thedeadone.net » thedeadone.net

The RPG Blog Alliance

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 30 May 2011 09:30:48 +0000

So last week, I added my blog (well the roleplaying related posts at least) and my lost heroes dev blog to “RPG Blog Alliance”.

I saw a number of fellow bloggers/twitters joining up and thought I’d be in good company. But as of writing, it’s up to 131 members. That’s 131 blogs about roleplaying. 131 active blogs about roleplaying.

The feed is syndicated to twitter via @RPGBlogAlliance. And now my feed is constantly filled with new blog posts about roleplaying, from learning to GM to geomorph tiles to development blogs of new games. New content, all the feck’in time!

And there was me lamenting the decline of the roleplaying hobby. In just the last week, it’s gone from a manageable list of blog posts that I can read to avalanche of information I can’t digest in a timely manner, or at least before the next blog post comes in. That’s quite cool.

Review part 1 of my Custom Dice

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:02:34 +0000

As part of winning these custom dice, I have to do a review of them. However I haven’t gamed in months, certainly not since I received the dice. So instead I’m doing a “part 1” of the review now, which is, in a sense, a bit weird as it’s my design on the dice! Part 2 will come when I actually get to game.

My Fudge Dice

So in lieu of not actually gaming with them, I grabbed my big bag of dice and compared them to my other fudge dice. I bought a set of 16 dice from Grey Ghosts years ago. Comparing them physically the dice are all the same size. Of course my new dice are printed rather than engraved like my current fudge dice. Just rolling them randomly on the table together I notice no difference in them.

Visually there is certainly no problem in picking out pluses and minus when you roll a bunch together. In fact I think it’s easier, the pluses and minuses on the printed dice are bigger, check out the slightly fuzzy photo below:

I think though that my little Cthulhu icon on the blank side feels quite contracted on the dice compared to the other sides. But that may be an artefact of the design more so than the dice itself. However the quality of the print is impressive. The detail is quite vivid (though you may not be able to tell from my bad photography).

The original design, in case you've forgotten!

Certainly if you wanted to get some icon on a dice, this would be a be a great way to do it.

I’ve rubbed them and rolled them, and so far, none of the print has come off. So it seems quite sturdy. I have been keeping them in my big bag of dice these last few months and no damage to the print at all from being tossed about.

Overall I’m quite happy with them, hopefully they’ll prove to be my “lucky” dice. I think they’ll be kina cool too if I go to cons with them, though I’m generally not big into showing off my geek status. I managed to meet up with my roleplaying group and showed them the dice, which got a good “ah cool!” from everyone. So that’s a decent objective measure there.

My Cthulhu/thedeadone Fudge Dice!

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 22:18:21 +0000

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)

thedeadone gaming dice?

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 21:01:13 +0000

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!

A fresh lick of paint on thedeadone.net

Mark Cunningham — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 13:10:36 +0000

I’ve just redone the colour scheme of thedeadone.net and have thrown out that over-powering black and grey mix. Tell what you think?

(Poll won’t work on LJ, so come on over to thedeadone.net to vote)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Arg, how I hate Internet Explorer!

Mark Cunningham — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 20:41:18 +0000

I don’t pretend to be a great web designer or programmer. Most of the stuff I do is really just tinkering and as part of that I decided it was time to create a new look for thedeadone.net, which involves creating a new “Theme” for WordPress. About a week ago, I got the theme up and running, the layout done. I’ve kept adding configurable options so that I can use it as a standard WordPress theme and also have it customised to how I think thedeadone.net should be done. I decided, as a first step, I’d change the colour scheme to match my previous theme, then install the new theme here and start using it.

A week later I’m ready to throw my laptop out the window. At first, I didn’t find it hard, modifying the CSS stylesheets to get the right look and spacing. I checked it in Opera and used Firebug in Firefox, everything was great. Then I tried it in Internet Explorer and elements were all over the place. Slight padding changes would shift around half the page, I had to start again, adding fixes and changes to get it to work in Internet Explorer. It sucks. It’s like writing code that is completely standards compliant but finding it doing utter different things on different operating systems.

Anyway, I’ve started to use the new theme here. It’s not finished, lots of stuff to do on it, but I’d rather see it in action than continue to work in the dark on it.

This is the frontpage of my previous theme

And this is an example of a category list

This is the brand new frontpage, still lots to do, but much better

Just for comparsion, here is the new theme

A new look for thedeadone.net

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 05:00:49 +0000

I’ve been working on a new theme for thedeadone.net for a little while now. The functionality is about 90% there. The layout is 99% done. But there is about 50% more to go. I have to choose colours and modify the layout with icons and images to make it “pretty”. I also need to make it work for the forum so at least I have a similar theme across the two sites.

I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.

If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?

Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.

Phew! Made it!

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 09:00:36 +0000

Okay, so it looks like I made the jump to the new host fairly successfully. WordPress is up and running and all my data transfered okay. The only hitch, right now, is that the forum is down. I’ll fix that soon.

It’s certainly different being on new host. Like buying a new car without driving it first and finding controls in different places and finding new features and grunting when you can’t find that one or two great features from your previous car. But so far, it looks good.

For the record, I have hosted thedeadone.net on Redbrick since about 2002, I think. Redbrick is a College based club based on computers and networking. I’ve been a “associate” member (which is ex-student/alumni member) for quite a bit. The webspace they offer is great, seeing I was able to run WordPress (with some hacks), do WordPress plugin development, use a domain, automatically have shell access and, for a service ran by students, a great up-time (except for the last two months or so but they were the exceptions)… all for a ridiculous low price IMHO. My new host is Digiweb and the reasons for moving are many and do not reflect on the service provided by Redbrick.

Anyway, back to doing real stuff again…

thedeadone.net may not be avaliable over the next few days

Mark Cunningham — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:14:38 +0000

Just a quick heads up. I’m going to be moving host over the next few days and my website will be unavaliable from tomorrow until whenever the nameserver changes propagate across the web. So I’ll be closing down the website tomorrow morning and moving the final snapshot of data across and updating the name servers. This affects the support forums as well.

This does not affect MOC, the Irish Gaming Wiki or my livejournal page.

See you all on the other side!

thedeadone.net is back!

Mark Cunningham — Thu, 15 May 2008 05:35:17 +0000

It’s seems I’m back online again. The admins of Redbrick, the host of thedeadone.net, turned Redbrick off after it was discovered that people’s personal webpages had been hacked. Now it looks like everything is up again (if you find something a-miss on the site, drop me a comment). The admins have re-installed everything from scratch and re-instated all the user-data from back-ups before the attack. A pretty large amount of work for admins-slash-students to do.

In all the time I’ve been on Redbrick, this feels like the longest it’s been gone. And it’s a strange experience to have lost my online presence for such a longish unexpected period. I felt like I couldn’t connect or speak about anything, nearly as if I ceased to exist in an online context. Not that I would have hade much to say, having just gotten over the vomiting bug and having to work from home while my daughter recovers from chicken pox. I’m absolutely shattered. But anyway, I’m back online and I do have a small queue of posts to put up.

thedeadone.net » thedeadone.net

The RPG Blog Alliance

Related Posts:

Review part 1 of my Custom Dice

Related Posts:

My Cthulhu/thedeadone Fudge Dice!

Related Posts:

thedeadone gaming dice?

Related Posts:

A fresh lick of paint on thedeadone.net

Related Posts:

Arg, how I hate Internet Explorer!

Related Posts:

A new look for thedeadone.net

Related Posts:

Phew! Made it!

Related Posts:

thedeadone.net may not be avaliable over the next few days

Related Posts:

thedeadone.net is back!

Related Posts: