parakkum

...check this out:

http://www.gamingreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=My_eGallery&file=index&do=showgall&gid=101

A new prepainted, collectible Star Wars mini game. Looks like we have Eps 4-6 coming out first, then 1 and 2.

Yet another thing I probably won't buy, but the figures do look neat.

Apparently, board gaming is gaining popularity in Korea. This is a link from Boardgamegeek posted by the first foreigner to open a boardgame cafe in that country:

http://www.boardgamegeek.com/geeklist.php3?action=view&listid=2436

Interesting. I hope to make it to Korea sometime in the near future, though not because of this. It's neat, tho'.

Read the first post, then scroll down to the long post by "Warlord Ralts."

http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?t=86916

I'm official. I tracked down the last department signature yesterday, then turned in my forms to the Office of Graduate Studies and Research. They sent me and my two dissertation copies to the Special Collection section of the library -- I walked through a hallway of Doctor Seuss art to get there. They took the copies and signed, then back to OGSR for a final signature.

And done.

Now back to experiments, and setting up my next job.

War of the Ring is looking enticing to me. It models a lot of the situations and possible situations from The Lord of the Rings, with two victory conditions for each side, one based on territory gain, the other based on Frodo successfully or unsuccessfully making his way to Mordor with the Ring.

I've played LotR Risk, which was fun -- definitely more so than regular risk -- but still relatively disconnected from the theme on which it is based.

Then, of course, there's Lord of the Rings, which moves very quickly and can be a lot of fun. "Hey, I was killing Shelob!"

If anyone feels like being corrupted:

Star Wars Miniatures

I've watched it in play; the system is quite fast and very simple. The miniatures look nice, too. Online retailers sell the boosters at a reasonably steep discount (36% or more). You can get a case of 84 for about a hundred bucks.

They do look nice, but I'm wondering if this is the kind of thing I should talk others I know into buying, since I already own so many games.

Apparently, Magic (the card game) can bring out bad things in people. Check out the following list of suspended DCI (that's the Magic organized play program) members, especially noting that many of them are banned for "assault":

The list of suspended folks

We just watched the Revenge of the Sith trailer.

I'm psyched.

I'm well aware that Attack of the Clones is a painful movie experience. Note all the rewriting stuff earlier.

Regardless, I'm psyched.

On a related note of Sith Goodness, I recently bought one booster of miniatures for the Clone Strike set for Star Wars Miniatures. We mostly have original trilogy miniatures and haven't bought prequel ones, as there's just more of an emotional attachment to, say, Stormtroopers than Clonetroopers. kwc bought the Clone Strike starter set, so he has General Kenobi and Jango Fett (to complement his Boba Fett from the original set). I decided I'd buy one booster to see what I ended up with, and I now have Darth Maul. Nifty, and a good complement to my Darth Vader.

We ran the two against each other a few times and Maul won unless Vader got lucky. This makes sense, though, as Maul is better on his own, whereas Vader is a good team player (assuming the other members of the team don't mind summary executions when they screw up).

Back in high school, I killed time in AP Chemistry one day figuring out what would happen if someone in the Rifts setting wearing typical personal body armor were hit by a typical rail gun burst. The basics:

A Rifts rail gun burst involves multiple high-velocity projectiles
It doesn't breach the armor (always nice to have body armor that can stop anti-tank weapons)

The outcome, in short, was that the target would be sent flying across the landscape at a remarkably high speed, certainly beating them to a complete pulp inside their amazing armor. It's a fun, if icky, SF image.

At least the armor's recoverable.

Here are my session reports to date, posted on Boardgamegeek:

War of the Ring with Shane
Wings of War at Neil's game day
Attack! at Neil's game day
War of the Ring with kwc
Star Wars Miniatures Death Star Infiltration mission with kwc

The two War of the Ring session reports were exercises in thorough game documentation which I won't be repeating anytime soon, as they take hours to put together, and make the game take longer. kwc has since beaten me at War of the Ring...

There's another Star Wars MIniatures report in the stack as well.

Last week, I found a very cheap supplier of single miniatures from the Clone Strike expansion for Star Wars Miniatures. Coolstuffinc.com has, on average, the lowest prices I've seen for Clone Strike figures. I was especially happy to see their very low prices for "bulk" infantry such as Clone Troopers and Battle Droids.

kwc and I purchased a bunch of figures which should arrive within a week. He concentrated on Jedi, while I went for the large groups of basic troops. In addition to the figures that are coming, we both have a handful of figures already, including Jango Fett and General Kenobi for kwc and Darth Maul for me.

