HIH Thomas,Son of Richard, KA, DMH, LMMO, CES, etc

A friend of mine wants to go to GenCon, and due to circumstances beyond my control, I can't offer her crash space. Is there anyone going to GenCon who has floor space, an extra bed, etc., who wouldn't mind a roomie? Contact me via email (blackhatmatt AT yahoo dot com) if you can help out.

Hey, check it out. Game Geeks reviewed Midnight Roads.



You know, the only reason we didn't mention Supernatural is that none of us watched it. Wasn't deliberate!

Okay, there is a lot of smack being said around the interwebs this week about how you can't introduce Robin into the current Batman film franchise. That's ridiculous. As Dick Grayson is actually one of my favorite superheroes in all of comicdom, I feel like I should help out here, offering my own take on how to bring Robin into the current franchise. It's a grimmer reality Nolan's set up here, so let's stick with that. Imagine all the currently established actors, and this should all work fine. For Robin, remember the kid that played young Bruce? He'll do for now.


(For more on the awesomeness of Robin, please check out Robin: Year One, by Chuck Dixon, Scott Beatty, Javier Pulido, Robert Campanella, and Lee Loughridge. Grab the issues rather than the trade, if you can. The paper's nicer.)

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/07/speaking-of-old-d-campaigns.html

Here's a scan of a small section of a much larger map I did for my old campaign world of Emaindor.
I drew -- and colored! -- this by hand when I was 13 or 14, so that puts its origin in 1984 or thereabouts. I'd been playing in a version of the same setting for several years prior to that (as well as in a Greyhawk-based campaign). I can't quite recall why I used graph paper instead of hex paper, but I suspect it's because I didn't have hex paper larger enough to cover the vast amount of terrain I wanted to draw.

You will note I was very fond both of calligraphy and of imaginary languages. I created several of them (Cynda, Emânic, Otrenska, and Rathwynnic, derived from Dutch, Welsh, Swedish, and Old English, respectively) with simple grammars and extensive vocabulary lists. I found that even the silliest names sounded much cooler if they were translated into a language no one natively understood.

The setting itself was a weird mishmash of things, but was primarily a medieval Europe knock-off, albeit one that mix and matched cultures and time periods. I had a Frenchified Roman/Byzantine Empire analog, for example, and an Arthurian/Celtic bunch standing in for the Germans. Now that I think on it, there were a lot of Arthurian elements to the setting, because, let's face it, King Arthur is heroic and tragic in a way that appeals to teenage boys (and old men, ironically enough). Despite being an AD&D world, it was even more strongly human-dominated than you'd expect. There were no halflings and few gnomes. Dwarves were reclusive but present and elves were reclusive to the point of xenophobia. Most of my adventures were political or investigative in nature, a tendency of mine that hasn't changed much in 20+ years.

A few years ago, I had a professional cartographer do a rendition of these maps and it was really cool to see that. I'll dig around on my computer to see if I can find them again. I won't say I prefer my amateur versions, because I'm not sure I do, but I still have a lot of pride in them. I spent untold hours drawing them and carefully placing the towns and cities and sites and naming them all. It was a labor of love and pretty well illustrates why I still love this hobby after so many years.

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/07/pig-faced-orcs.html

I decided to be stupidly indulgent and bought myself a bunch of old school orcs from Otherworld Miniatures. I'm suffering mightily from a wave of nostalgia about some of my old D&D campaigns (about which I'll write in due course) and these orcs just spoke to me. I'm not sure exactly when I learned to understand Orcish, but then you pick up a lot of weird knowledge after gaming for nearly 30 years.

Junk currently cluttering the vestry at my internet church:

How to brand yourself with a laser printer.

A job that I haven’t announced here yet.

Kicking off the month’s self-portrait thread.

And something like a dozen threads about me at Chicago that I can’t bring myself to look at yet.

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)

http://grantgould.blogspot.com/2008/07/in-comic-shops-this-november.html

'Bout time we had a "Wolves of Odin" update around here! ;) I'm happy to announce that "Wolves" has a publisher, a release date (well, a release month), and the official website/blog is now up and running: WolvesofOdin.com! Obviously it's bare bones at the moment, but there'll be lots of updates and other goodies over the next few months. And you can sign up for the newsletter - there's a little box on the site, be sure to check that out.

