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).
I’ve been trying to pick a font to use for the logo of Lost Heroes RPG for the new website and I’ve settled on these few. What ones do you think work? (You can vote in the poll at the bottom)
Option 1
Option 2
Option 3
Option 4
Option 5
Option 6
Option 7
Option 8
(poll after the cut)
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Thats what I’ve been spending my non-work non-family energy on recently. This is what I posted to the igaming mailing:
Inspired by the relaunch of IrishGaming.com v2 by Nick last month, I
decided to give Irish Roleplaying and Gaming Wiki [1] a big spring
clean (not a relaunch). I’ve changed hosts, upgrade the software,
gotten rid of all the spam and other malicious edits, re-did the
front-page (more to do there) and allowed file uploads. I hope people
take a moment to have a look and see if anything important to them is
up to date.
I have also updated Planet Irish Gaming [2], brand new spanking
software, tons of Irish Gaming sites, its actually very busy compared
to the old planet. There are also features to create a post directly
to the feed and the ability to submit new feeds.
During my spring cleaning, I found a number of articles about groups
and websites of which I have no idea of the state of them:
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/SaneSpotting
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/DU_Gamers
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Gamers_Realm
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/White_Elephant
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/D15_Gamers
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Fabled_Games
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/STOCS
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/The_Red_Branch_Guild
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Vaticon</a>
http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Forgotten_Legacy
Anyone able to give an update on their state or current
web-location/presence of these things?
Also the http://irishgamingwiki.com/wiki/Convention_Calender has died
a death quite a while back. Is there another resource that’s actively
used? I know there was one for a while on the IGA/Gaelcon site but
that seems to have disappeared.
[1] http://IrishGamingWiki.com
[2] http://IrishGamingWiki.com/planet
Someone has since updated the Convention Calender, which is cool. There is a lot of work still to do on the wiki, but for the moment I’m content to watch over it and if someone starts the initiative, I’ll help and finish it. For example, I’d like to have “templates” for conventions, retailers, groups and organizations. Right now they are all done sort of ad-hoc and the current status of a lot of them, I don’t know.
Anyway, if any of the readers of this blog know of something on the wiki they might care about, please take a moment to update it or even better if you know something about the Irish Gaming and Roleplaying community that <i>isn’t</i> on the wiki, please feel free to add it! And if you have any feedback, you can drop a comment here, or on igaming or the wiki itself. Those three methods are the best way to get a message to me about the wiki.
I don’t know if they’ll be a reaction to my plans for the IrishGamingWiki.com but I certainly know that within the online community there are a few that have strong opinions (or use to have) but I also know there isn’t that much concern between projects or users about these things. To put it another way, I don’t know if people care what happens to the Wiki.
I hope people do because I’m certainly feeling guilty about letting it languish over the last good while. I couldn’t update the MediaWiki software without a bit of effort on my part and it got spammed heavily. But recently I did do an update and finally cleared out the spam and blocked users and IPs. (If spammers continue to be a problem, I’ll look at better spam-fighting techniques). The administrative and backend parts of the Wiki need some love, certainly some work on the webpage look and feel, updates to the RSS feed, etc. I even have a logo designed at home that I haven’t scanned in yet.
I haven’t set aside time to do this necessary work. I haven’t had the motivation at all. I did recently update and tidy up Planet Irish Gaming as I was briefly inspired after IrishGaming.com was kind of re-launched (IrishGaming.com has nothing to do with me in any way). But beyond that, my motivation is still waning. I’ve even been tempted to find someone or group who would be willing to take over the wiki because there is a lot of cool info captured there. No-one has shown any interest to me about it up until now and I haven’t see any group I’d trust with it (things for Irish Gaming have a tendency to appear and disappear with frequency online).
So what is my big plan? Change host for the IrishGamingWiki.com and stick Google AdSense advertisements in the side bar. That’s it.
If you’ve just shrugged your shoulders and thought “so what?”, I’d agree with you. I have AdSense ads running on my thedeadone.net and, to be honest, the income generated so far would indicate to me that it probably won’t cover the cost of hosting the website over a year (even though hosting it is relatively cheap).
However, payback in nearly any form is a great motivator. Certainly, while working on TDOMF, which is completely free, donations, gifts and ad revenue that I have received have been great motivators (though peoples’ feedback is by far the most rewarding). Without it, I don’t think I would have continued to support and extend TDOMF so far (and to think that came originally from the failed Game Crafter’s Guild of Ireland website). So hopefull I’ll be more motivated to put effort into maintaining it and doing work on it.
Anyway, comments, feedback, criticism welcome but name-calling will have you tarred!
I’ve read a number of books on how to write and on the creative process of writing and the one piece of advice I’ve kept with me is that you should cultivate the things that inspire you and avoid the things that demotivate you. The trick is identifying what inspires you and what has the opposite effect. For example, a badly written book can be a great inspiration because after reading it, you think “hey, I can write something ten times better then that.” But for me, I find myself becoming demotivated when I read reviews of roleplaying books and blogs of prominent roleplaying designers and writings. I feel I can’t reach their standards and so it discourages me from writing my own roleplaying game/book.
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