Here's the list of incoming figures:

kwc's list:

C3-PO
General Veers (These first two will help play scenarios with our classic figs)
ARC Trooper
7 Clone Troopers
4 Clone Trooper Commanders
2 Clone Trooper Sergeants
Agen Kolar
3 Jedi Guardians
Ki-Ad-Mundi
Kit Fisto
Luminara Unduli
Mace Windu
Qui-Gon Jinn
Saesee Tinn
Asajj Ventress
2 Dark Side Acolytes
Durge
Aurra Sing
Zam Wesell

my list:

Aayla Secura
20 Clone Troopers
4 Clone Trooper Commanders
4 Clone Trooper Grenadiers
4 Clone Trooper Sergeants
Luminara Unduli
Asajj Ventress
20 Battle Droids
4 Battle Droid Officers
Destroyer Droid
4 Geonosian Overseers
20 Security Battle Droids
10 Super Battle Droids
Zam Wesell

So kwc can bring the Jedi action and I can field hordes of disposable troops. Fun all 'round.

I've realized that the Rebel side in the classic Star Wars Miniatures set is pretty boring. The Imperial side is a lot of fun to play. In addition to Vader and the Emperor, there are Storm Troopers, Storm Trooper Officers, Heavy Weapon Storm Troopers, Elite Storm Troopers, Imperial Officers and Scout Troopers.

It's understandable that they wanted to include the major named characters from the classic trilogy, but the other units didn't have to work so poorly together and be so uninteresting. Here's the Rebel complement:

Bothan Spy (useless grenade tosser)
C-3PO (draws fire)
Chewbacca
Commando on Speeder Bike
Elite Hoth Trooper
Elite Rebel Trooper (those guys who die on the Tantive IV)
Han Solo
Hoth Trooper
Luke Skywalker, Jedi Knight
Luke Skywalker, Rebel
Obi-Wan Kenobi
Leia, Captive
Leia, Senator
R2-D2
Rebel Commando (Endor garb and grenade throwing)
Rebel Officer (Hoth clothes)
Rebel Pilot
Rebel Trooper (more guys who die on the Tantive IV)
Wookiee Soldier

Assuming that you have to keep the named characters, I' want to drop the following units:

Bothan Spy
Elite Rebel Trooper
Leia, Captive
Rebel Officer (Hoth clothes)
Rebel Pilot
Rebel Trooper
Wookiee Soldier

In their place, I'd like to have had:

First, some cosmetic changes:

Rebel Trooper (wearing the Endor clothing, and with a slightly better attack than a Stormtrooper, but weaker defense)
Elite Rebel Trooper (wearing the Endor clothing as well)
Rebel Officer (also in Endor clothing, perhaps offering the same bonus)

Then, some substantive alterations.

Rebel Scout (more Endor garb, with Stealth, Spotter ability and otherwise weak stats)
Loyalist Noble (a commander effect that lets one or two units move but not attack after it takes its activation)
Rebel Medic (or Medical Droid -- something that can heal non-droid characters)
Boush (if you're going to have another Leia, why not this one?)

That would have made me happier. Here are some possible stats for Boush:

Boush, Leia in Disguise (20 points)

Hit Points: 50
Defense: 18
Attack: +8
Damage: 20

Special Abilities:

Unique

Thermal Detonator 20 (Replaces attacks: range 6; 20 damage to target and to each character adjacent to that target; no save)

Force Powers:

Force 2

The Revenge of the Sith set for Star Wars Miniatures comes out next week. I picked up a set list from the Wizards of the Coast message boards and put it up with some editorial comments.

Revenge of the Sith set list with a few comments

It looks like I'm not in danger of spending a ton of money on this one soon. I am satisfied with my Clone and Droid armies.

Some observations from the miniatures game:

All Battle Droids: not so good
Battle Droids with Geonisian Overseers providing Double Attacks: very good
All Jedi: not so good
Jedi with Clones and Aurra Sing: quite good

Hunh.

"Base Set, featuring 48 soldiers and vehicles from WWII plus detailed hex maps of terrain representing the battlefields of Europe, will be first shown to the public at the Gencon game convention in Indianapolis this August and is set to hit store shelves the following week. A 48-figure expansion, bringing additional vehicles and troops into combat, will follow in December. More expansions are planned through 2006."

I had some insight today into why I don't typically like computer games, but do like boardgames. I figured that part of it was people interaction, but I still don't really want to play games such as Katamari Damacy, even though they inspire a lot of commentary and cooperation between the person currently playing and everyone else.

It comes down to iterated effort versus analysis. By iterated effort I mean attempting an identical task repeatedly in an effort to succeed, whether that means simple success or maximizing your outcome. This is typical of many computer games, where there are save checkpoints and you can make as many attempts as you want to achieve success. Analysis, on the other hand, I use here to describe tasks where there's a lot of thinking about the general traits and specific challenges of the task during times when you are not attempting to complete the task. This suits many boardgames well because you are unlikely to be able to conveniently set up repeated attempts at completion of the same task, and each play may be very different due to the input provided by other players, but general approaches are amenable to analysis.

