Good cartoon

Jesse Moynihan's MANLY. So good.





P.S. I'm still alive. Playing miniatures. Current X-wing champ of Tompkins Co., NY playing Whisper and mini-swarm. Still working on getting my Warmachine army painted... Maybe I'll post some pics...

Best animation for today

Cyclope from marine duchet on Vimeo.

Half million hits (!) and a hiatus for miniature gaming

Wow. I noticed this blog has now exceeded 500,000 hits and 600 followers (counting Blogger and G+). It's a mystery to me why this is the case since I haven't been adding much content for the last year or two. Old posts still get a ton of hits from Google searches though...

Real life has gotten intense lately with serious time pressures from my job and family life. It's all wonderful stuff, but it's hard to handle late nights of gaming when the spawn awaken at 6am every morning.

So yeah, without actual play inspiration the blog has slowed to almost nothing - especially since the second born arrived. I'm pretty much on RPG hiatus at the moment because I can't handle long games and this Spring semester I'm going to be super busy. I need way more sleep than the normal person to function properly.

My gaming lately has focused more on stuff I can do in bite-sized chunks of time. Skirmish-scale miniatures mostly. In particular X-Wing Miniatures, which is totally fun and looks really cool on the table. I am also painting up a Warmachine faction (Menoth) for imminent deployment. I can play these skirmish games in ~1 hour, which fits my life right now. I can also paint minis in the evening, which is something that I find supremely calming.

Han Solo versus Boba Fett. Fun stuff.

My Perception vs. Player Perception

In our last session the party climbed into a hole in a cloud. At the bottom - deep inside the cloud - they found a small river leading to a dark lake, the extent of which they could not make out in the dim light. Gemma the dwarf and Dvin the gnome eased out to the end of a rickety boardwalk extending out over the water. Just below the surface of the water, at the edge of the light, bones were emerging from the water. They clicked and they clacked and the water bubbled, and the bones self-assembled into a bridge extending from the darkness towards the party. Fingerous phalanges eventually wiggled out of the water near the adventurers, as the terminus of the bridge pulled itself up onto the boardwalk. At the edge of the light, ghouls with scabbed, cracked faces shambled across the bridge towards the party, and animated skeletons emerged, self-assembling, from the body of the bridge itself. A tough fight! The party won! The adventurers then walked across the skeletal bridge to a small island, where they found a prize in the ghoul refuse: a small golden orb bearing microscopic engravings - a map of an unknown world.

...so the whole session was basically a single encounter. I thought it was a good, fun encounter and I had a blast as the DM. I felt a little disappointed afterwards, however, because there wasn't much in the way of exploration, narrative advancement, or NPC interaction in the game. I try to have every session present a good splash of each of these elements because it's the kind of stuff I like when I play. Also, there was a lot more chit-chat than usual that night (which is cool, the players are friends, some of whom I haven't seen in a while), music was playing the background, and there were plenty of miniatures and gratuitous Dwarven Forge settings - all in violation of immersion dogma! I had fun, but I wasn't sure how "well" I did as a DM...

Within the fews days after the session, however, three of the players separately mentioned to me how much they liked the session - especially the skeleton bridge. Ok, cool!

Dear Princess Celestia: Although this truth should always be self evident, it's important for me to always remember that sometimes it's okay to have a simple night of beer, metal, monster killing, and treasure fondling. As a Dungeon Master I shouldn't fret too much about packing every single session with mapping, dialogue, and weird characters. The simple, perennial pleasures of death dealing and leveling-up will never disappoint anyone who plays the game of Dungeons & Dragons.

Session 7 ghoul smashing music:

ACKS Minimal Edition for OD&D Fans

If I were going to start a new campaign I would almost certainly go with the Adventurer Conqueror King System for a ruleset. For me this game hits closer to the sweet spot between crunch, flexibility, and user friendliness than perhaps any of the other retro D&D-inspired systems out there. I was aware of ACKS when I started my current campaign, but decided not to adopt it because the core rulebook is still a bit too long and fluffy for my tastes. It contains a lot of material that is of extremely high quality, but is largely extraneous for my own campaign.

