So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.

I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.

I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.

I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!

I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.

But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:

Now with my two designs, I sent them.

And I got the results in my hand right now:

I think they look rather cool myself!

(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)

I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

My current avatar for the game is female. Much prefer to watch her slay monsters than him, don't you think?

I’ve been playing Monster Hunter Tri for the Wii over the last week. Still working through the offline game so far. There has been a lot of hype about this game, but it matches up to what I expected, which isn’t the same as what is hyped. I debated with myself if I would get my money’s worth out of it as it appears to be a game that requires a bit of a time commitment (and a bit of “grinding”, something I swore I’d never waste my time doing), but in the end, it was watching How to Train a Dragon for a second time with the kids that changed my mind.

Like what excites me in tabletop gaming, it’s the experience I’m after when I play a computer game, be that pure fun or a thrilling adventure. One of the first games I got for the Wii was Resident Evil 4 (I never played any of the others in the series) and the first few hours of play were great. A lovely creepy, mysterious and thrilling experience. I’m not sure how much I’ve done of it, but it’s gotten to the point that the experience has worn off and I’m just playing a game; managing ammo, expecting the ridiculous and impossible twists, the pointless searching of tunnels and out-of-place puzzles. I think this is because I have the time/attention-span of a casual player but the desires of a hardcore player. I don’t play long enough that the experience carries me most of the way. (Zelda has done the same to me, I can’t believe after getting the armour together I have to go explore yet another nine dungeons or something.)

We've watched it twice, once in 2D and once in 3D. The 3D doesn't add much. Still loved it, loads of gamer references

Watching How to Train a Dragon again, the final battle between the Vikings and the great dragon, just reminded me of the trailers and screenshots of Monster Hunter Tri, and it struck me. MHT has a wonderful simple premise. One that would work just as easily as a quick game or a much larger roleplaying experience. Though I’m not interested in computer gaming roleplaying (this isn’t a slight against WOW players or anything, I’m just not interested in it), it occurred to me that it’d make a great premise for a tabletop roleplaying game.

My big chip about tabletop RPG fantasy games is that they are often highly detailed evolved worlds. Lots of rich source to explore when you play. A lot of people love this I know, but I guess I’m a little different. This, to a degree, puts me off because it presents a learning curve to the world. To make a proper character to roleplay means you should, at the least, have a good idea of the world you’re creating the character for. A detailed fantasy RPG makes me feel I should have a strong knowledge of the world before play and, quite often, you have tons of choice. And when you have too much choice, you have no choice, in a way. I could pick up a Lord of the Rings RPG because I’m a fan of the books, but Exalted wears me down. Riddle of Steel has a great combat mechanic, which makes it stand out, but the setting is detailed and dense, putting me off the setting part.

But that’s why I think MHT is fascinating. It doesn’t offer a fantasy world. It offers a premise. You are a hunter of monsters. You have seven (I think) different types of weapons to specialise in (compared to pages of detailed descriptions of medieval-inspired weapons for example). But by using different materials, buying charms, etc. you can make these weapons quite unique. The game starts you in a village, and gets you to hunt different types of monsters (and doing some grinding too) and you learn about the monsters in play. You don’t start with a big list, you build your knowledge via experience. You don’t have tons of choice, you are a hunter and you have several weapon-types to specialise in, but it does offer quite a range of customisation the more you play. (Which was one of the things that attracted me to the game, being able to create a fairly unique character.)

If you had a decent tabletop RPG mechanic for combat fighting the monsters, you could adopt a similar premise. Start small, add bits to the world (new monsters, towns, NPCs) as the players get better. Having such a simple premise would make it easy to layer on top bigger narratives as the players get more confident and attached to the world, suggesting hints of a possible invasion or conspiracies of a far away empire, etc.

Great old school RPG and I had a great character, a young teenager trying to become a warrior... which he did and became scary good!

My GM has gotten himself an job (good for him) and is now travelling the world, so we haven’t gotten to finish our “The Enemy Within” campaign, set in the Warhammer Fantasy world (1st Edition mind you so “old school”). This campaign worked because all of the players rolled up characters instead of creating them. Our initial choices were made by the dice. It allowed us to create basic characters with not that much pre-existing knowledge of the world. The campaign then set us off with our group direction and carried us around the world to the point we learned the world in play.