Naturally, there's overlap. I tend not to like mission-oriented first-person shooters, but I do enjoy a certain amount of head-to-head play. Here there is not a set task to repeat, but rather the changing challenge of other players. If I actually played this kind of game more than once a year, it might fall into set parameters and become more iterative in nature.

This applies outside of games, of course. In martial arts, I dislike long forms (requires iterative effort to perfect) but really enjoy working with people (inherently less iterative, more amenable to analysis).

Dungeons & Dragons artist David Sutherland died on June 6, age 56.

The CBC story

I have a few Advanced D&D books featuring Sutherland's work on the cover.

Fans of the cyberpunk genre, or perhaps people who played the Cyberpunk or Shadowrun roleplaying games will be familiar with the concept of "wired reflexes." The notion here is that you somehow have been modified to react much faster than a normal person. The normal in-genre and in-game consequences of wired reflexes are impressive, leading to the kind of perceptual differences shown in The Matrix, when the Agents and Neo simply see the world around them as moving in very slow motion and conversely are seen as moving very fast, and Underworld, in which a vampire assassin pulls a trigger so fast her semiautomatic handgun appears to be firing on full auto.

Based on the name and some genre ideas, this kind of reflex modification mainly involves replacing your main nervous system transmission routes with a faster mechanism -- fiber optics sound good for this. Assuming away the time needed to convert between the chemical nervous signal to the fiber optic and then back again at the brain, what kind of time could we gain by such a replacement?

Nerve transmission speeds vary depending on the nerves involved, but one reasonable average is about 50 meters/second. At this speed, it should take about 40 milliseconds for a signal to travel one-way along the longest route in your body (foot to brain), or 80 milliseconds for a round trip. This suggests that we could shave that 80 milliseconds off your reaction time by using fiber optics (again, assuming away the time needed to convert the signal).

So how much do you gain from this 80 milliseconds?

Human reaction times differ based on the test conditions, but "recognition reaction times" that require identifying and choosing between two objects average 384 milliseconds. This rises as the number of valid choices increases, making it hard to estimate what that translates to in real life -- how many "valid choices" are present for our cyberpunk protagonist when she's faced by an alley full of scrubs? Even sticking with 384 milliseconds, that means that our wired individual gets an 80 millisecond head start, cutting 21% of her reaction time. Not shabby, but not amazing.

This suggests that someone with wired reflexes would, over time, tend to act slightly before those without, but certainly not so much as to appear to move differently or be a blur. Especially given that another 60 milliseconds or more of even the simplest act is taken up by muscle action, there just may not be a lot to shave off of that reaction time should one be able to speed up the brain part of the decision-making process.

On Saturday, I attended my first Bay Area Games Day, a bimonthly gathering of silicon valley gamers at the Los Altos public library. I was there a little after the start time of 10am, and quite a few games had already started.

I sat around and wrote for a bit, then played my first of two games, Power Grid. In it, players represent power companies attempting to power the most cities in the United States. The game features market manipulation and a decent catch-up mechanic, such that the player in last place buys resources (coal, oil, trash and nuclear fuel) first, and can thus bump up market prices -- because resources of a given type become progressively more expensive as they are bought. I'd be interested in playing again.

The second game, after SSO showed up, was Arkham Horror, this year's remake of the classic 1987 original. I recall trying to play the original with Cataptromancer way back when and not doing so well. Arkham Horror is a collaborative game set in the world of H.P. Lovecraft's horror writings, in which players work together to keep a Great Old One from devouring the town of Arkham. In our game, we drew Ithaqua as the big bad. At first, it seemed as if things might be dicey, with gates appearing all over. However, we turned things around quickly -- perhaps too quickly for the genre. I might want to handicap the game to make it harder with large groups. Still, I am now tempted to put Arkham Horror on a wishlist somewhere -- it really did carry the flavor well and has much prettier are than the original.

On Sunday, I went to a Bullshido throwdown, organized by folks from bullshido.com and held at Modern Combatives in Berkeley. Tim was cool and came along with me, so someone would have my back in case I got hurt or people were fools. I went once on the ground, then again from the stand with the same dude, who was strong but wasn't doing well on getting me. I did discover, however, that I am out of shape. Damn. That's what happens when there's no substantial exercise for a year. It's also been three years or so since I trained any Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. Later I rolled with a much cooler guy who didn't have anything to prove. I managed to pull off a sweep when he was standing over me, and was pretty happy about that.

I think BJJ is still my thing, but I am definitely out of shape.

A quick heads up, if anyone needs to feed an addiction: I'm selling some Magic: the Gathering cards on eBay. Here's the link to my auctions:

Click here for Magic crack!