Damn. If I had only known about THIS:

The ACKS Character Codex. This book is a beautiful thing. It is the core of ACKS system condensed into a small digest-sized booklet. It's essentially a Men & Magic or Player's Handbook for ACKS. And it's only $4.45 on Lulu! (This isn't an advertisement, by the way - I have no connection to the creators of this item.) This means if a referee wants to adopt the system, they could afford to buy a stack of copies to hand out to players. The referee could then use the more voluminous core book as a reference.

This book looks great. Here you can see it compared to the Grey Co. Spellbook supplement and the original Men & Magic:

Here's the title page:

Tavis Allison tipped me off on this thing. Apparently the Codex is not considered an official Autarch publication, however Tavis tells me that an official version of the Codex is on Autarch's lengthy to-do list. Let Autarch know if you want more stuff like this. I do!

Best Superhero Flick?

Mr. Gorgonmilk was wondering about trends in the quality of superhero movies. I'm not a big movie guy - actually I hate almost all movies - so I admit that I couldn't think of many superhero movies that transcended being merely watchable. I did, however, recall this scene from 1978...



Cinema doesn't get much better than this... At least in the opinion of Cyclopeatron...

Brief Log of Catheign Sessions

Friday night was Session 7 of our Cloud Mines of Catheign OD&D game. Below is a brief log of sessions, localities, and loot for the campaign, primarily for the benefit of those involved in the game. Hopefully I'll get to post some better descriptions and illustrations related to the game, but unfortunately it's been hard for me to find much time for blogging these days...

Primary PCs:

Bas – human thief (played by Reese of Kingdom's in Trevail)

Dvinsfeldfar – gnome MU

Broom - human cleric (played by Nathan of Secrets of the Shadowend)

Gemma - fighting dwarf

Kale - fighting man

Occasional PCs (currently residing at Inn in Tilman’s Grove):

Skuldge - human MU (played by Greg of Gorgonmilk)

Rufus – Fighting ½ giant

PCs gone or dead:

Sillus – fighting lizard man of Peis

Nix – cleric, left Catheign

Flurd – MU, left Catheign

Hu – fighting man, RIP

Session 1

            Arrival at Tilman’s Grove, Catheign

            Triangulation of cloud mine, initial foray up to first level

            Janis and Filby hired to join party

            RIP Hu and Filby

            Items recovered:

                        Goggles of Seeing Through Dense Mist

                        Some minimal goblin coinage

Session 2

Meia and Janis join party

            Thorough exploration of first level of cloud mine

            Goblin fights

            Ghoul falls from sky onto roof of first level

            Items recovered:

                        6 gold ingots

                        Scroll: ESP

                        Mic. Jewelry worn my vain goblins

                        Silver dagger with ancient script

Session 3

            Discovery and initial exploration of High Star Garden

            Zymos moondial, Gadeaxe stardial, Orchid of the cloud fountain

            Confrontation with ghouls seeking Dvin’s snuffbox

            Borgus the goblin, and his basket of black mushrooms

            Items recovered:

                        4 gold bracelets

Session 4

            Initial exploration of Low Pyramid of High Star Garden

            Room of animated mosaics

            Gol stonecutter Frammus

            Battle with Mielle’s Guard

            Death of Meia

            Items recovered:

                        Unidentified fungus

                        2 ancient, inscribed short swords

                        gold bracelet

                        90 gp

                        ring of feather fall

                        MU scroll: magic missle, invisibility

                        Dagger (unremarkable)

                        Meia’s Gem

                       

Session 5

            Exploration of low pyramid

Note from Mielle and encounter with Mielle’s projection

            (stopped session in burnt library)

            Items recovered:

                        Small silver effigy of fine workmanship

                        124 platinum pieces

Session 6

            Continued exploration of low pyramid         

Chased Mielle to shanties as base of observatory tower

            Crash of wasp-covered wooden orb into the star garden

            Discovery of excavation at base of observatory tower and undercloud river

    

Session 7

            Spiked down excavation wall to undercloud river

            Encounter with self assembling skeletal bridge

Ghoul encounter

            Broom paralyzed by ghoul, almost drowns

            Small island with old statue

            Items recovered:

Finely engraved orb map of unknown planet