Posts tagged with keywords "roleplaying"
There is an interesting discussion going on right now over on the igaming mailing list (and cross-posted to LiveJournal), but one I’ve consciously chosen not to comment on. The people involved have much bigger stakes in it than I ever have and I’ve had my share of being on the virtual battleground but I have little to add on this.
So I guess I’m doing it here. If you take the time, read the original post. It’s roughly about now in the year that some argument occurs (though the last few years have been quiet). The discussion is about how scenarios, or rather TableTop RPGs, are run at Irish Conventions. Apparently we do it differently to everyone else and one of the “old hands” in the scene has strongly suggested that cons change the way they do things.
Read More…
Satyr Colourtest #1
So I’ve been playing with some new techniques and some new equipment. The above image is the first colour image I’ve done in a while and it was coloured very quick. I used a “lightbox” to trace the original pencil sketch (which you can see below), then used a selection of toned coptic markers to give it shadow and depth. And finally, using gimp’s hand-drawn selection and “colorify” I was able to colour it in less than 30 minutes. I’m not sure I’m going to continue the image first, it was more for a test of techniques and equipment but I certainly like it. There are lots of little computer tricks I could have applied and I really didn’t go into depth in my choice of colours.
Read More…
So I’m finally getting over being poorly last week, but I’m finding I’m not up to full speed yet. I’m quite tired from the run of antibiotics. Last night, after the kids were in bed, I planned to do some writing (on Lost Heroes) and some painting (bought some new watercolours) but instead, all I could do was zombie out in front of the TV for half an hour before I crawled up to bed.
Today has turned out to be a frustrating one. Work was going fine till after lunch, when my PC started to act weird. It’s a new PC that I’ve just got up to spec with all the software I need and have been using fine for two weeks. So I reboot and it won’t start - can’t find “boot device”. As it turns out my hard drive is fecked. So the whole afternoon is lost, I couldn’t even go and do something else. I’ve lost some stuff, nothing critical, but I have lost some work on TDO Mini Forms which I hadn’t been backing up.
Anyway, chin up. I’ll get a new harddrive tomorrow, spend the rest of the day re-installing all the software I need and trying to recover as much data as I can and just getting on with it. 
I had fun with this. I’ve known about Inkscape for a while, but I never used it. I know SVG is much better “image” format for DTP (Desktop Publishing) so I should have looked at it sooner. Particularly because Inkscape is also open-source. SVG basically allows you export your image at any size without a loss in quality that you might get by resizing a jpeg. As it turns out, inkscape is a doddle to use. So easy to start doing stuff, it looks like it’s going to be my default diagramming tool from now! I’ve already converted my lost heroes logo into SVG.
I set myself a little project, to create a “Family Tree” of the Olympian Gods that I’ve mentioned in Lost Heroes. My plan was to make this part of the setting text. I want to do something similar for the Tuatha Dé Danann and the Aesir when I finish that. I have idea about something for the Angels as well. Now don’t go thinking this is a complete family tree of all the Olympian Gods, thats just something I don’t have time for and someone body has already done that. This is instead, just the Gods and other characters mentioned as part of the Olympian God pantheon in Lost Heroes RPG.
Family Tree of the Olympian Gods from Lost Heroes RPG
It’s missing a “legend”, though I’m not sure it needs one. It looks pretty cool, because Inkscape simply rocks! 
Two friends I know from the Irish gaming community (and someone else I don’t know) have gone off and setup a podcast about the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying scene: The Adventuring Party. (I’ve already added it to the Planet Irish Gaming feed).
I haven’t listened to it myself yet, mostly because I don’t normally listen to podcasts and I don’t own an ipod, but I think I’ll have to make an effort for this.
I’ve been regularly roleplaying with Liam for a while and so I know he’s a good guy and fun to game with. He’s involved in the Irish gaming scene on the ground more so than I ever was and was activiely involved in STOCs and Sillicon when it he was in DCU.
Shane is another STOCs head and while, oddly, I’ve never played a game with him but we have on occassion discussed gaming and roleplaying. While having different opinions about it, he always has some good points to make. If you follow his livejournal, I think irishgaming.com describes him pretty fantastically:
The martial artist, RPG writer, paramedic, snowboarder, LARP writer, ex-online-RPG-pundit, James Bond afficionado and wearer of a fine selection of Hawaiian shirts Shane O’hUid
So best of luck guys and to everyone else, get listening!
I mentioned briefly in my previous post about “the Day of Fudge”. Well, it’s official. On Saturday, 10 GMs (members of the community) volunteered to run a Fudge game, on the 6th June, in a public place for non-Fudgers. In fact there is more than 10 GMs, many more have been enlisted outside of the community and there are groups in Spain, Brazil and France! It’s more like a “distributed” FudgeRPG con.
The whole thing was the idea of Patrick Benson, intended as a sort of grassroots/viral movement. And the new community answered the call. Patrick requested that 10 people from the community volunteer before the last day of January and it seems to have paid off, all coming together at 6.30pm on Saturday, Jan 31st (a nice dramatic ending there)! Ann Dupis of GreyGhost games has also promised goodies to all the GMs who take participate which is amazingly generous.
Sadly, I won’t be doing it myself for various personal reasons - unless there is a bunch of Irish-Dublin based gamers who want to try Fudge, who also happen to be reading this blog. But to all the GMs participating, I applaud you!