I'm divesting myself of my dual lands. Good stuff for tournaments, not so necessary for fun play.

For most of its lifetime, Dungeons and Dragons has had demons and devils among its monsters. Briefly, in an attempt to avoid criticism as "satanic," the serial numbers were filed off and they were renamed as the none-to-evocative Tanar'ri and Baatezu.* In a similar vein, the art on the Magic: the Gathering card "Unholy Strength" had its pentagram airbrushed off when it went mass-market.

Both decisions were later reversed.

Now Wizards of the Coast has gone entirely in the other direction. In their new collectible game Hecatomb, you play endbringers, folks who summon abominations to harvest souls and bring on the end of the world (first one to end the world wins).

Well, then. :)

The nice clerk at Pegasus Games said it's not doing terribly well yet, and didn't like it himself, equating it with a junior high kid trying for shock value.

*This was misguided, anyway. The criticism was never based on the presence of demons and devils among the characters' enemies. The folks who think roleplaying games are a significant social evil that matters more than, say, hunger, take issue with characters that can cast spells and that kind of thing.

Some random notes from the most recent Star Wars miniatures chat, with the game designers (who, incidentally, are very good at following the online SW minis community and using it as a gauge of what's working and what's not):

For the Endor pack:

• Intended to deliver a handful of miniatures and lots of maps

Champions of the Force, the next expansion, will contain:

• Additional New Republic units (not something I care about)


• Yuuzhan Vong not represented


• Lucas nixed many Old Republic units, so more Sith than Old Republic


• Queen Amidala


• Exar Kun

For the upcoming spacecraft miniatures game:

• Miniatures will be "relatively" sized, rather than truly in scale


• Will not supplant the normal minis game in the production schedule

Upcoming releases in general:

• As long as people keep buying


• They have a couple years' worth of material planned


• Bounty Hunters set will have remakes and new bounty hunters


• No new Ewoks in the next two sets, but there does seem to be a demand


• Their contact at Lucasfilm really wants them to make Jar-Jar


• Their policy is to start providing set facts 6-9 months before release


• Either a new Emperor or a Darth Plagueius figure will be showing up

Of course, to be serious in your recreating of Hoth, you need more than one. Wizards of the Coast is producing a limited release of AT-ATs for its Star Wars Miniatures game:

The AT-AT press release

The model stands 14" tall and is pretty much completely inappropriate to the skirmish scale of the game. Looks nifty, though. It might work better with a modified rule set designed for larger battles.

Were I to buy one, I'd go to my favorite SW minis seller, Auggie's Games n Movies

Neat model. I have no idea what I'd do with one. Now, if they had a vehicle-scale game with 1" long snowspeeders, I'd be right there.

One of my old local game stores is selling the Star Wars Miniatures AT-AT at two for the price of one. At that price, you could field the Imperial assault force from Empire - four AT-ATs - for a hundred bucks.

This is genuinely tempting. It also suggests that they're having trouble selling them, probably undercut by online retailers who charge from 25-30% less than MSRP.

Wizards is releasing an Attack on Endor scenario pack this February. It's a replacement for their failed line of Ultimate Missions books, and will contain an AT-ST, three Stormtroopers, a small scenario book and two double-sided maps. It can be preordered for $14.99 at coolstuff.inc and for $13.99 or less at iconusa.com. Notably, this means that entire package costs less than a single AT-ST from the Universe set on the secondary market.

Sadly, no extra Ewoks are in the set.

From the Star Wars Minis message boards:

The best custom Star Wars minis ever

Also, from Boardgamegeek:

A list of game reviews from the early days of White Dwarf magazine featuring more than one name that's become familiar to me in the last five years or so.

Found by the watchful eye of cataptromancer:

Download Ars Magica fourth edition for free at RPGnow.com.

Wings of War, my favorite little card-based "miniature" game of air combat is moving ahead to World War II with the upcoming Dawn of War set, which promises to "support a simulation which must encompass planes with very different flight capabilities and firepower, while still keeping the flow of the combat simple as it is in the WW1 series."

From Ken Hite's March 22nd Out of the Box column:

Easily the show's biggest news was the announcement of Warhammer 40K Roleplay, which will use a close variant of the Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay system as revised and designed (rather nicely, in my book) by Chris Pramas and Green Ronin. Green Ronin will likewise be handling the design for W40KRP (as it is unfortunately actually acronymized), and the release will be structured around a three-game line model. Coming up in March 2007 will be Dark Heresy, a basic W40K RPG pitched as "Traveller meets Call of Cthulhu"; then for GenCon 2008, we'll be seeing Rogue Trader, (which is, I suppose, "Traveller meets really dark Traveller") and then in spring-ish 2009 we get Death Watch, which is essentially "Starship Troopers Freelance Police," as best I understand it. Quite frankly, that last is the one I'm most curious about, if only because I ran a "Traveller meets Call of Cthulhu" game for a while in college, and then wrote a treatment of the same basic thing in 2001 that vanished onto the Steve Jackson Games cutting room floor. Thus, the first two aren't going to take me anywhere I haven't already been. But that last concept, "space marines as superheroes," is pretty awesome, and could be amazing in the right hands, which is to say, in the hands of, oh I don't know, Chris Pramas and Steve Kenson. So yee bally haw! Or whatever it is they say in the future, where, you know, there is only war.