Anything that gets in the way of experience, takes from the whole thing. Just as with writing, anything that jars the reader from work is bad. You don’t want your reader to be correcting your grammar or laughing when they shouldn’t be at the way one of your character’s talk, how will they take anything else seriously? The same goes for roleplaying books and playing them. And for me the “burden” of a huge setting that I can’t relate it to or hang it on something is really off-putting. Warhammer fantasy is sort like a European medieval/renaissance alternative history (with Elves and Halflings) and it does it well. There’s my hook. Post-apocalyptic settings are also based on the modern world but imagined after the big bomb. Modern day games, such as urban fantasy concepts (like most of White’ Wolf’s World Of Darkness games), I can grok too.

The same also applies to far future based worlds, where the technology and science are so far advanced, they are incomprehensible as anything other than magic. Though I sometimes feel that there is something more interesting in such settings, because they ask the question, what’s going to happen to humanity? But then you’re playing, not a human, or at least not a modern human, but someone or thing so advanced that they are effectively alien.

And that’s the other thing that bugs me some what about fantasy worlds. They often shoe-horn in modern perspectives in very different worlds. Sometimes this can work when the setting doesn’t take itself too seriously, or it’s close enough to the readers world that its easy to get. But it can sometimes lead to claims or appearance of “cultural misappropriation” or it can be used by players to hide anti-game decisions (“that’s what a follower of X would do!”). So personally I prefer human or close-enough to human type characters. I’m not saying you can’t have a game or play a game where characters are significantly different, but there is a point when a human becomes too alien to play convincingly or to have a good experience with as a player, unless it’s down simply for kicks.

In Lost Heroes I make an explicit ruling on this. I say something like: “you can play a human that can turn into a dragon, but you can’t play a dragon that turns into a human.” The difference is subtle.

Okay, this post has become a lot longer than I intended. Must stop rambling. All really to say I think the premise of MHT would make an interesting tabletop RPG game.

I know, I haven’t been blogging. Many excuses that no-one cares about. To fill the void that is this blog, here is a recent post I made on lostheroesrpg.com. Enjoy!

I’ve been working my way through the current draft of the setting. I had hoped this would only take a week or two, but it’s taken much longer for various IRL reasons (including a car crash and its subsequent fallout), mostly because the only time I can work on it, is the few hours spare I get after the kids are in bed and I’m not always as mentally focused at that time. (I’m getting old, I fall asleep in the sofa at 10.30 in the evening!)

The first half of the text required a lot more re-work than later pieces, yet it was the later pieces I struggled with the most first time round. It seems as a general rule, depending on the length of the chapter, the more I struggled with it the less re-working it requires. With that in mind I started working on the Pantheon chapters in reverse order, hoping to populate the better changes and feel from the later chapters back to the previous chapters.

It was only when I got to the chapter on Demons that something started to worry me. Not the writing, but something I had put to the back of my mind since starting this run. Demons are nasty things. Not nasty as in anti-hero way (like Vampires are sorta cool yet there still “monsters”) but the worst of mankind, supernaturally empowered. Rapists, murderers, abusers, molesters and so on. While it’s possible to create “good” Demons (Fallen Demons or Demonic Bloodlines that avoided the influence of Hell for example), the vast majority of character types are bad, real bad.

Lets get this out of the way now, Lost Heroes is based on old mythologies. These old religions contain stuff that modern readers may find tasteless or even offensive. I can already think of several bits and pieces that might offend some. I’m aware of them but I didn’t want to PC-ify these old stories, just for the sake of writing an RPG. So instead I tried to emphasis some over others. I don’t know if this works or if I should be more cautious in how I treat these themes in the setting. In part, this is the purpose of trying to make this “Book of the Gods” so that I can present something to others and get a real feel for the reader’s reactions. To put it another way, when does editing become censorship? I can’t tell because I’m buried in the forest, checking the bark on each of the trees.