The book (a graphic novella, as it were) will be published by SRG, also known as Super Real Graphics, which is run by my pal Jason Martin, who himself is a talented creative machine. There were several factors leading up to my decision to go with SRG -- I liked the idea of going with a smaller indie publisher, I liked the idea of having complete creative control over the book (I'm still doing everything - writing, drawing, coloring, everything), and I liked the format of the "SRG Presents" graphic novellas. I really dug the page quality, the price point, the size, the look.. Everything just seemed to click, and Jason was really excited about publishing the book, so that's how the ball got rolling. I feel like the end result will be awesome for everyone.

The book is set to appear in the September issue of Previews and will be hitting comic shops in November.. and of course will be available on Amazon and all that good stuff. Rest assured, I'll be keeping everyone up to date on the latest news both here and on the official "Wolves" site.. Lots more to come, people! :)

Grab your swords and get ready...

The complete Progress Report is now available for download at http://publications.dragoncon.org. The full document is approximately 7.5 MB, however, you can also download it in chapters if you prefer.

While you are there, check out the rest of the newly created Publications website featuring information on everything from printed publications to web banners!

Afraid of missing a Newsletter? You can now read them online at http://newsletter.dragoncon.org, or subscribe to our new RSS Feed at http://newsletter.dragoncon.org/?feed=rss2!

If any of you Cananadians live in Calgary or Edmonton, there's an offer of a four-course dinner for two cooked at your home by a professional chef up on livelongnmarry that has no bids so far!

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/07/new-beginning.html

In 1996, TSR was unable to pay its printer, meaning that, if something were not done, Dungeons & Dragons would go out of print for the first time in 22 years. For nearly six months in late 1996 and early 1997, TSR released no new products in any of its many game lines. Even publication of Dragon and Dungeon magazines ceased for time. For all intents and purposes, it was a gamer Apocalypse.

On April 10, 1997, Wizards of the Coast of Renton, Washington acquired TSR and its properties, saving D&D from extinction. However, it was clear that the game had suffered both creatively and financially during the latter days of TSR. WotC decided that the best course of action was to release a new edition of the game -- a fresh start to herald a new beginning for the venerable fantasy RPG. That new beginning happened in August 2000, with the release of Third Edition. "Advanced" was dropped from the title, but it was clear that 3e was primarily a successor to Gygax's AD&D line begun in 1977 rather than the D&D line inaugurated by Tom Moldvay in 1981 (or earlier, depending on where you wish to draw your lines of creative demarcation).

A new beginning required a new look and 3e's graphic design was very different both from 1e and from 2e. The Player's Handbook, shown below, sports a faux "tome" cover, lacking a cover illustration at all. The clear intention here was to make the PHB (and all the other 3e books) look as if they were gilded, jewel-encrusted librams of great value.


In 2003, the infamous v.3.5 revision was released, with a slight variation on the original 3e cover. My friends called it the "super pimp" edition, because the faux gilding and jewel-work was even more prominent and elaborate.


I'm going to take liberties and treat the 3e and v.3.5 covers as a single cover for the purposes of the present discussion. The differences between them are more of degree than of kind. Both have the same basic appearance and attempt to evoke the same feel from viewers. More to the point, I'm not sure the few differences are enough to justify two separate entries, so I hope I can be forgiven this one indulgence.

I'm really of two minds about these covers. On the one hand, they're rather garish and more than a little silly. In general, I'm not at all fond of faux antique veneers. At their best, they make you wonder why you should choose a faux antique when you can just as easily get a real one. At their worst, they come off as kitschy and the 3e PHB covers certainly do veer toward kitsch. On the other hand, I can completely understand the thought processes that lead WotC to choose this as the cover design for the books. They wanted covers that made D&D "special" again and that conjured up images of spell books and grimoires.

This was, after all, the relaunch of the first RPG ever created and I have no doubt that WotC wanted to give the game not just some spit and polish, but also a look that expressed something of what D&D meant to them and to the hobby. WotC may have been richer than God thanks to the success of Magic: The Gathering, but their experience as a RPG publisher was limited and certainly not anywhere near as successful as even TSR had been in its dying days. Thus, the 3e covers, goofy as they definitely are, were likely born out of love and respect for the game they had inherited and no small amount of awe at what they were undertaking. The WotC of 1999 and 2000 was simply a different beast from the one that emerged in later years, or so it seems to me. They may have hit it big, but they were still gamers, through and through, and they were geeked to high heaven to be captaining the hobby's flagship.

So, for me, the 3e era covers are a wash. I don't hate them but neither do I love them. The faux tome concept was silly even when Ars Magica did it back in its own third edition. Nevertheless, there's a certain rough charm to it; these covers are the kinds of things a twelve year-old would, in his naive enthusiasm for the game, think were really cool. I have a hard time faulting WotC for giving in to such enthusiasm themselves, even if there should have been an adult somewhere telling their art department that this probably wasn't the best look for the game.

A few sour notes before closing. Both covers have the new Dungeons & Dragons logo and, not only is the logo rather uninspired, it also seems to me to yet more evidence of the treatment of the game as primarily a brand rather than an entertainment. This approach is not unique to WotC, so I don't mean to single them out. However, in light of their eventual acquisition by Hasbro, it is nevertheless ominous. Both covers also have the words "Core Rulebook I" and that too bothers me. As it turns out, I don't believe any 3e books other than the Big Three ever used the words "core rulebook" to describe themselves (though I could be wrong), but it set the stage for what would reach full flower with 4e: the serialization of the D&D rules and the elevation of supplementary material to necessary components for playing the game.

Item: The rashes and swelling are just about all gone, and the settling down has been nearly monotonic (that is to say, decline followed by decline, rather than up-and-down type progress).

Item: To my utter surprise, the return of my normal skin tone and texture came with a buddy - sleep. Quite a lot of sleep, particularly by my standards, and deep sleep at that. I don't think I wrote about having a lot of little nightmares on Sunday-Tuesday, but they didn't stay around. I'm aware of having dreamed a lot, and of a very few snippets about as meaningful as any second-long sleep of dream is likely to be (i.e., not much), but feel none of the lingering traces of nightmares. Just sleep. A lot of sleep. Probably over eight hours a day, the last couple of days. This is me not complaining at all.

So, My parents are in town, but I am theoretically working today, so I have not had much chance to interact with them. Unfortunately, as the day before July 4th, the work has not been exceedingly productive either. So it goes.

So, since I haven't had any time to actually write, about origins or anythign else, but I had some time to kill waiting for the arrival of family, my timekiller has been fiddling with character sheets for 4e. I started with a pretty cool landscape sheet which I loaded into Omnigraffle, added an editable layer, and filled out with drivingblind's character information, and it looked ok, but a little bland. So I took the basic template and rebuilt it from the ground up in Omnigraffle, and I was pretty happy with that.

I probably should have stopped there, but the simple reality is that very few people actually have access to Omnigraffle, so I started from scratch again and attempted to rebuild it in Word. It wasn't quite as attractive, but it was pretty good. Then, to just be complete, I reflowed it using Trebuchet MS rather than Calibiri, for the folks who don't have the C fonts, and that worked out too.

Anyway, these are definitely suited to filling out by computer rather than by hand, and just marking up in play and re-printing when people level up, but I admit I enjoy doing it that way, just for tidiness and ease of reference. I don't have near the layout and design chops of many of my friends, but this sort of utilitarian approach is entirely suited to my tastes.

They also probably will start running out of space sometime around level 11 or so, but thankfully that's not a problem. That said, the advantage of doing this in word (above being more widely usable) is that if I'm feeling _really_ crazy, I can set it up to take a data merge from excel and automate a lot of the data-entry.

I intend to kick these around a little bit then see about doing black & white versions then releasing the .doc files for those inclined to use such things. So as such, comments, questions and requests are welcome.

Edit: On another topic entirely, Dragon Magazine's posted The Artificer class, and I'm already pondering what the multiclassing feat for it would look like. Probably go the same route as the Warlord, and grant Healing Infusion once per day, and allow choice of a skill from the Artificer list. Sometime around level 11 you could make a really wicked Archer/Wizard by picking up Aggravating Force, since it's a ranged weapon, at will, intelligence vs AC attack with a great secondary benefit.

Additional Edit: After time spent reading it, the Artificer is totally the Green Arrow/Hawkeye class. And that's _awesome_.

http://grognardia.blogspot.com/2008/07/good-grief.html

Anyone know where this piece of art is from?

Is it perhaps from the Player's Handbook II? I accidentally stumbled upon it while looking for cover images of the 3e and v.3.5 PHBs to use in today's entry on those two covers (yes, I'm doing both at once, because they differ so little in appearance that I didn't think they deserved separate entries).

In any case, I can't say I'm too fond of this illustration. Aside from being a particularly poor example of the "wall of action" style, its ham-fisted execution strikes me as paradigmatic of the iconoclasm-cloaked-as-respect-for-the-past that WotC excels at these days. I mean, if I were an artist and my mandate was to paint a picture that encapsulated "this ain't your father's D&D," this is how I'd do it.

• Text messaging has always struck me as more than faintly ridiculous: Spend a quarter to cramp your thumbs sending a handful of characters to another cell phone, when you could call that same cell phone and talk for a full minute for less. And even though texting costs phone carriers almost nothing, the cost of texting to consumers has more than doubled in the last three years.
• I was at Barnes & Noble a little earlier today, prowling the history section as I often do. (The history section is now about the same size as the computer book section. This was not always the case...) I remembered something I had noticed many times in the past: B&N stocks an absolutely amazing number of books on the Knights Templars and Freemasonry. (By contrast, I counted three—three!—books on Ubuntu Linux.) The history section at Borders stocks almost nothing on these two topics. Do people actually buy this stuff? Or is there a Templars/Masonry fan club at the highest levels of B&N?
• Xandros has purchased Linspire. Linspire tried their hardest to create an OEM market for desktop Linux, but annoyed FOSS purists by including commercial software in their CNR installation service, which was actually the only part of Lindows/Linspire that I really liked. Ubuntu has mostly swept the desktop Linux field, but I admit, they haven't gone after OEM installs as vigorously as Linspire did, nor as vigorously as they'd have to to get some traction against Windows. Ubuntu's parent Canonical is developing a mobile version that will be sold preinstalled on subnotebooks, but we're not quite there yet.
• Mike Reith sent me an interesting little utility called IsDelphi, which will scan a directory, inspect any executables it finds, and report which ones were written in Delphi. The most interesting revelation: Skype is a Delphi app. I hadn't heard that.
• In case you weren't already worried about whether you should take that trip down the hill to get a latte, I suggest a spin through Dark Roasted Blend's collection of weird car accidents. You Could Be There.
• And in case you're not steamed out or punked out yet, head down to the closest Greek restaurant, order some calimari, and curl up with an anthology of squidpunk. Damitall, when are we gonna see glyptodontpunk? I'll show you escapist and whimsical...

Death Tribble and I discussed "Flag" characters, perhaps combining it with Power Armor Suit characters and how many countries never really got represented in comics. DT worked up a list of 15 countries, I took a look at their flags.

I settled on Kenya... liked the iconic Masai shield quite a bit and worked that into a power armor design. The other discussion that was happening on a few boards was females and power armor... how to do it, make it look practical, (in a paranormal sense and setting), yet still register as a female under all that muscle weave and servos. So I wove that element in as well... so here we have a female Power Armor suit from Kenya. Hope y'all like.



These works are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License.
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5

Good God, I've got to lose sixty pounds someday. And get a new pair of Chelsea boots. And some Russian tanks:



-Rikki

It would have to happen. I've caught some bug off someone finally, in the depths of winter during the Aussie cons. Most of the people at the con had it while we were there but it saved me for last it seems.

So considering that, I'm just going to throw upa few of the photos from the Perth con, which, to all intents and purposes was a great success. From what I hear it'll be an annual fixture if the crowds continue to be this good. Thanks to all who came out!

Once I'm feeling better I'll get back to some actual art on this blog.


Chaykin and Jusko signing.


Yes. Jusko Cheese.


Jewl and Kandyse and some idiot.


Dalek Fondling.

I...don't really have anything to say to this, except that you should probably read it. It's pretty great.

• And now I go up, and then I come down. See you on the other side. #
• back in my local pub. Mission accomplished. #
• Today is ASTONISHING X-MEN #25 day in the USA. And so to bed. #

(Automatically crossposted from warrenellis.com. Feel free to comment here or at my internet church at Whitechapel. If anything in this post looks weird, it's because LJ is run on steampipes and rubber bands -- please click through to the main site.)