Now that is just cool. Coming in a year.

Space Hulk is a clever boardgame of nasty, quick aliens versus slower Space Marines in the confines of a floating, derelict spacecraft. The original game, which I own, is a substantial, well-produced affair with glossy card tiles that interlock to make maps of the hulk's tunnels, as well as a set of plastic Space Marines and a double handful of plastic Genestealers -- the aliens.

This is a big game.

However, several people have had the idea of using GW's 6mm epic-scale miniatures and magnets to make a "travel" version of Space Hulk.

Andy Skinner's Travel Space Hulk
Leon Samadi's take with images of tiles
A complete set stuck to a refrigerator

I do have unbased epic Space Marines I could use, but no free Tyranids. I think, however, that I'd like to try making this with counters instead of miniatures -- I'd just print a counter sheet, back it with a magnetic sheet, and holepunch the counters. This means I wouldn't have to sacrifice any of my epic minis and I could have more visual variety. I'd also probably just produce the maps by scanning the maps as shown in the scenarios, then reducing them and reprinting them.

I've been tinkering with some thoughts on new rules sets for use with my Mechwarrior figures. Take a look at the extended if you're interested, and feel free to comment.

Last year, I sold off some Magic: the Gathering "power cards" that were (1) worth a lot of money and (2) not so fun for friendly play, which is all I'm likely to ever do again with my Magic collection. Recently, I did a survey of some of my other game-related items to decide which ones are likely to never, ever be used. Decisions I made:

1) I'm keeping Space Hulk. It's a great game that I will introduce to y'all who haven't played it at some point in the future.

2) I'm keeping the Space Marines I've put together, pretty much for use with Space Hulk (there's an issue of White Dwarf Magazine with rules for normal Marines in Space Hulk).

3) I'm keeping all my Epic stuff. I will put together the things I have not yet assembled, Krylon coat all the metal pieces to keep them from oxidizing away, and try playing with the new Epic Armageddon rules set.

4) I'm really not going to do anything with other unused or partially used miniatures, so a whole chunk of nostalgia is going on the ebay auction block. We have:

The old Space Marines boxed set, fit to produce three squads (30 marines). This is a second one that I never assembled.

A bunch of old Chaos Space marines.

32 Eldar Harlequins. These actually saw a reasonable amount of play time, back in the day.

Some other random Eldar.

Marneus Calgar, a Space Marine diorama. So far, this is the only one not selling.

36 Melniboneans, including one or maybe two Elrics. Bought when I thought I was going to participate in a fantasy wargame campaign -- they were packaged as Elves, but they're Melniboneans.

The Last Starfighter Tunnel Chase game. Seriously.

As I wrote earlier, I was selling some old minis and other stuff off on ebay last week. Here are the final selling prices:

The Last Starfighter Tunnel Chase game came in the lowest, at $1.25. I guess that 1984 bad-SF-movie nostalgia isn't strong enough.

Random Eldar came in at $3.50, and the Space Marine diorama at $4.28.

The Chaos Space Marine collection hit $42.75, while the now-rare Melniboneans came in at $52.00.

The Imperial Space Marine boxed set that I bought way back when for $20 sold for $88.78. What's sad about this is that it would run a person about $110 to field an equivalent number of plastic Space Marines these days, so even though I made a massive profit, it's still a great deal for the buyer.

Finally, my old Harlequins sold for $97.77, which surprised me until I realized I was offering a complete set -- unlike the little groups of Harlequins I'd seen sold on ebay previously.

I hope everyone enjoys their new toys.

Back in the day, FASA released the Star Trek: Starship Tactical Combat Simulator, a wargame depicting ship-to-ship combat in the Star Trek universe. Cataptromancer owned a copy, which I coveted purely for the cool counters. As it happens, it seems to have been a decent, if record-intensive game.

Fortunately, Jason Robinson has converted ST:STCS into a free, downloadable computer game. Now, all the calculations are done "under the hood," leaving you to allocate power and then maneuver your ship and fire your weapons. It's a sweet little game, even if I can't manage to beat an L42B with a Chandley.

It should not shock anyone I know that a computer game that appeals to me is a port of a board game.

In the extended: the stats for pieces in the upcoming Star Wars minis Champions of the Force set. I'm really looking forward to it.

Sometimes, the ads Gmail throws at me are dead on. Today I clicked through on an ad for Hill's Wholesale Gaming, a dealer in large quantities of collectible gaming merchandise (largely CCGs). I can't speak to their shipping prices yet, but if you're interested in a game -- especially a "dead" CCG/CMG -- then their prices are pretty good, if they have the item in stock.

Examples of "dead" games and their prices:

Star Trek CCG unlimited box - 540 cards for $8
Star Wars CCG unlimited box - 540 cards for $12 (this is supposed to have been a good game, by the way)
.hack//Enemy booster box lot - 1,650 cards for $25
Yu Yu Hakusho: Dark Tournament booster box - 240 cards for $6

And what has me tempted?

Mechwarrior, naturally. The game isn't dead, though, so its prices haven't pitched off the face of the Earth yet.

Following up on m's recent post about the Nintendo Wii, I have a question for all my DS-addicted peeps out there: Has anyone purchased, or is anyone planning on picking up, MechAssault: Phantom War for the DS? As it happens, there's a coupon in there for the plastic minis version of said game, so if you had it, I might want to beg it off ya'.

In another subset of the minis gaming genre, Battlewagon Bits is a neat little site that sells individual components of GW multipart miniatures to aid in your customization work. After all, why buy a whole pack of Chaos Marines when all you really wanted was some Chaos Heavy Bolter plastic bits? I no longer buy any GW minis, but if I did, this site would be awesome.

A game of Arkham Horror as captured in 205 pictures over three hours, with snappy music:

Bruno posted a truly awesome story of Kobolds on a mission to the SJGames Forums:

The obvious solution is not to find the unicorn, but to find the nearest princess. This has the added benefit that princesses rarely weigh 1500+ pounds and even more rarely have six foot spears grafted to their foreheads.

Full story in the extended.

Several years ago, I decided I wanted a copy of the D&D Cyclopedia, a sort of "all-in-one" book for basic Dungeons & Dragons that was released in 1990 or so. I was able to pick it up at a very sane price (around retail) from an online seller, which was itself a real step up over earlier years when I would have had to go hunting around used bookstores and game stores that stocked used or vintage merchandise.

More recently, game companies, especially roleplaying game companies, have turned to online sales of PDF versions of their books. You can, for example, buy digital copies of your favorite Steve Jackson Games books at their e23 store, or browse thousands of products at DriveThruRPG.com.

PDF versions of game books have a number of benefits. For consumers, they offer immediate access (click to buy it), the convenience of not cluttering your place or your backpack with books, and best of all, the opportunity to buy things that will never, ever see a reprint as a physical book. Similarly, companies can pick up sales from people who are hesitant to add another book to their shelves, can release direct-to-PDF products that would cost too much to distribute conventionally, and can convert their whole product catalog into a revenue stream.

From what I can see on DTR, both Wizards of the Coast and White Wolf have been aggressive in offering a substantial portion of their entire portfolio for sale in PDF. Always meant to run the classic Dragonlance adventures? You can buy them for $4.95 each. Wanted to check out the Planescape setting? $5.95. Try Vampire: the Masquerade, Revised or second edition, for $15 and $14, respectively.

Some people worry about pirating, but to paraphrase Bill Coffin, "Your stuff is being pirated already." And given the option, people will happily buy material rather than torrent it.

For me, the most appealing aspect is having easy access to material that, as I said, will never see a physical reprint. There are just so many things that looked cool on the shelves through the years...

Over at Jeff's Gameblog, Jeff Rients tells us How to Awesome-Up Your Players, including tips like:

"Always Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing"

and

"Your NPCs suck and they are all going to die"

Thomas T. on RPGnet has an excellent idea about an economy based on that immortal D&D critter, the tarrasque.

"Once apon a time a nation decided to end the threat of the tarrasque once and for all. An army was assembled, led by the greatest heroes of the age. Most importantly, a number of powerful magical weapons were created for the battle. The monster was lured into a tight canyon and the battle began.

"At terrible cost, the tarrasque was defeated. But not slain. It was impaled by fourteen Immovable Harpoons (like an immovable rod, but spikey), each attached to a thick adamantine chain sunk deep into the canyon walls by magic. The tarrasque was restrained.

"A fortress was built around the tarrasque, to watch over it. Every day its watchers hack away at the tarrasque with powerful magic weapons to keep it weakened in case of escape. Even so, there are casualties as they misjudge its reach, or as it's angry thrashing causes rockfalls.

"Of course, being a powerful magical crearture, the tarrasque's blood, flesh and other body parts have certain useful properties. A side effect of keeping the tarrasque imprisoned like this was a neverending supply of powerful magical components. A city grew up around the fortress to house the various wizards, scholars and alchemists that came to exploit the tarrasque's bounty. Eventually, it was almost as if the neverending stream of tarrasque blood, flesh and bone was more important than imprisoning the beast itself."