And here I am, reading through the Demons chapter, realising there is very little balance to this chapter. It is dark and it remains dark. There is, preceding this chapter, an chapter on Angels who battle constantly with Hell to prevent Demons destroying everything. While some parts of Angels are dark, there is much light. When I was writing it, I tried to get my head into what might be the motivations of these Demons and their masters. It did haunt my dreams for a while, imaging the horrific nature of Hell, but I felt it was important to get it down on paper. A starting point.

One thing, from the beginning, of Lost Heroes is that I didn’t want to restrict your choice of characters. Of course a GM may apply their own restrictions for the sake of the game, but I wanted there to be a choice. Even if that option was only really available to allow the GM to create antagonistic NPCs, it should be there. Choice is also an incredible important theme in the setting. Everything is about choice. A True Chosen Demon… is a human who accepted to become a Demon. The evils of Demon are the evils of humans, amplified by the supernatural. Do you chose to be the monster or the hero? And so the gamer is already making a choice.

Reading about the monstrous Demons of Lilith, wife of Satan, I started to have doubts. I posted this on twitter:

Just re-read the Demons chap. in Lost Heroes. Am a bit worried that u can create evil and disturbing demons as PCs. Should I take chap. out?

Which it later got imported into Google Buzz where some discussion occurred.

I have no conclusions so far. I’m going to keep tapping away at this drop, hoping in the end that the bits will fall together. What do you think?

While working on the Fudge One Month Adventure Challenge (I’m not going to finish it in time, but that’s not really the point), I had an idea for a RPG magic system. I was thinking about how to put the entire system on a single page for the adventure I’m writing, including a magic system and I wanted to keep it simple to understand. A brief discussion on the mailing list and it got me thinking about what magic should be in a roleplaying game.

I know, this is a big can of worms and everyone but everyone has an opinion about what should a magic system be or how it should feel etc.  But this is about what I think magic should be like in a game, not anyone elses and my feeling is that magic should be strange, weird and mysterious. Of course this is completely at odd with the mechanical/systematic nature of roleplaying systems and settings. You need magic to be some what systematic otherwise it is nothing more than random rolls on a table. I also think magic users should be different to everyone else, they should see and react to the world different. They live in a world-view that’s is alien to the average joe, that’s what makes them magic users. Be that world-view spirits and demons or UFOs and aliens.

World of Darkness’ Mage does this by using “paradox”. When you use magic that breaks reality, you’re character gains paradox points, which build up until they explode in some weird (and fun) way. Paradox backlashes (as they were called) were often the most fun part of playing Mage, basically when magic goes wrong. Ars Magica magic does something similar with Twilight, where a magic user can botch and enter a state of madness and come back, sometimes with a flaw or sometimes with a great insight to an element of magic.

My idea is rather simple and I think you can slap it on top of nearly any systematic magic system. I’d like to hear if people think they like it or not. As a magic user gets better at magic, they also move further from reality or the rest of the world’s understanding of reality. At each pivotal increase in understanding (i.e. each increase in magical ability beyond the first), they gain a “rule”. This rule can be determined randomly using tables, the GM may decide it in secret and the player has to figure it out in game or the player and the GM can design something together.

The first rule affects the way they do magic It could be that when they perform magic, all the plants nearby die, windows show distracting what-if visions to the magic-user, etc. But they also gain some special advantage, such as being able to generate fire without a source, have a much looser restriction on magic casting times, etc.

The bigger the increase in magic, the bigger the effect or scope of the rule and it’s consequential advantage. At the highest levels, it just goes off all the time, the magic user can’t never pass through a doorway, because they’ll end up somewhere else or they cover up statues because if the magic user sees the eye of a statue, it comes to life.

If they choose to stop using magic, and stop practicing it, the rules will fade away over time, but if they ever try to use their magic again, all the rules will come back.

But to offset it a bit and offer players some control, the player should be able to spend their XP to add conditions to any of these rules, to lessen their effects. They can’t buy out the rule but they can restrict it’s scope. They could add a condition such as “never on Tuesdays”, “not when I’m wearing blue”, etc.

