It seems like all I’m posting about these days is movies, but I saw Skyfall last night and I’m going to post about it regardless. I’m also in the middle of The Hydrogen Sonata and it’s pretty solid, though. Anyway, movie review. This is going to have some spoilers so I’ll put in a cut.
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November 18, 2012
Skyfall
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July 1, 2012
Fixing Prometheus
There seems to be a thing going around where people are trying to fix up Prometheus to make it more coherent. This seems like an interesting exercise, so I thought I’d try my hand at it. Needless to say, this will contain major movie spoilers.
To make things a challenge, presumably the goal should be to do so with the minimum number of changes. So here’s my attempt at Fixing Prometheus In N Easy Steps: (more…)
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April 4, 2012
SotC / 7th Sea, simplified
A while back I did a thing on converting 7th sea characters to Spirit of the Century, but re-reading it the other night I decided it’s a little too heavyweight for actual games I’d run. So here’s an attempt at the same thing but stripped down, with a few other tweaks because I am compelled to do that (in practice this is basically a 7th-sea-themed SotC/Apocalypse World mashup).
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January 19, 2012
D&D 5e
So I hear D&D 5th edition is coming out. I hear there is a risk of it being called “D&D Next” but that seems too dumb to be plausible, so I’m going to assume it’ll just be called “Dungeons & Dragons”. I’m not sure why the ampersand is so important but it totally is. Anyway, if I ran the circus, here’s what I’d do:
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December 15, 2011
So You Want to Be a Warlord
This past couple weeks I’ve been playing The Company, a facebook game by Flying Lab Software (aka the folks who brought you Pirates of the Burning Sea). Since, as mentioned, I’ve been playing it for two weeks, that makes me an expert and I will now present an analysis.
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Hexmap extension for mediawiki
One of the things that came out of Agents of Empire was that people wanted a hexmap they could edit, and there weren’t any good hexmap extensions for mediawiki (or any real RPG mapping extensions at all that I could find). So I did one up. It’s pretty simple but I figured other people might want to mess with it, so here it is for download. More details after the cut:
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November 13, 2011
Immortals
So yesterday I saw Immortals. I didn’t know much about it going in, as evidenced by the fact that I thought it was a sequel to 300. I mean, c’mon, they’re both action movies set around a war in ancient Greece involving some dudes named The Immortals. But no, totally unrelated. Anyway, I had some thoughts.
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July 25, 2011
Agents of Empire: the Importance of Metaphor
The first arc of that board game RPG mentioned in my last post is over. It’s on hiatus as I try to work out how to get it more like what I want mechanically, but in the meantime I’m going to write a post or two about it. Like this one.
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April 26, 2011
Board Game: the RPG
As mentioned on the mud a bit, I’m sketching out plans to run what is basically a board game/wiki/RPG mashup game. The idea is it’ll be some kind of politics/building/attacking/exploration game where the majority of play is offline: there’ll be a map with tokens, you decide what you want to do and edit the wiki or email me, and we work out what happens and update the wiki with results, and then it’s the next player’s turn. Occasionally there will be opportunities for live play on the mud like we do for normal RPGs, I assume once every couple weeks. These will be optional — you can play entirely offline if you want. The system will be some kind of FATE variant like I usually do, but with considerably more expansive rules for the board game component (not crazy complicated, but it’ll feel structured).
Gameplay inspirations are Civilization, Diplomacy, Star Saga, and (on the RPG side) Kingmaker and Houses of the Blooded. There will be some space for collaborative world-building, but (I am guessing) this is going to be a lot more “game” than “cooperative writing project”.
Interested? Awesome. I put together a survey about what sort of game this might be like — if you have opinions or just want to show your interest in playing, please fill it out.
February 1, 2011
2010 XYZZY Award Finalists Announced
The first round of the XYZZY Awards are open, and the finalists have been released! Whether you voted in the first round or not, you can still vote for the winners until Feb 23rd, so visit the site and check it out.
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