I meant to write this up a while back, but I haven’t had the time to do the dutiful blogging. I’m working during the day, coding free software in my spare time, and the in evening I’m writing/working on Lost Heroes RPG (for Fudge). And then of course my free time is spent with the kids and family.
I’m not sure if this post should be done here or over on the blog I’ve put together on Lost Heroes RPG website, seeing that website is more dedicated to Fudge than my personal blog. But lets do it here for the moment. Since the Fudge community was re-born in the September of last year, it’s rolling along quite well. Activity seems to be up across the board!
If you’ve been using my Monster Fudge RPG feed, you’ll have noticed that activity is strong on both the Fudge Forums and the Yahoo Mailing List. And only last week, we now have a facebook group too!
One of the most interesting activities right now is the “Day of Fudge“. Basically get 10 GMs from all over the world, on one day, to run a game fo Fudge in a public place for people new to Fudge. It’s a great idea. There is at least one Spanish GM and one Brazilian GM in the list.
Also, recently enough, there was a topic on what fudge projects are people activily (and not) working on. Besides my own Lost Heroes game, there is number of interesting projects going on from Heroes of Oz (Wizard of Oz RPG), a spy-game, Power Extreme (a the Fudge supers RPG), Strange World (Carnivore Games), Cacería de Bichos (a spanish generic/bughunt centred sci-fi FUDGE game) and a few more besides. Excellent work. As well as that Pablo Jaime Conill (zonkpj) has just written up a 7 page article on fudge for a Spanish fanzine.
And since the new yahoo group started there has been several web chats including ones host by Ann Dupis and Brad Yonnie (of Now Playing), which is great way to bring the community together despite physical distances.
Sadly there seems to be some doubt over the fate of old Fudge Wiki, Fudge Factor archives and the old FudgeList archives. These are a great legacy from the old days of the community and it would be a pity to lose this content. The new community doesn’t seem interested, at least not right now, in having a one wiki to rule all of Fudge. Every project seems to have it’s own space carved out of the intertubes for itself. For the moment, the legendary content remains in the hands of the previous owner Carl. My personal preference would be to see the content in a new form, like a PDF book, but alas I seem to be the only one. 
But overall, it looks like Fudge is rolling a Superb these days!
Okay, so not earth-shattering news. I’ve finally done something with the lostheroesrpg.com domain and setup a blog and a custom theme. I’ll be releasing Lost Heroes Roleplaying Game there.
I was a bit afraid that I might be duplicating/crossposting content between the two blogs and I was looking at all sorts of solutions to do it. But practically it’s not going to happen. The purpose of lostheroesrpg.com will be a platform for promoting and releasing my Lost Heroes RPG project and there will be no worries about having to cross post, though I may “borrow” content from thedeadone.net for lostheroesrpg.com. In fact, the first thing I did was copy the Wordpress theme I created for here and modify it.
I’ve already added the feed for it to the Monster FudgeRPG feed but does it qualify for the Irish Gaming Planet feed? (Probably not).
While working on Lost Heroes RPG over the Christmas, I wrote this little flash fiction. I was hitting a bit of mental block so I changed tack and wrote something else. I think it works actual, what do you think?
He put down the staff beside him and scratched his head. “I don’t know if it’ll work. I’ve passed the message up the ranks, but Hermes doesn’t really have any pull with Hades you know? Do you happen to have a fag? I’m dying for a cig.”
I pulled a pack out of my pocket and offered him my last one. He accepted it and used his herald’s staff to light it. It sort of glowed and a flame squirted out of the top, lighting his cigarette. “You don’t happen to be a great singer or artist or something that I didn’t know about?” I shook my head. He weighed his hand heavily on his shoulder, “its not looking good.”
“I need to save her, bring her back.” I pleaded with him.
“The best I can do is allow you to see her one last time from the opposite shore of the Styx. You can say you’re goodbyes and all that. I hope she made it to the Blessed Isle otherwise…” he buried his head in his hands. He was suppressing a sob. “Why do you want to bring her back? The dead is better dead, Hades let nothing leave his domain.”
Controlling my own grief I said, “Because it was my fault. I killed her. I made a mistake…” But at my words, his entire body shook and his face drained of colour as he stared at me.
“Oh my. What have you done my friend!” The sky started to darken. “I’ve given them a connection, a connection to you and you damned fool admitted your stupidity!” His staff started to glow, the wings on his shoes started to flutter. “I can hear Erebus demanding justice!” He added meekly, “you’ve given her to the Furies by telling me this…”
“I don’t understand…” but I could barely speak, the roaring sound of a car drowned out my words and its lights stinging me and holding me in place. He was gone, already flying into the black stormy sky. Before the truck hit me, I saw her face, in the driver seat, an awful black aura burning of her deathly beauty, rage and revenge.
After all the votes were in the font used in “Option 2″ was the winner. More than a few people said they’d have voted for “Option 6″ if I modified it a bit, but after playing with that font for a while, it wasn’t working. Anyway, until I spend money on a genuine graphic artist, this is my working logo:
I could spend time messing with effects or by adding colour, but I think for the time doing it simply will be fine. Now all I have to do is setup the webpage!
(Strange… Wordpress seems to be stretching the image in the post, but if you click on it, you’ll see the original).