With this sort of system, magic characters become strange and mysterious. No two will be alike and they’ll act strangely to average joes. But they’ll also be fun. I’m very tempted to flesh it out into a full system and add to my lost heroes rpg. What do you think? Would this add an element of mystery and fun to a plain vanilla magic user character?

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.

Unlike most of the people involved in the discussion, I’ve only GMed at a few conventions, submitted only two (may be three, I can’t exactly remember) scenarios, attend conventions every few years and I’m not really part of the “scene” though I know a lot of the oldies and some of the younger ones by face or name. We’re a small enough country you know.

I’ve GMed at conventions but only in my younger teenage years (15+ years ago, maybe even more), when the offer of free entry and T-shirt were a big thing for me. I ran only systems I knew but I barely remember the experience. I do remember being called up a few days before one Gaelcon and being asked if I’d GM some game because I did it the year before, I could hardly refuse. I remember as youngster it was the systems I knew that I want to play.

As I entered collage, I wasn’t really involved at that level again. The only scenarios I submitted were because friends asked me to, no other reason. I put a lot of effort into them at time, getting them in on time, trying to layout them out to support GMs, etc. But I found as a newbie scenario writer, I was given the short stick for a lot of it. My second scenario was ran on the dreaded Sunday morning slots where one of the players arrived and promptly fell asleep, because, like everyone else, he had been out drinking at the pub quiz the night before.

The complaint in this discussion is that numbers are dwindling and the organisation behind scenario submissions and finding GMs is breaking down. Writers submit their scenarios late, GMs don’t get them until five minutes before the session starts, everything is a mess and with dwindling numbers, it’s just badness. The solution, proposed, is that the writer is the GM and there is only one table per scenario (ran by the writer). So no bad GMs to run that scenario, but then you have lack of tables, people don’t get to play the games they want, and so on.

I have to agree, at the few conventions I’ve been at, I’ve been lumbered with GMs who didn’t know the system but knew thew world (we still had a good game), with GMs who only got the scenario as we sat down (that game sucked) and games that didn’t run because there wasn’t enough players. Hell, in one case, I heard about game that was going to be scheduled and offered to be a GM, but that fell apart because of not enough players.

From my writer perspective though, it was always a one writer-table experience. Unless you’re one of the “superstars” of the scene or writing one of the stable games (like D&D or in the olden days Vampire), you only ever got one table. Most of the games I’d like to play are not the big name games (and this was before the big “indie revolution”), I play those with my regular troupe, it’s the unusual or less popular ones that I grab my interest. They regularly only have one or maybe two tables. To me it seems like we have the two systems already in place, but then I don’t have the vast amount of con-experience to validate that assessment.

So on side we have the big popular games or writers with several tables and GMs running the scenarios. This is the given impression of how cons are ran. And on the other side then, lesser popular or well known games and writers often only get one table (possible two).  So it already looks like, to me, we have a hybrid system of multiple GM to one scenario and single-table-writer-GM scenarios. The commonality is how the scenario is submitted to the con as a scenario writer must assume that other GMs may read their scenario and can’t just run with a few notes in their head.

So is the issue really with the scenario submission process? Should it be more flexible, lower the bar to get more in or raise the bar to get only the high level of quality? Or am I missing the fundamental difference in the two styles of organization?

It would seem to me that the clog in the pipe is the scenarios received by a con more than anything else. Cons need to have a better submission process that encourage new writers to contribute but keeps a high level of quality. Not easy I guess when everyone involved is volunteers. The more I think and write about it, the more it seems to me that conventions are like publishers in many ways. They need to be to maintain a high level of quality of submission. Yet unlike publishers there is very little feedback from the cons until the actual day of the convention (i.e. the public launch of the scenario in a live game), (in my experience but if yours differs, that great). If you don’t care about the quality than the model needs to change and give more flexibility to writer/GMs to just run stuff.

If we keep the old way, you need more writers to get involved. I think the first thing to do is reduce the foreseeable “barriers to entry” as much as possible, provide some sort of enticement to get new writers in and then provide good and decent feedback before the convention.

