Blackmoor Vituperative

Oh, I nearly forgot: I was interviewed for a few minutes last night by Bethany Halle, of “Fire of Fantasy and Darkness with host Bethany Halle”. I am not sure why she thought I would be interesting, but since she appeared to be having technical difficulties (did I mention how badly the internet at this hotel sucks?), there probably wasn’t much harm in interviewing me rather than someone genuinely interesting.

My portion of the interview starts at one hour and twenty-five minutes (1:25) into the podcast:

The Fire of Fantasy and Darkness with host Bethany Halle – Highlighting the World of Fantasy

RSS podcast feed

My first “podcast”: myself, Greg Porter, and John Meagher, on the Game Development panel at MystiCon 2011, 2011-02-25 @ 20:00.

Game Development podcast (mp3, 51 MB)

I really hate my voice.

I have been invited to be a guest at MystiCon 2011. It’s this weekend. Here is my schedule, in the unlikely event anyone wants to seek me out and listen to me blather.

• Game Development, Friday, 20:00
• Running a LARP, Saturday, 13:00
• Game Publishing, Saturday, 15:00
• A Unique Magic System – Can It Be Done, Sunday, 11:00

I am not a terribly interesting person. At best I am “a character”, but I haven’t actually done much worth talking about. However, I have the good fortune to know some genuinely interesting people. For example, Tee Morris.

I know Tee through RavenCon, a science fiction convention in Virginia which he and I had a part in founding in 2006 (my part in that being a bit smaller than his). He is also the author of a number of books, the most well-known of which is probably MOREVI. He also happens to be one of the authors of Podcasting for Dummies. In this case, I am the eponymous dummy.

Here’s the deal: I wanted to record our Friday night superhero game, because I think it’s going really well. I tried using a PC microphone I have had rattling around in a drawer since 1995. The results were not satisfactory. I went to H. H. Gregg and Best Buy and looked for an omnidirectional microphone, but they didn’t have them. I searched online for “omnidirectional microphone”, and all I really found was a Blue Snowball. Was this microphone good? Bad? Indifferent? Hell if I knew. So I called Tee and asked for advice, and now I am passing that advice on to you.

First off, he said the best choice for microphones for what I was doing is the Rode Podcaster. The Rode Podcaster is $230, though, which is way more than I wanted to spend.

A decent second choice, according to Tee, is the Samson CO1U. It’s $100, which, while more than I would like to spend, is not out of the question. So that was a strong contender.

However, Tee asked if I ever planned on recording on the go — recording a panel at a convention (MystiCon, for example, where I am appearing as a guest). It really hadn’t occurred to me, but you know, that might actually be pretty cool. His suggestion, in that case, was the Zoom H2 portable stereo recorder. Tee himself has the Zoom H4, which he loves, but he said that the H2 was much easier to use, that it has great sound fidelity, and that it also doubles as a USB microphone.

I read up on all three of Tee’s suggestions, reading reviews online on various web sites. I dithered a bit, but eventually went with the Zoom H2. It should arrive in a couple of days, and I plan to take it with me to MystiCon.

Thanks, Tee! I hope I haven’t grievously misrepresented you.

I don’t play a lot of video games. I played WOW for a couple of years (rather, I paid for it for a couple of years), and from time to time I dust off my neato-bitchin’ Logitech Extreme 3D Pro flight stick and fly my WW2 fighter plane into the ground a few dozen times, but really that’s about it. That’s not the point, though. It doesn’t matter whether I play video games, collect Norwegian ballads, or spend my days writing pornographic limericks about toothpaste — in the USA, no one is allowed to pass a law against it, or even regulate it. Why not? The important reason why not is because IT’S NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS WHAT PEACEFUL, CONSENTING ADULTS DO WITH THEIR FREE TIME. A less-important reason is because we have these rules that the government is supposed to abide by, and one of them says (among other things) NO LAWS RESTRICTING FREE SPEECH, YOU FASCIST JACKASS.

So why am I spouting all of this stuff that every child ought to know by the age of ten (and which most legislators apparently never learned)? Because some jackasses want to pass laws regulating video games. That by itself is not new. This sort of thing comes up every so often. Before video games, it was movies, before that it was rock and roll, before that it was novels, and before that it was movies again. Ad nauseam. I bet you dollars to doughnuts that the first time some monobrowed cave dweller scratched a stick figure in a limestone rock, another monobrowed cave dweller was there claiming it would cause the downfall of not-yet-quite-humanity. And yet here we all are, and it’s turned out more or less okay so far.

What’s new (ish) is the Video Game Voters Network. So watch this short but entertaining public service message, and then get off your butt and do something useful: vote. Vote libertarian, if that’s an option, but if not, at least vote for the least oppressive, least power-mad, least war-crazy, least superstitious person you can find. And then call them periodically to remind them that you voted for them because they were supposed to be less of an irrational fascist dillweed than the other irrational fascist dillweeds that wanted the job, and if they don’t shape up you’ll vote for some other irrational fascist dillweed next time around, and they’ll have to go get a real job.

You might or might not know that Green Ronin’s DC Adventures book (published in August) uses the same ruleset that Mutants & Masterminds 3e will.