More in the extended. Here's the original thread.

I recently did a second round of purging of my old Magic: the Gathering cards via ebay. Last time, I accepted various forms of payment. This time, I only accepted Paypal, finding other things like money orders just too much of a hassle. I was concerned that this might negatively impact bidding, but it appears not to have had that effect.

The top performers:

• Library of Alexandria - $152.50
• A set of four Sinkholes, Beta edition - $118.84
• Mana Drain - $102.56
• Juzam Djinn #1 - $90.00
• Juzam Djinn #2 - $85.00

I was expecting the Library to hit $130, so I'm happy that it managed to top that. Actually, everything went for somewhat higher than I expected. I tried to time the auction end times so that the maximum number of people would be able to bid; I have no idea if that helped boost the prices.

So two days ago, as we were playing Lego Star Wars (Original Trilogy), I commented that I would "buy a Batman game if it were done this way."

So they're making Lego Batman.

If you look carefully at the date on that article, you'll note that this is not new news -- but if I heard about it before, I'd forgotten.

It'll be fun swinging around, tossing batarangs...

I always have some ideas for games (board, miniature) or modifications to games running around in my head. Here's at least part of my current idea/tinker list:

Salient - Salient is the name I've assigned to each of my successive attempts at rules for my old 6mm Epic line minis from Games Workshop, or anything else living at roughly that scale. In many drafts over the past couple years, I've repeatedly carved off big, meaty chunks of complexity. I like the latest version -- it's simple, and it should let me model "people versus cold, heartless aliens" pretty well with minimal fiddliness.

Commands & Colors: Star Wars - Commands & Colors is the basic engine that powers Battle Cry, BattleLore, Commands & Colors: Ancients, and Memoir '44. As fun and straightforward as it is, I think it would work well with some of the land battles in Star Wars. The assault on Hoth, the battle on Endor, a host of battles from the Clone Wars -- it would all work well within this engine. I'd just need to put together some playing pieces and, you know, a full deck of command cards.

Tunable Axis & Allies - The current incarnation of Axis & Allies starts the game roughly in the winter of 1941, just after the American entry into the war. I'd like to have versions "tuned" to different starting times, such as 1939 or even 1936. To do this, you'd need a "war entry" mechanic in the manner of the progress track from War of the Ring that shows how close the various nations are to going on a wartime footing.

MOSPEADA - The 'human insurgency in alien-occupied Earth' story told in MOSPEADA would work well, I think, as a card-driven wargame. I imagine that some of the CDGs on the American revolutionary war could be adapted with the most success, although even that has more out-and-out military actions than the MOSPEADA series tended to. A full treatment would model each of the successive attempts by the humans to retake Earth. As the human player, you know the assaults are doomed, but the goal is to cause as much immediate harm as possible and to get motivated troops to the ground, where they can continue to cause problems. I imagine there being a "frustration" track for the Inbit (Invid), showing the Queen's progressive annoyance with Earth and humans in general. The human goal would be to push this frustration track to some level before all the proactive humans are captured or killed.

Shadows over Couruscant - This adaptation of Shadows over Camelot was suggested in a comment on BGG, forwarded to me by SSO (go acronymns!). The basic idea of the original Shadows is that players play the knights of King Arthur's round table, going on quests and such -- but one of them may be a traitor, secretly trying to destroy the knights. Porting this over to Star Wars, the story would be set during the prequels. Players could play different political figures, or perhaps members of the Jedi council, with one secretly serving the side of the Sith.

Jeff Rients has an awesome Gameblog where he talks about roleplaying games and associated ideas. I've mentioned him once before, in the context of his essay titled "How to Awesome-Up Your Players".

Now, there's yet another (of many) reasons to go visit his blog. He's training ninjas.

As it happens, Jeff's nephew has discovered his God-given ninja nature. Cute as this is, the feeling of invulnerability it engenders had the unfortunate side effect of making him completely oblivious to "stranger danger." What's a mother to do?

Call in uncle Jeff:

My first line of attack on this problem was to appeal to his ninja virtues. "A wise ninja must avoid unnecessary danger," I tell him. But he doesn't really seem to buy it. So I go for the carrot approach. Ever since he discovered my plastic minis collection he's been dying to try Dungeons & Dragons. I've held off. One of my concerns is that I needed to be sure he and his cousin (my daughter) were sufficiently literate and numerate to play. Elizabeth can count to 20 now so the last big educational barrier has recently been removed.

"Alright, here's the deal then. If you can go four weeks in a row without talking to strangers, your mom and I will schedule a game of Dungeons & Dragons. But it won't just be ordinary Dungeons & Dragons. It will be Dungeons & Ninjas. But listen up, dude. You know I check in with you and your mom every week, right? You have to get good reports four weeks in a row."