For example, one of the “barriers” people throw about is that people don’t know how to write scenarios and so there should be workshops and guides etc. These are all great but don’t necessarily encourage writers to submit their work to cons. Perhaps cons could start with a “Style Guide” that gives suggestions on format and layout, sections/chapters and notes on readability, much like you’d get from a publisher who may solicit freelance work. Of course they shouldn’t necessarily be about how to design the scenario though as there is “more than one way to skin a cat”, but guides and references are always useful, if well presented. You could use the wiki to “crowd-source” it even.

Also, why not promote the scenarios submitted last year? Make them available from the con website, with snippets of positive quotes from the players. I always find it odd that last year is forgotten, websites deleted and and the scenarios get banked and gather dust. I don’t see an issue with an old scenario being run again if there is demand for it. Also, by using last years scenarios as promotional material you’re also playing to the ego of the writers, encouraging them to come back and write more this year.

And you need to entice writers as early as possible. Awards don’t do it BTW. Not saying awards are bad, they serve their own function, but only one person can win an award, the rest are losers. You don’t want you’re new writers to be losers, you want them to write for the con next year. I know cons aren’t going to pay writers, and while it’s nice to provide them with snacks and give free entry, its not a particular enticement for someone like me. It’s nice, but really not enough. Instead it’s the little bit extra that con might do. As way of example, I write some free software. People  use it and come back to me for support. A small small minority of users will donate a few Euros my way to say thanks. That’s nice. I also provide a wish list of books and that is really really nice when I receive a surprise parcel with one of those books. It’s how I discovered Watchmen. Those little things, are what keep me developing the software and trying to help and support the users. GreyGhost who publish Fudge RPG, for example, will send you free stuff if you run a fudge game at a convention. So to get new writers and keep them, there has to be that little extra something to entice them and keep them. Perhaps a free signed RPG book, a piece of art from a local artist or even getting their scenario illustrated for example. I don’t know whats available to the budget or ingenuity of con RPG organisers, but it doesn’t have to be expensive. Con goers know what to expect from the con experience, but it’s that little bit extra that can make it memorable.

There are less physical ways too, such as proper feedback. If you have a hard deadline for scenarios and those that arrive on time should be reviewed and feedback provided back to the author. For a new writer, knowing that someone took the time to actually read the work in its entirety and make a point of providing useful feedback is great. In fact, feeding to the egos of the writers is cheap but just as effective as physical gifts. Send them a copy of the con pamphlet with their name highlight and their scenario listed.

In the end however, we’ve got to recognise that on all levels of these experiences are people who volunteer and provide their creativity and effort for very little return. So I can imagine it’s hard to change the way things are done or to take criticism from people like me who haven’t done their time. So I offer my thoughts as is.

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.

Satyr (original) in Pencil

Satyr done in Tone with Coptic Markers

I bought a really cheap lightbox, it says it’s A4 but it barely handles a full page. However a big proper one costs 50 euros or more, depending on brand, so I’d rather try a cheap one first to see if I’d use it before investing in a decent one. It’s just a bright light under a white perspex box and it allows me to place the original drawing on top and using the light I can trace it onto another page. I use to scan the image in and then print it out, which was laborious and time-consuming. This method I allows me to play with the original image while I copy it, improving and enhancing it. It also allows me more freedom when I sketch, I don’t have to worry about getting rid of the construction lines (which can be actually helpful for tracing).

Satyr done in Ink/Brush

Satyr done in Ink/Pen

I also bought a new set of watercolour paints and plan to try them next. I did have a set of watercolours, but I haven’t used them in years and they had all dried. When I was much younger, watercolours were my particular favourite type of paint though I never really mastered them. I also played with pens versus brushes. You can see the pen work versus brush on the same Satyr. My wife likes the brush one, but I feel I have a lot to master with the brush, but I think long term it’ll produce much better effects. I did try a bigger image:

Paris Cityscape in Ink/Brush

In the thumbnail version it looks okay, but I’m not particularly happy with the end result. I should have gone for deeper blacks and less tried to capture tone with shading. I think the original pencil version is better but doesn’t translate to computer well.

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!