This demo session might give folks an idea what the game is like in play (more or less — they explain things that wouldn’t be explained if no one were recording it, and the role-playing is very sparse for the same reason).

“Vigilance Press Podcast has DC freelancer Jack Norris and artists extraordinaire James Dawsey and Dan Houser join them for a game of DC Adventures to see how it plays (and Jack gets to play Green Lantern). Check it out!”

http://mikelaff.podbean.com/2010/09/08/dc-adventures-actual-play-demo/

From the West End Games Fan Site forum:

Princes of the Universe Needs you!!!

PREVIEW SAMPLE
http://www.godsendagenda.com/art/PotU_Sample.pdf

HELLAS was never intended to be just a single role-playing game — from the very start we had planned five books, and the second one even had a name: Princes of the Universe (after the Queen song). This book would expand the HELLAS universe in new and exciting ways, allowing players to see who the movers and shakers of the HELLAS universe were, both heroic and villainous.

As with HELLAS, we had planned Princes of the Universe (and, indeed, all the books in the series) to be an experience — full color, high-quality artwork, glossy cover, the works — and so POTU was designed that way from the very start. It’s truly a sight to behold.

That’s where you come in.

The number one thing you can do to help is spread the word. When you visit gaming sites and forums drop the HELLAS name and talks about your experience with the book. Direct people who may be interested in a good sci-fi game to the webpage and to the Kickstarter site.

With your help, we will be able to print Princes of the Universe in the way it deserves to be printed: in full color. All we’re asking is for your help and support now. If we can get enough support before our deadline, we’ll be able to augment our current printing funds with your added money and print our book in color.

We’re not asking you to spend more than you would normally spend for the book, but if you want to then we’re offering additional benefits for additional pledges, as you can plainly see on the Kickstarter page.

Here is the link http://kck.st/aZUGdU

Thanks for your help.

I wish these guys the best of luck. Publishing a role-playing game and breaking even (much less making a profit) is much more difficult now than it was back in the mid-1990s. They will need all the help they can get.

I want to run a gritty science fiction game or a modern fantasy game, using d6 Space, d6 Fantasy, and/or d6 Adventure. If I run the modern fantasy game, it’ll be in my Rough Magic setting. If it’s a science fiction game, I want to make up a new setting. I am tentatively calling it ZeroSpace. Here’s a blurb:

The Thousand Worlds are at war, and have always been at war: with the Veejhad, the Shi, and countless other enemies. Some are human. Some are not. Some are powerful. Some are hardly even worth mentioning. Some are outside of the Imperium. Some are within. Still, the wars rage on, as they always have, and they always will, using weapons that can destroy planets and viruses that selectively infect family members of known dissidents.

But that is far away. If you have seen combat, it was at least a couple of years ago.

The people of the Thousands Worlds are privileged beyond imagining. For the wealthy and the powerful, there is no disease, no hunger, no death, and no wish unfulfilled.

But you are neither wealthy nor powerful. You have known both hunger and disease, and no regen tank, clone bank, or offline personality backup will replace you when you die.

You are a member of the Imperial Grand Survey, part of the skeleton crew of Remote Observer Station 1AC5, a sensor array pointed into the darkness at the edge of the Outer Rim.

You see a supply ship every six months. The most recent was two months ago.

Your assignment is for five years. You have at least two years to go.

You aren’t going to make it to five.

I recently stumbled across a number of free-to-download game books published by West End Games (such as d6 Space). On flipping through them, I thought, “Hey: this is actually pretty cool.”

So I spent some time looking around for source material. I did find a bit (d6 Space Ships), but no setting material or adventures or anything like that. So I looked around for West End Games’ web site, only to discover that http://www.westendgames.com/ is no longer online.

Gone? Just… gone? How very odd. So I turned to that fickle friend, Wikipedia, and read the whole sad story of West End Games. Such a shame.

More’s the pity. On reading d6 Space, I got to thinking that this might be a palatable compromise between extremely rules-light games (like my neglected stepchild, Jazz) and more mechanically complex games like Mutants & Masterminds (which I like very much, but I confess the mass of game mechanics weighs heavily on me). I even wondered if it might be worth dusting off my affectionately misbegotten cyberpunk-immortal pastiche, Legacy: War Of Ages, revising it and rewriting it using the Opend6 game system. Or, heck, maybe even writing something altogether new….

But, alas, it appears that these d6 books are, like Legacy, no more than the weathered artifacts of a game company that strut and fret its hour upon the stage, and then was heard no more.

Here’s to you, West End Games. You rose higher, and fell further, than Black Gate Publishing ever did.

I am supposed to be playing in a Morrow Project game this evening, using GURPS. I have been reading the rules for GURPS (GURPS Lite, which is free to download).

I am debating whether to play or not. I said that I would, so I feel that I should, but I have been reading the GURPS rules, and there are so many things that I dislike (bad mechanics, like bell curve rolls; inconsistent mechanics, like sometimes needing to roll low, and sometimes needing to roll high; overcomplicated mechanics, like literally a dozen different weapon skills; etc.). I do not want to be the guy who comes to a game and complains about the rules the whole time. That’s no fun for anyone.

I am still a little behind on my classwork, so I should be working on that anyway.