With that mission in mind, design has already started on that most awesome of games, Dungeons and Ninjas:

I don't have anything resembling a working draft yet, but I see the Top Secret Dungeons & Ninjas Player's Manual (the Top Secret part is really in the title) as breaking down into 3 major parts. Part 1, "Congratulation! A Ninja is YOU!" is a reworking of Basic D&D character generation. The biggest change will be in the classes. There will be four: Ninja Warrior, Ninja Wizard, Shadow Ninja, and Mystic Ninja. These classes will correspond closely to the traditional Fighter, Magic-User, Thief, and Cleric, except that they all wear pajamas and masks.

Jeff's rapidly earning his way into Uncle Valhalla with his heroic deeds.

One thing I have to watch is my tendency to assign myself more projects than I have time for. Be it at work or otherwise, there's always more interesting stuff to do than time in which to do it.

The corollary to watching how time is spent is making sure I don't spend money on things I won't have the time to actually work on. That said, there are some outstanding projects I'd really like to find both time and money for.

The first miniatures game I ever played was Warhammer 40,000 - Rogue Trader, a quirky little game that spawned a vast empire of miniatures gaming and derivative IP in the form of computer games and a burgeoning online world. I've held onto my Rogue Trader book, as well as other jewels like Chapter Approved and the Compendium, but I sold the bulk of my miniatures, keeping just the Space Marines:

(Picture found at The Stuff of Legends, a really handy miniatures website.)

Since then, the game world has advanced and grown. The most recent edition of Warhammer 40,000, the fourth edition, features cleaned-up rules but the same rich world, with twenty years of additional material. Among the "new" additions since I last played are the "young" race of the setting, the Tau:

The Tau fascinate me, and a 40K Tau force is one of the ways I'd spend time and money, if I somehow acquired a surplus of both. However, there's an option even cooler than a 40K Tau force. Far more than Warhammer 40K, my game of choice in the day was Space Marine, a game geared toward larger-scale battles, using smaller-scale minis. Instead of being 28mm tall, a person is 6mm tall -- roughly 1:300 scale. I was first drawn to Space Marine -- later rechristened "Epic" -- by a friend's copy of the very first epic game, Adeptus Titanicus. AT featured giant war machines from the world of Warhammer 40K, like this Warlord Titan:

Sometime in college, I acquired nine or so Warlord Titans in a trade (I traded away some 40K stuff I was never going to use). Fixing these up is one of those projects that requires no additional money, just time. However, if I once again had that inifnite money and time, I'd also pick up these:

Yup, those are epic-scale Tau, available (at a price) from Forge World. Sadly, as a niche product in a niche category, they're not cheap. That squad of infantry (called "Fire Warriors," by the way), would run me about $24, or about $1 for each 6mm-tall soldier. Ouch. That's way more expensive than my old epic minis cost me, even adjusting for inflation.

Okay, enough of that. Now back to writing a paper.

The "o" key on my current laptop suffered an injury today. It's sort of halfway better right now, but as part of testing it and trying to get it reattached properly, I ended up typing a lot of "o"s -- five of them in the entry box for Google. On a whim, I decided to see what five "o"s get me.

Turns out, it gets you this.

Following that link takes you to a White Wolf "World of Darkness" character sheet. Yup, the kind with all the "o"s to fill in for your character's scores.

I find this hilarious.

Since I keep mentioning this and then forgetting to provide a link:

Non-comprehensive list of games whose themes were changed between design and publishing, compiled by Bruno Faidutti, himself a designer of many games. Some of the interesting rethemings include:

Medieval Japan --> Aborigines (because war-themed games aren't popular in Germany)
Trojan War --> Renaissance Spain (because there was a competing Trojan War game already released that year)
Medieval War --> Trojan war (because the Trojan war was more "original"...that year)
Mississippi cotton shipping --> Loire wine shipping (because there was already a successful Mississippi shipping game)
Space empire building --> Polynesian island exploration (because SF games aren't popular in Germany)

The short version often amounts to "game publishers are as twitchy as movie producers when it comes to guessing what will or won't sell."

Click here to see a beautifully done custom retheming of "A Game of Thrones" (based on the Martin novels) into "Battle for Dune." It's a thorough job, with a new board, new pieces, new cards, the whole deal. I've never played AGoT out of a lack of interest in the setting, but this looks like an amazing reworking.

This week, I'm splitting off some content from my general blog. Gaming-related posts will now appear in their own blog, Gifts Ungiven. Many thanks to kwc for generating the new blog for me and helping me transfer over past gaming content (and for getting Gifts into the MT aggregator already). I had enough game content that I realized it really needed to live in its own space, leaving MT/parakkum for more general friends and family kind of material.