I’m sure everyone is already aware that Gary Gygax, one of the co-creators of Dunegons and Dragons, passed away on Tuesday. Was never a fan of D&D but without it, I wouldn’t be playing Nobilis or writing roleplaying stuff today. Muted feelings really.
Also announced on Tuesday (before the news of Gary’s death): STOCs (irishgamingwiki link) one of the oldest running Clubs in DCU proposed “merging” with the Games Soc. STOCs is/was the gaming & roleplaying society in DCU and even though I’ve been long out of college, I still have strong ties to the club. The “merging” is rather actually being subsumed into the Games Soc which is oriented towards Computer Games (though originally the Games Soc was an off-shoot of STOCs, I’ve been led to believe). STOCs ran the small annual games convention Sillicon with it’s popular Pub Quiz (irishgaming wiki link). I’ve even ran and wrote games for Sillicon in the past. I do not know the fate of the future of Sillicon. This has saddened me.
Apparently, my last post on Fudge, got some people annoyed. Fred Hicks of EvilHat (Fate and “Spirit of the Century”) and Chris Helton of Seraphim Guard etc. both chipped on my blog to say they don’t believe Fudge is dead! (I didn’t know I was so popular). This weekend, on top of that, I got a message back from Brad at Now Playing that he is very interested in publishing Reboot as both a Fudge and Now Playing product. Sounds all good to me. So perhaps the “rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated”.
But I can’t shake that feeling of deja vu. I remember when specky caused a huge storm on the Irish online gaming community, things were shook up, events even happened. And then it seem to go quietly back to the mists it came from. Don’t get me wrong, the community is still there, particularly offline, but there is no cohesive online group. At best it is a distributed announcement list, at worse it’s just a pile of dead forums and mailing lists, still active because no-one has the heart to kill them off.
Is Fudge community going the same way? Fate seems to be super strong in terms of online presence. But it is not Fudge per say. It is a specific brew of Fudge, much like Now Playing and Seraphim Guard. People using Fate don’t come back to Fudge. The whole remaining Fudge community seems centred on the Fudge List which, doesn’t seem healthy as it’s part of a bigger site, the phoenyx which I really know little about. One of the people behind the software, seems to think Fudge is dead or at least the parts not in Fate (that’s certainly not good, no?). There are rumours of a “Fudge Planet” from GreyGhost that would be the place for Fudge publishers and fans… but it must be over a year since I’ve heard anything concrete on that. Why does it take so long to put together such a site? (I’d like to say, I’ll do a site next week! But I’m wouldn’t get the traction. I mean, “who the fuck am I?” to everyone else).
Deja vu. A community that feels like it’s crawling along. It’s still alive, but when you prod it, it kinda grumbles and turns to the other side. Fudge hasn’t changed. It can’t. Everything else has though: software, games, market, community-ethos… etc. I don’t think Fudge can die. From it’s burning embers, many things are still be crafted. That will go on for a long time. Is the community waiting for something or is that all it is now?
But you have to remember, an online community is just an online presence. The Irish online community is just a zombie, but there are still conventions every year, clubs and societies every where, the IGA still occasionally organise events, etc. It continues like it did before anyone claimed it was dead online. I think the same is true for Fudge. It will continue but by it’s nature, it’s buzz and community may not. People will produce Fudge games, re-discover Fudge, use Fudge in their own home brew worlds, etc. Fudge isn’t dead. It may be a bit of a recluse, but it has that “something” that brings people into it’s fold. If you put a positive spin on it, the success of Fate should allow you to recognise that Fudge still has something that appeals to modern-day gamers, not that Fudge is dead. IMHO, etc. etc.
My last post was about Planet Irish Gaming which is part of the uber-cool and useful Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki. One of the biggest uses of the wiki was the convention calender, which is updated regularly enough by lots of people. Though this may now be superseded by a Google Calender yokey ran by TygerKrash but at least the wiki page is still free for anyone to correct the information.
Well, even without the convention calender, the wiki is certainly not dead. It’s regularly getting updates and this last little while a user called Oldfartgamer has been doing a tremendous job of doing lots of historic updates.
So I’m calling out for help in filling in lots of blanks. Oldfartgamer has added a number of stubs for people and has been trying to restore information about cons gone by like Gaelcon 1996.
