doom gave us the BFG-9000, Traveller gave us the "PGMP-12" and "FGMP-15," that is, "plasma gun, man-portable, available on planets with a tech level at least 12," and "fusion gun, man-portable, blah blah tech level 15."

Even the spaceship from the cover lettering was just called "Free Trader Beowulf," not "Star Trader Beowulf."

Old Traveller stuff, of which I still have piles and piles, had a powerful and unique minimalist aesthetic.

Should be sweet to see what's next.