If you “know stuff, like” about Irish gaming and roleplaying, which I’m sure you do, you can add to the wiki. If you’ve doing something in Irish gaming, such as shop or independently publishing games, check to see if you have an entry (and make sure it’s correct!).
Check out Planet Irish Gaming.
Yep. That’s the whole purpose of this post. Plugging Planet Irish Gaming. It’s something I setup a long time ago and it’s been running for quite a while, and I’ve been adding feeds as requested. I recently did some tidying up of it and added some new features (such as getting updates as emails!).
So if you’ve got a feed that you’d like me to included, please drop me a mail (or leave a comment). Anything related to Roleplaying and Gaming (nominally related to Ireland) would be welcomed.
(I guess I should I should add a feed from thedeadone.net…)
Specky, one of the founders of DiddlySquat, has given his personal account of the demise of DiddlySquat.
According to the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying Wiki:
Diddlysquat is an RPG publishing company founded by Geoff Moore in 2004 with the intention of producing a horror/sci-fi tabletop RPG called Spectres. The Spectres game was intended to be released as three prequels followed by the main game system.
But sadly DiddlySquat is no more and I guess we won’t be seeing Spectres as a full game (though the work will probably be made available via GCG).
When you read this kind of things it really makes you cynical about the communities involved (both online and offline). Sure I’ve argued and caused near-flame wars in the online half of the Irish gaming community, but I would hope that people don’t bare grudges and that they should realise that, sometimes, antagonistic nature of online discussion is actually healthy. But I don’t think that’s true. People do hold grudges for the slightest things.
So, here is a farewell to another doomed project of the Irish Gaming Community. I roll my dice to you (*sounds of all dice scattering across the table and getting lost on the floor* doh!) 
As an aside, I can’t help but draw some parrallels to this earlier history of other projects in the community too and the recent flop of the an Game Chef concept (see this comment). I guess I’m too old for this shit. 
Only a day spent in the warm waters that is the national gamers event called Gaelcon. I dumped my kid on her Grandmother and Auntie, grabbed my bag of dice, ever-present satchel and a few pens, (oh and my Nintendo DS Lite, don’t go anywhere without these days).
I only had a day. I choose Sunday. It was a hard choice. It was Gaelcon or a few movies at the Horrorthron in the IFI. But the lure of the “Indie Track” was too much. I had been dying to play Universalis since I’ve read it. It’s a pity I had to choose however. I guess being an older gamer means balancing time and commitments with gaming but having to choose against other events is plainly unfair. The Horrorthron deserves to be in the Halloween weekend… but does Gaelcon? I know there is the ever present Call of Cthulhu slot and some (not that many really) costumed players but is it really Halloween? I didn’t debate this on my early morning drive from Malahide to Clontarf Castle. I was going by myself. No plans, per say. That’s the way to do it.
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… and just a little soul draining. My last few entries on my blog have all been about the Game Crafters Guild website and mostly technical in nature. Here, here and here.
I thought the idea behind the GCG site was/is a good one. It would be something I would contribute to and participate in. So I made a new feature-rich version of it and it went live a little while ago. I didn’t just plug together some pieces of software, I wrote code to join them, tested it, created new themes and templates for and brought it all together. It works. It is alive.
However, it is barely shambling forward.
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So I’ve been quiet. Hidden away in a bunker, miles underground. All I had was a laptop and broadband. 
The data packets crackled with the potential of lightning. My eyes were bleary and red as I fumbled trying to stitched the limbs on… in my final moments of exhaustion, I was transfixed with horror as it opened it’s eyes…
“It’s alive…” I shuddered before I lost my mind.
Well the truth is, I probably lost my mind long before then.
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It’s about this time of year, roughly a month or two before Gaelcon when there are rumblings about the “online community”. Controversy and flame wars generally follow. See here for the beginning of those storm clouds.
But that got me thinking again. What is an “Irish online gaming and roleplaying community”? Seriously?
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So the online Irish gaming community has moved, without a word, to livejournal. They even have a “community” setup.
But to be honest, I’ve already got my own homepage setup so I don’t particularly want to setup another blog just to join in. Well, luckly I found Live+Press, a little plugin for Wordpress that allows you to synch blog entires from Wordpress to LiveJournal.
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